Beware the App Store.

As people willingly walk into the future, they are being lured by streaming this, virtual that, and the ever vague “cloud.” What they do not see or realize is the vanishing control of things they had taken for granted for so long.

The first crack in this “utopia” was when Amazon had to pull books from its bookstore because the entity selling them through Amazon did not have the rights to do so. Well, that’s all proper you’d say, but they also reached into the pockets of the end users who had bought those books, and took those books out of the buyers pockets.

Follow UP to my previous Jawbone post.

I’ve continued to use my Jawbone UP wristband but its usefulness is going down as I use it. It’s designed to be an activity tracker, and there’s mounting evidence that it’s not doing that very well. The app is a nutrition tracker, and I’m finding that it’s not doing what I’d like. So let me discuss my findings to demonstrate what the problem is.

What does it take to compute?

As tablets begin to overtake desktop and laptop computers as the “go to” piece of hardware for getting a job done, the need for a big OS and big apps falls into question. Case in point, you can shoot HD, edit and upload to your favorite web repository from an iPod Touch, Android phone, Windows Phone, etc. Apple’s latest OS- Lion, pulls liberally from the iOS devices, and Windows 8 is rumored to be a lot like their Windows Phone OS. It is with this background that I checked out how big the apps were in my Mac OS Applications folder, and I was pretty surprised by the results.

Apple’s new iMovie Pro. (aka Final Cut Pro X)

Say goodbye to the Pro Apps as you know them. The writing has been on the wall for several years, yet many Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio users continue to cling to the hope that Apple will make a major leap with Final Cut Pro and bring it into 64-bit computing, and finally address the numerous issues that have been on wish lists, sometimes for an entire decade.

Well, Apple demoed iMovie Pro at the FCP SuperMeet this past Tuesday April 12th and made absolutely no qualms about visually signifying the end of the Pro apps as we know them. There was no talk of Color. Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Blu-ray authoring, 3D authoring, feature film features, etc. No the focus was solely on Apple iMovie Pro.

How did we get to this sorry state? Well, I think there was a conversation in January that sort of went like this:

When geeks disagree about Arri’s Alexa

Over at the Pro Video Coalition, there are several great writers I read with enthusiasm. One of these is Art Adams whose technical geekery exceeds my own (in a good way). His recent articles on the Arri Alexa and how different ISOs affect the number of stops above middle gray has sparked what I would consider an intense debate between Art and myself in the comments of his articles because, well, I just don’t get it.

TechThoughts Nears 100,000 Views!

TechThoughts continues to grow since I brought it all back here. Every day, more visitors return, and new ones visit for the first time. Remember, you can subscribe via RSS, and even e-mail so you’ll know when a new article hits. As this blog approaches its 100,000th visitor, I have a special contest.

How NOT to treat production professionals.

I can understand shrinking budgets. I can understand low budget production, I can understand working for free. But so many of these videos have popped up in the past year or so that it demonstrates a bit of push-back: the abuse of production professionals is really becoming an epidemic.

If two ops, a camera package, with ENG audio and basic lights used to cost $1200/10 then why do producers, or corporate people who are needing a video made, somehow think it’s now okay to pay $500 for it?

Don’t miss a TechThought. E-mail subscriptions now available.

Sure RSS is fancy, there’s Twitter & Facebook… but if you subscribe to enough stuff, or get busy on a project, you are simply not going to scroll through pages of stuff to try and make sure you didn’t miss a phenomenal article from me. Well, now you can subscribe by e-mail.

When I post, You’ll get an e-mail that will just sit in your in-bin till you have the time. I use it to follow other essential blogs and find it far better than chasing down good info through so many other various methods– especially since e-mail is an absolute requirement when it comes to business tools. Facebook, Twitter, RSS, etc, not so much. Computers should be doing the work for us, and e-mail subscriptions make that happen.

When is a trade news site not useful? When it does so little.

I’m just one person. I write when there’s time between jobs, or while stuff renders, etc. But I try to really make it interesting and useful to readers. In fact, in the 2 years I published elsewhere, and not touched a single thing on this site, the articles I wrote here were STILL garnering some 50 page views a day. This is down dramatically from when I was publishing new content, but testimony to the quality of the work I produce.

So it really bugs me when I see competitors to TechThoughts, and to EventDV Magazine and Web site, for which I am a owner, and contributing editor, respectively, getting traffic for writing as little as TWO SENTENCES and linking to something else.

iPhone 4’s 960×640 pixel screen as camcorder monitor?

A lot has been said about the iPhone 4 screen’s incredible resolution.

Packing a 960×640 (o.6 MP) resolution into a screen that small means it is 326 pixels per inch. Unless you have perfect vision, reviewers have said that you’ll just not be able to make out individual pixels. This is a very high resolution for any portable LCD screen, and when shooting HD video, a high resolution monitor is critical.