Actual Worldcon Membership Data

I've been reading a lot of speculation about Worldcon memberships lately as part of the ongoing Puppygate, and much of it is wrong. Fortunately, the WSFS Formulation of Long List Entries Committee, led by Mark Olson (yes, I'm a member) has updated the Worldcon Detail Membership Figures (caution: Excel spreadsheet) and the headline numbers on The Long List of Worldcons.

One element of note, and something I was mistaking when doing my own calculations: Loncon 3 had over 10,718 members of all types, but only 8,723 of them were WSFS members (attending or supporting, with voting rights). Roughly 2,000 were single-day or other non-voting classes of member. Remember this when estimating what the total electorate was for the 2015 Hugo Award nominations: the union of the membership of the 2014/15/16 Worldcons as of January 31, 2015.

And here's another reminder: The Secret Masters of Fandom are not secret. Maybe we're a little slow sometimes (it's not like any of us are doing this stuff as our Day Jobbe), and often quite boring and tedious, but not secret. The only real secret of the SMOFS is that we're not particularly secretive.

Another Camera Test

Today's video test was to be the same shot as yesterday, with the camera turned up to one of its HD settings. As a bonus, we got a Union Pacific local heading east, where it would meet Amtrak at Thisbe, the first siding west of Fernley.

( Passing Trains at Fernley )

After dinner, I dumped the video out of the card, converted the MXF files, and combined them in MovieMaker. It's probably not obvious, but both audio channels are on this video. Apparently the only way to combine the multiple channels is to add the first track, then save the movie from MovieMaker as the highest-definition file it can handle, then start a new project, import the result of the first export, then drop the second audio track in and save the resultant file. This obviously loses some resolution, and it takes twice as long because you have to save the file twice.

There's some chance that we will not be able to fully wrap our heads around how to use the high-end features of the camera until we shoot the Westercon Business Meeting this year, which will be under "field conditions," so to speak.

ETA: Anyone who wants to take a crack at starting with the raw MXF files the camera produced is welcome to them. Caution: this is nearly 1 GB of raw data. The P2 camera is not particularly economical in storing data!