News From Here & There

Advanced Photoshop After Effects Color Magic
Richard Harrington's latest podcast shows how to use Lab Color in Photoshop Extended CS5 to do some secondary color correction. Richard then imports the PSD into After Effects to do some additional compositing.

This is one of my most advanced, deepest, and most useful techniques. I show you how to isolate the color of a single object in moving video and swap it to anything you want. The magic is done with LAB color mode and tracking mattes. If you watch only one Motion Graphics or Video tutorial this month... this is it.

Creative COW Podcasts: Photoshop for Video Podcast (SD)



Another Swat At Google
Following up on Google's announcement that it wants to use "open" video formats in Chrome rather than H.264, Tom Sneath at Microsoft has a little fun suggesting that the United States should adopt the Esperanto language.
TomSneathBlog: An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google



Sony's View of The Future
Imaging Resource has an interview with Mark Weir, Senior Manager of Technology and Marketing at Sony Electronics. The discussion covers Sony's latest and future products, including the promise of 3D capture across several of its products, and the company's intention to produce the long-awaited followup to the Sony Alpha A700.
While this is primarily a talk about still cameras, they talk a lot about video:

Last year, we delivered AVCHD, Full HD 60i capability in a compact camera, and this year at the show we've shown a model that can capture 1,920 x 1,080 60p video. With that kind of video capability in a compact camera, there are some real appealing benefits to compacts these days.

Imagining Resource: Mark Weir, Sony

And On Mount Olympus...
They also talked to Olympus, who have a different view of video in still cameras:

Sally Smith Clemens: Right now, 720p is fine. Yes, there are a few people [talking about 1080], but do you really need it? I mean, do you really see a difference in that? Most of your broadcast television -- network shows -- are broadcast in 720p, if they’re in HD. There are very few that are broadcast in 1080p. If you’ve got digital HD, like Comcast, and you look at the pixel dimensions, very few of them are in 1080p.

Imaging Resource Interview: Peter Ewen, Katie Roseman, and Sally Smith-Clemens, Olympus



JVC 4K Camera
Did you know that JVC showed a 4K camera prototype at CES? Me neither.
Crave: JVC demonstrates 4K camcorder, transports us from Vegas to New York



How does a Canon 7D compare to an Arri Alexa?
Probably not well, but Nick Paton says he gets asked to use them side by side daily and he needed to know where he would have issues, so he shot this latitude test. He notes that the "Alexa responds very well where as the 7D footage fails in highlight exposure detail and its codec compromises its ability to be pulled up in the darker regions. It's interesting and telling and goes part way to explaining the more than substantial price difference."
Vimeo: Alexa vs 7d latitude tests