The Nikon D90 and, even moreso, the Canon EOS 5D MKII, are shaking things up with their ability to record short bursts of VERY high-quality 1080p HD video, using a full-size 35mm sensor.
Of course, digital cameras that also record video have been around for years in the consumer world, and many of them are quite good. This reflects 2 important truths: many of the most important professional tools are evolving UP from consumer cameras (HDV anyone?), and that the best place to see the *future* of the tools you use is CES.
I've got a bunch of things to note from this year's show, but this little camera jumped out at me. It's from Casio, the company that first introduced the big LCD on the back of a camera as a viewfinder and to view the shots you've taken. (See? Big, embedded LCDs. First on a consumer camera.)
This particular little unit records 720p HD video, but uses it in ways that, frankly, are much more interesting than the 2 pro units I mentioned above. Pressing and holding the "shutter" button (shutter? An anachronism like "dialing" a phone) creates a burst of images from which you can choose one to keep. No more getting stuck with somebody's eyes closed, or a bunch of images you don't need. It also has the ability to keep recording to a cache, so that when you actually press the "shutter" button, it dumps everything in the cache to the disk, a way to go back in time so to speak. This is indeed something pro cameras have, but here implemented much more helpfully for still photographers.
Now all that said, here's the really insane part: 1000 fps video!!! Yes, it drops the res way, way down, but you know what? For a $400 digital camera for home use, it looks GREAT! My guess is that the current limit is constrained by the ability of an SD card to record images, as well as the size of the media...but think about what you can do with, say, big, fast pieces of P2 or other solid state media.
Hey, did I mention VFR? Go here, then check out the second video. It's a shot of cheerleaders (settle down -- they're children, you perv) that starts at 30fps, and slides into 210 as they toss one of the girls into the air.
Then there's the "Science" page that shows the same shot at different frame rates -very helpful to explain to folks that you might get the result you want at lower frame rates...but then again, that 1000 fps looks INSANE. Just click around. You'll get the idea. The first clip of the water balloon is pretty cool.
Oh yeah, here's one more feature in the Casio line of pocket-sized cameras: MOTION KEYING. Forget green screen. The camera auto-detects motion and extracts the moving parts. The application in this context is creating digital greeting cards. One of the examples is a kid swinging a bat over a static background that makes it look like he's at a big-league plate in a big stadium.
They're not claiming it's anything it's not -- they explicitly say that it's a set of still images, and I'm sure that the manual says something about limiting the number of moving objects in a captured sequence, and shadows are funky...the shadows themselves are treated as part of the outline of the moving object rather than keyed THROUGH....but dude, MOTION KEYING. And how's this -- you don't need a computer to do the compositing! The backgrounds are in the camera...and of course you can use the LCD to see if you have the desired results before you save it to send along later. And coming soon, an online service from Casio that'll give you a whole lot more control, tools to create your own backgrounds, etc. I imagine that this will be priced closer to Picasa (free) than not...but hey, you're already in for a couple of hundred bucks plus a flash card, so they could probably get away with charging a little for it.
You can check out the rest of the cameras and features in the product line - another great movie of a water balloon on the opening Flash animation - but I'm telling you now, keep your eyes peeled for an inexpensive pro camera that records 1000fps or more, with real-time motion extraction. INSANE, I tell you.
Here's the video report that first caught my eye. If you've followed some of the links above already, you'll see that some of the features I mentioned are available in larger form factors, presumably higher quality and bigger price tags, but, seriously man, look at what the little baby camera will do.
PS. Hey Apple: this company's full name is "Casio Computer Ltd." I'm not sure they even MAKE computers. I'm just saying.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jan 17, 2009 at 5:50:43 am
When Steve Jobs called Blu-ray a big bag of hurt, he was being asked why the new MacBooks have no Blu-ray drives. His answer spoke to the cost of licensing the hardware. When his lieutenant Phil Schiller chimed in, HE was speaking about Blu-ray content when he said that the iTunes Store and Apple TV was the right way to deliver HD.
Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.
Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.
Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.
And back in 1983, $500 was real money.
I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.
(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)
There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.
Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.
(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)
This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.
More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.
(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)
I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.
The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.
I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.
Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Nov 25, 2008 at 9:20:40 am
To be specific, my cable system just added the HD feed of the Food Network. Walter handles the HD editing, color grading for Good Eats, among the most popular shows there. Walter also handles both HD and SD animations for Good Eats, among the most distinctive parts of the show.
Wally and I have the Red Sox postseason to thank. Okay, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, the Yankees, Cubs and Phillies.
The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN), the VERY first to build schedules of major pre-game and post-game coverage (usually an hour, often 90 minutes), as well as extensive original programming, ESPN-style studio newscasts, talk shows, documentaries, etc.
This was a model followed by YES, the Yankees network, among many others, and is fantastically profitable.
When the current ownership bought the team in 2002 for $700 million, they were widely derided as insane. The business of baseball was in a shambles, with the entire league combined posting a $14 million loss that year. But the ownership team believed that -- even apart from a fanatical fan base coming to the park -- they could turn a profit on the NESN part of the package alone, and that it could more than offset potential losses by the ball club itself.
The club became far more profitable of course, and the $700 million investment is becoming, remarkably enough, one of the great bargains in sports history.
One of ownership's big investments was in HD. Every Red Sox game (and hockey too, which NESN also carries) is carried in stunning HD -- the best picture and VERY best sound of any sports broadcast I've ever seen. This includes the Super Bowl, whose sound and picture ass the Red Sox kick 162 times per year.
Here's where the baseball playoffs come in. This year, MLB wisely distributed the playoffs to TNT and TBS, preserving the World Series for Fox (alas, baseball coverage heinous beyond description.) We have a tiny regional cable network...whose other markets just happen to include New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, all of whom had teams in the basebally playoffs....
...and NONE of whom got TBS in HD. The outcry was so overwhelming -- and they'll be the first to say that the screaming was loudest from Boston, which had the longest heritage of all-HD coverage. They responded with TBS in HD on the very first day of the playoffs, October 3.
The news was so big, and the revenue impact so great, that it was reported on the cable company's INVESTOR INFORMATION page.
Comcast and Verizon had the same problem, btw, and also responded by bringing TBS HD online just in time for the playoffs, and not one day earlier.
Ours was the only system, however, to add FOOD NETWORK HD at the same time. (You knew I was going to back to this, right? Or maybe you'd given up hope.)
Nora and I used to watch the Food Channel all the time. We enjoy food, enjoy cooking, and our favorite show from day one has been Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. Many of the recipes we've picked up have become staples. The sweet potato pecan waffles are now a holiday tradition for us.
But the show is about far more than recipes. The Monty Python-inspired graphics are a hoot, and reflect the show's REAL draw, which is a smart, funny approach to food science, with history and anthropology thrown in. A recurring cast of characters, puppets, great music, and unusual approaches to shooting are all part of the mix.
And some cooking. Even when we weren't cooking at all -- and not doing much these days either -- we find Good Eats one of the most entertaining shows on TV, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes smart, funny TV.
You'll find clips there (heads up: Windows Media) that show off Good Eats style. The very first sample video: the history of cans. Short version: it started with Emporer Napoleon in 1794. Like I said, not an ordinary cooking show.
I've known that Walter has been doing the HD post on Good Eats for a while, but it wasn't until Monday that I got to see the show in HD for the very first time. In a word, stunning, even by HD standards.
The episode was on deep-frying turkey. Perfect example of why Good Eats is such a great show: I don't eat turkey, and even if I did, I'd never deep fry it. Yes, it's the best-tasting and fastest way to cook...but building my own winch to lower the turkey into 400 degree oil is more than I'm up for.
One of my favorite parts of the show is when Alton demonstrated what might go wrong with deep frying a turkey. He was in front of an Atlanta-area fire station, and as he lowered the turkey into the oil, it literally exploded into flames. Not caught on fire. No, burst into a tower of flames that poured out of the pot into a genuine inferno 15-20 feet across.
Cool!
And it looked truly amazing in HD. The shot ended as firefighters stepped forward to extinguish the flames, and the screen filled with the white blast. Dissolve from white into the next scene. Perfect.
There were other great things in the show. You could see every single hair on Big Foot, every spike in Alton's own hair, every ripple on the giant plastic ice cream cone, and razor-sharp display in the hardware store. Again, not your typical cooking show.
Walter and I have known each other for the better part of ten years now, and I've known for a long time that he's a talented dude. But this was my first time to see his latest work with Final Cut Pro and Color, in its full HD glory. I gotta tell you, I was really, truly impressed.
So even if your town doesn't have the rabid fever for the Red Sox that can force the addition of Food Network HD, pester your local cable company anyway. It's worth it just to see Walter's work on Good Eats alone.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Oct 11, 2007 at 6:07:45 am
CNN reports that Apple has started charging credit cards for the shipment of Apple TVs. They continue, "Analysts say it's likely to sell well initially." Wow. You think so? The same analysts believe that Apple has taken pre-orders for more than 100,000 units, and, well, since I read it on the internet, it must be true.
Blog pioneer (he was doing it 10 years before blogging had a name) Dave Winer reports that one of his readers says he got a notice from Apple that his has actually been shipped. I got Dave's link from NewTeeVee, who quotes Dina Kaplan of Blip.TV: “The impact of Apple TV is going to be pretty big.” You think?
I'm not mocking Apple TV, just the analysts. And not even all the analysts. Jonathan Hoopes is an analyst for ThinkEquity, and has been bullish on Apple for a long time. (He rates Apple a buy, with a target of $120/share. You can look it up.) He sent a letter to his clients with a slightly more articulate take on the potential impact of Apple TV:
"In addition to sharing digital content within the home, we believe investors should understand the value of the various potential business models that Apple TV could enable.
As a digital media content delivery vehicle positioned in users' living rooms, we think the AppleTV/iTunes combination could become as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior as the iPod/iTunes combination has been to the traditional music business model."
Apple has quietly added an “Export to Apple TV” feature capable of creating high-definition videos viewable on the Apple TV accessory. Unlike Export to iPod, which currently creates sub-DVD-quality 640 by 480 videos,
Export to Apple TV creates not only full DVD-quality 720 by 404 videos, but also 1280 by 720 videos.
He's done a little experimenting with this, and observes that a 90-minute movie weighs in at about 3 gigs. That sounds about right, but it also sounds a little heavy for Apple TV's initial offering of a 20-gig hard drive. (Oops.)
Still, check this out: the video from Jeremy's experiments so far only plays back in iTunes! It seems to herald HD delivery through iTunes. I don't think our boy Hoopes was even aware of this when he wrote in the article linked above that Apple TV is poised to blow Netflix clear out of the water, and is a step away from torching TiVo too.
That said, Apple is quick to admit that the average iPod user has bought 20 tracks from the iTunes music store. Which suggests to me that the stunning majority of iPod users have bought nothing from iTMS.
So this is one area that Hoopes is clearly flat-out wrong. iTunes isn't disrupting the music industry's basic business model. I don't think it ever will. Disrupted the portable music player industry that iPod was so late to join? Absolutely.
Is it going too far to say that iPods have taken off because you don't need to buy anything from iTMS to get a dandy experience? iTunes is awesome software for ripping your entirely legally purchased CDs and elegantly getting them on your iPod.
Unlike the iPod, Apple TV will require payment to view content on a big screen. Apple can't include DVD ripping tools in its official software so you're going to be limited to viewing content purchased from the iTunes store.
That's Jason O'Grady, one of the hardest of the hardcore Mac users ever. Like Hoopes, I think he lets some of his arguments take him off course, but I think he's zeroed in on this: Apple TV takes off when I can use it for my media.
Anyway, we're about to find out, ain't we?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 21, 2007 at 5:32:13 am
