Well, I see by the old clock on the PC wallpaper that it’s time to start another column and that CNN senior meteorologist Valerie Voss is back from what I’m sure was a richly deserved week off.
I’m watching Voss do the cable television weather show in one window on my home computer while I’m stringing together these well-chosen (I hope) words in a second window.
And to add to the mix, I’m pumping out the display on my PC into my 52-inch, big-screen TV set and recording the results on a VCR.
So I’m making a videotape of me writing this column in one part of the video screen while Voss is doing the weather in another part of the display.
I’m doing this exercise in dubious video journalism using a new $300 gizmo by Canada-based ATI Technologies Inc. called the “All-in-Wonder” board, which I installed inside my Pentium-class PC.
After slipping the board into a free PCI slot, I can watch the words that I am typing as I write this column appear both on my PC and on the big-screen TV set in my living room.
Key to the package is the fact that anything I can make happen on my computer screen can be recorded on videotape for replay later on.
I could, for example, make an entire videotape of the writing of this column, showing every strike-over, every paragraph move, every misspelling, every grammatical gaffe, and, hopefully, the correction of each.
It’s too bad Andy Warhol, who once made an 8-hour movie of a man sleeping, didn’t live to see this. It would be just Andy’s kind of film. I can see the marquee above the little art house just off Times Square right now, “Computer Columnist.”
I’d have my 15 minutes of fame for sure. All I need is an 8-hour video of me writing this column. My goodness, think of the value to journalism schools alone of catching a working hack at every nook and cranny of his trade.
Nah. Not gonna do it, as former President Bush liked to say back before a case of the very late-term middle-age crazies set in a few months ago and he started jumping out of airplanes.
Your humble correspondent, who has no immediate plans for jumping out of airplanes, remains a Gutenberg era gaffer whose bout with the middle-age crazies happened when he actually was middle-aged, unlike the apparent case with some parachuting 72-year-olds one might name.
Not gonna do it. I know my limits, and I have stretched them real close to the squeaking point to produce today’s review of this nifty new gizmo for machines running Windows 95.
I love playing with this new toy, but I have to tell you that it can leave you with a case of the Binary Black Shakes, a microchip-borne malady so prevalent that some people are simply using the acronym BBS to describe them.
The condition called BBS is very much like most people feel when getting ready to jump out of airplanes. Observable symptoms include hand shakes, stomach knots and cold sweats, which, in the case of BBS, are triggered by computer delays and malfunctions while doing traditional computer-type tasks.
It is hardly taking a controversial stance to say that one should not have to deal with the same stress one gets jumping out of airplanes while doing a day’s work or an evening’s “relaxation” in front of a computer display or a video screen.
The BBS once reserved for cranky word processors now can invade your living room TV set.
We’re talking convergence, the new reality just now sinking in to owners of multimedia PCs and Macs that the only difference between a computer and a TV is that the computer probably has a smaller screen and probably rests in a different room of the house.
The Macaholic in me compels me to tell you that the great power of this “All-in-Wonder” board is to bring the same powers of video computing to PCs that have been available for years in certain Macs, such as the 7100 AV (audio video) PowerMac that I use at home.
Now you can have the joys and jitters of an AV Mac on your Windows 95 machine as well.
And you won’t believe what can go on between the CBS cyclopean eye on WBBM-TV and the Spice adults-only Pay TV channel when you wire the devil cable box from TCI into the devil computer box from Microsoft using a $300 All-in-Wonder board.
The All-in-Wonder name comes because the gadget has 7 different functions that used to require different boards for each. These include a few that are meant for games, including a 3-D graphics accelerator and 64-bit 2-D graphics output that is far faster than ordinary computer output.
You need a Pentium 100 or better, a free PCI expansion slot and at least 16 megabytes of RAM to make it work. Also, the stuff you produce, such as 30-frame-per-second moving video, gobbles up huge amounts of hard drive real estate. A 2 gigabyte or even 3 gigabyte hard drive is all but essential.
To use the video parts of the board, you either plug a coaxial line from cable TV into the board directly, or hook the cable wire into a VCR and then connect the video out and audio out from the VCR into the All-in-Wonder board.
The software that comes in the box then makes your computer display regular TV in a window or full screen on your computer monitor. You can even use it to create “video wallpaper” while you go about regular computer tasks.
The device also lets you capture both single frames and full video clips of whatever comes in from the cable TV wire or from your VCR.
The captured stills and movies can then be run through video authoring software such as MacroMedia Director, which is included in the package, and turned into custom television productions.
Once you have used your computer’s powers to create your video production, you can activate the device’s television output feature and send the show to your VCR or big screen television set for actual play or recording.
During my review I found the included MacroMedia software to be extremely cranky, however. I vastly preferred using such programs as Microsoft Power Point and Lotus Presentation Manager to produce the actual shows I created to test the product.
As I noted above, this let me produce actual videos of things that I did on my desktop computer, such as displaying various photographic slide shows and running QuickTime movies and animations as well as just playing sound files.
It is a snap to use the video capture feature to save a video clip from the TV and then include it in a PowerPoint show along with all the other graphs, charts, photos, etc.
Finally, the board adds a slew of new powers to the simple act of watching cable television that also should get mentioned here.
For example, the board lets you not only display the closed captioning included in major broadcast programs for the hearing-impaired, it lets you store the actual text produced in those captions into files that can be added later to word processing documents.
A fairly amazing feature also lets you set your computer to monitor a channel, such as CNN, and then beep to alert you if certain key words are uttered in the broadcast.
The devil box from Canada called the All-in-Wonder board can even be set to automatically start recording a transcript whenever somebody on the television says a keyword.
And if that isn’t enough to give you the BBS, I don’t know what else to suggest, short of a one-way plane ride with Mr. Bush.
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Binary Beat readers can participate in the column at www.chicago.tribune.com/tech or e-mail jcoates@Ameritech.net.
