Category: Technology

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest

Prius Project bicycle can change gears with a Thought!

Prius Project bicycle can change gears with just a thought http://tinyurl.com/3rt66zc

This is pointed to more as an indicator of the distant future – one where direct brain control takes over from keyboard, touch pad or voice control. Still, it’s interesting what’s being done now as an indicator of what will be the future. Will it be control of software by thought, or will it go beyond that to imagining the edit or look and having the software work off our brain waves to results?

For the Prius Project bicycle, a team from Deep Local is working on a helmet with built-in neuron transmitters that allow the rider’s brain patterns to trigger the electronic shifters to move gears up or down. The system is said to take just 10 minutes to learn, after which the rider will be able to shift gears by just thinking about doing so.

In this context I’ll once again point to Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – Tan Le (2010) – a TED video – to consider in the context of this Prius Project. Direct brain control of software is much closer than I ever thought.

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest

Google Acquires Facial Recognition Company PittPatt

Google Acquires Facial Recognition Software Company PittPatt http://tinyurl.com/3dworyl

Facial Recognition – actually identifying the person – is more advanced than facial detection – simply determining how many faces are in a shot – and is going to become an important source of postproduction metadata.

Final Cut Pro X attempts to analyze shots (optionally) for facial detection, as does Premiere Pro CS5 and later. Final Cut Pro X also attempts to derive from the size of the face, the type of shot: Wide, M, MC, etc. Right now the technology is a little “hit and miss” or basically unreliable. For now.  These technologies will get better. Apple purchase a Swedish company last September to boost it’s efforts in Facial Recognition.

Meanwhile Google are also building up their portfolio of recognition technologies with the purchase of PittPatt.

When we get reliable Facial Detection, we’ll be able to find shots of individuals across our source media wherever they appear in a shot, and we’ll only have to apply a name once. When we get reliable facial detection, which is not yet, today.

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata

Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera

Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera http://tinyurl.com/5w2p4qb

The article is about ubiquitous facial recognition spurred by a report of a new app for police that allows facial recognition at five feet away. To be clear, many consumer still cameras, and some software, does facial detection: that is there is one or more faces in the picture. Some even recognize when people are smiling, but they do not identify the individual. Apple’s iPhoto and others try and do facial recognition but my experience to date is that it’s been very hit or miss. Apple purchased a Swedish company last year to improve it’s facial recognition technology.

Clearly others already have better technology and it has been pitched for law enforcement work for a long time. However, it’s the postproduction implications that interest me. If we can have a software tool identify all the people in our footage, at lest to the stage of identifying each instance of the individual. Reading through the article it is likely the name could be discovered or derived from Facebook or other social network or public record. At worst the person would need to be manually named only once.

For a metadata-based application each clip could be tagged with the person’s ID for as long as they’re in the shot.

We would end up with ‘bins” for each individual.

Identifying people in shots is Derived Metadata and then can be used as input into other smart algorithms to take more of the boring out of post.

There are a lot of other interesting applications and implications of this increasingly popular (and capable) technology.

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Apple Pro Apps Business & Marketing

“Full-time Editor” or “Pro” is asking the wrong question

Over the last couple of weeks, some of the discussion around Final Cut Pro X is focused on who Apple wrote it for – a discussion I’ve contributed to in more than one place. And I see today in Oliver Peter’s excellent review of Final Cut Pro X he tackles the same question and punts on “full-time” editor as the distinguishing factor. (And yes, yet another Final Cut Pro X post, but one where the main point isn’t really about that piece of software specifically, but relevant to the discussion.)

It strikes me that we might really be asking the wrong question, or questions. It’s not so much what type of work you do, or what proportion of your time is spent doing it, or even the attitude one takes to one’s work – “professionalism”. In the context of talking about the relative suitability of tools, surely the question is on workflows and toolset?

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Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

Another Perspective on Final Cut Pro X

http://tinyurl.com/3ls73kv A great perspective imho

I rather like this take on the reaction:

Beyond that, the new FCP is supposed to be easier for people who have never done serious video editing before. Pros don’t care about this, of course. In fact, many don’t like the idea of making video editing easier and expanding the pool of people who can do quality video editing. Making a task or software easier to use both makes current users’ jobs easier but also lowers the barriers to entry.

The thing about many Pros is that they like complexity on some levels. They like the idea of being elite and doing something that very few people can do. Or, more precisely, doing something that very few people would put up with. Just look at how complex and ugly Bloomberg Terminals are to see how people and industries like using something that looks complex and hard to comprehend by outsiders. Wall Street veterans have resisted a easier-to-user, easier-to-learn, more attractive Bloomberg Terminal for years.

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Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

TalkAbout Tech 013: Like Ripping off a Band-Aid

TalkAbout Tech 013: Like Ripping Off a Band-Aid http://tinyurl.com/43uxe8m More from me on FCP X.

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Apple Pro Apps

More on Final Cut Pro X’s monitoring solution

I recently wrote about Airplay as a possible solution to external video monitoring for Final Cut Pro X, and that would indeed be a cool monitoring solution but not for critical work as it’s H264 compressed and 8 bit.

With Matrox’s announcement today of their monitoring solution, which confirms uncategorically that there is no “broadcast quality video” out of Final Cut Pro X, I had to rethink what I thought they were thinking!

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Apple Pro Apps The Business of Production

Who are Apple’s Final Cut Pro X customers?

When you’re designing software you always have a “use case” or typical user in mind. For our Assisted Editing software I can pretty much name every person we had in mind when creating it. First Cuts was definitely made for me. Transcriptize was an idea from Larry Jordan and was made for him. Sequence Clip Reporter‘s inspiration was from my friend Les Perkins.

So, when I had the opportunity to ask Apple who their typical user is, I had hoped for something more specific than “the vast majority of their current Final Cut Pro users”. Without knowing the demographics of their current user base, we have no idea how to work out who exactly is buying Final Cut Pro X, or who ‘should’ be buying it.

It’s hard to point fingers at who the “2 million installs” equates to, or even the year-earlier “1.4 million unique paying customers” (and there are likely a couple more installs that didn’t pay).

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Apple Apple Pro Apps The Technology of Production

How will Apple solve FCP X monitoring? [Updated 7/7]

Over the last year I’ve managed to have some valuable insight on the direction Apple has been, and is, going with what became Final Cut Pro X, but of late the timing – June 21 – has got me thinking. One of the things that has bugged me is that Final Cut Pro X seems like it’s only most of a story. That there are still “other shoes to drop”. Since I don’t know how to quit when I’m “ahead” on the forward looking insight, here’s some more.

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Apple Pro Apps Business & Marketing Random Thought

When Logic doesn’t help

I was have a beer last night with my friend Joe B – @zbutcher on Twitter, follow him and check out his Final Cut Pro X curation site linking to all the stories he can find – and naturally the conversation covered the current Final Cut Pro X release and the consequent debate. In my mind, a good discussion is one I come away from with enlightened or changed thinking. And this was a good conversation.

Continue reading “When Logic doesn’t help”