Author Arthur C. Clarke, Passed Away whose science fiction and non-fiction
works ranged from the script for "2001: A Space Odyssey" to an early
proposal for communications satellites, has died at age 90, associates
have said.

On the sad occasion of the passing of Arthur C Clarke, I thought
readers might want a link to what seems to have been his last
interview. In January, IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Saswato Das
visited Clarke several times in his hospital room. We had just
finished putting together this 14-minute story this week, and posted
it last night.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/radio?id=2518

  Steven




In the spring of 2002, my colleague Alan Greenberg and I did an
interview with Arthur Clarke at his home, in his "Ego Room" I think,
in preparation for its showing at INET 2002, the Internet Society
Conference held in Washington the summer of that year.  It was
Professor V, K, Samarayanake ("Professor Sam") who was instrumental
in persuading Clarke to permit the interview.
We discussed his career, science fiction predictions, and a fair
amount about the Internet.  We had tried to arrange a video hookup
for him to be the keynote speaker at the conference, but that wasn't
going to work, and since we were in Sri Lanka on mission, we decided
to try to arrange the interview.
We got him on a very good day (a previous visit the year before did
not work well) and he was interesting, lucid and funny.   Sri Lanka
Television taped the whole thing professionally.  We did a little
editing, and it's now 32 minutes long.
I'd be delighted if someone with the right equipment would be willing
to convert the tape and post it on YouTube.  I have a copy of the
original tape in PAL format, in addition to the derivative NTSC
version on VHS; either would be good.  Would any of your readers have
the equipment and the time and be interested in doing that?   I can
deliver either tape to FedEx within hours.

George Sadowsky

---


Thanks to George Sadowsky and Alan Greenberg, I have been privileged
to convert and upload an interview that George and Alan conducted in
2002 with Arthur C. Clarke at his home in Sri Lanka.

The links are:

Pt1.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEqfn5evqbc
Pt2.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu_ZTJFcCZE
Pt3.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fp1qMZ9kj5c
Pt4.     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AReq_SZYVXk

I used a Miglia Director's Cut Take 2 to import the video over
IEEE1394 as DV to Apple's iMovie 08. I then cut the segments into >10
minute lengths to comply with YouTube's upload restrictions. iMovie
then uploaded them to my YouTube account as h.264/AVC video.

The Director's Cut unit is no longer produced. It was a victim of RoHS
legislation. I could have similarly imported as MPEG2 or MPEG4 with
the TVMax+ (currently in production.) I'm going to use that device
when I reimport the tape for burning to DVD. I will reimport because I
don't need to subject the video to another lossy compression
(DV->h.264->mpeg2  would be a little silly.)

Regards,
Victor Marks