This is an 84 minute interview with Stephen Colbert and Neil deGrasse Tyson. It’s chock full of excellent quotes, information and stories presented in an incredibly entertaining package.
I’m not exaggerating when I say: you need to see this. It’s long, but you will surely learn from it.
These are the very first HD videos shot in Lunar orbit, ever. Of course there have been countless photographs, but never before have we seen the Moon so close and personal in moving pictures. (don’t forget to full-screen the video and set them to HD)
And here are the cameras that shot these videos:
I found this to be an incredibly interesting and well-explained video detailing the way the Apollo command module re-entered the Earth atmosphere. There’s also a very brief overview about the entire mission. It’s obviously a very old video, presumably made by NASA as a basics explanation for the general public, but I don’t know where it came from exactly.
The best part is all the way at the end, where they detail the dangers of re-entry. It is the most critical part of the 8 day mission where errors could quickly result in either a burn-up in the atmosphere or skipping back into an orbit with no way to recover in time. And yet during these especially critical phases, the crew is entirely on their own as the high air velocity and heat cause ionization that blacks out all communications to the ground.
Note: Image above provided by NASA, it features the Lunar Module ascending for rendezvous with the Command and Service Modules after spending 21 hours and 36 minutes on the moon.
A guy called Wells Riley wrote this excellent article on the importance of design within startups. I’ll just go ahead and say this is a must-read for anyone remotely interested in design, startups and the internet.
The successor to the insanely popular and groundbreaking 5D mark II, done right this time. With a sensor that, on paper, looks a surprising amount like the sensor in the new professional Canon C300 video camera, being exactly 3 times the resolution of Full-HD.
The processing on the new DIGIC 5+ processor make for a light sensitivity is simply astonishing.
The headphone jack means you’re no longer forced to record dual system audio, and there are audio meters now! You can even change your levels whilst recording with the touch sensitive pad on the back so you won’t hear any buttons clicking.
All put together, on paper this looks like a camera that was designed with video in mind rather than an afterthought as we’ve been used to. Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on one.
Let’s cut to someone who’s got more than just technical details and theories to talk about, here’s a hands on review by Philip Bloom:
And here’s a still from the video once again highlighting the amazing lowlight sensitivity:
A quick and easy way to download a video on YouTube or Vimeo, is using KeepVid.
Copy the link from YouTube, paste it in the field on KeepVid and press download. You need to have Java installed, which you can download here.
You’ll get a list looking something like this:
The number at the end is the video resolution height. For example 720p stands for a video resolution of 1280×720. The ‘p’ stands for progressive, and is generally better than ‘i’. The higher the number the better the quality.
Alternatively you can make a bookmark linking this code:
javascript:void((function(){ var e=document.createElement(‘script’); e.setAttribute(‘type’,'text/javascript’); e.setAttribute(‘src’,'http://clipnabber.com/scripts/bookmarklet.js’); document.body.appendChild(e) })())
When watching a video if you click the bookmark, you’ll be sent directly to the download page.
The Rocks is one of the oldest areas in Sydney, located between the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. It is an area filled with, what Australians consider to be, old architecture. Of course for most Europeans this looks like an ordinary city street, but it’s still an area that is pleasant to the eye. Every Friday night there is a small market, with some food and music. An opportunity for some snaps!
They had poffertjes! I’ve never liked them so I didn’t have any.
This guy was not happy.
This is my showreel for 2010, made of various Visual Effects works, but also some of the timelapses I shot all over Australia and a lot of Canon 7D camera work, part of which was shot using the Merlin Steadicam.
You can also watch it in 1080p HD on YouTube.
Or see it slightly larger on my new Showreel page.
All of this work was filmed, animated, composited or designed over the last 9 months. I’ve used applications such as 3D Studio Max, Cinema 4D, Vue Xstream, Adobe After Effects CS5, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, and of course Photoshop and the like. Plugins that I’ve used over time include Optical Flares, SureTarget and Twitch by Videocopilot; various Magic Bullet tools including Mojo and Looks, some plugins from the Trapcode Suite and Reelsmart Motion Blur. For Cinema 4D, I utilized a great plugin called xplode to generate fragments for explosions, although the fragments in the Siemsen Group logo (breakdown here) were in-fact entirely hand-cut.
The showreel was edited using Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, with the titles done in After Effects. Color grading was very quickly done with Magic Bullet Mojo. I sharpened most of the 7D clips just a bit to give them that slightly crisp feel, and adjusted levels and individual colors on almost every one before applying mojo.
The music was mixed together using Sony Vegas, using materials from different sources, the primary element being this piece from the Bangkok Dangerous soundtrack by Brian Tyler. I then added drums and various sound effects to that, and mastered them to produce the right mix. That was exported on a 6 channel wav file to use in Premiere.
A charity project, I was operating the Canon 7D on the Steadicam Merlin. The 7D performed well under the extreme low-light conditions and the footage turned out great.
