Work(ing Title)

This morning RED Digital Cinema announced their new products Scarlet and Epic. From the lunatic fringe executive who brought the world bulletproof eyewear, this little gem has taken the top spot in my photography obsession category for the forseeable future. Be sure to scroll through the RED Scarlet / Epic announcement brochure for all the details, but the important thing here is to understand that someone is out there pushing a customizable, pro-grade still camera that also happens to capture motion at greater-than-HD quality and one-quarter-normal speed. I can just picture putting down my Canon 5D to collect dust, while I’m out in the world, shooting gorgeous stills and downright arousing slow motion video.

Bill Crow comes through with fantastic news about HD Photo. I’ll be trying this plugin in conjunction with Adobe’s built-in support for RAW image processing.

HD Photo plug-ins for Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and CS3 have been officially released for both Windows and OSX. They’re available now from the Microsoft Download Center.

Here are the separate downloads for Windows and OSX.

The Windows version is supported on Windows XP and Windows Vista, and works with Photoshop CS2 and CS3. While not officially supported, it will also work with limited features with older versions of Photoshop and with Photoshop Elements. The included README file has details.

The OSX version works with both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard), and supports Photoshop CS2 and CS3.

The features supported on Windows and OSX are identical. The files created with either version are fully compatible with each other and with Windows Vista, Windows Live Photo Gallery, the HD Photo Device Porting Kit, and several other applications that support HD Photo.

I previously posted information about the features provided in the plug-in and an overview of the encoder parameters and what they do. Take a look at previous blog entries here and here. I also gave a presentation at WinHEC 2007 about HD Photo Best Practices. While targeted primarily for hardware developers, the presentation contains a lot of information that may be useful for Photoshop users that want to best optimize their encoder parameters. You can find a copy of the presentation here: WinHEC 2007: HD Photo Implementation Guidelines.

If you’ve been using the beta version released last summer, you won’t find anything new here (other than the removal of the expiration date and the absence of BETA in the name.) All the changes we’ve made since the last beta are under the covers, fixing a couple minor bugs, addressing several theoretical security vulnerabilities and generally bringing the code up to current Microsoft standards for released software. But on the surface, the released plug-ins look and act identical to the most recent betas. Don’t forget that the BETA versions will expire on December 31st, so you should definitely download and install these new released versions.

Once again, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Pegasus Imaging Systems for their participation in the development of these plug-ins.

This blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(Bill Crow)

Amazing shit I’ve found this evening while on lunch from slingin’ Pods:

Big Baby Jesus, aka Old Dirty Bastard, dead at 35. His location of death signals his true love.

The Museum of Media History cira 2014. Very creepy ending, though I do like the Googlezon logo a lot, and I’d like to see them merge.

Build your own HiDef Personal Video Recorder. I think I’m going to have to construct this franken-console just to have an alternative to the broadcast flag mandate.

Kottke tutorials photo time panoramas. This technique makes me want to pick up a proper d’slr in time for snowboarding season.

Senate stock picks outperformed the market by 12 percent over five years. I’m not really concerned about the pointers this study will make towards criminalizing a number of the US Congress, I just want to start following their picks.

Just left Cupertino after having lunch with McFaul. Walked to my car and who parked next to me? Take a good guess before you peek at the answer.

Some would call it sad, and point to the social issues surrounding a
culture that works its people too hard.

I simply feel that the image of passed-out Asians in good suits is hilarious! However you feel, please enjoy this gallery of sleepy Japanese businessmen!