Northern Voice 2008: Mobile Video Blogging

Chris Heuer and Roland Tanglao show how to stream video live from a phone, and discuss how it is changing the landscape for blogging. Lots of good interatction with the audience.
The session itself was (of course!) broadcast live from Roland's phone. This video is a mashup of Roland's stream, a GO-HD camera I had in the audience, and audio from a portable recorder stuck near the front of the room.
From MooseCamp at Northern Voice 2008.


Tags: nv08, northernvoice, northernvoice2008, mobile, live, video, blogging

Video: BC Wireless Industry Survey

Michael Bidu, Executive Director of WINBC, gives a quick overview of the results of a 2007 survey of the wireless industry in British Columbia. The sector is healthy with over $1B in revenue and 6,000 employees. It has now reached a level of maturity where substantial investment is needed to fund the sales and marketing needed for the next stage of growth.
From MoMoVan, Mobile Monday in Vancouver, March 3, 2008.

Tags: momovan, wireless, funding, bc, survey

Northern Voice 2008: Achieving a Personal Style

Some pithy comments by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, renowned photographer, writer and artist, on the role that lighting plays in achieving a personal style in your pictures. Starting with the lament that "right now we are going through the opposite of a renaissance of lighting," and that the world is becoming "Flickr'ed", he identifies both the biggest enemy and the holy grail of photography.
From the PhotoCamp session at Northern Voice 2008.

(A somewhat bigger version of the video is here.)

Piano Phantom

Just for fun, here's a short video I made to test some video sync software I am working on. It may not be obvious at first that there are several media streams being synchronized, but keep watching.

Northern Voice 2008: Best Compact Cameras

Tim Bray gives a quick survey of the state-of-the-art in compact digital still cameras in the PhotoCamp session at MooseCamp, Northern Voice 2008. Tim's talk itself is quite compact, as he cuts to the chase about why you would want to use a pocket camera versus an SLR, what the dream camera would be and how close you can get to that today. The links to the topics and cameras are gathered here.

(A somewhat better quality version of the video is here.)

Experiments in user-generated music videos

R.E.M. has done something innovative with their latest single, Supernatural Superserious. They posted 11 videos of the group performing the song and invited fans to mash them up into their own music videos. The results are here.

Some of the videos are pretty good. My favorite is actually only slightly connected with the concept, but especially after seeing some of the others it really grabs you (or me at least).

My own effort was just a technical exercise in synchronization. Still, it has some charm IMHO.

This is just the latest in band-encouraged fan videos, following on from a 200 contributor effort for a Shins video which was written up in Wired (which gets bonus points for a great headline).

Ultra-budget film-making

Kirk Mastin, a professional photographer, had a great idea on how to compare the quality of a cheap Flip Video camcorder with that of my beloved Canon XH A1, which costs about 20 times as much. He literally taped a Flip onto the side of an A1 and then shot a documentary with both of them simultaneously.

The results are fascinating. They are best viewed in the original Blip.tv form because they get cropped on Kirk's blog.

The Flip version looks not bad at all, even though it was cropped to get a 16:9 aspect ratio. Just shows that technique wins over equipment.