Touch screen experiment

Some many moons ago I posted on my facebook that I have removed the screen protector from my Nokia Lumia 830 Windows phone. I had said I will explain later why. Now is the time.

Some many moons more before that I posted an interesting question. With someone as picky as me about screens, how will I find touch screens for a desktop that accumulates greasy finger prints?

It was time to put it to the test and a smart phone undergoes the worst of it so it is a perfect candidate.

Result after over a year of use without the protector:

Scratches on main screen: yes.

Scratches on camera: yes

Finger grease permanent: no. wipes off easily.

This phone has gorilla glass 3 so the scratches were a disappointment. When ever I wanted a clean clear view of the screen I wiped it clean. However this is easier done with a portable devices. I would not want to do this every time with, say, a 32"+ VDU -thus question answered on touch screen VDU.

Would I recommend a screen protector for a mobile device? This answer is complicated and is by individual preference. If you replace your phone once a year or two years, don't bother with the protector. By the time the scratches become prominent enough, it will be time for a new phone. If you don't have the cash flow to get new phones at the above frequency, get the screen protector.

A screen protector also does more than scratch protect. A good quality one will absorb impacts preventing screen fracturing. So there are other reasons to use a screen protector as well.

Lightworks

This is a short blog update.

I am currently processing a lot of video clips and want to retain its quality as much as possible. I wanted something that will let me do that without costing me a fortune. I found Lightworks and it's free (limited to 720P resolution video unless you get the paid version).

The video clips were captured on my PlayStation 4 but I noticed an interesting problem. Lightworks reads and lets me edit them fine but during export it would blank out the second half of the clip. PS4 encoding is likely causing some problems so to fix it I used the hugely popular Handbrake encoder(also free) to re-encode the clips at the highest quality possible without a placebo effect. Lightworks was able to export these files fine. However the higher quality mp4 encoding left a problem. MP4 is what is considered a "playback-friendly" format and not an "edit-friendly" format. In other words I needed AVI.
Once again Lightworks is great because it has a Transcode mode. I used it to transcode the mp4's into AVI which is an edit-friendly format.

Since I am busy with my video project, I will likely talk about my experience with Lightworks more later but that depends on how it goes though! I am impressed with it so far.

I have done video editing and sound editing as a hobby for a while now and have some great works (that I am not willing to publish, sorry!). I have learnt a great deal in these areas so I am certainly not an amateur. Some of my past video games have involved taking one type of sound and turning it into another type of sound. Of course sitting with a sound engineer for Mai FM a long time ago taught me heaps and that knowledge still sits with me today. So Lightworks really is, for me, all about features and how easily I can do stuff in it.

Ok so the update wasn't so short, but that's the beauty of enthusiasm!