The Panasonic GH4, is it a cinematic monster or a wimpy video camera?

http://www.eoshd.com/2014/05/panasonic-gh4-review/

It’s a monster. Even compared to the full frame 14bit raw from the 5D Mark III the GH4 holds its own. It represents a big return to form for Panasonic, a consumer camera that pushes way beyond the image provided by the GH3 and AF100. As a 4K camera never has the format been so practical to shoot as it is with the GH4. With file sizes 8x less than on the nearest competitor and a price 5x less expensive than the Canon 1D C, the GH4 is the most exciting camera I have ever shot with at EOSHD.



http://www.eoshd.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/gh4-review-1024x628.jpg

DSLRs rightly or wrongly have a poor reputation amongst some sections of the pro video community because of the workarounds and ergonomic foibles in using them on a job. That’s why Canon created the Cinema EOS series – in part so they could segment the market on price from the much cheaper, lower margin 7D, 5D stuff – but in part to do a re-design of the ergonomics for video users.

Rivals

None of the other 4K solutions at the moment including the upcoming Sony A7S are as practical or as affordable as the GH4 for shooting cinematic 4K. Out of the box the A7S isn’t a 4K camera at all. << PLEASE NOTE - MidNight Mapper..>> When you have added the required recorder you will be way past the $5000 mark (considerably more in Europe) compared to the £1299 / $1699 it costs for a GH4 body with internal 4K codec.

Recording 4K in-camera for editing on a 1080p timeline is the best route for image quality with this camera, but selecting 1080p in camera does have a few perks of its own.

• ALL-I encoding instead of IPB (which subtly changes motion cadence)
• Up to 62fps for slow-motion at the highest image quality, up to 96fps at lower image quality
• Less compression per pixel with the 1080p 100Mbit/s IPB option than in 4K

Of course the Ex-Tele crop mode is very useful in 1080p on the GH4 as it was on the previous GH cameras, but 4K gives you that in post and much more flexibility with where you place it in the frame and the extent to which you reframe the shot.

Automate Android

Automate Your Device For Free With MacroAdroid

xda-developers by Mario Tomás Serrafero 12:00 pm

There are some really good automation apps out there. Some of them are powerful enough to automate your living room, like Tasker, while others such as Llama feature an emphasis on location profile settings and the context-aware configurations.

XDA member UndeadCretin has been updating his MacroDroid app since 2012 to provide a competitive alternative to the known automation giants. MacroDroid features a simple user interface that offers a much less intimidating user experience than the high learning curve of Tasker. It is also much more aesthetically pleasing than Llama’s outdated look and feel.

The simple UI and quick step-by-step process of making MacroDroid profiles is both easy and powerful, allowing you to automate the uploading of pictures to social media, managing your networks depending on context, sending text messages containing certain strings of data such as your location, and much more. While it lacks the plugin capabilities of Tasker, it still offers a strong set of over 45 triggers and 70 different actions, as well as many constraints to make your scripts as smart as possible. The developer has been supporting the application for a while now and is active on the forums to guide you or help you with any problems you might have.

The big downside is that the free version is limited to just 5 macros, with an additional limit on constraints and actions. This is bad news for everyone wanting to immensely automate your devices, but for everyone else that simply wants a quick alternative for some small automated sound profiles or data and network management, the application does the job with a small memory footprint and a straight-forward programming system. If you’d like to check out MacroDroid, visit the forum thread!

BYOD -Yikes!!

A recent court ruling by the California Court of Appeal creates yet another headache for organizations implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs. The Court of Appeal in Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service stated, “We hold that when employees must use their personal cellphones for work-related calls, Labor Code section 2802 requires the employer to reimburse them.”

This case only covers telephone calls. But personal data and apps, as well as homeWiFi use for work-related activities, may be soon to follow. According to a recent ABI Research blog on the ruling by analyst, Dan Shey, “The best tools will make it easy to separate personal voice and data services usage from business voice and data services usage.”
http://networkingexchangeblog.att.com/enterprise-business/california-court-ruling-changes-byod-landscape/?source=EENTOUTB11181403N#fbid=ZNHXrY6FpEV

UAS Survey and Rules - MAPPS Selected for FAA Working Group on UAS

http://www.uasvision.com/2014/09/16/mapps-selected-for-faa-working-group-on-uas/ 

The Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors, MAPPS, the
national association of private sector geospatial firms, has been selected as a
member of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) working group on
unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). 

MAPPS is the only representative of the geospatial, aerial survey, and remote
sensing community on the committee.

- See more at: UAS Article

Evolution of Movies - Its shorter than you would think...

http://flowingdata.com/2014/09/22/evolution-of-movies/

Evolution of movies

SEPTEMBER 22, 2014  |  STATISTICS

We know that movies have changed over the decades. We've seen it in declining ratings and box office hits versus Oscar winners. However, these are changes that come along with movies rather than the movies themselves. Cornell University psychologist James Cutting looked closer at the construction of movies over the years, such as shot length, amount of motion, and use of light.

The charts above show a decrease in shot length (smaller sample of movies on the left and larger sample in the top right).

The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today, Cutting said. At the Academy event he showed a scatter plot with data from the British film scholar Barry Salt, who’s calculated the average shot duration in more than 15,000 movies made between 1910 and 2010. That’s a lot of shots. In a 2010 study, Cutting found an average of 1,132 shots per film in a smaller sample of 150 movies made between 1935 and 2010; the King Kong remake, incidentally, had the most: A whopping 3,099 shots packed into 187 minutes.

The decrease isn't quite as linear as the smaller sample shows, as you can see in the larger one. But the downwards trend seems clear. I hope the trend continues towards movies composed entirely of one-frame scenes.

Youtube HTML5

Adaptive Bitrate support in HTML5 cited as factor in the switch from Flash

YouTube began testing simultaneous support for both Flash and HTML5 video delivery back in 2010, but Flash has continued to be the default in most cases unless users opted into an HTML5 only beta -- until now. YouTube announced today on their developer blog it will now default to utilizing the HTML5 video tag on certain web browsers.

The announcement discusses some of the previous limitations that kept HTML5 from usurping Flash from the front of the proverbial line. While it isn't discussed in the post, Flash's security issues, most notably pointed out five years ago by Steve Jobs in his essay "Thoughts on Flash," are likely to have played a part. One of the points in HTML5's favor is its widespread use insmart television sets and streaming devices. Related to that, the primary reason given was a lack of Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) support, which reduces buffering.

ABR is part of the suite of MediaSource Extensions, which enables live streaming on game consoles and devices such as the Chromecast, in addition to standard web browsers. YouTube reports that ABR reduces buffering by over 50 percent globally, and 80 percent on "heavily-congested networks."

While the default will become the HTML5 video tag, diminishing the Flash object tag, Youtube's iframe tag API will automatically detect whether Flash or HTML5 is supported by the client, and utilize the correct technology. HTML5 will be the default on YouTube if the site is accessed using Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8, and current beta versions of Firefox.

By Electronista Staff

Read more: http://www.electronista.com/articles/15/01/27/adaptive.bitrate.support.in.html5.cited.as.factor.in.the.switch.from.flash/#ixzz3QDhuFOSB

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