Here's a quick unfiltered look at the Canon T1i indoors at night with minimal lighting.
The pups are three lab boxer mix pups that we are boarding for the week--sleeping and being generally cute... Shot handheld with manual focus. No post processing, no color correction. Original file was about 150MB...
I hate buying electronics--not because I hate electronics, but because I obsess over reviews, consumer reviews, unboxings, sample videos and whatever other information I can find pre-purchase.
So, after about a three months of debating on what HD video camera I wanted to buy, I completely switched gears and bought a Digital SLR still camera. Why you ask? The Canon T1i is a hybrid DSLR that shoots HD video (720p at 30FPS, about what a movie downloaded on Xbox Live would look like) and 15 megapixel stills.
I know equipment that try to do too many things often fail, and I do think Canon failed at building a usable everyday video camera--it won't auto focus while recording, audio is poor and BlueRay quality HD mode (1080p at 20FPS) is too slow to be useful. However when I see clips like this, I get excited about shooting video with a real 35mm lens.
If you click through to YouTube you can watch it in HD, but even there it's still not the full resolution of the 720p mode of the camera. (BTW, the 500D is the European version of the T1i, so same everything.)
I've got lots of things to figure out like manual focus, camera support, power, etc, but I think that DSLRs that shoot video will be the wave of the future.
It arrives tomorrow, so I hope to shoot some test footage this weekend.
UPDATE: My best guess is someone was just banging on the keyboard to make a test ad and KLM are just so close to each other on the keyboard that that's what the URL ended up being.
The sad part is it's probably one of the few ads I've clicked on in my Gmail, so this tactic may be surprisingly effective. :)
We've got a KLM person in the comments who may be able to verify. Kudos to them for following up.
Now that I have GoodSync running (see my last post) I was looking for cheap local storage. What I found at the local Best Buy was close out 320GB USB drives--good, small, cheap.
I've been struggling with my home network all day. I had a 250GB drive in my FreeNAS server fail and it's made my whole Easter Sunday very depressing. Lucky for me I had dual drive setup that mirrored all my important data, but I hadn't been good at keeping it all that up to date.
I was a big fan of Microsoft SyncToy for backing files to my home network, but it's failed me in the past, and the new Sync 2.0 framework that seems to run constantly system is bothersome, so I ventured out for a new solution.
I've been using Siber System's RoboForm for years and I knew they had a sync solution, but I hadn't investigated. Oh, what I've been missing out on is file-syncing sweetness...
This bad boy will sync files between networks, FTP sites and (the kicker for me) my Amazon S3 storage account. Now I can have automated local backup to cheap USB drives or my FreeNAS (if I ever get it working again...) *and* I can backup to the Amazon cloud storage for mission critical files I can't afford to lose.
April is a good month to cracking, GoodSync is $19.55 until 4/15 (down form 30 bucks with coupon code 1040G) and “data transfer in” to Amazon S3 is only $0.03 per GB (vs. the standard $0.10) for 3 months, April through June.
Seriously, April 1st is a big day for me. It means 90 days in a new city, 60 days in a new house and the 30 day anniversary of discovering the location of my iron.
All in all, the move was quite a bit more intense that I ever would have imagined and the New York City pace is everything people say. I find that my days are a good two hours longer in Manhattan then they were in Cincinnati and the risk of being unproductive is much higher. I really have to focus on the task at hand to keep the day from slipping away.
I am enjoying the train commute (half of my Facebook updates originate there) and I’m getting back into listening to Podcasts and really using mobile internet sites. I can see how anyone who commutes into the city needs an iPhone or SmartPhone.
I am not enjoying the red tape that moving to a new city entails. My wife and I have made a collective five trips to the BMV to get the cars registered, countless reams of new job and insurance paperwork, and all new banking and utilities to deal with. You know you have to update the Netflix account or they’ll stop sending you movies :)
That leads me to an April Fools challenge for those of you who still bother to read this drivel. Does anyone know where I can get a copy of the low budget indie film April’s Fool?
This little gem of a film was released in 2001 and I was lucky enough to stumble upon one of the few theatrical showings at the Esquire Theater. It was shot mostly in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky and unlike Airborne I remember it being somewhat good. I’d love to rent it again to see if it has a shelf life.
at Amazon.
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