A tale of two podcasts

I did my degree in the eighties and after an abortive start on a Physics Bsc. I switched to a maths and programming course (ironically the maths was easier!). I came across an old paper I'd written on the two branches of artificial intelligence - commonly refered to as the strong AI model and the weak AI model. I don't know if I'd read it somehwere (this was more than twenty years ago!) but I'd made a rather insightful comment;

....It shows maturity within a discipline when valid sub-sections become vibrant and recognisable to external observers.....

I think that can now be said of podcasting - gone are the days when every podcast you listen to (and The Daily Source Code is probably the worst offender!) was about everything and nothing (and actually mostly about podcasting). Two shows that I've recently discovered that relate to this industry are;

• VFX: The Visual Effects Show - Ron Brinkmann, Alex Lindsay and friends review visual effects of the latest movies while discussing the challenges and technologies of today's visual effects pipeline. In a recent episode they talked about the effects work on Flyboys which caught my ear because I knew it had been shot on the Genesis digital film camera. We'd had some rushes at work and I was amazed at the clarity of the images. They had only bad things to say about the grade of the finished film, which is a shame because digital cinema cameras are really starting to shine. They also talked at length about the green-screen/gimbal rig work and how all of the part-models were static and the tracking shots had to work as if they were shot from one moving plane looking at another moving plane. I'd have loved to see the automated cameras movements swinging around the model to achieve that look.
  All in all a really interesting podcast if you have any involvement with digital effects.


• The Schubin Report - Technologist and engineer Mark Schubin looks at the past month's digital television news and events - He's an old-school engineer who has very much kept on top of current developments. This month's podcast has a great section on why every HD television currently available is a bad buy! Rupert put me onto this one and initially I though he was a bit of a schill for JVC - but if you ignore the adverts he really is quite balanced.

So - my recommendations for new listening.