Ars Technica reports on a federal ruling that makes redistributing software in a manner that violates a free software license akin to copyright infringement.  I won’t go into the details of why this is such a huge victory, as Ars does a much better job explaining it than I ever could.  But this is also a huge victory for us at Northwestern.  Many of our projects are released under copyleft-type licenses: GPL, Creative Commons, etc.  In fact, this very website is powered by Origami, an open-source project of our developers here.  Now we can all rest easier, knowing our work will be afforded the substantial protection provided by copyright law.

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DER SPIEGEL has published an article about the golden age of Timbuktu featuring an image of the digital lab implemented by NUIT NUAMPS. The lab was installed in collaboration with ALUKA and SAVAMA-DCI.

More NUIT A&RT NUAMPS TIMBUKTU project work here 

Download PDF here

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    Harlan and I returned from our nine-day planning grant trip to Dunhuang, in Gansu Province in western China, on Tuesday.  It was a very successful trip, filled with many meetings with our friends at the Dunhuang Academy.  If all goes well, we will be looking forward to continuing our work with the Academy in the digital preservation of the Mogao Cave site.  The only downside is the horrendous jet lag that persists days after returning home, after having only just gotten over the effects from the first round of travel…  It was interesting to see how Olympic fever has overtaken China at the moment, even across the far reaches of the Gobi desert.  The Shanghai airport was already sold out of all of their Olympic merchandise.  Here is Huanhuan, one of the 2008 Olympic mascots, whose fiery head ornament design is inspired by the murals at Mogao.  He stands outside the visitor’s center at the site.  Ms. Fan, Director of the Dunhuang Academy, carried the Olympic torch past this same spot only a few months ago.                     

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                    We have entered the home stretch on video production of our big summer project, the capture, edit and web presentation of the two week Institute of Education Sciences (IES)/ National Center for Education Research (NCER) Summer Research Training Institute hosted by Northwestern’s Institute for Policy Research (IPR).  If number of acronyms is any measure of importance, this is certainly a high-level event.  We are set up to capture video of the sessions, and Wallace and Ostertag implemented a nifty slide capture device which will enable us to sync all Power Point presentations with near exact precision in the final web viewer, adjacent to closed-captioned video windows of the presenters.  Our editors are catching video from the lectures by the hour, and assembling edits round the clock.  All systems are go, and we have already completed ten full lecture programs from last week alone out of a final expected program count of fifteen sessions.

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There’s been a lot of changes over the past few months in the technologies supporting NUAMPS video production and post-production.  Stefani has posted previously about our switch to a tapeless camera, the Panasonic HVX200.  However, this is only half of the equation.  These cameras produce footage at a rate of approximately 1GB/minute.  And since our existing editing facilities were only designed to support approximately 216MB/minute, we clearly needed an upgrade.  Additionally, we had no real way to share work on large projects without long, laborious data transfers between editing machines.

Enter XSAN.  We purchased an Apple Xserve and two Promise VTrak RAID enclosures.  These enclosures house 32 750GB drives, giving us approximately 13TB of space for the editing of HD video.  These enclosures are controlled by Apple’s XSAN filesystem, providing the quickest and most efficient access to our source footage.  Finally, everything (including our five editing stations) is interconnected over 4Gbps fiber, providing a connection speed even faster than the internal drives of the stations themselves.

End result: enough space to edit even the largest of projects, with the ability to share projects immediately.

This technology has allowed us to shoot, edit, and deliver approximately 30 hours of video over a two week period - a task that would have been downright impossible using our previous systems.  Stefani will have more on this specific project.  Until then…make sure you get your fiber.

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Now that we’re up and running on our new system, we’ve posted a few new programs for you:

The Medium

The Old Maid and the Thief

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2008 Annual Math Awards Lecture

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          I am currently wrapping up my first experience with the New Media Consortium (NMC) sumer conference, hosted this year by Princeton University.  I’ve seen whole host of media presentations over the past few days, including a very interesting session put on by our friends at Bradley University about their award-winning digital theatrical performance, The Adding Machine.  Last evening I presented NUAMPS Archival Imaging to a very lively audience, and generated a lot of interest in our process with conference-goers.  I have some interesting ideas and other conference tidbits to share with the NUAMPS crew upon my return, and I look forward to returning to NMC in the future to continue NUAMPS’ relationship with this very innovative community.  

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While our blog continues happily on Wordpress, the NUAMPS site has gone through a major metamorphosis. Cosmetically, you won’t notice any significant redesign, but underneath we’ve gone from hand-coded html to the Plone content management system. So you can expect more updates, more often.

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NUAMPS has recently delivered two more programs for air on the Big Ten Network. Produced in association with University Relations, these pieces highlight the superb talent that exists among both faculty and students at the Northwestern School of Music.

NUSO Student Showcase

Scheduled Air Dates:

Thursday, June 12th - 1pm EST (Premiere)

Musique de Chambre: A Faculty Recital

Scheduled Air Dates:

Tuesday, June 24th - 8pm EST (Premiere)

Wednesday, June 25th - 4am EST (Repeat)

Friday, June 27th - 1:30pm EST (Repeat)

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We’ve expanded the types of articles available at Science in Society by including Medill Reports and Research Digests.

Read them.

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