ROGERS

It’s been so long since I wrote something, that I thought it was about time to pick it up again. Obviously a lot things have happened since last August, as they tend to do over time. I have been amused to read the posts about the RED Scarlet and Epic, as well as the 5D MkII.

The RED machines have been improved into a better modular system, which is very exciting. Unfortunately, they have also been delayed until at least 2010.

On the other hand, the rumours about the 5D MkII were close, but not quite. 15MP turned out to be 21MP, which is impressive. The weather sealing, not so impressive. But it is a great camera, and I’ve had one for about 2 months now. My only gripe? Those big Canon lenses are bloody heavy. Luckily, I have a few manual primes which work pretty well with an adapter. I guess you can’t have it all.

I still reach for my film cameras. They are so, er, light…

I wonder how long it will take for me to tire of typing on the tiny iPhone keyboard. Not long, I think.

In fact it took as long as the previous two sentences to make me go and find a computer, and type with a real keyboard (with modicum of speed). Well, that’s not the point I guess. But it is interesting how the iPhone has evolved, suddenly.

From third party applications which were only able to be installed by hackers and the technically savvy; to real, sanctioned, and official apps from Apple. It’s hard to think of an (Apple) product that has been so rapidly influenced by outside forces… or been so popular. And now it can run apps which are actually useful and cheap (and a good portion of “cheap” is free).

Now I have a dedicated Wordpress app for my iPhone. I’m not sure if I’ll ever use it.

A smattering dust can really ruin a good scan. Watching the local film processing guy drop your neg on his putrid floor (imbecile!) can raise your blood pressure faster than you can say C41!

So I’ve been having problems with little smatterings of dust on most of my scans. And the scanner I use doesn’t have Digital ICE (it’s an old Minolta - keepin’ it real). After using a few of the available software-based anti-dust systems out there, I remained unconvinced. On the discussion boards, people were saying to do it by hand. For bigger bits, sure, but a billion tiny grains…?

I decided it was simple to do better. I wrote (in the loosest sense) a Photoshop action which reduces dust, but doesn’t remove all the grain from the photo.

It is does all this with a difference matte made from the original (dusty) image, and a version that has been run through the Photoshop Dust & Scratches filter. Old school like.

It aint fancy. (download after the jump)

There is a great interview in Variety with James Cameron and his perspective on 3D films (pun intended). Of course, what he says is quite convincing, and salient. I met him once. He made some convincingly salient points then too. Via Daring Fireball, via John August.

It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on “visual effects” and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn’t make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing.

Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:

I’ve become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We’ve done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it… hmmm… music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.