The following was included in a CD I got the other day:
“Digital” now exclusively means “on your computer” or something, so a CD is no longer digital.
Neither is a Bluray disc.
Useful Consumer Review
I read somewhere that Toshiba FlashAir (SD cards with wifi built in) was supposed to be kinda nice.
And it is! It’s very hackable and easy to configure from Linux. You just mount the card, edit a simple text configuration file (to set the SSID and the passphrase), and it’ll connect to your wifi access point just like that.
It runs an HTTP server on the card, too, so to download the photos, you just use HTTP. However, you can’t just use wget or rsync, as you’d expect, because the interface is all JavaScript. For no reason at all. The file names and sizes just contained in a long JS array, and you have to parse that to download stuff automatically. Sigh.
Fortunately a kind person has written a Python script to do just that.
So I put the card into my Sony RX 100 II camera, snap some pictures and then I place the camera within five meters of the AP. Because the range sucks.
This being wireless, it doesn’t work reliably. Nine times out of ten, it’ll connect to the AP. Sometimes it just sits there. It’s even worse when I’m walking with it switched on in and out of range, because then it just gets… stuck. Often with a half downloaded image.
To work around the latter problem, I forked PyFlashAero and made it re-download files that have different file sizes.
But over all, it works much better than expected. I mean, for a wireless product, it’s good. Not having to fiddle around with the SD card and card readers is really nice.
In the meantime, I don’t think we have to worry about our robot overlords taking over the world any time soon.
Chirp Chirp
The bird from last year (which might be a fieldfare) moved from outside my bedroom window to outside the living room window.
So it’s now chirping its little head off on the other side of the apartment. Which means more sleep for me. Yay!
But, man, it’s loud…
Mystery Object
When I bought some hair wax at the hair dresser the other week, this weird thing was included in the package:
I thought it might be a suction cup or something, but it doesn’t really work well as that. So… er… What? WAHT!!?!?ONE!!!
Useful Consumer Review
I’ve been filming some concerts the last year or so. I’ve been using mostly normal compact cameras, and they work quite well. The Sony RX 100 II is probably the best one of the bunch.
However, they either stop filming after 30 minutes because of tax reasons (apparently, in the EU there’s an additional tax on film cameras that can be avoided if it’s “not really” a film camera), or the battery runs out after 30 minutes.
Or both.
So it was suggested to me that I might want to look into using a real video camera, and the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera is supposed to be pretty spiffy. It has a big sensor or something. I dunno.
The first attempt didn’t work so well. The built-in microphone red-lines quite easily, even at the lowest sensitivity. So concerts are just square waves of BZZZZB KNKNK BZZKN.
I finally bought some small external microphones and tested them the other… month.
And with that mike, it the audio comes out fine.
The battery life isn’t all that awesome, though. I get about 50 minutes on one battery, so I have to carry extras. And on the higher quality settings it generates a lot of data, to put it mildly, so using a 128GB SD card is required. Unless you want to shuffle SD cards all evening.
Then I noticed that the video looked all washed out and dull. After some googling, that’s apparently a feature. The camera doesn’t do white balancing or normalisation or anything. To leave you (i.e., me, the film professional) with as much detail as possible, everything is kinda grey and boring.
Fixing that is apparently called “colour correction”, and I’ve watched tutorials on that this evening. There’s a number of packages under Linux that purports to help out here, but I couldn’t get Kdenlive to work. Cinelerra wants to recode everything upon opening, which takes hours. The same with Kino. And daVinci didn’t want to install at all.
But I did manage to get Lightworks to install and work, and it’s pretty fast and nice. Although incredibly confusing. I’ve played around with various colour corrections. Here’s one where I went black-and-white with high contrast:
(Note my fabulous “put the camera on the table and then keep on drinking beer” camera technique.)
And here’s one where I just tried to make the white bits less white, but add more contrast:
Oops. I should have increased the audio sensitivity on that one…
Lightworks transcodes to a format that Youtube doesn’t need to transcode, so uploading after colour-correction is quite fast.
In conclusion: I think things are too complicated.