Two videos about small flying objects: Quadrocopters (YouTube) that play tennis and SmartBird (YouTube), a flight model that flies like a bird. It looks like the cool stuff doesn’t come from NASA any more.
Crazy Croutons
“Y'all need to get your shit together! You hear me, humans? Your shit is all outta whack! You're all over the place like a bunch of crazy croutons and tomatoes in a crazy salad!” *
Patrick Renner's
public bookmarks on weird stories, beautiful products, loud music and stunning images.
twitter.com/iptrkpm
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Patrick Renner's
public bookmarks on weird stories, beautiful products, loud music and stunning images.
twitter.com/iptrkpm
pomfort.com
Great improvement of Google Street View by Microsoft Research. Engadget writes about it here.
Maps of cities by Eric Fischer that show where tourists and locals shoot photos. Great trip planning tool.
Relax
ProLost’s Stu Maschwitz on Bit Depth-, Gear-, Boke-, Resolution-, Frame Rate-, Depth-, and Accessibility-Fetishists. His credo: Don’t complain on any (often minor) technical shortcomings of your movie technology - and simply make a movie.
Zacuto DSLR Shootout (3-epsiodes video)
Extensive test of recent DSLR Cameras vs. an ARRI Film Camera by rental house Zacuto. Conclusion: DLSRs have way better sensitivity (for example for shooting with available light) and when DSLRs are going start to record in RAW (or in my opinion at least in 10/12bit ProRes), they reach the quality of film in dynamic range, too.
Summarizing article on Creative Cow: http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/dslrs-a-time-exposure
“ In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.
Jeremy Keith cites the design principle “Priority of Constituencies” behind HTML5
On YouTube since 2007 - but I haven’t seen this video until having played with the Daft Punk iPhone app lately. Great visual interpretation of the fabulous “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”.
“ iMovie for iPhone looks cool, too, although as a cousin to Final Cut, I wish they had called it Final Tap. It could have gone to 11.
Mike Morton from WWDC.
3 days to go. To get in mood for South Africa watch this. “Next level beats” from “Die Antwoord” (website is Flash only).
Today in Pages: “Portfolio”
Corporate Identity
A few days ago I had the chance to attended a talk about an experimental social networking project of German T-Mobile. The talk was quite good - except that the slides were very text-heavy. The concepts that were presented were buried somewhere on the wall in extensively small continuous text. It was hard to decide if you should listen or read.
When we started discussing the talk afterwards with colleagues, one of the first things that all of us wanted to express was that the slides reminded everybody of the fine print of T-Mobile’s phone plan promotions (… ** Only between 9pm an 23pm on weekdays *** Availability restricted to Europe XXL plan in selected cities **** Partner cards are excluded from weekend data plans…”) - and that that feeling was so strong, that even the spoken words sounded like the sales talk in a mobile phone shop.
The interesting thing to learn is, that if a very strict (magenta!) corporate identity is enforced everywhere from business cards to project slides, it gets very vulnerable to negative connotations. If you try to bring to your mind the nasty fine print of mobile phone plans, it will probably be in T-Mobile’s CI.
“ 1983 - Bjarne Stroustrup bolts everything he’s ever heard of onto C to create C++. The resulting language is so complex that programs must be sent to the future to be compiled by the Skynet artificial intelligence…
James Iry on C++ (among other great comments on other programming languages) [via fms]
ARRI Alexa Digital Film Camera shoots ProRes
When the ARRI Alexa camera was announced on IBC in September 2009, not all features have been unveiled: Behind the curtains ARRI worked on features for a new “Direct to Edit” workflow that allows to edit compressed footage as it comes from the camera. RED showed that this is an interesting way of working, but realtime playback of R3D files at least in HD is not possible without expensive hardware extensions.
When the ARRI Alexa camera was announced on IBC in September 2009, not all features have been unveiled: Behind the curtains ARRI worked on features for a new “Direct to Edit” workflow that allows to edit compressed footage as it comes from the camera. RED showed that this is an interesting way of working, but realtime playback of R3D files at least in HD is not possible without expensive hardware extensions.
Now ARRI teamed up with Apple and implemented QuickTime and the ProRes codec right into the camera. This means that you can take one of the two memory cards (Sony SxS cards by the way) out of the camera, put them into a decent MacBook Pro and review your shooting day’s work in compressed 12bit-precision 444(4) footage in the Taxi.
This does’t mean, that you will entirely get rid of rushes or dailies - the camera can record ProRes QuickTime movies and output uncompressed RAW data at the same time. And you probably don’t want to edit ProRes 4444 footage that takes 120 GB/h, but at least you have the incredible image of Alexa’s sensor in a “pro-sumer” file format right from the camera.
I’ll be very interested to see the reactions at the ARRI booth on NAB next week and how filmmakers will make use of this unique feature. This is definitively one huge step further away from good-ol’-analog film.
The floppy icon...
…slowly becomes a running gag in Office for Mac over the decades [via daringfireball].
More hand-made music videos (this time stop motion animation): Nobody Beats the Drum - Grindin’
