Once again it’s June the 25th. I spent most of the day doing the same thing I did this time last year and this time the year before last.. I had a picnic at the Grave of Eric Arthur Blair aka George Orwell. Today is his birthday and for the last couple of years I’ve met with Dr John Perivolaris to pay our respects to the great writer and talk about the years events around surveillance and civil liberties.
We had a drink, munched on some food and made some media.
Last years post can be found at www.SocialMediaPicnic.com We hope to do the same thing next year so please put it in your diary and come along. There’s always some passers by who are also making a pilgrimage. This year it was some German folk, a lady on a bike and @Hedgewytch.
Throughout the year if you come across any relevant links or content around surveillance or civil liberties, please tag it with the #1984 hash tag.
Fair enough I thought, but when I met him he was just frank and very funny.
The video of the panel we did at the #140conf is floating around somewhere in the ether. I may even drop it in a blog soon.
What I have here in the mean time is a brief conversation with Paul at the end of the day. We were on the way out the door and both of us had cold beer on our minds. That’s probably why this is not so much an interview as a chat in a corridor over a conference when what we really wanted (and had later) was a chat over a beer.. well away from the conference.
Jeff Pulver, the chairman and founder of Pulver.com was the main man behind the 140 characters conference in New York that brought together Twitter users from all over the world.
New york was the first of the 140 Characters conference and others are planned in both London and Los Angeles. Originally the event was to explore the effects of twitter on: Celebrity, “The Media”, Advertising and Politics”. These topics were covered, as well as many more. As ever many of the conversations happened outside the main auditoriums..
I was asked by The Open University in England to grab some interviews with the assistance of Matt (@Barnstormed) and in the corridor we caught up with Jeff and asked how the conference had come about..
During the 140 characters conference in New York I got to connect with some really fascinating people.
Moeed Ahmed is the Supervisor of Internet Media, New Media section with Aljazeera in Doha, Qatar. With the help of Matt (@Barnstormed), I managed to grab a few words with him at my hotel.
This interview and others will also appear on the Open University website ‘Platform‘.
It’s been ages since I was the proud owner of a decent HD camcorder. The last one I had was a 3ccd Panasonic that took DV tapes. At the time it was way too good for what I needed, so I sold it to upgrade my stills camera.
Ever since then I’ve been dabbling with pocket HD video recorders, in particular the Kodak Zi6. The Zi6 is a great little device for blogging and with it’s combination of AA batteries and additional SDHC memory, I always have one at the ready. Recently I was given a Kodak Zx1 to review but I’m thinking/hoping it is broken as there are some major issues when recording low frequency sound. Anyway.. the less said about that the better. The sooner manufacturers realise that decent audio is far more important than the video, the sooner we will have great devices we can really use.
With pocket HD cameras the market leader seems to be the Flip Mino HD.. I think this is because every blogger and his dog (apart from me) seemed to get one to try out and talk about. Not wanting internal memory or a weird battery, I opted for the Kodak Zi6..
The same seems to be with HD Camcorders.. Canon really seems to be on top of blogger advocacy and made sure a few decent video bloggers had access to their kit.. Once again, I missed out on these trials and although I know camcorders like the Canon Legria HF S10 are damn fine bits of kit.. when it came to go out and find one for myself I decided to enter the web with an open mind.
For me, any highly spec’d image capturing device has to have decent optics. This goes without saying. I know Canon have really proved themselves over the years but I have always been drawn to the fact Panasonic pride themselves in their electronics and partnered with perhaps one of the finest glass manufacturers in operation today. Leica make great lenses. Fact. I still have my Leica M6 and a selection of lenses even though i rarely shoot film.. I am yet to see optics as good as those that fit on my old M6.
So when i first saw Panasonic’s Leica lensed HDC-TM300 early this year.. I had a feeling this could be the camera for me. There is always lots of talk online around the HD format AVCHD, but I see it being used more and more to get as much data as possible into smaller memory space and to be honest.. I just can’t be bothered with any type of magnetic tape now, even if the quality is still better.
While saving up enough funds to purchase something decent I read more and more about different cameras and could see that the HDC-TM300 is a serious camcorder aimed at enthusiasts. It has more features that I will ever get round to using and with its twin flash-memory capability, it should be robust enough to rattle around in the bottom of my backpack with all my other gadgets.
Feel
The camera looks and feels like many other in the range. Smooth lines and solid in the hand. It has an EVF (electronic viewfinder) as well as a large flip out LCD touchscreen, an attachable accessory shoe and a great little manual focusing ring round it’s Leica lens.
It’s sister, the HDC-HS300 comes with a 120GB HDD (hard disc drive) and an SD/SDHC slot but I really wanted to put the moving parts aside and go for 32GB internal solid state and a removeable SD/SDHC memory card slot. It will take a Class 6 card up to 32GB but at the moment I am using a Class 6 16GB card bought for about £25.
Features
So what’s it got..? Like said.. more than i’m ever likely to use. To be honest i had to read up on what it’s three MOS image sensors (“3MOS”) were capable of. Each sensor is dedicated to one of the red, green and blue primary colours. The total number of pixels available on each MOS image sensor is 2.07 million pixels (Full HD) for both video and stills. The sensor itself is a little bigger than normal at 1/4″. There is always a worry that camera upgrades include more pixels but less light gathering capability as these pixels are squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces. Not so here.
Amongst some of the many features these are a few that interest me:
~ Image Stabilisation
~ 3 second Pre-REC
~ 2.07 million pixels per video shot and 10.6 mega pixels when shooting stills
~ Leica Dicomer 12x optical zoom lens, with surrounding manual focus ring
~ Interval Recording – time lapse recording from 1 second through to 120 seconds
~ External Microphone input with manual level control (a must for any serious camera)
~ Face Detection – (scary but works really well. Even on the dog!)
~ 12x optical zoom (30x and 700x digital but i never turn this on for obvious reasons)
~ Touch Screen LCD (inc ‘Target Frame’ – Set a target ie face, focal point or object to lock on to even when it moves)
~ Headphone (as well as an AV output port)
~ iA Intelligent Auto – (kind of an idiotmode for when you have been drinking and don’t want to miss a shot)
~ Relay Recording – record seamlessly from the internal memory to the SDHC memory card
These are just a few that jumped out at me.. There are loads more that I could list.. (if i understood them
Reading from the manual I can tell you the camera uses MPEG-4/AVC H.264 high definition video compression, saving 1920×1080 movies to either the internal solid state memory or the SDHC memory at the following sizes:
~ HA: 17 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HG: 13 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HX: 9 Mbps (1920 x 1080 VBR)
~ HE: 6 Mbps (1440 x 1080 VBR)
I know that the Canon cameras can capture data at 24Mbps but I like to be able to edit while mobile from a laptop using iMovie. I think files larger than the ones I already have to deal with may well crash my brain, not only my hardware/software. Besides I would happily offset the data rate and take the 2 extra MOS sensors that Panasonic has over the Canon’s one large one. I may change my mind when I get an 8 core laptop.
My 16GB SDHC Class 6 memory card records just over 2 hours at the highest quality (AVCHD at the HA setting). It is possible to copy the clips from internal memory to external and visa versa. There is even limited editing available should you want to chop stuff up while traveling to save space.
Conclusion
In my opinion this is the perfect all round consumer level camcorder. It ticks all of the boxes I had in mind when I was looking for a camera for shooting video for web at the best quality costing under a grand. Saying that, playing it through my HDTV via HDMI, blew me away. The quality of picture and richness of colour was way beyond what I have previously experienced. I may need a little more practice exporting video for web (and a bigger home bandwidth) to get close to the quality I know this camera is capable of, but it is compact and feature packed. It has some really innovative use of it’s touchscreen and has all the inputs/outputs I could possibly need. With the options of manual control and of course it’s funky time lapse feature, I feel it is a camera I can grow into and learn from.
Just to force a gripe and pick on something.. Although I love it’s 5.1 built-in mic, it’s positioning on the top makes it prone to my heavy breathing and wind noise. Still I plan to upgrade the sound with a more directional mic for interview purposes.
Also at £800-£1000 It’s probably a little expensive for the average consumer but this is still a new camera and I imagine the price will come down soon enough.. When it does.. buy it. Or if you can afford it now.. buy it now.. I’m certainly glad I did.
UPDATE: Here are a few of the accessories I have found useful.
E3 was a blast.. Loads of meetings, loads of gameplay, some Audioboo action and no doubt this will all keep trickeling into my feeds over the coming weeks..
On the last day at E3 we were ushered into a room within the Xbox Live stand and sat with Aaron Greenberg (Director of product management at Xbox). We were allowed to ask him anything, so i started the ball rolling with a question from avid Xbox fan and gamer Nik Butler (@Loudmouthman) Nik wanted to know why you couldn’t cross dress Xbox Live avatars..
(I must apologise for the crappy sound but the expo was really noisy and i have found out the hard way that the Kodak Zx1 is nothing like it’s predicesor the Zi6 in handling noisy environments. As a result the audio crackled on all the footage it shot. (No low cut filter me thinks.) I am going to try shooting video with a more highly spec’d camera for a bit..Mainly because i have dropped my trusty Zi6 )
I’m writing this on my last few minutes of battery power, about 38,000ft above sea level, with six and a half hours left on my flight from London to Los Angles.
I am traveling in a group of thirteen after being asked by Digital Outlook, in association with Xbox, to blog the E3 Gaming Expo. Not only blog in the normal text based sense but to use some of the tools I normally use that feed into twitter.. AudioBoo, flickr, 12 seconds etc.
I guess they are after a non serious gamer with a different perspective to give their take on the event. And i shall. There’s loads of new tech and game releases for me to get my teeth into so there should me more than enough content to get me excited..
So why then am I writing a blog post before anything has happened?
I chose WordPress as a basis for my blog a while back and have been happy with it ever since. Me being me though means I have to try and be a little bit different.. a little css adjusted here an over sized graphic here.. As a result I have had to ask Derek (@Delboydare) to assist me in upgrading my wordpress version and he has done a great job. Tapping away behind the scenes, he has ensured my transition to the latest version of wordpress has happened without a hitch.
Then there’s Nik, @loudmouthman. It seems he has been hosting/managing a couple of well known blogs recently and as I’ve been wanting to make the switch from my former hosting company NXS.nl, I thought I’d take him up on his offer. I know that with Nik being on the other end of the tweet almost 24/7 i could not wish for better hosting support.
The changeover itself happened almost too fast for me to notice.. All I had to do my end was insert the new name servers and it was done. I had to check three or four times because I did not think it could really be that easy. But no.. it was done and i was up and running on my new server with no visible downtime.
The conversation with Nik that followed informed me that my security had increased substantially and some extra plug-ins had been installed into my wordpress blog that would on the whole make my life more easier when it came to posting anything on my blog.
I spend a good portion of my working life recommending tools sites and apps that i think worth using.. Derek has shown me how valuable our networks are when it comes to sourcing the skill sets outside of our own and Nik has shown me that I can love a platform without knowing it’s full potential and that there are some people out there that don’t just talk the talk and really know their game.
So.. here i am re-enthused, reinvigorated, reminded on how good a platform wordpress is and stuck in the air unable to post this to the web till I return to terra firma.
I should be in the hotel about 8 hours from this sentence. There are about 12 people in the team that headed out from the UK.. Many had come in from other cities in other countries.. Spain, France, Italy and Germany to name a few. Some host gaming forums/sites like www.XboxWay.com and www.Xboxdynasty.com Some are PR.. One guy Sean Geer calls him self ‘old media’ but i think he is much more than that.. Anyone that packs A Nikon D90, Lumix LX3 and an Eye-Fi card is ok in my book.. Especially as I have the same in my bag.
I also am packing two laptops.. two Kodak HD recorders, solar chargers with extra lithium-ion cels.. and so on.. My back is already having a go at me. I really need to make a point of using everything that I have brought just so as this pain isn’t in vain.
All going well and I can jump through the security hoops stateside, I’ll be tagging all of my content with the hashtag #E3. you can listen to my Audioboos on www.audioboo.net or through Buddhamagnet‘s BooBase.
If you want to see everything on one Page then Documentally.Rezpondr.com is the place to be (thanks to @Philcampbell for creating/setting that up) and no doubt everything will go through my Twitter account as normal… Documentally
If you start watching/engaging now you will hopefully see the transition from bumbling ignorance to slightly clued up. I will be filling in all the spaces in my gaming knowledge through regular contact with Nik Butler but please feel free to drop a comment on this blog if you would like me to cover anything in particular in the world of XBox..
Thanks for all the tips on what i should go to see out in LA but i feel i may be too busy channeling all of my Expo observations into www.xbox.com/e309
Still, i hope there will be a few hours off here and there so if you get the chance.. ping me on twitter and maybe we can grab a beer.
