Coldstreams
Need to click on the link since the embedded Youtube player does not yet handle 3D.
This is a ten minute teaser - perhaps a lot more to come! - of the Washington Civil War Association’s Civil War era history, camp and battles at Deep Creek Farms, Medical Lake/Spokane, WA. This video includes scenes from two battles combined into one, plus some camp scenes. I have about an hour and a half (times 2!) of 3D video to use in eventually putting more short videos together from this event.
Need to click on the link since the embedded Youtube video player does not yet handle 3D.
It is hard to believe, in this YouTube age, that taking video of people in public could be a crime. But the police are serious about not wanting to be recorded — and they have been making arrests to prove it.
via Adam Cohen: Is Videotaping Police a First Amendment Right? | TIME Ideas | TIME.com.
A U.S. Court of Appeals in Boston, a Court of Appeals in Chicago, and a filing by the U.S. Department of Justice are establishing that the people have a right to record police activity in public.
And I add that in a surveillance society where police agencies are video recording everyone, everywhere, all the time, it is essential that the people have a way to protect their own rights. In my city, a police officer was convicted of civil rights violations in the police department’s murder of an innocent man after suppressed security videos were made public. Ten officers up to the acting police of chief were implicated in a massive cover up and hiding of evidence. The suppressed security videos were critical pieces of evidence.
Why? And what might you do with this?
The author’s argue that the Dalvik Virtual Machine, which executes the Java code on Android devices, suffers from being new and not yet greatly optimized, and porting the whole Android system to C# could result in a higher performance version of Android. (The translation was done automatically using a code conversion software tool.) They did it and call it XobotOS.
A small sample of test applications showed performance improvements on the order of 8x faster. That would also translate into less power consumption, meaning longer battery life.
Check out the Xamarin blog post for more information. The source is available on GitHub.
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I am setting up gear to record an event this weekend in 3D, and to record audio in stereo
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”300” caption=”Group of XLR connectors (Photo credit: Wikipedia)”]
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with two long shot gun directional mics.
I use two Lumix GH-2s for the video recording but there is no way to monitor the recorded audio on the GH-2. Plus, I am using XLR mics. While I have a separate XLR mic mixer, I was not successful in feeding stereo signals into the GH-2 and could not find a solution to that problem.
I decided to just record the soundtrack separately. Since I do not have a digital audio recorder, but I do have an older SD camera with XLR inputs (a Panasonic DG-AVC30), I am planning to record the audio on the AVC30, while recording the video on the two Lumix cameras. My first attempt at a setup looks like this (sorry for the lousy smart phone photo - something better in the future) with the AVC30 bolted upside down on my homemade mounting rail.
The 18-inch long shot guns are mounted on top of the GH-2s, and crossed over. The one on the left records the right audio channel and the one on the right records the left audio channel. These feed into the XLR inputs on the AVC30, which enables me to monitor the audio as a I record it, plus I can adjust the audio levels in real time.
The three cameras need to be synchronized - the only way to do that is by recording an audio pulse (hand clap, snap of the fingers, other sharp sounds) on all cameras simultaneously. The audio tracks will then be lined up in the editor. I’m sure there are easier ways to do this but I am working with what I have and my zero billion $ budget!
The plastic bag on the tripod handle covers up a remote for another camera (not shown) and was put on there since I was out recently in the rain and wanted to protect it from the rain. I suppose I could get rid of that now!
What’s with all the rubber bands? That’ll be for another day.
Update: Found the problem with the mixer and ended up using the 2 XLR mics into the mixer and into one of the cameras. Didn’t need to use the video camera as an audio recorder. Whew!
Incredibly, my travel schedule had me driving through Redding on Sunday, May 20th, just about the time of the annular solar eclipse. Redding was directly in the path of maximum sun shadow as well.
I was not equipped to photograph the sun directly, so instead took photos of the crowd and the “scene”, and primarily shot 3D video of this beautiful location. I suspect that once I edit the 3D video it will be the world’s first 3D video of a solar eclipse event (the event, not the sun, though).
I have a LOT of 3D video to edit as I was at Maker Faire the day before, also shooting 3D video. And this coming weekend is another event at which I will be shooting 3D video. The raw video is piling up faster than I can get to the editing!
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- Watch time-lapse video of yesterday’s annular solar eclipse (digitaltrends.com)
- Video: Solar Eclipse Time Lapse (gadling.com)
- Solar Eclipse (instagram.com)
- Solar Eclipse Comes To The States (4us2be.com)
I shot this at Maker Faire, near San Francisco last Saturday. Kids in a Faraday cage being zapped by giant static bolts from huge Tesla coils, timed to music. That’s Maker Faire!
More Maker Faire videos coming soon!
To use the Youtube 3D viewer, you’ll need to watch on the Youtube web site here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/HcgcX2FiHEg
Maker Faire was incredible, unbelievable. Words can’t describe it - so I shot plenty of 3D video that will be posted eventually!
Sunday, I was at Sundial Bridge in Redding, CA for the eclipse.
I am finally back home and will soon start to edit and post 3D video of these events. A little something different!
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- Gallery: Maker Faire Bay Area 2012 (dvice.com)
[caption id=”” align=”alignright” width=”240” caption=”camera madness (Photo credit: deepwarren)”]
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Probably because smart phones have replaced the point and shoot camera market: Samsung shuns point-and-shoot cameras, switches factory to pricier mirrorless types — Engadget.
Earlier this year I reviewed camera manuals (yes, manuals) from all the major camera makers. Samsung manuals are the best, most clearly written camera manuals I have ever seen. Nikon came in second with good manuals too. The other companies - not so good!
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Unfortunately, the battery life of smart phones, relative to feature phones or plain old mobile phones, is very poor. Whereas my “feature phone” had a battery that typically lasted up to two weeks, most smart phone users re-charge their phone every day, and some times several times per day!
User research on smart phones finds most people use their phone for 4 to 10 hours before they need to recharge the battery. While many users recharge the battery overnight, every night, there are many users that recharge throughout the day, at every chance they get, such as plugging in when working at their desk.
There is not a single magic bullet to fix the problem of smart phone battery life. Batteries improve each year, but only by the low single digit percentages, while power demands rise much faster in new devices. The physical size of a smart phone or tablet also limits how large a battery can be used, putting a constraint on solving the problem by just adding a bigger battery.
It would be helpful if there were a single “Battery Saver” option that would enable a configured set of features for maximum battery life. But on most phones, no such feature exists. Instead, you need to consider disabling unused features manually. But most smart phone users are not going to know which features to select (and personally, I think this needs to be mostly automatic) to achieve best battery life.
- If your phone or software allows, disable software features that do background checks throughout the day, even while you are not actively using the phone. That is, avoid having Facebook or Twitter update constantly, or continually checking for email. Surprisingly, some studies have found that about half of the battery power is consumed during the nearly 90% of the time the phone is supposedly idle or sleeping!
- Choose a display theme (if available) featuring a dark background. Lighting up the LCD for, say, a black text on white background, uses much more power than white text on a black or dark background.
- If Wi-Fi is regularly available, say at home or your office, then use Wi-Fi instead of the cellular data link. Not only will your mobile service provider like you, but Wi-Fi reduces the power consumed for data transmission. Even though Wi-Fi uses a considerable amount of power, data transmission is typically 10 to 20 times faster than over a typical 3G link. That means the Wi-Fi transmitter is turned on for a fraction of the time compared to the 3G transmitter.
- If you know you will not be using Wi-Fi, then disable it. For example, while driving or walking, leave Wi-Fi disabled to avoid constantly searching for available Wi-Fi hotspots.
- Location services can also use a lot of power quickly. GPS, in particular, uses a considerable amount of power. Many smart phones use a variety of methods to determine your location including knowing where a currently used Wi-Fi access point is located, or using the known location of a cellular servicer tower site, or GPS. But if you are not using location services, disabling this feature will cut power needs. However, avoid turning it off and back on frequently as it can take 30 seconds (or so) for GPS to re-acquire location data rather than just referring to a last known, good location reference.
- Turn off Bluetooth if you are not using Bluetooth.
- Use audio alerts instead of vibrate alerts.
There is a lot of research being done on ways to improve battery life. This work includes the development of new battery technologies, but also improvements to the radio network and communication protocols, smarter operating system features that attempt to predict when software or hardware can be set for reduced power modes, or which limit big data downloads (such as app updates) to when plugged in on charge or connected to a Wi-Fi network. There are also tricks that app developers can incorporate to reduce their app’s power needs. But for now, these are all for the future.
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- Improve your Android Battery Life (blowfish12.wordpress.com)
- Using Wi-Fi can extend battery life of smart phones (coldstreams.com)
