Archive for the 'Cinema' category

I recently stumbled upon several good ideas for the photographer (and cinematographer) with a limited budget. They seem quite simple and interesting to apply.

Ring Flash for a penny

For macro-photography and proxi-photography, a flash is often needed. But it is difficult to obtain a nice light not simply coming from the side (and casting ugly shadows). This is why exist those ring flashes that are usually so expensive.

Today, Strobist provides a neat little idea to make nearly free ring flash out of a common cobra flash. Just use a circle (more precisely, an ellipse) of cardboard or white metal to reflect the light of a more common flash light (see the image below). In seconds, you’ll get most of the advantages of a ring flash without changing your equipment.

The flash light comes from the side and is reflected toward the scene while the hole in the middle allow the lens to peer naturally into the scene.

Poor man’s steadycam

You may know that a steady-cam is a simple rig that allows to stabilize a video camera for use while walking or running. It is so essentially simple that Johnny Lee made one out of three metal pipes and a weight. It is much nicer than the expensive pro ones and you can easily copy the design if you do not want to pay for the 39$ he asks for it.

Older issues

If you have been attentive, you can remember that there were similar other ideas popping up in these pages before.

• Poor man’s light photo tripod
• Poor man’s fish eye lens

You knew that Hollywood had to hire somebody to create those computer interfaces that look completely futuristic, that look so good and that look credible. Actually, Mark Coleran in one of these designers Hollywood pays (handsomely) for creating man-machine interfaces (for movies like Island, Mr & Mrs Smith, etc.)

Recently, we can see, things went much further than the all-seeing, all-knowing eye of HAL in 2001, a space odyssey.

ArsTechnica has a very interesting article showing how nVidia and AMD-ATI show different performance while decoding High-Def video.

There is no clear winner. It all depends on the type of video applied.

When you want to play video on your PC you often end up being chased by error messages about missing codecs or similar tough configuration issues. Initially, we saw some people bundling as many Codecs as possible in freely downloadable packs that where then distributed to the Internet. However, most of them where essentially a bunch of codecs in a ZIP file and were terribly prone to machine crashes.

Now come some very nice video players that include all the needed codecs (and some more) in a nicely presented package. This is the right form, so I wanted to give you the names of the best contenders and my impression about them:

• VLC (or VideoLan): Very famous around here in France, handles nearly anything, has a near perfect management of sub-titles and adds a fun little gem: playing the video as the Windows desktop background.
• GOM Player: Can handle partial video (watch while you download) and will direct you to possible sources when it does not have the needed codec.
• KMPlayer: Can also play damaged or partial video, but you need to have RealPlayer and QuickTime installed to allow it to do it all.
• rulesPlayer: Built as front-end for open source MPLayer, it has tons of codecs and handles plenty of international languages for the interface and many subtitles formats.
• SMPlayer: Also a front-end for open source MPLayer, it has tons of codecs and a slick little interface.

All of them are recommended, even if VLC is the player of choice at Roumazeilles.net.

Or so it seems from the more recent news I received through different channels these days. First, BluRay BD+ copy protection and DRM system appears to have been cracked. In the latest revision of AnyDVD (a quite well known DVD copying software), there is now an option to handle BD+. It means that even the slight advantage of BluRay against the other competing High Def DVD formats (mostly HD-DVD) is disappearing and you can expect that all BluRay discs will be found in the black market since they are now easy to copy.

Then, we learned that Paramount started selling DVDs at a bargain price (3 US$) in China in an attempt to reduce the impact of rampant piracy in this country. Cheap discs mean that consumers may buy more (you have to admit that pricing the discs at the same level as the bootleg copies easily available makes a good selling point).

It could be a marketers’ last attempt, but there is a near simultaneous announcement that has shed a significant light onto this issue: UK-based music store 7 Digital tells us that DRM-free MP3 tracks outsell their DRMed counterparts by a factor of four to one. This should help music producers understand that the market is requesting DRM-free products. But will they hear?

What happens when you translate English to Chinese to English? This is the question that should have been asked before translating the subtitles to Star Wars, the revenge of the Sith (or is it Star War, the backstroke of the West?)

It’s so bad, that it may have been good to store it under “culture”.

Source (with many more examples): DynamicDiscord.

We knew already all about Darth Vador youth. But his private life was staying out of reach of even the most courageous paparazzis. This is no longer the case, thanks to Esteban Diacono.

The very first discs for BluRay+ (BluRay discs with BD+ newest DRM technology) arrived: Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Day After Tomorrow. Unfortunately, these discs are nearly useless because of the DRM scheme used to protect them.

For the first time, they use a virtual machine technology that allows to load code at the same time as the video data. It is thought to be a way to run code that would check if the BluRay players has been hacked. However, the discs do not play on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, and most other players (including the PlayStation 3) have longer-than-usual load times (up to two minutes). Samsung’s BDP-1000 also has problems of stuttering and error messages.

Some of the manufacturers announced software updates, but remember that now that DRM is on us, we may have to upgrade the player firmware just to play a DVD…

Maybe the deep space Mother Nature has been copying from the Star Wars movies when it created Mimas, one of Jupiter’s satellites.

Mimas in front of Jupiter’s rings

Via Neatorama.