Friday, February 29, 2008
Aftermath & picture quality issue
Stansted Airport near London has changed a lot since last time I was here. It looks modern and the one thing that they now take very seriously is security and baggage restrictions. We've seen countless airports worldwide but Stansted may well beat them all. What certainly is a good thing on the one hand can sometimes become a little annoying on the other.
The flight back from Great Britain was fine; we landed at the EuroAirport in France late at night. "Remain seated with your seatbelt properly fastened while taxiing." Okay, here we are, no problems. "Be careful when opening the overhead compartments as any luggage may have shifted during the flight." I hand part of the baggage to Saskia and put the rest onto my seat. A few seconds later the doors are open and we can disembark the aircraft. As common at smaller airports that don't have that many gates the plane is parked somewhere near the terminal building and you have to leave the craft via stairs rather than an aerobridge. It is dark and the stairs are wet and surprisingly slippery. I'm almost down on the ground when trying to get a better grip of my backpack that I'm carrying in the one hand and one of our cameras in the other. And phhhffffliippp – gone! Damn, in the dark I grabbed the second belt of the camera instead of the backpack! It fell about 1.5 meters onto the concrete ground – and as you would expect from Murphy's Law it hit the floor in a way that our trusty little notebook computer got seriously damaged. Perfect, well done! I was in a killing mood with an air of desperation.
Later on in the terminal building we had a closer look at the device. The chassis was damaged in several spots and when shaking it you could hear small parts falling around. Turning it on did not work.
To cut a longer story short, we finally got the hard disk data back and the notebook is in a semi-stable operating condition at the moment. It is the unexpected and unnecessary things such as this incident that are the most annoying. It is amazing how important computers have become for everyday life and one's personality. Striking! But anyway, it's just a computer, and life goes on with or without it.
The picture quality issue
After returning from the continuous WSF trip around the globe we processed all the acquired data and sent out a compilation to our partners; as expected the response was very good.
While having a second look at all the pictures we found that some of them were pretty dark and the colours incorrect. Hmm … strange, because we had invested lots of time during the trip to select the best shots out of many and to make sure that white balance, etc. were as close to perfect as possible. Seeing the images on a regular tube monitor instead of a TFT laptop screen now revealed a number of flaws! Hell, really! I had always suspected this might be the case, and it was still a little shock to realize it was actually true! So that meant additional post production time … The images in this weblog are still unchanged, so depending on whether you watch them on a real monitor or a flat screen the result may vary significantly.
The first prerender verson of the WSF movie already exists and Patrick Damiani is working on the official soundtrack. We'll be back with details shortly!
Labels: notebook problem, picture quality issue
# posted by hg/tuw @ 18:14 
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