News from Here & There

Zactuo EVF video part III
Zacuto is doing a series of videos about the design and focus - pun intended - of their upcoming EVF. The latest episode features Steve Weiss, Jen Bogehegn and some guy discussing pixels, dots, dot pitch, magnification, sharpness and HDMI. It all sounded very interesting and a bit confusing, and I don't think I really learned a thing about the EVF. Or even how to evaluate it. Hopefully the next one will be more on topic.
Zacuto: Part 3 "What Do All the Numbers Mean?"



Lighting Diagram Designer
Sylights has an interactive light designer; simply click and drag objects around the screen. It doesn't do any calculations or tell you what to use (or even what the effect will be like) but does let you arrange things and create diagrams to give to others. And there's a free iPhone app as well.
Sylights: Diagram Editor



Elgato Turbo.264
Michael Britt at photocinenews takes a look at the Elgato Turbo.264, an inexpensive hardware compressor in a USB stick that's useful for quickly producing dailies. This article is excerpted from the forthcoming book: Photocine: Digital Filmmaking with DSLRs
A good inexpensive way to encode H.264 formatted video is to use the ~$99 Elgato 10020196 Turbo.264 HD Encoder/Accelerator USB dongle and accompanying software. The Turbo USB dongle contains a specialized chip dedicated solely to encoding video into H.264 files of various flavors. This chip takes the workload away from the computer which speeds things up and frees your computer for other processes. The Elgato software doesn’t give you the same level of control as when using Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder but it does provide a fast integrated way to batch transcode videos for Youtube HD and automatically upload them to your account.
photcinenews: HDSLR Dailies with Elgato Turbo.264 and Private Video Sharing Sites Pt. 1






Stead-DSLR
An interesting combination steadycam/shoulder rig. There are photos and some sample videos on the site. It's $347 plus shipping and Handling.
Stead-DSLR


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