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All posts in Hardware

Posted:
November 11, 2011

What would Magyver do?

Anyone who’s worked in video production for a while has probably tapped into their inner Magyver at some point. We’re never far from a roll of duct tape, and always ready to use any available equipment in ways that the manufacturer may not have planned.

If you’ve already read my previous article on how to combine a RotoLight RL-48 with a Microsoft LifeCam Studio, you’ll know that I already think that this funky, inexpensive ringlight is a really handy piece of kit. And today, I found another reason to love it.

Autocue / Teleprompter
Shortly after the first iPad was launched, I bought one – it’s a flawed product and I particularly resent the way that iTunes acts like a surly-faced nightclub bouncer whenever I try and copy content across, but it makes a really useful teleprompter. I said as much in this article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

You still need a kit with a one-way mirror to use it inline (so your talent is looking directly at the lens as they read), but there’s a bunch of these solutions available. In a pinch, though, placing it close to the lens will do – just as long as the camera is far enough away to give the illusion of eye contact.

Working to a tight deadline
Unfortunately, there are still one or two pieces of studio kit that I’m waiting for, and an inline autocue kit is one of them. But deadlines are deadlines, and I’ve got a production that requires an autocue now. I used to carefully balance the iPad on the lens hood of my HVX202, but the XF300 I’m currently working with doesn’t have the same gap between the hood and the internal mic. So this isn’t an option.

Looking at what I had available, I had a flash of inspiration – the hotshoe mount for the RotoLight has a stem with a flat disc at the top, so I screwed it into place, and hooked the flap on the back of the standard iPad case over the top. It’s almost like it was made for the job.

A couple of points
The XF300 mic has a huge overhang, which lets me tuck the rest of the iPad cover out of the way. Most cameras don’t have this, so you may end up needing to cut the front flap off to avoid covering the lens. Your call.
This example uses the iPad version 1 – I have absolutely no idea if the fancy new case for the iPad 2 can be adapted to this technique.

So now I can fire up ProPrompter and get cracking!
Hope you found this useful,
:l

Posted:
November 10, 2011

Perfect webcam lighting – the RotoLight RL-48

Not a webcam light

Before I get started, let me just say that the RotoLight RL-48 is not designed to be a webcam light – it’s a really versatile ringlight for use with D-SLRs and camcorders. One of the unique things about its design is that it just squeezes onto the foam windbreak on your camcorder’s shotgun mic (I use it with my Rode NT-G2), and it runs off three AA batteries, making it very portable and really simple to deploy in the field.

It’s not without its limitations, though – the range is pretty limited, so it’s not going to match a fresnel like this one for punch, and the only way to dim it down is to dismantle it and insert one or more of the included ND filters that are stored in the body.

But like all video equipment, you find out what the limitations are, and work to its strengths instead. As far as I’m concerned, the RL-48 is a seriously handy addition to my off-site kit bag, allowing me to quickly rig up a light source for vox-pops and interviews in seconds. But that’s really not what I wanted to talk about here.

Webcam lighting
Generally speaking, there’s not much to like about webcams. They rarely have decent manual controls, which means that they’re impossible to lock down, and you’re likely to experience all sorts of fun stuff like noise, focus-hunting and exposure/colour balance shifts during use. But let’s be honest – they’re not designed for serious video work. They’re designed to let you see people who are sitting in front of their computers.
The Microsoft LifeCam Studio isn’t without its faults, but it’s safe to say it’s one of the better models on the market. You can, at least, lock the focus, the exposure and the colour balance (assuming you turn off TruColor, which I’d strongly recommend). Interestingly, it’s also one of the only ones I know of that supports a 4:2:2 YUV colour space, which theoretically brings it in line with semi-pro camcorders like the HVX202 and XF300 that I currently use. But the merits of this are debatable given that much of the colour fidelity will be stripped out during its use as a web-based communications device.

A different approach
About my biggest beef with webcams is that they’ve never addressed their biggest shortfall – and that’s lighting. Because you’re sitting at your computer, it’s highly likely that the main light source is going to be the eerie blue light cast onto your face by your monitor. Either that, or there’ll be a window right behind you that causes massive backlighting problems.
So when I was asked to come up with a low-cost solution that would allow non-technical operators to set up a live broadcast that didn’t look as though it was shot in their bedrooms, I knew that I had to address the thorny problem of lighting. And this is what I came up with.

With a bit of lateral thinking, you can break down the Rotolight’s camera mount and attach it to the LifeCam Studio to provide about the best close-range fill light that you’ll find at this price. It does mean that you’ll need to employ a stand or clamp to mount it (and if you’re clamping it to your monitor, I recommend that you don’t overtighten the clamp – this may break your screen), but overall I’m pretty happy with the end result.

The video was shot in an entirely dark room with the RL-48 as the only source, so you can see that there’s more than enough light for night work. Even if you’re shooting in broad daylight, it’s still good practice to use a fill where you can.

Now you just need to find a better microphone solution – but that’s another article!
If you have any tips you’d like to share – post them in the comments section below.
Cheers!
:l

Posted:
May 29, 2010

Ten flaws in one day – the iPad magic soon fades

I’ve only had my iPad for a day, but already the magic is fading. Here’s a list of 10 things (because I know that people love lists) that take the polish off of this device for me. And I’m not talking about the obvious stuff like the absence of Flash, camera, etc.

iPad not charging via USB

A lot of people are finding that their iPads won't charge when connected.

1. Can’t charge via USB.
This one was a real surprise. I wouldn’t call my computer a cutting-edge machine – I built it earlier this year with an eye on getting the components I could afford at the time – but it is fairly up-to-date. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P which provides a heap of USB 2.0 ports, AM3 support, DDR3, yada yada.
Like a LOT of other people, this means that I get the ‘not charging’ message when I connect my iPad. This is because the iPad requires more power (10W) than standard USB 2.0 ports can provide. It does seems to trickle-charge when the iPad is in sleep mode, with ‘trickle’ being the operative word. So I need to charge using the power adapter, and then sync via USB. Major pain.
I seem to remember seeing external hard drives with a dual-USB power cable (which takes power from two ports simultaneously). Maybe someone will make something similar for the iPad?

2. USB port location
It seems to me that the data port on the iPad would have been better placed on the longer side of the device, rather than following the iPhone/iPod Touch design. Landscape is the natural preference for movie viewing and productivity applications, so having docks that force the iPad into a portrait orientation seems counter-intuitive to me (and surprising, given Apple’s strong reputation for usability/design).

iPad USB port location

Why here? Why not on the side?

3. 4:3 screen
I wasn’t hugely happy with the half-baked ‘not widescreen/not 4:3′ aspect ratio of the iPhone/iPod Touch when it was released. As I frequently produce videos for mobile devices with small screens, this seemed like a lose/lose solution – you’re going to be wasting screen space whichever video standard you choose for your content.
In retrospect, however, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a lot better than the iPad’s 4:3 1024×768 format – maybe if I was still shooting with DVX102′s, I’d think differently.
As a result, HD content needs to be downscaled during playback, so 720P widescreen content is taking up more bandwidth and processing power than it needs to. Sure, you can avoid this by creating a 1024×576-pixel video, but then Apple wouldn’t be able to claim HD playback (this is actually the square-pixel value for SD PAL video). And who wants to create yet another device-specific file during export?
Oh, and while I’m on the topic, this also means that the double-up function for using iPhone apps doesn’t fit the screen that comfortably, either.

4. On-screen keyboard
While it has its faults, the good old QWERTY keyboard layout is the one that most of us know and love. I get why Apple created an on-screen keyboard for the iPhone/iPod Touch that changes based on function (.com and @ keys popping up when using URLs and email addresses, for example), but the iPad has more than enough screen space to accommodate more keys – like a row of number/symbol keys, for instance.
This bugs me most when I’m typing in a password – I regularly use a combination of numbers, symbols and alpha characters, so having to switch keyboard mode four or five times gets pretty irritating after a while.

5. Brightness
The auto-adjust sensor for brightness has never really worked. Not on my iPod, nor my Air, and not on the iPad. I’m sure I’m not the only one who likes to read in bed while my wife is trying to get some sleep, and the iPod Touch was great for this, allowing me to continue reading long after the lights went out.
But the iPad has more backlight LEDs to contend with, and even when I manually dial it down to a minimum, there’s still more light leakage than I find comfortable in complete darkness, and I’d really love to see an app that lets me dial the backlight up and down without having to dive into the settings panel to do it. Maybe a soft-option switch for the volume control?
(I know that Stanza lets you adjust the text brightness from inside the app, but it only adjusts the text colour, not the backlight.)

iPad backlight bleed

Too bright, even at it's lowest setting.

6. Home button
While we’re on the subject of light leakage, why couldn’t Apple make the Home button partially transparent? They do it with the logo on their notebooks and I’m guessing that there’s more than enough light bouncing around inside of this thing to make it plausible. It would be really useful when you’re using this device in the dark (reading in bed, perhaps) to know where the button was without having to feel around the edge of the screen. But I guess that’s just one of the problems of having an ‘orientation-agnostic’ device.

7. Dude, where’s my calculator?
One of the things that surprised me most when I saw the Home screen for the first time was how sparsely populated it was. I was impressed that pre-existing apps had been given a screen of their own, but where was my Weather? Where was my Calculator? Sure I can download free iPad-specific apps that fulfill the same function, but why the heck did Apple ditch these staples in the first place? It’s like Windows 7 not having Solitaire (which it does, by the way).

8. Icon spacing
So I’ve got this relatively enormous screen – why can I only fit 20 application icons on it? There seems to be an inordinate amount of space between each one. You could probably fit up to 40 of them on this screen. Or make them bigger. Or something.

iPad icon spacing

Why the long space? Geddit? Never mind.

9. Sub-folder image syncing
I’ve never really bothered copying images from my PC to my iPod Touch – the screen is too small to make it worthwhile. But now I’ve got the iPad, it’s one of the first things I did – the photo frame option positively encourages it. I have a crapload of photos on my computer, with crap being the operative word for most of them, so why does iTunes make it so hard for me to get them onto this device?
I can drag and drop music and video files into their relevant categories, so why not images? Instead, I find myself having to select the main folder where I keep my images, and pick sub-folders from that. Trouble is, the photos I want to use are actually in another folder inside these (it’s where I keep the versions that I’m happy with). I can’t go further than one folder in, so it looks like I’ll have to create a single folder for all the images I want to transfer and copy the images to this so I don’t upset iTunes. Blerg. Is this because it prefers to work with iPhoto?

10. iBooks
What a disappointment. Bruce Springsteen once sang “57 channels and there’s nothin’ on”. I know how he feels. Looking beyond the cutesy (and slow) bookshelf animation (why do Apple’s own apps have to be so damn cheesey?) and you’ll find thousands of free titles at your beck and call. Do a search for your favourite author and you’ll find bugger all (unless you favourite author is dead and his/her works no longer under copyright).
I was expecting better things from Apple, but I guess Amazon got there first (and probably wrote exclusivity clauses into their publisher contracts).
That said, the Kindle app for the iPad is excellent. As long as you’re in a territory that isn’t hamstrung by geographic publishing restrictions. Like Australia. Dammit.

I work with digital video, and many of my clients are looking at the iPad with interest, so I bought one because I needed it for the business (at least that’s what I told my wife). There’s a lot to like about it, but I reckon if I’d just got one for personal use, then I’d be feeling a little bit disappointed right now.

Posted:
April 18, 2010

Panasonic’s new AG-AF100

Panasonic's AF-AG100

D-SLR DOF and interchangeable lenses, but can it compare to video D-SLRs?

Like most videographers, I felt a very strong pull towards D-SLR cameras with 1080p recording (like the Canon 5D Mk II) as they offer the kind of DOF that would cost a fortune to achieve with a video camera (even if you go for the 35mm lens adapter option). But while they’re a nice option, they come with a bunch of issues that cool my enthusiasm.

I read on DP Review that Panasonic is launching a new video camera based on – wait for it – the Micro Four Thirds image system they co-developed with Olympus for D-SLRs. Hit up the link to find more about the facts and figures, but here are my thoughts on the subject.

First up, I absolutely hate the styling (it’s never really been the broadcast and professional team’s strongpoint), but this goes deeper than simple aesthetics. It looks potentially front-heavy – particularly if you whack a nice zoom lens on the front – and while I can’t see the grip on the other side, my guess is that using this thing for any length of time isn’t going to be a comfortable affair.

It’s also AVCHD – 4.1.1/4.2.0 most likely, otherwise they’d be shouting about the ‘pro’ AVCHD100 standard – and I’m also guessing that over/undercranking won’t be making an apppearance here. That said, it’ll probably have way better filtering than these video D-SLRs do, and dual balanced XLRs will make it a much better option for recording audio alongside your pictures (without the D-SLR drifting I’ve heard about).

Lenses like this one can be picked up pretty cheaply, and the SDHC SDXCrecording media marks a change from the awful P2 card trap that users like myself find themselves in.  So I have to admit, I’m pretty curious as to the market and price point for this camera. I reckon (and this is a wild stab in the dark) it’ll hit Australian shores in 2011, and will cost around the $4K mark.