I’m very busy today, so in an effort to minimize the time I’m spending writing this blog, I’ve decided to just copy and paste the text of an e-mail I have just sent to Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine:

Hi Jeff,

It was a pleasure to meet you at VON a few weeks ago. I had been wanting to meet you for quite some time as you have such great inside into the emerging media on the internet.

As an independent content creator, I find it unsettling when people like the FCC try to widen their jurisdiction to the internet. Even if their initial regulation is harmless, it still makes me uneasy because it feels like it’s a foot in the door. I read this article today about how the CRTC in Canada is interested in regulating new media:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/04/13/crtc-review.html

Even though the CRTC says they want to ensure the “diversity of voices” (which I already find ridiculous because I detest CanCon guidelines), I still find it unsettling since I fear that once they have the power to regulate they could regulate other facets of new media… for example, language. It makes me wonder whether someday we’ll have to pay fines for using the F-word on the internet…

(Oh, if only all countries had a watershed like in the UK and parents took more responsibility of what their children watch/don’t watch…)

I would love to hear your opinion on this, perhaps you would be interested in blogging about it?

Looking forward to meeting you again.

Best regards,
Casey

–
Casey McKinnon
Executive Producer, Galacticast
http://www.galacticast.com/

I started new sequences for about 5 scenes and after cutting them together I noticed that the sequence was not 16:9, but 4:3 (it turned out that the default sequence settings on my version of FCP create a 4:3 sequence). After changing the sequence settings (as well as the default sequence settings so this doesn’t happen again) the videos in the sequences I was cutting together got stretched out sideways (as if I was playing a 4:3 letterbox video on a 16:9 widescreen TV). I tried to right-click on the video footage to see if I can “interpret footage” (which is an option in Adobe Premiere Pro) but there weren’t any options for that.

Does anyone out there know to interpret the footage without having to re-import all the individual clips and re-edit everything I’ve already done?