Video lenses for Mirrorless: How sharp should a lens be, how wide the aperture?
What matters more than resolving power for video are weight, quiet focusing, focus shift and focus breathing.
Alec Kinnear
Creative Director
Alec has been working with video since 1995. Before founding Foliovision in 2004, he worked as a Head of Television for Grey Moscow and a TV producer at Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia. Alec maintains a photography and culture weblog at uncoy.com. Alec holds an Honours B.A. from Trinity College at the University of Toronto in Modern Languages and Literature.
OS X Image Resizer Review: ResizeMe, EasyBatchPhoto, PhotoBatcher, PhotoBulk, PhotoMill, Retrobatch, ThumbsUp, Adobe Lightroom
My own vote was initially for the more subtle and accurate render. Now that I've studied the results more closely, the sharper and blockier render also works.
Effective Video Communication: Consumer Reports Exposes Tesla’s Dangerous Autopilot
Clear videos where the auto-pilot car runs stop signs, red lights and shifts lanes dangerously make the point more effectively than stats.
The shortest path to directing major studio motion pictures: Christopher Nolan’s Following 1998
Time spent on story and storyboards will cut costs in half or two-thirds, while making it far more likely people will like the final result.
How to shoot low-cost high production value exteriors in 2020: behind the scenes of Nightshift
A lightweight camera and lens rig allow a filmmaker to shoot complex, expensive dolly and crane moves with no heavy equipment and minimal crew.
Video Stabilisation Test: iPhone 11 Pro vs Nikon Z6 vs Canon M6
If you ever wondered how the video stabilization in iPhone 11 compares to what's in a Nikon or Canon camera, here's a three-way shootout.
DxO PhotoLab: How to Build an Efficient Processing Workflow
At feedback.dxo.com, Roseblood asked about an article on my workflow in DxO PhotoLab. I know I've written one but couldn't find it in my archives there. As I've spent countless hours improving that workflow to process artistic, football and family photos, I'm happy to share it, this time in a more permanent format.
Keep reading DxO PhotoLab: How to Build an Efficient Processing Workflow
Dev Site – Staging Site Now Automatically Included with All Pro Licenses
From this week, there's a separate field for a dev site in every licensed account.
Should iPhone users trust Apple’s promises about the iOS 13.5 Contact Tracing API?
iPad and iPhone users should be very wary of upgrading to iOS 13.5. There's no path backwards: it will track and trace you in entirely new ways.
How to Brave the New (Coronavirus) World in Style
Like most of you, coronavirus, or more accurately COVID-19 has hit Foliovision like a cement mixer barrelling down a country road. In Slovakia, masks are now de rigor everywhere. This includes at work, walking in the streets in town or dining out.
The parliament had to quickly rewrite that last law when they figured out the day after passing the law that it's impossible to eat or drink with a mask on.
Keep reading How to Brave the New (Coronavirus) World in Style
How to build user-friendly software licensing: The Newsletter Plugin vs FV Player
I've just had another very poor licensing experience with independent software. It's encouraged me to share some general guidelines on how to license open source software.
Keep reading How to build user-friendly software licensing: The Newsletter Plugin vs FV Player
Is WordPress Free? Not according to Flywheel – try $599/month
I've been working in WordPress for a long time. The original impetus behind the creation of WordPress was a free alternative to Movable Type, after SixApart introduced $299/website pricing for their version 3.0 in 2004. Most webloggers at that time were fairly techy and most sites were personal weblogs (they'd be considered mixed now), so right away they fled to b2 which quickly was forked to WordPress by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little (in the right place at the right time). Mike Little's a very personable guy who truly believes in open source and sharing. Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of Automattic who have taken $617 million in venture capital, the publisher of WP Tavern (the main WordPress news site). He's also owner of WooCommerce, which was more or less stolen from the original publishers by WooThemes, making Mullenweg effectively the buyer of stolen goods (as Mullenweg paid Woo but not the original publishers when he acquired WooCommerce for $2.1 million).
Keep reading Is WordPress Free? Not according to Flywheel - try 9/month
How to convert Markdown to Wikitext
We're looking at long term newsletter, marketing automation solutions now. Preferably open source. Mautic came up but there's no Wikipedia article on Mautic.*
I decided to quickly put one up. Alas, I can't stand writing wikitext, it's very slow. I can edit it on other people's articles slowly and carefully. I wanted to write in Markdown so I did. It turns out there are no usable conversion tools. At first I was directed to Pandoc. We've got an online version which handles unlimited characters. I didn't have much success with our version. I tried the official version. No luck there either. Other people were facing Markdown to wikitext Pandoc conversion issues as well.
There's some command line utilities which have to be installed (no thanks) after installing npm first. Or there's online utilities which are no longer available. Finally I was redirected to our own Pandoc converter.
Keep reading How to convert Markdown to Wikitext
How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders
So you now have a website with all your videos encrypted with FV Player Pro using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, AWS Elastic Transcoder or Coconut.co (full FV Player integration coming soon )? Or perhaps your video platform is Vimeo and you can just put up FV Player Vimeo Security and stop at least the known video download tools. Bravo!
Now you want to post some of your videos to Facebook. Are your videos protected from download there? Not really, not even in a private group. Using FV Player Pro with independent hosting is not really an option. Facebook doesn't play well with independently hosted videos, you really have to upload to their platform, which we don't control.
Here's some good strategies to minimise your risk.
Keep reading How to Protect Your Facebook Videos from Downloaders
The State of Comments 2020: WordPress, Disqus, Medium, Typepad vs Custom Comment Systems
Due to all this dross, good and informative comments are lost and have almost no long term value. Thoughts and some solutions.
How to Grade Canon C-Log: Three Step Workflow
A quick primer on how to efficiently grade Canon C-log, including step by step workflow.
High ISO Noise Reduction: CaptureOne vs DXO PhotoLab
How much of a difference can software make with high ISO images? A lot of difference it turns out.
Piping UptimeRobot alerts into Teamwork Chat
I hope this short essay helps anyone trying to monitor site uptime or pipe any kind of alerts into Teamwork Chat.
Worst Services We Actually Use: Fruux Review
Insisting on changing web standards instead of supporting customers is the best example of Millennial Moronity I've seen in my career in IT.
Project Gutenberg – Subverting WordPress.org for .com marketing
People who use WordPress to publish their poetry, their photographs or communicate to their customers their small business (about 30% of the internet) may not even know about Project Gutenberg. Ostensibly Project Gutenberg began as a new editor. Given how mediocre the WordPress TinyMCE editor has been from inception (note: we created FV WYSIWYG on FCKedit ten years ago and it's still the only editor which allows a writer to switch to code view and back again and not have all his/her paragraphs and line spacing arbitrarily changed), a new editor is a laudable goal.
Unfortunately Project Gutenberg turned out not to be an upgraded post editor but a new vision of WordPress in permanent Page Builder mode. There have been serious writings about the tyranny of choice. By forcing writers to make decisions about blocks, multiple photo layouts, forms, sliders every time they create a new paragraph, there are two results likely:
Keep reading Project Gutenberg - Subverting WordPress.org for .com marketing
