ISO vs. ZIP/RAR

What is an ISO file? An ISO file put simply is a perfect copy of a disc (usually optical) stored in one file on the hard drive of a computer. ISO is uncompressed and contains even free space of said disc.

According to Wikipedia, "An ISO image (International Organization for Standardization) is an archive file (also known as a disc image) of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system." (Wikipedia, ISO Image, June 2011)

This varies from a compressed archive such as ZIP, RAR, TAR, GZ, BZ2, etc, in that an archive file contains only the files and all unused sectors are removed to save space. With this in mind, one would think that an ISO file was simply an uncompressed archive.

HOWEVER, this is not entirely true. Even uncompressed, an archive file still removes completely-empty bytes. There's no need to zip up the files of an entire 40GB disc and end up with a 40GB file, unless there was actually 40GB of data that was filling the entire thing up! If there was only 15GB on a 40GB disc and you archived the entire disc uncompressed, you would end up with a 15GB file.

This is not true in the case of an ISO file. When you create an image of a 4GB DVD, you will end up with a complete 4GB ISO file, even if half the disc was unused.

This is useful because the main point of ISO files is to be able to create a disc image file and re-burn it to another disc, thus making a copy. In this case, file locations are important in addition to file data, and an burning an ISO image, we are sure that all of the files are laid down on the surface of the disc in exactly the same configuration as the master. Of course, this would only REALLY matter if you were dealing with a raw DVD video that would be more reliant on the burning process than an MPEG-2 file burned to the DVD as data.

VHS

A few days ago, Mom and I splurged on a DVD recorder! Yes, that's right. We went to Best Buy and bought a Toshiba DR430 DVD recorder for $128. The sole purpose of this, at least for now, is to convert all of our old VHS tapes to something more modern. Like DVD! If you have a DVD, you can easily convert it to pretty much anything else that's modern.

The first thing that came to mind, which really brought this idea into a serious light was my recent activity on Lego animation, all of which I've been posting on Youtube. Of course, I actually started animating back in 1999 or a little before, from what I've seen with all of the conversions I've been making this weekend. This includes working with media such as Lego, clay and Andrea's stuffed animals.

Almost all of the videos we made were low quality (because we were using an old, worn out camcorder with a broken focus on the lens. I had figured out that the camcorder always backed up approximately 1.5 seconds after you stopped recording, just to ensure that there wasn't any static or blank tape when you started the next bit. With this knowledge, I was able to make one to half-second durations of video and pretty much simulate stop-action animation. These videos I am converting now ARE my VERY FIRST ATTEMPTS at this! Well, almost. The very first attempt I made didn't work because I was still discovering the 1.5 second thing, so that one is lost. But I redid that same exact video, which worked, and which I am now titling Horses in the Mountains.

I should remember that. I didn't give it a good title when I converted it yesterday..I called it something like "Lego - Collapsing Mountain and Horses."

Another bit of nostalgia. Shortly after I discovered my newfound ability with the camcorder, I had two of my best friends from Jr. High, Ben Weilert and Max Moe, over for an overnighter. Ben had created this comic strip in school which he called "Holy Living Man" and his head was a block of cheese. Just goes to show you how weird Ben was. Well anyway, we had them over for an overnighter and we created a video using clay (Plastacine), and a white board to caption the characters, and used Ben's storyline from his comic strip.

Well, yesterday I finally converted that whole video, along with an entire 2-hour tape's worth of other videos onto a DVD.

Therefore: I am going to now work on converting these DVDs to something like MP4, WMV...something and upload at least the animations to Youtube. Most of them are poor quality, most of them have stupid outtakes and really stupid story lines. But all of them are my originals and besides, I can do anything I want with my own stuff on Youtube, can't I?

So enjoy!

I'm going to be posting quickie intro and credits videos I made up this morning as a sort of preview to whet the appetite of my thousands of subscribers..or maybe more like five.

Can new technology go too far?

The first time the Star Trek people remastered all their videos on DVD, they simply did a straight conversion with maybe a little cleanup. However, with all this new Blu-ray stuff, they've remastered it AGAIN and have gone so far as to "digitize" the video, replacing the model Enterprise hanging on strings in the studio with a poorly done 3D render. Well, I was watching the ad on some of our videos and it says that you can watch the videos with that 3D render instead of the original model if you so choosed. But I think this is just a cheap way of advertising Blu-ray. In fact, I think Blu-ray is way too over-advertised anyway. How much can we remaster old videos to make them better and better?

Seriously, Blu-ray is just a way to create a 40GB DVD. And of course, if the technology is popular with a big company like Disney or Universal, well, they'll do everything possible to get sales including remastering these old videos into high quality digital video with replacement 3D renders and adding hours of 'extras' which are a waste of time.

Personally, I say if you want Blu-ray to take off, stop advertising so much in the way of "hours of special bonus features!" Instead, why don't you pack hours of actual MOVIE onto the disc. Why not put Toy Story 1 at 2 (and now 3 in June) onto one side of one disc and say, "Get all three Toy Stories on one single-layer Blu-ray disc!"

Well, really it seems as though they invested in this great technology and now they don't exactly know what to do with it. It's like getting a one-million dollar check in the mail and...now what?

Back to old videos though: sometimes the mistakes and cheap look that the old videos had can be appreciated MORE than a remaster of them to make them look cooler. Star Trek for example was COOL when it was cheap! Of course, it's kind of cool now, but not as much.