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 »

After spending the last few days, on and off, installing Windows 7 on a couple of laptops, and after seeing some press releases over the last couple of days for Win7-ready versions of several utilities, I thought I would compile a quick list of utilities that I have found helpful for either optimizing systems or just saving my bacon… Read the rest of this entry »

Toshiba has announced a new, tiny SSD that will almost certainly find its way into next year’s flash-based camcorders, making them even smaller than this year’s already-small flash-based camcorders. They are also one of the first devices to use the new mini-SATA (mSATA) device connector. Sizes are 30GB and 62GB, and volume production will begin in October.

Why so small? An advantage to having such a small device is less weight and less power consumption (typical read power consumption is 1.3W, write is 1.8W.) This will probably lead to longer battery life for the end-user.

The advantages to using SSDs for video are many: they’re pretty fast, they’re more resistant to impact than a hard drive, the capacities are nearly as big (but their physical size is a fraction of that of a hard drive), and the cost difference is becoming less and less by the day. Makes me wonder when there’ll be a camcorder with an eSATA port, to get your video off to a computer that much faster? It’s probably inevitable, really.

Check out this blog we discovered on WebTV Wire. It’s a fabulous collection of different sites where you can find free public domain footage.

The blog,  “Free Online Stock Video Footage – 9 of the Best Domain Video Resources” was compiled by Michael Pick a few years ago, and is a good resource for anyone who needs to grab some old military footage, cartoons or commercials as well as NASA space pix and other footage that is open to Creative Commons non-commercial use. Read the rest of this entry »

When we hit NAB, there was this feeling in the air that the new & the future will be 3D. Panasonic actually revealed their take on the issue at NAB, and recently I was thinking about how impressive this technology actually is. So I thought that I’d mention the prototype they announced as the Panasonic “3D Full HD” camcorder.

It’s looks crazy and it shoots crazy but will it work?

According to Panasonic, the camera will operate by placing two cameras side by side into a single chassis. Most 3D movies are generally done by mounting two cameras together, so this would be a slight variation with the same idea. The video from both camcorders are then linked together and exported as 3D video.

So I’m not entirely certain if this is a new technology that I’m interested in seeing get developed. Why to be honest? Why should I? What benefit does 3D have? I feel like there is no point, but who am I really… Just a guy that shoots video every single day.

Hopefully…

EngadgetHD is reporting that a new mass-production technique may push OLED technology into the hands of consumers sometime in the near future! Basically since the new means of production will scale down the cost of OLED development, the production expenses will be lowered and then so will the cost of all OLED products.

Research coming from Arizona State University’s Flexible Display Center and Universal Display managed to produce a pair of flexible OLED displays using the same process and techniques when creating LCD displays. The technology allows transistors which control the pixels to be applied to plastic. Even though normally glass is used for this process. By putting together the plastic & the glass, it’s then put through the LCD manufacturing process & pulled apart yet again revealing the picture to our left!