An alternate suggestion to either a shelf or digitizing -- some of those CD binders, with the platic pocket pages. It's amazing how much less space CDs and DVDs take up when you remove the jewel case/video box from the equation.

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radical "More Shelving" solution

I've seen the troll logic of big corporations. That bookshelf means more sitting space, which they will translate into a square footage cost, and then add in the cost of additional HVAC to cover the extra square footage. Also keep in mind that if Jessica gets a bookshelf then everyone above her on the org chart will be entitled to get one as well. So multiply the cost of the square footage by that number of people, and then the actual space that will take. You do realize they'll need a new bigger building to pull this off, and they haven't even moved into the next one yet.

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Sean, that's what we've got now - 25 of 'em lined up on the windowsill in front of my desk. Not ideal storage by any means, but perfectly functional for how we use them.

And ND gets the insane troll logic

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The insane troll logic sounded quite familiar to me. In more than one place I worked, we couldn't get more powerful computers for graphic artists because then everyone else would have to get them, even though everyone else was typing reports and running the occasional spreadsheet.

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Jess, I don't know what the explanation is, but getting shelves and bookshelves installed have been bar none the most complicated tasks my department has encountered. We've gotten approval to hire new staff with less red tape.

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I wish I knew the exact codecs that people who *ahem* tv shows and other media do to compress an hour very clearly and smoothly into 350MB.

That and the tools to do the same to my parent's home movies on my Mac.

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The insane troll logic sounded quite familiar to me. In more than one place I worked, we couldn't get more powerful computers for graphic artists because then everyone else would have to get them, even though everyone else was typing reports and running the occasional spreadsheet.

ND was witness to this at my old job. Here I was pushing the processor on my old iBook to the max, HD all but full, and slowing down tech rehearsals, while some office monkey who sits on the net and taps out word doc's all day get's a quad core computer with maxed memory and a DVD burner. I wasn't eligible for a new laptop, because I was the last to get in the first round, so I had to be the last to get in the 2nd round. Or some crazy bs.

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I wish I knew the exact codecs that people who *ahem* tv shows and other media do to compress an hour very clearly and smoothly into 350MB.

From what I recall, mostly Divx and Xvid.

New question - a client is requesting their digital masters in H.265. I can safely assume that's a typo, right? (My extremely cursory Google search indicates that H.265 hasn't been released yet. If that's wrong, does anyone have a link to where I can download it?)

[eta: I found this post from July suggesting a 2009 release date and nothing has jumped out to contradict it [link] ]

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From what I recall, mostly Divx and Xvid.

Xvid for video, MP3 for sound ought to do the trick. I compress an hour show sans commercials (for personal use) to about 500MB, but that is at higher resolution than the 350MB people. I can't remember what the bit rate I use is off the top of my head.

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I sorta want one of these...

[link]

About $20 for 2GB of RAM, a spare hard drive, load on Mythbuntu and it would be a very nice frontend for the living room TV.

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