Extreme Mountain unicycling
Sometimes you watch clips that impress you. In this case it’s a clip that scares me. I wouldn’t want to ride a unicycle down that type of landscape. Would you?
Cloud timelapses are fun when you can put the camera somewhere and go and do something else. Yesterday I knew that we would go from blue skies and sparse clouds to overcast and rainy so I set up the camera to record a timelapse. I set the interval to one setting and the number of frames to one. You see the rain clouds form and then the rain starts.
This timelapse was recorded over 220 minutes or more. It took a full charge of one of the long duration batteries. I could have plugged the camera and used power straight from the wall but sometimes it’s good to cycle batteries.
I really wanted the rain to fall so heavily that it would be impossible to see through the window at the end of the timelapse. That would have made for a nice conclusion.
If you’re the head of a company that’s doing as well as Apple there’s something you’ve got to be admired for. It’s the ability to sell a phone with no keyboard and get people to love it. It’s also about selling it for $599 and taking it back down to $399. What appears to be an act of generosity is a great PR stunt. Everyone that got an iphone and saw the price drop was angry so they wrote complaining. Steve jobs then “decided” to take the price down.
The effect of such a move is clear. He’s proved to his shareholders that the market was ready for a device that was $200 higher than it needed to be. Investors have a boost in confidence in the company and he gets glowing reviews from the blogosphere.
IBC is a big show. There are a lot of things to see. Some of those are fun and innovative whilst others are less interesting. I’ve noticed that there are quite a few companies showing mobile and IPTV solutions. Many of them are multiplatform, web tv, mobile and other. they work on a variety of codecs.
Anothr aspect is the virtual studio and automated processes. We see many remote camera rigs, remote jibs, remote 3d modeling cameras and to some extent virtual modelling and sets before any of the shooting is ever done. In reality it’s abou he one man operation. One camera operator to program, one person to control multiple camers and more. It’s also about high definition and 3d.
There were quite a few examples and solutions attempting to allow for 3D productions, from two small cameras fitted on a rig to allow for shooting as if it was two eyes to more expensive rigs where you’d see two cameras, one pointing down and shooting through a mirror with another shooting straight forward. Of course there are also the monitors that can play in 3D. Several stands had demonstrations and implementations of this technology.
After this we have the importance of asset managment. Many companies were working at offering solutions for newsrooms, video archives and more. That’s because of the amount of content that content aggregators are now having to contend with. It’s an interesting time. i learned quite a bit on this topic.
There are many more details to be discussed but those are some of the key points I have noticed at this particular IBC. More articles will come soon.
At this moment in time Virtual Reality is an abstract notion for most people. It is easy to find news features and documentaries speaking about the potential of the medium. The video above is the most effective demonstration of Virtual Reality that I have seen so far. I like that they use a greenscreen to key in the environment that the guinea pigs are in. We are immersed in to the reality that they are seeing. It demonstrates not only the games and environments you could find yourself in but how it is a communal rather than solitary experience. This advert removes some of the stigma of virtual reality.
From the 6th of May to the 8th of May 2016 a meeting will take place in Crans Montana Switzerland. It has the title of World Virtual Reality Forum.  “The World VR Forum is dedicated to advancing the virtual reality industry and culture.” Artists, documentary makers, news producers, architects, surgeons and an ever-expanding group of people will benefit from this technology. The video above helps us understand the intricacies of using something as simple as two hand held controllers.
In two to three months the Music festival season will start with Caribana, Montreux Jazz, Paléo Festival and many other music festivals. During these events media outlets and artists love to give interviews to journalists to drive interest in their upcoming performance. For now we usually have two or more cameras. In some cases you have one wide shot of the room or the artists and the second camera is a close up of the artist as he speaks. This summer I expect that we will watch interviews in 360° video where we can turn and see the journalist asking questions and turn to face the artist when he answers. When a group of artists are interviewed you will be able to watch the antics whilst listening to what they are saying. You will watch the artists and the journalists smile and laugh.
When I think of VR goggles I do not think so much about gaming as I think about documentary and television production. I like to think about how it could provide new opportunities for content producers to create interesting and immersive video content. “Their headsets were connected with the school campus more than 900 miles away in Okinawa, where the school’s headmaster spoke. The students were also treated to a 360 degree view of the campus inside the augmented reality.” (source) Google Streetview could provide live 360° vision of specific squares, St Marco in Venice, Notre Dame in Paris, St Peter’s in Rome or the market Square in Wroclaw. Imagine Google Street view when wearing a VR headset.
VR headsets are being offered by a number of brands for all mobile phones and the number of cameras able to provide 360° video are growing in number. As both of these democratise the market so content creators will have more customers and more incentive to produce relevant content.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Lunatics! Very silly lunatics.
I know, that’s not something you would see me do. I can’t ride a unicycle on a flat road.