Monthly Archives: August 2011

A smart move from Panasonic

Exploiting movie quality.

It’s no great secret among amateur movie makers that the Panasonic GH2 MFT still camera is also a state-of-the-art movie camera.

Click the picture for more.

The above link will take you to a full description of the GH2’s movie capabilities and will also allow viewing of movies made using the camera. The appeal of the GH2 over the (still waiting for mine!) G3 is that it accepts professional microphones, as opposed to limiting the user to a poor built-in one.

Now Panny has done something very smart in its recent announcement of two lenses which are clearly aimed at movie makers. With a software update the GH2 will be able to use power zoom with these optics, with variable zoom speeds. This makes for smooth zooming and a professional result. Two lenses have been announced, the ‘X’ in each designating the power zoom option.

These give an aggregate zoom range of 28 to 350mm FFE which will fulfill most movie making needs. Add an ultra wide (where no focussing is needed) and you are set.

With the addition of these optics it seems to me the GH2 (and G3 or GF3 but not earlier models) user has a still camera which will make a ‘no excuses needed’ semi-pro movie camera at very modest cost.

A friend writes:

Video – I share your enthusiasm for the development of high quality video in still cameras – I’ve enjoyed “one camera, two media” for the last ten years or so. On the other hand, I feel that 1080P AVCHD is a triumph of marketing over quality. Others have tested it against 720P MP4 and found the latter sharper; I’ve confirmed this informally and now get 1920×1080 playback using 1440×1080 MP4. Using MP4 you can make routine edits without rendering, which takes minutes instead of hours, and saves a generation. Here is a sample below (converted to Flash on Vimeo. The Algae scooper in our lagoon is kind of interesting too. (Editor’s note: ….and clearly designed by Rube Goldberg!).

Click to view.

Chiat/Day

Unremarked yet vital.

When Albert Einstein penned his theory of relativity, working as an obscure patent office clerk in Switzerland, he used pen and paper. Not a computer in sight.

When Maria Callas was hitting high Cs in her large operatic oeuvre, no computers were involved in creating the greatest vocal timbre of her generation.

Dylan and Lennon used much the same equipment found in Einstein’s toolbox.

And you can be sure as heck that Picasso would have laughed at the idea of a computer, if he even knew what it was.

But the one universally unremarked keystone to much of Apple’s success – now that everyone is writing on the change in CEOs – is the work of the company’s long time advertising agency, Chiat/Day. (‘Shy-at/Day’)

Their early ‘Think Different’ campaign featured images of all of the above geniuses and made it subtly but perfectly clear that dumb people used something other than a Mac, though the computer was nowhere to be seen. There was not a green eyeshade to be found among Apple’s pantheon of ‘crazy ones’. So the subliminal association with genius conferred on every Macintosh owner was clear. The campaign remains one of the classics of advertising.


“Think Different – because the people who are crazy enough
to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Click to view.

Yet Chiat/Day’s most famous piece is without doubt the ‘1984’ ad for the first Macintosh which ran just once during that annual orgy of steroid driven machismo and big money, the Superbowl. A strange venue for a cerebral product, but its vilification of IBM as Big Brother and the related message that PCs were for the unthinking masses, was clear. (Oddly, most of the attendees at that same Superbowl had likely arrived in corporate jets with their flight and seats paid for by their shareholders). Running it just the one time sealed its fame and it plays as well today as it did in …. 1984. The related implicit presumption is that none of the machine men in large corporations using IBM’s megatrons had even heard of George Orwell, let alone read his book. Likely true.


1984. Click to view.

I was lucky to find myself in Chiat/Day’s Santa Monica office in 1988 and still fondly remember that visit as showing me a new kind of workplace, one in which traditional offices and cubes were notable for their absence. The ceilings of this cavernous warehouse were high and people seemed to mill around in free form. Models and photographs were everywhere and video played on many screens. It was an incredibly inspirational environment, just ripe with creativity and intellectual freedom.

Chiat/Day’s most recent Apple commercials are the ‘Get a Mac’ series which ran through 2010, and they reflect the changing positioning and audience for Apple’s products. Whereas when ‘1984’ and ‘Think Different’ were made only a lucky few owned Macs, and the iPod was nowhere in sight, by 2006 when ‘Get a Mac’ started to run everyone owned an iPod. The iPod, which has now morphed into the iPhone and iPad, was a perfect introduction to the world of Apple’s computers. Accordingly, this campaign was targeted at a different audience. Intellect and relative affluence had given way to the mass market of poverty and a situation comedy mindset, and it’s not for nothing that these ads were miniature sitcoms. The intended audience, after all, watched little else. The campaign made John Hodgman, the poor schlub with the pocket protector and suede shoes an instant star. He was the nerd whose PC was always locking up and prided himself on the amount of storage and complexity of setup. By contrast, the Mac character, played by Justin Long, comes over as a sententious prig, just this short of curling up a contemptuous lip at the poor loser that is Hodgman. Unconsciously, Apple was cocking a snoot at the corporate world it so little cares about, yet when it comes to having a beer with one of these guys, it sure wouldn’t be the Mac dude that first comes to mind.

Get a Mac.
Click to view.

This is one of my favorites. The contrast between the nerdy numbers guy and the artsy hipster could not be greater and the humor and timing are splendid.

Chiat/Day is one of the many unsung heroes who contributed mightily to the success of Apple and their work is an education in photography, film making and pop culture.

FrameShop

A neat frame designer.

Users of Photoshop CS4 or CS5 who like to add frames to their electronic images should rush over to Joe Colson’s site and download his FrameShop script.

Once installed and with an image loaded in PS, you click on it in the File->Scripts menu and set your choices as Joe explains in his well written piece.

It works well. Steve Jobs said “No one reads any more” (right before introducing the iPad!); he would have been closer to the mark with “Nobody prints any more” and this script does the trick for members of that class who like a polished presentation for their online work. Here’s an example which took seconds to do:

5D, 85mm, f/8, Novatron studio flash.

Thank you Gregg L for the tip.

Update March 2015: The script has now been updated to work with Photoshop CC and continues to work fine with my version of CS5.

Goodbye, Mr. Jobs and thank you.

A great man retires.

Steve Jobs has retired as CEO of Apple.

As a boy I used to absorb everything I could about the greatest capitalist of all time, John D Rockefeller. When my schoolmates were watching cricket or rugby, I was boning up on the minutiae of Rockefeller’s life. At his peak, one of every three dollars of US GDP went into his pocket. And for every mention of slave labor, poor wages and brutal monopolistic practices, there is the counter argument that the man probably created more jobs and more wealth than any individual in modern times. The child of the oil hand laborer on Rockefeller’s rigs saw vistas of opportunity which would otherwise not have existed.

I am no stranger to great capitalists, having immigrated to the United States in 1977 with a net worth of minus $4,000, borrowed from friends to get me on my way. In a succession of positions, some not so good, I have had the extraordinary privilege of working for not one, not two, but three great capitalists.

The first was William E. Simon, once US Treasury Secretary when that job meant something, who created what we now know as the leveraged buyout. I worked for Bill in Los Angeles and still treasure mightily the dedication in his book, to this ingenue, with the most warm and generous words I can recall. Having admired him for years the opportunity to work for Bill – one both inspiring and frightening – saw me quit my job at some dumb ass big bank and join the next day.

The second was Art Nicholas who created a great asset management firm in San Diego. I was lucky to be one of Art’s partners during the great growth years of that business and learned more from him than I can ever relate.

The third was Larry Bowman, himself a graduate of the Cupertino pressure cooker, who welcomed me to his eponymous technology hedge fund during the internet boom (and subsequent bust!) where I lived maybe two lifetimes in but five short years. Larry, by a considerable margin, is the smartest businessman I have known and walking proof that the best money managers end up at hedge funds, often of their own creation.

These men were not mere heroes to me. I was very lucky to call them my friends. Each, in his own unique way, made me aware of my limitations and of my potential.

While I scrabbled for crumbs at the tables of these great men each gave me far more than material reward. They afforded me free education and infinite opportunity made possible only in a free capitalist society.

So it is an easy matter for me to assemble a short list of great capitalists whom I revere, the three I have worked for and the likes of Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Bill Gates and, of course, Steve Jobs.

A young and beautiful Steve Jobs.

In January I wrote a rather churlish and small minded piece titled Goodbye, Mr. Jobs, and Good Riddance. You see, one of the deep seated cultural mindsets inculcated in me during my days in an English public school was an abiding dislike of bullies. And, without a doubt, all these men I so admire had their share of faults. But dwelling on faults when the other side of the coin is so replete with what is best about the American system and American generosity of spirit is churlish indeed. And for this avid photographer, Jobs and his Apple Computer made transparent and predictable the mechanical aspects of the process of making images from files.

My first Mac, bought a decade ago for what now seems a small fortune, the brilliant ‘screen on a stick’ iMac G4 was truly a revelation, in the same way that my first Leica or first Porsche or first Patek Philippe was a revelation. As a mechanical engineer by training it did not take much digging to realize that all these machines were so superior to anything else because they were as beautiful – as engineered – inside as outside. There was no compromise when it came to making the hidden bits. They were as gorgeous and as fully finished as the bits you could see.

But what is so special about Jobs in the pantheon of great capitalists is how successful he was in so many disparate endeavors.

The original Apple ][ computer, the graphics interface of the Macintosh, the fabulous NeXT machine I used in San Diego, the towering genius of OS X – Unix for regular people, the iPod and the revolution that shook the music industry, the iMac, Pixar (whose sale made Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney) and, in what is probably his most lasting legacy, his touch screen devices, the iPhone and iPad. Our son is growing up in a world of computing soon to be dominated by touching and speaking, not typing. Transduction is increasingly a matter of speech and touch rather than hitting idiotically disposed keys on keyboards designed around the mechanical limitations of a bygone age. Jobs’s world is one where you take your computer with you and think nothing of its neglible weight, its instant-on capability, its always-connected status. Jobs wanted to change the world. He succeeded in spades. He did not so much create as refine. Refine, refine, refine ad infinitum until it Just Worked.

I’ll leave you with two favorite quotes:

* * * * *

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.

I am saddened, not by Microsoft’s success. I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. [Triumph of the Nerds, 1996]

* * * * *

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

* * * * *

I am not saddened by Jobs’s departure but rather I am happy that he will be able to spend time with his family in a less stressful life.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

Work and play

Good times.

The competence and performance of the desktop Mac – or Hackintosh in my case – has never been better. The price, it seems to me, cannot go much lower, with even Macs being more than price competitive with comparably equipped PCs.

My two year old Hackster, HP1, marches on unperturbed regardless of what I throw at it.

Play. HP1 with three Dell 2209W 1680 x 1050 IPS displays shows our son in LR3 and PS CS5.
The red phone is a hot line to the gutless wonder at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC.
Garish Dell logos on monitor bezels blacked out with a marking pen.

If there’s a grumble it’s that Dell – or anyone else for that matter – is clueless about making display stands tall enough for the preferred operating height, which means the display top should be more or less at eye level. iMacs are quite the worst in this regard. Hence the three reams of paper in the picture. HP1’s technology may be dated – Core2Quad overclocked, Nvidia 9800GTX+ 512mB graphics – but I can asssure you it lacks nothing in performance or reliability.

FU Steve’s latest ‘build’ for me is the HP10, using the latest i3 Sandybridge Intel CPU and a tremendous EVGA GT430 dual DVI-D graphics card with 1024mB of memory. No sooner was FU’s back turned than I clandestinely opened the case, dropped in another 4gB of RAM in the one open memory slot and saw Geekbench performance soar 6% past that of HP1! Never one to miss an opportunity to tinker, I invested another $130 in a cheap Acer display and $15 for a wall mount, and before you could say ‘iMacs suck’ the GT430 HP10 was happily driving two displays.

If there’s anything remarkable about HP10, other than the blistering performance, it is the incredibly low cost. Cheap displays are used here as color fidelity is not exactly paramount in the money management business, as long as you can distinguish red from green!

Work. HP10 with cheap Hyundai and Acer 1920 x 1080 displays,
which show the crooked game that is America’s capital markets.

Either rig is a photographer’s dream machine, and you really do not need more performance. Only heavy duty gamers need faster CPUs or more GPU performance.

A note on DVI single ink and dual link display connectors:

A single link DVI connector supports a resolution up to 1920×1200, and a dual link can support up to 2560×1600. The latter is generally found on 27″ and 30″ computer displays.

A reader Comment to FU Steve’s recent piece on the state-of-the-art in today’s Hackintosh suggests a few words are in order regarding connectors for modern LCD computer displays.

When FU spec’d the machine, he purposefully chose the EVGA GT430 display card which comes with two DVI dual link and one mini-HDMI socket. DVI dual link is the standard used by large 27″ and 30″ monitors to drive their huge pixel counts. It does not mean that you need two connectors on your graphics card. It does mean you need a DVI dual link graphics card and cable, not a DVI single link version of either. Most modern graphics cards support DVI dual link and you can immediately see the difference in the pin pattern on the connectors:

Single and dual link DVI connectors compared.

In practice, you may as well buy dual link DVI cables for all your connector needs as they can be used down the road if you get a 27″ or 30″ display. The premium over single link is negligible. A dual link DVI cable will fit either a single or dual link DVI graphics card or DVI monitor. For example, in the case of HP10 which uses two inexpensive 21.5″ 1920 x 1080 widescreen single link DVI monitors, one is connected to the GT430 card using a DVI dual link cable (which I had to buy) and the other is connected with a DVI single link cable because it came included with the monitor. The first cable will work fine with a 27″ or 30″ display, whereas the second is useless and would have to be replaced.

So, bottom line, the GT430 used in FU’s state-of-the-art Hackintosh (and in HP10) can support two 27″ or 30″ displays so long as a dual link DVI connecting cable is used for each. One cable per monitor, one socket on the GT430 per monitor. Two 30″ displays …. Hmmm!