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."

The Keyer in Colorista II with Stu Maschwitz

The Keyer in Colorista II with Stu Maschwitz shows "tips and techniques for easily and quickly getting powerful results with the new keying and color correction tools."

SFSU Digital Animation info meeting Aug 4th

There's a Fall 2010 Information Session at the San Francisco State Downtown Campus on their Digital Animation certificate program to learn about courses, the certificate, and how to enroll.

When
Wednesday, August 4, 6-7 pm

Where
SF State Downtown Campus
835 Market Street, 6th Floor
(across from Powell BART)

RSVP
www.cel.sfsu.edu/animation/

Questions
Contact Shelley Blockhus, Program Director

blockhus@sfsu.edu

(415) 817-4291

Tom’s Hardware preliminary CS5 benchmarks

Tom’s Hardware is designing "tests using Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, complementing our threaded Photoshop benchmark. As you’ll see in the charts below, though, Jon’s CS4-based tests exposed some very interesting results moving from 12 threads to 16 and then to 24. So, I quickly adapted all of Jon’s tests to run in each respective app’s CS5 version to cross-check the results. What we came away with simply blew me away…

With all of that said, we have a story in the works dedicated to testing Adobe’s newest Creative Suite, where we’ll explore the effects of 64-bit operating environments, the Mercury Playback Engine, and GPU acceleration with Nvidia’s few supported graphics cards. For now, it’s fairly safe to say that professionals with multi-socket, multi-core machines will be well-served by an upgrade to CS5."

...see the rest at Benchmark Results: CS4 And Introducing Adobe’s CS5 Suite.

Update: @flockofpixels is reporting that upgrading a "8core Macpro to 24gigs ram. #Aftereffects CS5 render before upgrade - 34mins. After upgrade -11mins."

'Knowledge at your fingertips' for After Effects

'Knowledge at your fingertips' for After Effects is a new script by Motion Graphics eXchange that let's you search for tutorials, expressions, scripts and presets within a dockable panel inside AE. Features include:

• Direct access to all entries from www.motion-graphics-eXchange.com inside After Effects
• Full-Text Search in our whole After Effects knowledge base
• Run Scripts, apply Presets and Expressions live with our 'Action Entries'-Feature
• Multi-Language on-the-fly translation for Expressions, Scripts and Presets (supported languages: en, fr, de, it, es, jp)
• Auto correction and translation of ADBE Matchnames inside jsx-files
• Thumbnails for every entry, incl. adjustable sizes
• Dockable and resizable panel to integrate in your workspace
• Fully CS3, CS4 and CS5 compatible
• the trial version is fully functional for a 14-day test drive

Knowledge at your fingertips from motion graphics exchange on Vimeo.

Colorista II multishot workflow with Stu Maschwitz

There a new video tutorial for Colorista II, Multishot Workflow With Magic Bullet Colorista II:

"In this tutorial, Stu Maschwitz shares a workfow for using Colorista II across multiple shots. He'll share techniques in creating a consistent look, highlighting your subject,and much more. Though he uses FCP in this video, these methods will work wherever you use Colorista II."

02 - Multishot Workflow With Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Data Glitch, a new After Effects filter

Data Glitch is a new native After Effects plug-in from Satya Meka and AE Scripts that simulates digital image glitches as you would see in a satellite transmission or a cable broadcast or from a damaged disk. The Bad TV plug-in is gives you an analog TV look, but at this time most of the glitches occur due to problems in encoding/decoding and sometimes data corruption. Some example renders were show in a preview post.

Update: check out similar project for Flash and other by Made by Pi, JPEGlitch test suite.

Here's Data Glitch: