No threat to CW Games, 2011 World Cup: India
NEW DELHI, Dec 2: India will host the 2010 Commonwealth Games and cricket’s World Cup in 2011 as scheduled despite security concerns after the Mumbai terror attacks, top officials said on Tuesday
Indian Olympic Association Secretary-General Randhir Singh said there was no threat to the Commonwealth Games to be held in New Delhi from Oct 3 to 14, 2010.
“What happened in Mumbai is tragic, but sport must go on and we are determined to host the Games,” Singh, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), said.
“There will be high security for the Games as is common at most international sporting events. There is no cause to worry.
“The Olympic torch relay in New Delhi earlier this year went off without a problem despite demonstrations because the security was very tight.”
The 2010 event is only the second time the four-yearly Games have been awarded to an Asian city, the first being the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur in 1998.
The cricket World Cup in 2011, to be jointly hosted by the four South Asian Test nations, was thrown in doubt after diplomatic tensions escalated between India and Pakistan over the Mumbai attacks which left almost 200 people dead.
But India’s Sharad Pawar, a federal minister who takes over as president of the International Cricket Council (ICC) in 2010, dismissed speculation the tournament was under threat.
“There is still some time for that and I am confident our government will take corrective actions,” Pawar told the CNN-IBN news channel.
“In the near future, you will see a totally different situation where all precautionary measures are taken and nobody will dare to show this kind of courage here.”
Indian cricket authorities are awaiting security clearance from the government for a Test tour of Pakistan in January, but media reports say the series is unlikely to take place.
India and Pakistan jointly hosted the World Cup in 1987 and 1996 with Sri Lanka, who organised three matches in 1996, and Bangladesh added as hosts for the 2011 tournament
Apple eats video editing jobs
Workers in the media industry face either an intoxicating future or one filled with doom because of Apple's Final Cut software and unifying digitisation removing layers of complexity from their work. That's the theme coming out of a tapeless media summit in held last week in London's Soho, a centre for media production and post-production work.
That tape's time is passing was the starting point. Cameras which used to record to a tape cartridge in the camera body now record to flash cards. This is good in that video transfer from the camera is faster but bad because the flash card is not an archive medium, whereas tape is, albeit one slagged off at the seminar. The troubles with tape archives are that tapes decay and get damaged. They get stored in a vault somewhere, making them hard to get at, and the cataloguing of what's on the tape is pretty rudimentary and not necessarily high-standard.
The media tape vault is a place old clips are sent to die through lack of use, an offline video cemetery when what's needed is an old clip online reference vault.
As the cost of video-editing equipment has come down and the capabilities of commodity server-based software, such as Apple's Final Cut Pro, have increased layers of complex older technology, with machines costing hundreds of thousands, even millions of pounds, being rendered redundant. The people in the industry whose work and skills are based on this equipment face job destruction. They might as well be working in analogue camera film developing and printing. Just as digitisation swept away those jobs and trades so the same is happening in video production and editing.
With software like Final Cut, the video editing server is becoming the single window through which video editors do their work, using plug-ins to Final Cut such as Motion, where necessary. When constructing a video obituary of a rock star they don't want to have to send a runner to a tape vault somewhere. It takes too long, it's uncertain what they'll find and the tapes may not actually be properly readable when brought back to the editing suite.
