"Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house."
- Alfred Hitchcock -
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Deja View in 3D!
Written by D. Eric Franks   
Wednesday, 01 September 2010 19:51

OK, so 3D is a gimmick. And consumer 3D is THE ultra-geekiest video gimmick ever, trumping flying cameras and depth of field by a few magnitudes. Still... THIS is AWESOME!

Sorry about the ALLCAPS and the exclamation mark, but Ed Glaser created this EPIC (ahem... sorry) video on the consumer Aiptek 3-D pocket cam. Epic. Note that something can definitely be "epic" and "gimmicky" at the same time, but I DARE you to watch this without smiling and enjoying yourself and thinking "Dang, this is better than anything on cable tonight."

Mr. Glaser does say "I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to shoot in 3-D, even if the video quality is a little lower. :-)", but you'll also notice that the movie he reviews is a 3D movie: Right tool for the right job, and shooting the episode in 3D is definitely the right tool for THIS job. Kudos!

* There is another unimpeachably perfect reason to shoot 3D: because it's fun! By all means, do NOT let me pee on your parade. Shoot 3D. Watch 3D. Love 3D.

References:
Deja View: Bollywood Harry Potter… in 3-D!

 
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The Worlds First Projector / Camcorder
Written by Jeff Whitley   
Monday, 30 August 2010 00:00

Talk about a convergence of technologies, the combining of a video camera with a projector  alt is definitely a first! Ordro, has packed a lot into a small package here, small enough perhaps that its small size limits projector resolution which is only a modest 854x480. Video is basically what one would expect in a compact HD Camera, 1080P HD and a 3” LCD, if you like to take stills with your video equipment you get a nice 12MP image and lets not forget the10X optical zoom. You get all this and more for around $800.00, but prices  have been seen as low as $550.00 from Ordo themselves!

Resources: CrunchGear
                       Ordro

 
Video Quality Doesn't Matter
Written by D. Eric Franks   
Friday, 13 August 2010 11:16

For years, I've railed against the myth of "broadcast quality," primarily because that term is never defined in any sort of general way, but also because if you've got the right content, the quality doesn't matter. Shoot a tornado with your cellphone and suddenly your cellphone shoots "broadcast quality" video, right? Well, researchers at Rice University have taken this a step further with a fascinating study that shows that quality really doesn't matter - as long as you've got great content.

"The Effect of Content Desirability on Subjective Video Quality Ratings” by Philip Kortum and Marc Sullivan appears in the February 2010 issue of the journal Human Factors and involved 100 participants watching 180 different videos encoded at different bitrates, from crappy (550 Kbps) to about DVD quality. “At first we were really surprised by the data,” Kortum said. “We were seeing that low-quality movies were being rated higher in quality than some of the high-quality videos. But after we started analyzing the data, we determined what was driving this was the actual desirability of the content."

This is not entirely surprising, of course, but I have two concerns with the study. (1) The 100 participants were probably all students, maybe even mostly undergrads. These folks have basically grown up watching technically poor-quality content, from reality television to postage-stamp sized, poorly lit, hand-held GooTube clips of their friends riding skateboards. (2) The researchers did not ask their non-expert subjects to assess the technical quality of the video, but simply to subjectively rate the "quality," concluding that "[t]he effects of content should be considered when evaluating the subjective quality of encoded video content." That seems obvious.

Still, the important takeaway here for me and you, however, is significant: Content is king and is equivalent to technical quality in importance. There is a dark side to the equivalence of content and quality, however. If your content sucks, no amount of technical expertise will save you.

References:
* Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Volume 52, Number 1, February 2010 , pp. 105-118(14)
* Video quality less important when you’re enjoying what you’re watching, by bjs on August 12, 2010

 

 
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