Video News

OK, folks… listen up! Here’s a challenge to VIDEO producers from a STILL camera manufacturer.  As you’ve been reading in our magazine and on our site, the lines are merging between still and video shooting, and many still camera makers are making the cameras able to shoot good quality video, too. But, most people still think of STILL cameras as only being able to take – what we VIDEO shooters call – “Freeze Frames”.

Well, that’s no longer the case. And Nikon wants you to know about it by offering a contest with a prize of $100,000 for a great video… and it can be shot from any type of cam: video, still, or any brand.

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Back in the dark ages, my parents subscribed to Showtime. Before a movie that was closed-captioned would air, their house announcer would intone, “The following presentation is closed-captioned for the hearing impaired”. They would then jokingly say “what?” But this was also back in the day before televisions shipped with closed-caption decoders built-in. And not a moment too soon, as my wife and I have noted: the kids these days are playing their loud booming cars ever louder, to the point where we are thinking it’s time to invest in hearing aid manufacturers. (No, we’re younger than we sound; we’re not sitting on our front porch, drinking lemonade and swinging our canes at the kids to get off our lawn.)

Ahem. But the innovation of the day comes from YouTube, who is using the power of having a ton of servers to create subtitles (which they are technically incorrectly referring to as closed captions; but then again, people know what closed captions are) for some education channels and all Google channels. You can also add your own captions from a script; YouTube will automatically work out the timings for you, so you won’t need to provide any timecode data. But, once your video is subtitled, you can download the timecode data that YouTube has calculated with all of your subtitles, so this could theoretically help you add captions to other types of media that you’re going out to (DVD or Blu-ray Disc, anyone?)

There’s also language translation capabilities here that appear to work well in the videos we’ve played with, but even Google admits that they’re not quite perfect (though they are often better than nothing, particularly if you don’t know the language being spoken in the video you’re viewing.)

We have high hopes for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1, now available in beta form for Windows, Mac and Linux. The new version is shaping up to be a winner in early testing; it appears to be vastly better about memory consumption and not putting my XP-based workstation’s CPU into a race condition (aka, “becoming a runaway process”). I’ll see how well it works on a 64-bit Win7 setup in a couple of hours.

AMD and NVIDIA have also both put out press releases indicating that a number of their graphics processors will play nice with Flash 10.1, which exploits both Stream and CUDA technology (respectively), and can also eke out a bit more video performance from Intel and Broadcom’s integrated chipsets as well.

Why care? Well, you have to use Flash for pretty much any web site you go to anymore, regardless of the scope of the web site. And Flash is the most popular way to show video online these days, and it’s not too hard to see why–it makes things simple. There’s no mucking through video codecs, because all of the necessary codecs for living in Flash-land are included in the Flash installer. And the codecs in question (Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 and VP7) are all pretty good performers. And the paranoid (but nice) copyright cartel loves it because it’s relatively easy and pretty much seamless to the end-user to apply DRM to Flash video. (You didn’t really want to download that video, did you? You did? Oopsy.)

If you want to take the 10.1 plunge, Adobe’s release notes warn you to remove your existing Flash players before installing the Flash 10.1 beta. Let us know how your experience goes.

Next: waiting patiently for the 64-bit version of Flash to hit Windows…

Every once in a while a cool video comes along that makes you just want to watch it over and over again.  Such is the case with this one – put together by Olympus celebrating 50 years of the little Pen still camera.

Although this is a still camera, the presentation appears to have been done using video editing skills. Like we’ve been talking about a lot lately, the lines between still cameras and video are blurring, and this stop-motion collection of more than 60,000 still photos is a great example of that. Read the rest of this entry »

November 12, 1970 marked the birth of a story so outrageous it was often considered an urban legend. A 45-foot dead whale, weighing a whopping eight tons, washed up onto a beach in Florence, Oregon. Due to the sheer size and increasingly putrid smell of the deceased cetacean, the Oregon Department of Transportation decided the best solution for removal was to blow it up using a half-ton of dynamite.

Moments after the dynamite detonated, it became painfully clear that this was not the best course of action. As smelly chunks of whale blubber came raining down, bystanders ran for cover. A car parked a quarter-mile down the road was crushed under the weight of one of the larger pieces that fell. Fortunately, no one was hurt and a great lesson was learned: Always have a camera rolling.

If it hadn’t been for the gentleman with the camera, the story of Oregon’s exploding whale may have slipped into urban legend obscurity. You, too, can help preserve a moment in time. Next time you hear of something fishy happening in your town, grab your camera and start rolling. You never know what kind of footage might fall into your lap!

We’ve just been informed that Canon publishes a series of white papers detailing some of the finer points of their line of digital SLRs. The documents aren’t the usual marketing material–there are a lot of very deep details that only an engineer who also knows English particularly well (a rare feat, I assure you) would be able to articulate. You can learn things from a white paper that a spec sheet can’t even begin to get into.

We’ve not stumbled upon many other product-specific white papers, let alone a cache of them for an entire product line. If you’re a manufacturer of any products that deal with video and you’re reading this, let’s see your white papers, regardless of topic–whether product-specific or just technology-specific. We’re eager to see what you have.

Elemental Technologies, the leading provider of massively parallel video processing solutions, today announced the release of Elemental Server, the world’s first GPU-based transcoding appliance. Elemental Server’s breakthrough technology enables faster than real time, simultaneous encoding of video files targeting the comprehensive specifications required for the three-screen experience of TV, PC and mobile. Delivering high-speed encoding and premium video output using GPUs (graphics processing units), Elemental Server can replace multiple CPU-only solutions for a fraction of the price, ensuring immediate capital and maintenance cost savings.   Read the rest of this entry »

As a tribute to vets everywhere on this Veterans Day, I thought I’d tell you about a video project that you can get involved in with very little effort.

From World War I to the current situation in the Middle East, many U.S. troops are out there with stories to tell of their experience on the battlefield. Some are stories of horrendous images and derring-do, others are stories of compassion or sorrow, while others are of more basic feelings of loneliness, hunger and fear. They all have stories, yet few actually tell their family and friends what they experienced, rather feeling it’s best left behind as they try to get on with their life. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s hear it for the continuing wide availability of reasonably priced HD tools:  proDAD’s Adorage Effects Package 11 is now out, providing a ton of travel-related transitions and flags of the world. It operates as a plug-in for many popular editing programs, including Premiere, Vegas, Liquid, Edius, etc.

We last reviewed Adorage in the October 2008 issue–it sufficiently impressed us that it won a Best Product of the Year award.

Full press release follows.
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Yes. We know. Web searching on TV has been around for a while. But not exactly in a way users have wanted it. Some call it “the last 10 feet”, bridging the internet from the computer to your TV in the living room.

The question has always been, how to get the internet to your TV in an easy, friendly and unobtrusive way. There have been huge boxes made just for that purpose, along with long download times, and some computers have the connectivity already in place, if you have to proper cables and your TV has the proper connection. However… these all proved too cumbersome for the average TV watcher and were received by the viewing audience in a less than enthusiastic manner.

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