…..
So, I finally got the lens Saturday. But, I had to head out of town at the last minute on Sunday, so I didn’t get to take any test shots until I got back and recovered from the trip. From looking at the lens, it looks fine. No oil on the aperture blades, no fungus on the glass, no scratches or chips in the glass, and the body was okay, etc.

However, when I put the lens on my K10D and started taking test shots, I noticed that the photos taken with the lens wide open at f2.8 were DARKER than the photos taken stopped down to f5.6. In fact, the f5.6 aperture setting seemed to be this lens’ “sweet spot”, as it got the exposure right. The photos taken at f8 through f22 were all supposed to gradually get darker as the aperture got smaller. Looking at the photos in the order taken (from largest to smallest aperture: f2.8, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22), the darkening of the photos should have followed an easily detectible progression from brightest/lightest to darkest. That didn’t happen.

The weird thing is that when I took the camera out of full manual mode and put it in Av mode (aperture priority), the exposure in the shots was balanced correctly. But, if I want to grow my technical skills, I can’t get into the habit of shooting in Av mode all the time. But, if I only shoot in Av, without understanding how to use manual mode, how would I know what to do if I needed to use full manual mode in a difficult lighting situation? Exactly. I’ve contacted the seller to arrange a return and refund.

So, my first experience with building a computer went well, although I did hit a snag with the first CPU cooler I bought. It attached to the motherboard with plastic pegs that were to be pushed through their corresponding holes in the motherboard and then twisted to “lock”. But, the problem was that the holes in the first motherboard I bought were too small.

I took the motherboard and cooler back to swap them out, and instead of a microATX motherboard, I got a full sized ATX motherboard, and instead of a cooler with push-pin connections, I got one that attached to the motherboard via screwing into a back plate. After I figured out how to properly attach the back plate to the motherboard (the directions were lousy), it was much easier to get the cooler installed.

The Parts

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L

Hard Drive: 500GB Seagate Barracuda

Memory: 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800MHz

CPU Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus

Power Supply Unit: Antec EarthWatts EA 500

Graphics Card: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

Case: Thermaltake V3 Black Edition

The Build

It took longer than I anticipated to get finished, but I’m very happy with my final product. The computer booted up properly the first time I turned it on. I installed Windows XP Pro without a hitch, and then installed all the drivers without a hitch. The pain in the butt was the 12 quadrillion Microsoft updates that were required. But, in the end, it was worth it. I added to my repertoire of skills, and got a kick from seeing something I put together work the way it’s supposed to the FIRST time.

Here are a couple of pics of the build process…

Empty Case (aka chassis)

Motherboard, power supply, and DVD burner installed

The End Result

And, here’s the end result…

Front View

Side View

So now, I’m rocking a quad core computer with 4 GB of premium memory from Crucial (Crucial Ballistix). I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 CPU. That’s four processors each running at 2.5GHz. Actually, as of a few minutes before I started writing this post, each core began running at 2.7GHz. Yep, I overclocked this bad boy as far as I could get it on the stock heatsink/fan without the CPU temperature getting too high. When I get an “aftermarket” heatsink/fan, I will be able to get over 3GHz per core without running into temperature issues. Overclocking for the first time was kind of nerve-wracking, but it wasn’t hard, especially since I didn’t try to do anything fancy.

When I went into my motherboard’s BIOS, I noticed that both my CPU and RAM were running at lower speeds than their supposedly “stock” settings. That’s called being underclocked, and what’s a trip is that at a whole half a GHz slower than what it was supposed to have been running, my computer was still FAST as lightening, compared to my dual core. At the higher 2.7GHz it’s virtually flying, so I definitely can’t wait to get a new heatsink/fan and max the speed out. That’s going to be freaking insane!

Video Formats
The two most popular video formats are .MOV and .WMV. The .MOV format is native to Mac computers, and iMovie will allow you to encode your video to HD. The .WMV format is native to Windows computers, and Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows 7) or Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) will allow you to encode your video to HD.

YouTube prefers the .MOV format because it’s smaller, but accepts .WMV and some others. The quality of HD in both formats is great. The only time it wouldn’t be is if your camcorder or webcam takes crappy video. You have to put good quality in to get good quality out.

Method
Because I have a PC and not a Mac (sobs loudly ), I used Windows Live Movie Maker to encode/render an example video I made just for this tutorial. The final product is below. But, to show you how I did it, I used a screen recording program to record my steps and my vocal instructions. Because the tutorial video is pretty large, and just under 10 minutes long, I opted for encoding it in the .MOV format over the .WMV format since the former would result in a smaller file size.

Example Video

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tutorial

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s it! It’s really not a complicated process. If you have any questions, leave a comment or use my contact form to reach me (see the menu bar).

Download the Custom Video File
If you want to get the 960×720p HD custom video profile (.prx file) to use with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) click this link to download.

How to Install the Custom Video Profile
Unzip the custom file. If you’re asked where to unzip the file, navigate to: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles and unzip it there. Start WLMM or WMM and it should be listed in the Save Move settings with the other profiles OR in another section called Custom Profiles (or something like that, I forget). Viola! That’s it. Happy videomaking!

Deuces!

When I record a video, before it’s uploaded to YouTube, it has to be encoded. By the time YouTube gets finished re-encoding it for their system, the quality has suffered. So, since I have to encode the videos no matter what I do, I’m thinking of just quitting YouTube and hosting the videos on my Silverlight hosting account.

I have a 10 gigabyte Silverlight video hosting account provided for free from Microsoft that is sitting unused. I could encode my videos for Silverlight’s specs and upload them there. The best part is that the Silverlight storage is just storage – my videos won’t be re-encoded resulting in a degradation in quality. The end result is SHARP, CLEAR videos of high quality.

Hmmm… I have some thinking to do.