Video: Eduquest - Death & Rebirth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip32N476eaw

An enormous number of you probably weren't patrons at the time that I made the predecessor to this video. Over a year ago, I got an IBM Eduquest, dashed off a quick unscripted video about it, and said I'd return. Then I never did, for a variety of reasons - now explained.

I now have two Eduquests, and I like the new one quite a lot. The old one was cool, and I respect it still, but this one's actually useful. Still, it's hard to talk about a computer, as I expound on at various points in this video. So what I've done here is to split my time between talking about the qualities of the machines themselves (of which there are two, which I cover in their entirety, so this is really a double feature) and talking about the various minutiae of PC history that they bring up.

It's not as meandering as it sounds, I feel all of it's on-point, but I do also know that I could have made this 40 minutes if I wanted to and gotten most of the really critical stuff in there. Still, this is how I actually talk about computers - if you were with me in person, I'd go off on all these same tangents, because I don't think the whole story makes sense unless you have the parts _and_ the sum.

Ultimately I think I like the result but gosh I hope my next video doesn't take nearly a month to make. I am exhausted.

Technical notes!

This video taught me that I _never_ want to shoot a video featuring a CRT connected to a DOS PC ever again, because it's nearly impossible to get rid of flicker. Oh, sure, at 60hz there are plenty of options. I run my shutter at 1/60th, full 360-degrees most of the time, and normal NTSC displays don't have a lick of scanline roll or flicker, but since VGA runs at 70hz, all my footage of the machines running was unwatchable.

My initial release candidate actually had a warning in front for photosensitive people because there were parts that were like staring into a strobe light. I had given up on fixing it, until someone suggested that I use a motion blur filter. That fixed it, although it gave all the screen shots a muddy, Gameboy-LCD kind of feeling. Unavoidable, sad to say.

It wouldn't have been nearly as painful except that the Thirty has a high-gloss tube which reflected the whole studio like a mirror, and I had to go through and gaussian blur it everywhere, creating animations for every time I move the machine. Not all that hard, but tedious and easy to mess up, and the results look a little strange at times. Irritating!

In the future, if I ever show off a DOS machine with VGA, it'll either be via direct capture or via LCD. And honestly, that's how I'd normally have done it, except that this video was supposed to explicitly be about an all-in-one, so there was really no winning.