Well,
that was quick. Right after yesterday's surprising announcement,
Sony flew its yet-to-be-released NEX-VG10 camcorder into London just in time for
today's showcase event. Naturally, we had to get our hands on this shiny baby,
and boy we were impressed. In case you missed the news, this snazzy device is
the world's first consumer HandyCam with interchangeable lens, meaning you can
share E-mount lenses with your young NEX DSLRs, or take advantage of
the abundant A-mount lenses with the help of an adapter (which will cost you
extra, mind you). Likewise, there are also hot and cold shoe mounts on the mic
shaft to cater your current camera accessories. Read on for our thoughts on the
rest of the camcorder -- we've put together a little sample clip for you at the
end as well.
There
isn't much to complain about with this $2,000 (and, sadly, possibly £2,000 for
the Brits) piece of kit in terms of appearance and ergonomics. We like being
able to hold it by either the seemingly solid body (using the strap) or the mic
shaft, and both ways provided comfortable grip without much fatigue due to the
light weight (even with the bundled lens). We were also able to quickly master
the jog-dial control next to the 3-inch screen, but for this price, we expected
a touchscreen interface as well to make life easier. As for the bundled F3.5-6.3
18-200mm lens, we found that zooming required a bit more effort than we liked,
so thankfully there's auto focus mode -- just like any ordinary camcorder -- to
save us from further wrist work with the focus ring. We must also point out that
unlike the Olympus PEN,
this Sony camcorder didn't pick up any mechanical noise from its lens auto
focussing; otherwise, this kit totally wouldn't deserve such price tag.
Of
course, what we really care about is the picture and sound quality. All is
revealed in our sample reel below (remember to enable HD playback mode), but in
brief: stunningly accurate colors, sharp 1080/60i picture, and impressive audio
sensitivity (notice how the mic was able to pick up conversations from afar; you
can also enable just the front mics to minimise background noise). You may
notice some shakiness while we were adjusting the lens -- we'll blame it on our
lack of practice from the little hands-on time we had. Regardless, the NEX-VG10
certainly lived up to our expectation, and we look forward to hear what the
filming hobbyists think of this prosumer-level camcorder when it comes out in
September.
Update: commenter
aim120 dropped us a link to Sony's own sample clip. Enjoy!
wireWax is a new service (still in beta) that takes the concept of YouTube annotations and makes it much better. On wireWax you can build interactive tags into your videos. Each tag that you add to your video have another video from YouTube or Vimeo or an image from Facebook, Flickr, or Instagram. A tag can also include an audio track from SoundCloud or a reference article from Qwiki.
What makes using wireWax different from using the YouTube annotations tool is that clicking on your tags (what YouTube calls annotations) does not send you outside of the video you're currently watching. This means that you can watch a video within a video or view a picture or listen to a different audio track within the original video. When you click a tag in the original video the video pauses and the tagged item is displayed.
Exporting & Saving
One thing that SVG can’t do is save the resulting image as a bitmap. It’s easy for <canvas> because the element is already a bitmap in the first place! The canvas can export its image to a data URL (e.g., data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGg...). This data may then be rendered in the browser, which could then be saved or dragged to the desktop, used in a new canvas, and so on.
The browser must support PNG images, and it may have varying support for GIF and JPG. For our example, we’ll stick with PNG since it supports alpha transparency, and where we haven’t drawn on the canvas, it’ll be transparent.
To get the data URL, we simply call canvas.toDataURL('image/png'). Note that we’re calling toDataURL() on the <canvas> element, not on the 2D context. This is because we’re getting all the pixels in the canvas, not just the pixels in a particular context.
So taking the example we’ve put together already, we’ll make the browser redirect to a PNG version of the image when a user clicks on the <canvas> element (a contrived example, I know!):
canvas.onclick = function () { window.location = canvas.toDataURL('image/png');};
I am sharing of export images from web app specially to Eve and Sham, maybe useful for our harmonia project.
This is the workflow i was mentioning on exporting the contents of the new html5 tag canvas to an jpeg or png and it opens in a browser, which then can be save or be used for other things, we could also explore on other options of sending the image directly to other applications.
http://jsbin.com/abagi3/5/
Above url is a live prototype and you can actually view source to see how easily it is being done. :)
Google today launched Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. The new software means developers can publish their app a single time; from then on, they can change configurations, add analytics, remarketing, and conversion tracking without updating it. Just like the Web version, Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps is free.
For mLearning, tags
have huge possibilities. They add depth and vitality to content in
ways that significantly enhance just-in-time access to information,
and improve understanding and performance.
Two major tag formats are getting the most attention right now,
and you can use both for mLearning: the QR tag format, and the
Microsoft tag format.
Folksonomy (tagging) is 1 of 3 categorizations of Web 2.0 tools. This article from the "Handbook of Research on New Media Literacy at the K-12 level" provides clear definition and powerful application of tagging activities. This excellent article shows Web 2.0 technologies as cognitive tools.
Really funny! Perhaps we could play on this idea for e-Fiesta... maybe have a camera where we invite people to look into the camera and find their faces suddenly popping up in a poster of themselves - complete with the #efiesta tag, or something like that.
What strikes me is the use of humour and fun in marketing and publicity, especially when it comes to social media.
E.g. I esp like how the burly man was very amused at a Hulk'd version of himself standing over a burning city. People do like to see positive photos of themselves - especially when done by others.
(But wonder how the MDs would feel having to photoshop in real-time haha. :D)
Google is preparing to roll out a paid subscription service for some of the specialist video channels on YouTube.
The subscription service is expected to be rolled out soon, meaning it could be launched as early as this week.
As professionally produced videos that were once only available on network television become more common on the Internet, YouTube is looking at ways to leverage the medium and expand their revenue stream using the subscription-based model. In the past 18 months, YouTube has reportedly spent more than $200 million on advances to dozens of start-up channels.
Paid subscription for youtube channel services to roll out soon, as soon as this week. It could be bad or good news. More people will surely hope onboard YouTube when there is more money and folks living off YouTube will finally get to earn some money.
Contents may now come with price tag to be able to view.
for Niko and Video Team
A polished site for recording, uploading and sharing audio files... it offers the ability to share audio files with social tagging on FB, Twitter and Tumblr, and also timed comments too. Seems to be getting more and more popular. Perhaps we can use its API for our Well Said app...
We can consider this for developing more advanced features for our NIeFolio... first thing comes to mind is developing a proper tag-cloud for NIeFolio.
I realized sound effects works well on my desktop browser but was disabled my mobile safari.
Take note that audio tag has been crippled and disabled by apple on their iphone browsers, meaning they closed a big possibility of webapp development with Audio! We might have to look into other solution for Harmonia.
This webapp demo shows some get around and music playing in the background when you do other things.
This
Eveleen You might want to get the interns to see this. It about searching technique on mobile. Tag Ahead make use of auto search like google to reduce typing on mobile device which is hard for typing and save alot of time and bandwidth on errors searches.
Google announced a new social networking layer that may
compete with Facebook but, at the same time, is
utterly different. The Google+ project will do some of the same general things
as Facebook, such as sending messages to friends, sharing links, chatting, and
sharing pictures, but the big difference is that with Google+, you can choose
who you want to share these things with
iOS 7 hits iPhones this fall, but only the iPhone 5 and iPod touch will get all the features announced at WWDC. The iPhone 4 and 4S will get the new look and a splattering of features. And forget about the iPhone 3GS and older iPhones. They will be stuck in the skeuomorphic world of iOS 6 forever.