Photography

Emerson HD 5MP Camcorder Review

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I recently bought the Emerson HD 5MP camera because it was cheap. I mean that really is the reason. It was HD and cheap. I needed a camera that I could give an actor. It needed to be something that wouldn’t cause tears if he dropped it in the middle of a river. So for $25 from Big Lots I figured it was worth a try. The image is actually not too bad, but it does tend to drop frames. This will cause an audio sync issue after about 1 minute into recording. This is easy to fix in post, but you have to either use their software or Moviemaker. Premiere will not handle the files. Low light handling is noisy, but it does give you an image if you absolutely have to shoot with it. There is an on camera light, but you have to be super close to notice the difference. The most positive feature was the removable battery and if it were a better camera I’d praise this feature even more.
In all it is not a great camera, but if you are willing to fix sync in post and you want something that your child or crazy actor can mess around with, this may just be the camera for you.

Bluetooth Audio

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I love everything that the Frugal Filmmaker does.  He has great tips and links to others with great tips.  About a year ago he promoted the DSLR Film Noob‘s use of bluetooth for audio.  This is a computerless transmitter and receiver that just plugs into your audio source and outputs to your headphones (or anything really).  I finally took the plunge, not necessarily for the same reasons as Deejay.  I run a quarterly screening for video artists and some like to use different projectors and audio gear.  These adapters allow me to put the receiver into the system inputs at the front of the room and transmit from the projector at the back of the room.  The only downfall was that the transmitter is a bit touchy.  I’ll have to permanently attach it to an adapter in the right position.  For the price of $40 I really can’t complain about lessening the cable liability.

Enter the Cloud

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Today we had to transfer files too large for email. With gas prices the way they are it seemed ridiculous to drop off a disc so that the client could post on the web. So, we began cloud exploration. I was looking for free and easy and I came across several, but only tried two. The first was Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The limitations are its downfall, it can store 25GB and loads photos and documents up within minutes, but it will only accept files that are 50MB and under. Great for photos, but not for video or larger graphics. For those larger files I went with Memopal. It is slower to upload, but holds 3GB of whatever you please. If you pass it on to your friends they will give you each an extra 500MB of space. The only downfall to Memopal, other than speed, was it requires you to load software, which I was dreading it would to my client also. Nope, the link takes them directly to the file to download. While neither free version solves video delivery to contests, both get full copies of photos, graphics, and documents where I need them to go.

Update: The downfall to SkyDrive is that both users need a Live ID so it is not accessible to anyone that you send your link to.

New to WordPress

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So I set up my WP site, and like my Blogger site my goal is a Video blog.  I see that once again I cannot host here, but can elsewhere.  I have included my list of video sites that I test piloted for a previous project, they can be found under “Personal Video.”  All host the same Batman clip that I did for a friend.  The goals of this saturation were: 1. A test of the various services.  2. Oversaturation of the video sphere.  I am intrigued with the differences in the sites, unhappy with some, and very happy with some of the major players.  I will go into my findings at a later date, but now I must finish other homework and discover the world of video blogging first hand.