Camera 4.0: point & shoot futures

Camera technology seems to be advancing faster than computers, maybe as a part of a general shift toward the development of portable devices. Here's a few recent examples...

Gizmag looked at the Canon Wonder Camera Concept displayed at Expo 2010; here's their video report:




And showing at SIGGRAPH 2010 was the "Frankencamera" project from Stanford (more at Technology Review via @Coleran). Here's an excerpt from the project page (which also includes a video), The Frankencamera: An Experimental Platform for Computational Photography,

"Although there has been much interest in computational photography within the research and photography communities, progress has been hampered by the lack of a portable, programmable camera with sufficient image quality and computing power. To address this problem, we have designed and implemented an open architecture and API for such cameras: the Frankencamera. It consists of a base hardware specification, a software stack based on Linux, and an API for C++.

Our architecture permits control and synchronization of the sensor and image processing pipeline at the microsecond time scale, as well as the ability to incorporate and synchronize external hardware like lenses and flashes. This paper specifies our architecture and API, and it describes two reference implementations we have built. Using these implementations we demonstrate six computational photography applications: HDR viewfinding and capture, low-light viewfinding and capture, automated acquisition of extended dynamic range panoramas, foveal imaging, IMU-based hand shake detection, and rephotography."



The Frankencamera is now available as a free download for Nokia N900 "mobile computers."

Lightroom 3 released

Adobe Lightroom 3 has been released; see details at Lightroom Journal and John Nack's blog.

There are a number of podcasts and other resources available through Adobe Education Technologies, and a series of in-depth tutorials by Julieanne Kost, Getting Started with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. Here's the intro:



Update: Peachpit has a big Welcome to Lightroom 3, with many videos from Rafael "RC" Concepcion.

Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects

If you liked Running on Empty by Ross Ching (a timelapse of scenes of empty LA freeways) or the timescapes by Tom Lowe, you may want a peek at Creating Timelapse Movies in After Effects by Richard Harrington, who shows you the basics in AE of how to use time-lapse photographs to create pan & scan video clips.

Update: see also later posts, Time-lapse and dynamic pans, Time-lapse: Real is the New Virtual, and Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

commonsExplorer: a browser for Flickr + more

commonsExplorer is an experimental interactive browser for the Flickr Commons, a collection of pictures with "no known copyright restrictions." It provides a "big picture" of these collections with a single screen interface that reveals structures and patterns and encourages exploration.

commonsExplorer is a Java executable, so Windows and Linux users will need to have Java installed. The application requires a network connection, and may not work from behind a firewall or proxy.

Creative Commons has had its own search function for awhile according to a post at Google Operating System, which has a nice cache of articles on new features in Google Image search, which can filter for usage rights under advanced search.

For video, see Free Online Stock Video Footage | 9 Of The Best Public Domain Video Resources from WebTV Wire (one dropped out); for audio see Videomaker's compilation of royalty free sound FX and Legal Music For Videos from Creative Commons.

Update: via @juanmiguelsalas comes 15 Best Places for Designers to Get Free Stock Photos Online by Six Revisions.

Update 2: see Royalty Free Music For YouTube Videos at Who Is Matt, and Openfootage.net.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II in the real world

If you're interested in the idea of a shooting video with a DSLR camera but follow the developments sporadically, Oliver Peters has a meaty illustrated overview of one camera in Canon EOS 5D Mark II in the real world.

His other recent posts have provided good coverage of FCP plug-ins and more.

Maltaannon's Tilt Shift

Maltaannon posted a video tutorial and preset in Tilt Shift. The real genius behind his approach is creating a free Preset, teaching people to stretch their troubleshooting skills with a video walkthrough, and creating a commercial opportunity by linking the whole effort to a filter that does something similar (and more), Magic Bullet Looks.

More on tilt shift effects can be found in older AEP posts Tilt-shift photography meme and Fake the tilt-and-shift look using After Effects.

360 Cities panoramas

Via aescript link to a panorama for NYC, which goes way beyond these:


san francisco from twin peaks in San Francisco


Swarm of Bees by the Beehive in France

Shooting broadcast sports + HDV camera review

Tom Guilmette is a prolific communicator and a director of photography, cinematographer, and editor. Here's a few of his videos:

Sony HDR-SR11 Camcorder Video Review - 120 Frames Per Second from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Shooting sports from Fenway Park from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Lightroom's Golden Ratio & Spiral guides

Teh interwebs have noted The Tremendously Lazy Rule of Thirds and comments, but the most interesting tidbit so far, via tgaul, is that Adobe Lightroom has Golden Ratio/Curve guides in the Develop crop tool (hold down the o key).

There's more on the use of the Golden Ratio at Pendery.org (in Lightroom) and in Layers magazine. Layers has another tutorial, a video that shows you how to construct of the Golden Ratio and spiral; see Illustrator: Golden Section.

For tips on creating your own spirals, see the AEP post Taming the Spiral. [update: see Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly too]

It's a wild world, so there's no reason to get stuck on one schema. There's whole other orders of pattern available in Penrose tilings and Islamic patterns. But some roads can be too ethereal for suit everyone, like Christopher Alexander's ideas on design, complexity and order, or film editor Walter Murch's observations on the similarities of between the Pantheon, the ratio of planetary orbits, and musical scales.

Fake the tilt-and-shift look using After Effects

In the latest edition of Digital Arts, Sam Hampton-Smith shows how to recreate the trendy tilt-shift lens effect in After Effects. Eventually this link will work, but for now you'll have to look at a hard copy: Fake the tilt-and-shift look using After Effects.

I'm sure a free AE tutorial will show up soon, but for now the outline re-described in the earlier post (and comments) Tilt-shift photography meme should do fine, if you have a soft touch on your gradient for the Lens Blur, Compound Blur or such filters. 2D Depth of Field, a 2006 video from VideoCoPilot, comes close but is missing something since it had other goals. According to a thread on the AE-List, further understanding can be gained by learning about view cameras, and by extension the Scheimpflug principle for changing the “plane of sharp focus.”

Update: Topher Welsh has a tutorial for AE, though it's not the first one:



Update 2: Maltaannon, Vailancio Rodrigues, and AE Tuts added Tilt-Shift tutorials for After Effects; this link connects the rest of the other info on this effect.

Dollhouse opening uses tilt-shift

Catching up with the DVR... the new Joss Whedon Fox TV series Dollhouse has opening credits that use some tilt-shift; for background see Tilt-shift photography meme (Zoic didn't seem to do the titles but did do the Dollhouse Mind Wipe effects):



Plus another time-shift item, The Simpsons get new titles (Idents.TV has some better viewing options):

Canon 5D .mov files crushed +fix

Prolost has been looking at Canon 5D QuickTime .mov h.264 files in the last few posts and has some Crushing News: the crushed blacks associated with the 5D movies is a failure of the AVC decoders in NLEs.

The fix using Apple Color to access the full dynamic range was discussed elsewhere, including by Cineform, which has codecs of many flavors. Other sometimes expensive solutions have surfaced and include codec alternatives to the one in QT: Rhozet Carbon Coder and CoreAVC, although they may pose other problems. Supposedly, utilities like MPEGStreamClip and SUPER can be used but you'd still have to trick the app into not using QT to decode. Movie samples can be found in previous posts like DSLR HD movie samples.

This sort of news seems important because we'll be getting these files to work with and because photographers will now be doing video. That's fine as long as they use Photoshop for video as Russell Brown instructs them to, but more challenging in competition once they clue into After Effects and NLEs.

Update: Prolost reports Quicktime 7.6 Fixes 5D Movies, though the gamma shift and other problems may be lurking; see Prolost post comments as usual. Planet5d is following 5D news...

Tilt-shift photography meme

John Nack has been posting items about Tilt-shift photography for a couple of years, and the meme has been hitting strong lately with application of the technique in video. Tilt-shift photography's miniturized scale model look and stop-motion feel is right at the point of cliché -- there's even a new iPhone app that creates tilt-shift photos which was reported today at Wired.

Smashing Magazine's 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography is the definitive survey of photos and video from a Flickr pool and elsewhere.

The New York Times has had a few items too, including a talking slideshow by Vincent Laforet (see picture at left), who has already moved on famously to DSLR video using the Canon 5D MKII. Others posting a stream of items on the trend include Wired and Boing Boing.

There's also a number of articles on Faking tilt-shift with Photoshop (the real thing even with a Lensbaby is not cheap). The basic approach is simple and can be done easily in After Effect or Premiere:

• Select picture with somewhat elevated viewpoint
• Blur outside focal area with filters like Lens Blur or Compound Blur with mask or gradient (you'll need a soft touch on your gradient)
• Increase contrast & saturation, then maybe sharpen
• Adjust frame rate for a stop-motion look

Here are some other articles that discuss their method:

• Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial
• Fake model photography
• Faking Tilt-Shift - a Tutorial for Realistic Miniaturised Photos

Update 01/06/09: Brian Maffitt adds a comment on the AE-List, "Trouble with a mask approach is that, while the blur looks good at the edge and the sharp area stays sharp, the intermediate blur is a cross-dissolved composite of blurred and non-blurred which looks "unnatural", especially at large blur amounts.

I prefer using the "Depth Map Layer" in Lens Blur, which uses a separate gradient layer to modulate the blur effect based on pixel value. You'll have to fiddle a bit with focal distance and iris radius, but you can get a convincing Tilt-shift with this approach.

Compound Blur can do the same thing and renders more quickly, but without the ability to repeat edge pixels, and the blur is a slightly-less natural gaussian style, rather than the more accurate lens blur. If you use a ramp to create your gradient, make sure to precompose the effect or the blur filters won't see it."

In the same thread, Trish Meyer added a tip for changing the frame rate: "you'll render faster by putting the original movie in a precomp, lowering the frame rate, and turning on the Preserve Frame Frame option in Comp Settings Advanced."

Update 2: see Michael Vitti on selective focus in Comments.

Update 3: It seems like the tilt-shift photgraphy and tilt-shift-faking pages at Wikipedia have improved. Also, Keith Loutit has a Vimeo channel with some good examples that shouldn't be overlooked; below is Helpless:

Inside the Fortress of Solitude (aka Crystal Palace)

John Nack noted a National Geographic feature, video, and photo gallery of Mexico's Cave of Crystals. The video explains more about the cave and the picture below (the people are in red).

The Making of 'Reverie'

Prolost posted details about Reverie, an impressive new video shot with Canon's 5D Mark II by Vincent Laforet (direct link to the Canon site). Now there's a behind the scenes video on the making of Reverie; it's not super informative but Laforet adds:

'if the Canon still camera team and the video team have come together to produce the Canon EOS 5D MKII - the next HD camcorder they come out with - may just floor us all… these are very exciting times - to be someone who focuses on “creating” as opposed to the “process” and “technique” of making your vision match the “reality” of the tools you have at your disposal.'

Here's a web version of Reverie. The QuickTime version is much better, and again you can find it and detailed comments though Prolost:



Update: The Full-Resolution Video Clips for Reverie were posted by Canon; Vincent Laforet’s Blog has the details at Original “raw” clips from “Reverie” Now Available for Download.

Update 2: Adam Wilt posted with humorous perspective on the SF Cutters list:

Does the EOS 5D MkII change everything?

Sure! Just like (in my short time following the business) Super8mm, AV-3400 Portapaks, Super8 Sound, Trinicon cameras with Betamax portapaks, one-piece camcorders, the ECS-90, the CMX 6000, EditDroid, VHS-C, Video8, Montage Picture Processor, Avid running on Apollos, Hi8, TAO Editizer, DV, Lightworks, the HDW-700, Panasonic WJ-MX12, FCP, the HDW-F900, Varicam, Vision2 Expression stock, the DVX100, HDV, P2, Vision3, Viper, Dalsa, SI2K, RED ONE, and XDCAM EX HQ (sorry if I missed your favorite world-changing revolutionary technology / camera / format / film stock).

More, better, and cleverer tools? Bring 'em on! Expecting the tool itself to cause an explosion of creativity and talent, and to turn the world upside down? Maybe not so much. Evolution, sure. Revolution? Um, hmm, erm...

As to some of the more breathless reports that the EOS 5D MkII eliminates the need for (a) lighting and (b) truckfuls of expensive cine lenses, tripods, dollies, crews, and such?

HD was supposed to have done away with lighting already, right? Turns out, it's not about candlepower, it's about control.

And with Canon and Nikon adapters readily available for the various 35mm relay lens adapters, RED ONEs, etc., how come Zeiss is several months behind making $15,000 Ultra Primes and Angenieux is scrambling to churn out enough $47,000 Optimos to meet demand? Perhaps there are *reasons* why cine lenses are different from stills lenses; could that be it?

Tripods & dollies & cranes, oh my? Don't need 'em--if you shooting "Blair Witch Project", or "Cloverfield", or "Medium Cool", or any "Bourne" film, or the opening shot for "The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp". If you're doing the *rest* of "The Bridegroom, the Comedienne, and the Pimp", or "Citizen Kane", or Wavelength", or "Michael Clayton", or "Casablanca", well, not sure a handheld 5D is gonna rock your world.

Adam Wilt / filmmaker, Meets The Eye / writer,
provideocoalition.com / Mt View CA USA


Update 3: Vincent Laforet spoke at ILM Nov 13th.

HDR Time-Lapse movies

Via PrepShootPost and KGO-TV/SF are HDR time-lapse movies made by TimeTraveler. Chad Richard of TimeTraveler has even posted his DSLR-based work flow as well as his experiments:


Twin Peaks San Francisco Sunrise from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

Also, TimeTraveler notes a cool blog called Abducted By Design that features various inspirations, like Motion Experiments from Norway's Klipp og Lim:

After all, tomorrow is another day

via everybody...

RED's Scarlet is to be re-visioned.

DSLR HD movie samples

If, like me, you've only been skimming the discussions of the new DSLR cameras' HD movie capabilities on the informative Prolost, on John Nack, Poynter, David Pogue at the New York Times, and through other blog posts listed on CrispyFeeds, you might have missed links to actual samples listed in comments.

Digital Photography Review posted movies from both the Nikon D90 (AVI/MJPEG and MPEG4) and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (MOV/MPEG4). There's also movies on the Nikon and Canon sites.

The D90 has 3 sizes at 24fps: 1280 x 720, VGA (640 x 424), and QVGA (320 x 216). The Mark II does 30fps at 1920 x 1080 (38.6 Mbits/sec ~ 4.8 MBytes/sec) or 640 x 480 (17.3 Mbits/sec ~ 2.2 MBytes/sec). Below is a reported test from the Nikon D90.



Update: Apart from RED products there are more cameras along these lines. Prolost and others have discussed the Ikonoskop A-cam dII (see the MacVideo.TV report and another movie from IBC), and there's the Casio Exilim EX-FH20 can record up to 1200 fps movies although at small sizes. Now back to the pages of the camera geeks and gadget blogs.

Update 2: I was going to stop but Prolost posted about Reverie an impressive new video by Vincent Laforet on the Canon site (direct link).

Update 3: The EOS 5D Mark II: Full-Resolution Video Clips for Reverie were posted by Canon; Vincent Laforet’s Blog has the details at Original “raw” clips from “Reverie” Now Available for Download.

Blame it On Photoshop ...Videos are Next

Beet.TV has a video interview with Adobe consultant Hany Farid of Dartmouth College; see Blame it On Photoshop: Dartmouth Computer Scientist Finds Fake Photos...Videos are Next.

'Even the average layperson is using Photoshop..., and sales for Adobe Photoshop Elements rose 20 percent over the last year, the New York Times reported in a story Friday. ...Videos are still safe from mainstream tampering for the time being, however. "Doctored video is about where doctored photographs were ten years ago," Farid says. He is currently working on solutions to identify fake videos.'

For more see our Digital Tampering & Forensics, a profile on Farid on NOVA scienceNOW, and John Nack on Digital imaging goes to court.

Overexpose or underexpose?

Prolost follows up on the challenging article on Digital Cinema Dynamic Range with a well-illustrated discussion on getting the correct exposure for a scene. See Exposing to the Left vs. Exposing to the Right, and as usual don't miss the comments.