Copenhagen 2008, the pictures

Find them here...

Icecream and carrots

That's one I've not had before.

6 types of coaster

And each one for a different beer, all brewed in the resteraunt!

A big pile of phase one cameras

And also the new value added case, nice.

Phaseone camera

So far everything is looking good. The coffee looks good, the pastries
look good, the sales manual looks good, the camera... I'll tell you
when I see one!

Danish beer!

Mmmmmm

The view from seat 34F!

PhaseOne Camera, Any Questions?

I'm off to Denmark tomorrow to see the new PhaseOne Camera. If you have any questions, e-mail, twitter (@alexray) or leave a comment.
I'll try and get some footage and pics and blog them live.
Saw a G9 up-close yesterday (how have I not seen one yet?) OMG it's nice, think I might be picking one up to take to Denmark with me.

Sublime to the Ridiculous

Just got myself a Busbi Video camera.
Having played with the Canon HF10 hi-def camcorder, this thing just feels silly.
But, it only cost about £29, so I won't mind gaffering it to all sorts of silly places :-)

The quality isn't great, the most annoying thing is the wobble in the picture when you pan.
The clip below was also my first go on Final Cut Express....

How big is the HF10?

Answer: it'll easily fit in a pocket (without the mic)
In fact, this picture makes it look bigger than it is.

Some Great Training Courses at The Flash Centre

TFC have got some great one day events coming up.
A Lumedyne training day, run by DJ LaDez of Lumedyne. Should be a great day for anyone interested in portable lighting and getting the studio look outdoors.
An equestrian photography day. If you photograph horses, or just like horses and would like to take better pictures of them this is for you.
A macro photography day. If you like to get up close to very small things you'll learn lots on this workshop.

Canon Hf10 Quick Review

Well the HF10 has gone back to Canon :-( so I thought I'd better put a few words down about my experience with it...

First off, this camera looks good, really good. It's a world away from the grey plasticy
feel of my old MVX460. Everything feels really solid, even the little flaps and covers over the various ports. Most of the camera is a glossy black, which I thought might scratch easily, but after a week it seemed to have faired well.
My favourite thing about the HF10 when compared to my HDV tape camcorder is the format, namely, solid state. It makes a huge difference to usability. I no longer had to worry about where I was in the tape before I started to record. The number of times I've missed things in the past because I'd been reviewing some footage, seen something I wanted to tape, then missed it all whilst trying to fast forward back to the blank part of the tape. It also makes it really easy to copy your footage onto a computer for editing. I was using iMovie '08 and it couldn't have been easier: Just connect using the USB cable, plug the camera into the mains adapter (I assume this is to avoid loss of power mid flow and possible corruption.) Open the import window in iMovie, select the clips you want to import (they're shown as thumbnails.) Bob's your uncle, a few minutes later, it's all done. I found that the footage copied over at just faster than realtime. I'd hoped it would be faster as I'd used the 17Mbs setting (the highest quality) and USB is nominally 480Mbs. Perhaps iMovie does something during the import that slow things down. When we get our shop unit in I'll do some tests recording to media card and at different bitrates. I'm sure a lower bitrate and a nice firewire card reader will speed things up.
Quality wise I was impressed. I did notice some chromatic aberration and minor artefacts when I looked at still frames but the actual footage looked fine to my untrained eye. I'll try and get some reasonable definition examples up here.
I did find the lack of a viewfinder a tad annoying, I like to use the viewfinder when I'm zoomed in so I can jam the camera up against my head to steady the shot. However, the flip out screen is very high res and bright, so that helps make up for it.
The Wide end of the lens could have been wider, it was about 37mm (35mm equivalent) which was too long for my liking but no camcorders these days seem to come with a good wide angle lens. The sceptic in me suspects that someone wants to sell me a wide angle converter.
All in all, my first foray into High-Def recording was made easy by the HF10. The controls felt familiar, everything was where I expected it to be (except the menus to turn on external monitoring) and everything felt reasonably snappy and reactive.

Update - some HD footage, you may want to wait for the video to buffer before starting to play.
The embeded video below is not HD, click on the linck just under the video to see the HD version on Vimeo's website.


HF10 test (HD) from Alex Ray on Vimeo.

The Flash Centre's Website is down (and back up)

But the people who know are on to it so it should be fixed soon........

UPDATE, It's back up now.

Wacom Tablets

I'm off to a Wacom training day tomorrow.

Their product range has expanded over the last few years to the point where I just don't get the difference anymore, hopefully tomorrow will fix that!

I'm looking forward to having a good play with the 12WX tablet / screen device, what I saw at focus on imaging looked amazing but I didn't have time to really give it a test.

If you'd like any questions asked, email me, twitter me (@alexray) or leave a comment below.

Keep an eye out tomorrow for some live posts.

Canon HF10 Frustration

As much as I love Canon for lending me this HF10, they could have sent an instruction book with it!

I'm trying to get it to output composite video whilst in record mode, to use as a monitor. I'm fairly sure it'll do it with composite and HDMI but I don't have displays to test that.

Anyone know the answer?

(Update - Wahey! I eventually found the right menu item)

Feed Flare links added

So now you can Digg me, stumbleupon me or think I'm del.icio.us (highly unlikely!)
Look they're just below here....

Canon HF10 on test. Any Questions?

I have a pre-production Canon HF-10 camcorder that canon have loaned me.
It is full 1080p, records to internal 16GB of memory and also has an SD slot for expanding that capacity.
I've also managed to blag a DM-100 mic, so it's looking quite professional (and the sound is really good to.)
If you have any questions about it, or would like to have a look, give me a call at the number below, e-mail or preferably twitter me @alexray.

(It's only here till the 14th, so get in quick.)