January 2008

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Just came across this Stanford speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. At times full of insight, at others surprizingly personal.

(via Ouriel)

Just came across a one-page site by Jan E. Schotsman which offers a couple of video tools for the Mac, and at zero cost.

Fix your video

The JES Deinterlacer does a fine de-interlacing job, but despite its name, it does more. It lets you slow down the frame rate, interpolating the in-between frames. Click here for a comparison between iMovie and the JES Deinterlacer. Feature list:

• Deinterlace movies (half height/normal height/double frame rate/blend,adaptive/simple).
• Change field dominance (for PAL films with fake interlace).
• Reinterlace from one or two movies.
• Standards conversion (PAL<->NTSC or custom).
• Inverse telecine.
• Trim, shift, simple color correction, noise reduction.
• Change encoding (RGB gamma, video range/full range).
• Fix jagged edges.
• Pitch preserving sound track for half speed.
• Change movie speed, reverse movie.
• Interlaced in/out, progressive in/out.
• Includes utility to view and edit image description extensions and movie and track geometry

Clean up your video

If you have noisy video, the JES Video Cleaner may be the quick tool for you. It also allows for removal of logos. I imagine this must be great for cleaning up consumer camcorder footage with a burned in date.

• General noise reduction (adaptive)
• Remove logo
• Average two movies
• Remove cross-luma
• Remove periodic brightness variation

Vintage computing

If you still run OS9, he has a helper program that allows for transfers > 2GB.

And if you have an old Power Mac, he offers a program for uncompressed capture of SD video.

Finally, Jan has a little app to fix the blue cast on a monitor under Mac OS 10.4.

Enjoy:

Edited by Merritt Duff. Hooked up by Arrow Kruse.

Peter Miser writes:

The long story is this, I got an iPhone about two weeks after they came out. I’m not the type to get all mushy about a piece of technology but it done changed my life. (If you don’t know, then you better borrow your cousin’s and check it out. I’m not gonna go on a whole tangent but messing around with an iPhone is like reaching into the future and hanging out with super attractive aliens at a hot party…or something.) About a month after I got it, I was asked to fly to L.A. to actually be in an iPhone commercial. You know, the ones with the “regular” person standing in front of the black background? Right! Well, I was getting all excited to go out there and this real stupid song popped into my head. As you may know, I’m a hip hop artist so of course I think, “why not record the thing?” about a day later it’s recorded. Then I think, “why not recut the iPhone guy lipsyncing my song?” That’s where Arrow and Merritt hooked me up. Arrow’s like the Wolf from Pulp Fiction. If George Bush knew Arrow, this whole Iraq business would be sewn up by now. Anyway, Arrow made some calls, tracked down Merritt and Merritt worked his delicate fingers to the bone crafting this exquisite piece of art. We’re pretty sure we have about two weeks before Apple threatens to break our kneecaps so enjoy it while it lasts.

LG will soon start selling some uniquely shaped flat screens, featuring a screen ratio of approximately 16:5.

Now, this should be fun to make a film for (unless the client asks you to protect for 4:3 as well). The screens will be sold from April, and cost from slightly above €1.000. Target for these displays are marketeers for now. Press release. If you don’t mind the disappointingly low resulution (at 1366 by 398 pixels that is a mere half megapixel) you can finally watch Ben Hur without any major black bars.

LG will first come out with two flavours of these screens, one with 1366×480 pixels, giving an aspect ratio of 1:2.8 and a bigger screen with a lower vertical resolution of 1366×398, resulting in a 1:3.4 aspect ratio. (via [norwegian])

Gem from the Web:

Over at Red I stumbled across their 404 page:

Looks like they are catering for a minority amongst camera operators