Canon demos next-gen digitial camera doing amazing things

It could be the 5000 mm lens with image stabilization that keeps a handheld camera looking as if it’s on a film head. The massive touch screen rear face, the multi-face portrait capture, or any number of other features that make this concept simply amazing- if it weren’t for the backpack that the photographers use to provide the horsepower for the live demo.

That said, we hold cell phones in hour hands with more computing power than laptops of just a few years ago, so you can expect that in just a couple years, the horsepower in that backpack will be on a chip that can fit in the camera. We live in amazing time. YouTube video from the Canon demonstration is after the break.

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.

Wanna make some noise? There’s an app for that: Linear Time Code.

JumpStart LTC generates a Longitudinal Time Code audio signal. It provides a convenient interface for setting dedicated timecode devices (deneke, sound devices, zaxcom, etc).

Many of these devices, as robust as they are, often have no way to manually set the time – and if they do, it usually involves pesky dip switches or something similar. Some start at Hour 0 each time they are powered up with no way to resume a previous timecode. But now there’s a solution for that too!

External Hard Drives hurdle the 3TB mark. Available Today.

Sure there may be some OS issues with addressing more than 2TB of data on one disk, but that hasn’t stopped Seagate from busting out a 3TB monster… okay, well, it’s no bigger than every other desktop drive, and in a couple years, we’ll be looking back at 3TB with dismay, but for right now, 3TB is a copious amount of space.

This is especially true for those working on big video projects and wrangling 4k video, or multiple cameras, or something like Canon’s new 50 Mbps cameras data. Shooting a documentary with three of those cameras, well all that data adds up. Oh, and because you can never forsee disk failure, better get two!

Check out the link for the full press release after the break.

OLED Screens will Replace LCD for Production Monitors. Here’s why.

I remember reading about OLED screens in some tiny nook of the web, a research arm of Kodak working with Cambridge University if I recall correctly, and they showed this little 3″ screen which was the total fruit of their labors at the time. It used a tenth the power of LCD, it needed no backlight, it was as thin as a dime, and it was viewable in sunlight. I really looked forward to seeing these screens used in production.

Well, Kodak sold off their OLED research to LG in the end of 1999, but that hasn’t stopped the rest of the electronics world from licensing technology and starting to build new, exciting products, Sony’s PVM-740 is set to replace all those crappy (even if expensive) LCD location monitors and I’ll tell you why.

LED Lighting Advancements focus on Control of Illumination

Abel Cine Tech has a very cool little article / promo page highlighting several new LED lighting solutions that you just don’t hear of every day. This includes the Creamsource by Outsight, the Laniro IANILED54 (pictured), Dedolight dual-condenser lens Ledzilla, and Litepanels fresnel lens Sola lights. I was fascinated by the new creativity in engineering controlled light using LEDs.

Sony gears up for Blu-ray 3D mastering and production in Japan

I spoke recently for the DFW-Professional Videographer’s Association and during the Dallas Producer’s Association’s “Production Roundup” about the critical importance of using video scopes while shooting, and in editing. It can be said many different ways but simply, if you understand the importance of using an audio meter to know the difference between audio that is too hot or too quiet, then a waveform monitor is the same thing for video– just as essential.

The headphone volume knob can be adjusted any number of ways, the meter is the only objective measurement. So, too, a video monitor can be adjusted any number of ways, and a scope is the only objective way to measure and calibrate your video.

Plural Eyes tweaks 1.2 update with 1.2b

A new beta version of version 1.2 of PluralEyes for Final Cut Pro is now available. This version stabilizes the new features that have been added during the beta and adds a new one: instead of having to name the sequence to be synced pluraleyes, you can now pick the desired sequence from a list.

I’ve returned.

After a couple years writing some great articles and reviews elsewhere, I’ve decided to roll all this media back together under one umbrella. Amazingly, after nearly 7 years of no posts, my work here gets more traffic than the other blog ever did. Plus I have complete control of the blog here and can make changes how and when I see fit, like tying Facebook and Twitter into the blog.