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Here’s some camcorder marketing talk you can ignore:

1. 100x digital zoom — digital zoom enlarges your digital image, resulting in lower quality.
2. Software included — chose the software that suits you, not some feature-limited, outdated software that comes bundled with your camera.
3. Filming at 0 lux — no camera can film without light. The result is a grainy, colorless, low quality picture.
4. Electronic stabilizer — while promising sturdy pictures without a tripod, this really degrades your picture quality. Optical stabilization is what you want. Or – for best quality – a tripod.
5. Digital effects — this is really something you want to do in editing, not in-camera. Keep your options open!

When I was a kid, I loved making flipbooks. They could have between 2 and 100 pictures. Flipbook.info is a great site that has many videos of antique flipbooks.

I was delighted to find out that there is software to print out your films, and make a thumb-able movie. For the Mac there is the free DYI flipbooks, and if you are on Windows, you can start your search here.

A US sandwich chain is taking the concept further and made a human flipbook: And a fun how-did-they-make-it film:

So long I resisted “monetizing” my blog. But today I received an offer that proved hard to resist. (And no horses were involved.) The makers of text-link-ads now also offer Auction Ads, which places eBay auctions on your blog. If your blog’s visitor wins an auction, you get a share. You have control over the layout, but most importantly over the key-words. Which means that you can chose ads that fit your blog. And the best part: if you sign up in September, you get an instant $25 credit to your account.

In the past few weeks, Microsoft has managed to impress me, and impress me thrice. First with their campaign “Bring the love back” (link). Then they showed a new way of collecting meta data for photographs. And finally, they have a cool table-top computer in the works.

But then the old Microsoft factor jumped in. They just do not know marketing. When I visited their site, I was surprized how un-cool they managed to make their videos. Yes, they have a cool web-site, but the videos are just old-school; nicely made, but essentially boring. If I hadn’t seen the video from Popular Mechanics first, I wouldn’t have grasped how cool this thing really is. Worse yet, in the same week that Microsoft has the first public showing of this new Surface thing, everyone is talking about a mobile cell phone.

They have the means to pay for any type of ad strategy, but it seems that the problem is at the core of Microsoft. Stories are much more interesting than facts.

So, without further ado, a video that uses Microsoft footage with a new voice-over, putting the Surface computer into perspective:

Thanks to Advertising for Peanuts, I found this cool video from HP, that nicely wraps up what today’s film-makers can do from their home computer.

I for one firmly embrace all this new technology, which makes it possible to produce broadcast quality programming with a managable budget. My hope is that more and more people make films themselves, and thus become more critical of the films they consume.