Product Review: Hague Mini Motion-Cam Stabilizer

I did a little research on camera stabilizers because I found any moving footage was every choppy. I’ve known about Steadicam for years, they were used in both the MTV and Pantene commercials I worked on. I needed a Steadicam for my iPhone!

I had no idea if such a thing existed but lo and behold it did! Sort of. Most stabilizer manufacturers make a prosumer device for small, light weight consumer cameras, perfect for an iPhone. I checked out reviews, specs and videos for stabilizers from Steadicam, Hague, Lensse and some great DIY stabilizer videos. Seeing as how I don’t have a machine shop, the last option was out. The Lensse was reasonably priced but most reviews said it was difficult to balance. The Steadicam Smoothie looked good, but again, was reviewed as being difficult to balance. I also read up on the iStabilizer but with its name, it’s cheaper price, and it’s lack of reviews made me nervous. I looked at the Manfrotto 585 ModoSteady Stabilizer but a single review that compared it to the Hague stabilizer, with words and video changed my mind. I settled on the Hague Mini Motion-Cam Stabilizer. It’s a mouthful, and you can only get it from their site, so there are no Amazon reviews, but I saw a bunch of videos on YouTube for it and it seemed to fit the bill. It arrived today. Now, I should be clear that a stabilizer is not an easy tool to use, but it’s essential to smooth movement and motion shots. I remember a Steadicam operator telling me he had to be certified, I believe it. A camera stabilizer ads an immense about of professional polish to your video project, but it takes patience and practice.

Here are the undoing photos, I’ll be adding video to this post in a day or so.

The only complaint that I have is that the Hague site wasn’t clear about the fact that the stabilizer came with an iPhone adaptor so I ordered one. Now I’ve got a $25 adaptor that I don’t need. Let’s see how good their customer service is. Unless someone wants a heavy duty, weighed and stable iPhone tripod adaptor (@stevegarfield…)

Review of Splice and SlowMo

While working on my iPhone film, I’ve been testing various editing applications, many of which I’ve mentioned already. I wanted to share more detailed info on a few of them. Tis post covered SlowMo and Splice. The former is strictly for slow motion, the later handles editing and slow motion. I won’t be reviewing Splice as an editing tool, you’ll see why soon.

SlowMo

SlowMo is pretty basic; shoot or load video, slow it down, purview and export the final footage.

Splice

Cool opening page and easy interface for an app that handles editing, cropping, slow motion.

As you can see, it’s simple enough to crop, slow, and compile clips for a final edit, which takes a bit longer than iMovie but not as long as ReelDirector. But, before I waste time talking about it’s editing capabilities, this is why it doesn’t matter:

640×480 is the highest resolution this app offers for final output. If you have the time to sit through the video below, you’ll see that, when compared to 1080p output from other apps, this one does not fit into my workflow. The Splice clip is at the very end.

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 5

I finally got a chance to do some lighting tests using my SIMA (SL-10HD) LED light. It connects via cold shoe to my AR-4i, OWLE, or my iPhone via its connector arm and iPhone tripod adaptor.
The SIMA uses 2 AA batteries, has no DC input. It comes with an arm that allows you to attach it to a tripod, or tripod adaptor-equipped iPhone. It provides 600 lumens for 45-60 minutes.

 

 

Here are some test photos and a test video.

 

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 4

I spent the day working on my script. I had been using Evernote for writing until it became useless. When typing the app froze, when saving it crashed. Apparently users have been having this problem for months with no resolution. So, I switched to Pages, Apples version of Word. Unfortunately there is no movie script app and formatting in the iPad was seriously slowing me down. I spent some time today checking out script writing apps on the iTunes store. There weren’t many, only 2-3 of the apps below are for film script writing, and I found one other under “script”, but that was $40:

I ended up buying. It works pretty well, I got a whe scene written today. I also had some time today to record a new video showing off a couple of new iPhone accessories. I’m still in the market for a good extra battery solution and some way to attach external hard drive space.

 

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 3

In this post I discuss a creative block that almost led me to drop my entire story line and start from scratch. Luckily, I had an epiphany. I also ran into a technical issue, I expect it’s the first of many, but resolved as well. It was a good week.

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 2

This is part 2 of my documentary. I look at the audio accessories I’ll be using to make my movie. I have an OWLE which came with it’s own microphone and a Fostex AR-4i that is a stereo recording device for iPhone that came with 2 microphones.

Here is audio test footage.

A New England Love Story Documentary Part 1

Here is part 1 of the documentary I’m making as I shoot my first movie.

My First Movie

 

Many of you who read my blog or have seen my portfolio know that I’ve done a bit of video work for my clients. There has been some video shooting, mostly editing and motion graphics. These projects were of course marketing projects with (usually less than adequate) budgets.

I got into doing video, and design itself, because I wanted to make movies. Unfortunately I lived in the wrong coast and was too practical, so web design became my career choice. I’ve always had stories in my head that I wanted to get out through movies, but didn’t have the money or the equipment.

A few months ago I picked up a side project doing a video for a major marketing event. The video was shot in and around Times Square. I used a big Canon HDV video camera for shooting, After Effects for animation, and Final Cut for editing. While shooting with the big pro camera I also shot with iPhone. In the end 50% of the final video was from the iPhone 3Gs. That device had a 3.2 megapixel camera and shot 640×480 VGA resolution video at 30 frames per second.

3 months ago the iPhone 4s was released with an 8 megapixel resolution camera that’s shoots 1080p HD footage.

It’s time to shoot a movie!

While I’m writing, testing, planning, I’ll use my 3Gs to record every step of the way. I’ll leave videos and photos here or you can see the videos on my YouTube channel and pictures in my Tumblr blog.

Google+ for iPhone Launches

 

 

Google+ was released for iPhone today. Scrolling through G+ you’ll see many posts like “finally, Google Plus for iPhone”. We’ve become such an MTV-generation on crack that having to wait 3 weeks for a smartphone app for a brand new social network (?) platform is excruciating!

If you are ready to download G+ for iPhone, click here. Word to the wise: you CANNOT currently find Google+ by searching the App Store. You must open this link on your iPhone.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:

The sign-in screen, clicking here requires your Google login and password credentials.

From here you can launch your circles, stream, upload photos or edit your profile.

 

Much like the mobile browser version, you can swipe through the streams from your various circles. A little tough for those of us with more than a few circles (disclaimer, I have 39 and counting).

 

From this screen you can see photos from your circles, view or edit your albums, see all the photos on your iPhone and choose which to upload, and see pictures of you others have posted.

 

You can view your Google+ Circles (I’m calling them Gircles dammit) here, add more, edit them. You can even see here how many people haven’t uploaded a damn avatar. My family is obviously not tech savvy!

 

You can view your contacts by name and add to Circles here. You even get the ubiquitous Suggested People feature, if you’re feeling lonely and adventurous.

 

I’m still trying to figure out what a Huddle is. There’s no explanation so I’m going with thinking of it as group chat. Unfortunately NOT a Hangout. I wouldn’t hold my breath for Hangout on iPhone or iPad, since it will conflict with Apple’s Facetime. I’m looking forward to using Google+ Huddle for the next Boston Social Media Club meeting.

I’m sure stuff will be changing as the Google+ team keeps moving forward. They’ve been doing a great job in taking everyone’s feedback.

I’m looking forward to the iPad app and more updates in functionality.

 

Flash and the Smartphone

I recently had a back and forth with @LouisGudema about Flash on mobile devices. I was complaining to restaurants that if they wanted my patronage they shouldn’t have built a site completely in Flash because I was out and about and my iPhone doesn’t support Flash. Flash and I go WAYYYYYY back. As a matter of fact was listed as an expert resource on Scalable Vector Graphics by the W3C back in 1999. I was and still am a big fan of Flash and have created some great Flash-based  pieces for Microsoft, Amazon, EMC, to name a few. However, I believe that Flash is only appropriate in very specific instances. Your main site is not one of those places. Mobile devices now outnumber PCs, making them one of the primary ways that consumers are interacting with the Internet and YOUR BRAND. Why shut them out by building your entire site in Flash? There are plenty of SEO reasons why Flash is not a good idea. Mobile is another reason.

There has been a bitter feud between Apple and Adobe over Flash. Apple says it’s a bandwidth hog (true), a security risk (true), and not a good UI for mobile devices (wrong, Flash scales). The real reason Apple doesn’t want Flash on iPhones is it would allow game and app developers to avoid the app store when getting their products to consumers, cutting off Apple’s control of software on their devices and cutting out their cut of the profits.  While the later is certainly selfish, it is business after all. Control over software on their products is more interesting: having a company like Apple approve and disapprove of every app, means they are ensuring the highest level of interaction possible on their devices, on the other hand, well, they’re in  control! Of course Adobe’s side of the argument is that Apple are jerks. I’d back them up on that except they haven’t exactly been working hard on a good mobile plugin. Flash Lite requires that you actually create an entirely different Flash file, for Lite in order to be read. That still leaves out every single Flash site out there that wasn’t created for Flash Lite, i.e. most of them.

The most important part of the Flash on smartphones argument is saturation: how many smartphones support Flash. Well, it took some digging and is still not likely a complete list, but the following, from Adobe themselves, is a list of all smartphones and tablets that support Flash. Not “will support Flash in early 2011, or by 2012. Despite the numerous press releases and interviews, if it’s not shipped, it’s not relevant to this discusison.

Smartphones:
Acer Liquid
Acer Stream
Acer Liquid E Ferrari Special Edition

HTC Desire
HTC Desire HD*
HTC Desire Z*
HTC Evo 4G
Nexus One with Google
T-Mobile G2 with Google
Droid Incredible
HTC Inspire*
T-Mobile myTouch*

Motorola Droid
Droid 2 Global*
Droid R2-D2*
Droid X
Motorola Cliq2*
Droid 2*
Droid Bionic 4G*
Droid Pro*
Motorola Milestone 2*

Nexus S with Google
Samsung Epic 4G
Samsung Fascinate a Galaxy S

Tablets:

Dell Streak
Dell Streak 7*

Samsung Galaxy Tab*

* signifies devices that ship with Flash preinstalled.

Of the hundreds of smartphone models available, the 27 devices above represent those that CAN support Flash, the 13 asterisked models above are the only ones that do out of the gate.

Supposedly the Blackberry Playbook tablet will support Flash, but it hasn’t shipped yet and as far as I can tell NO RIM devices support Flash.

As of January 2011 the smartphone market was broken down thus according to Canalys:

Since neither RIM, Windows Mobile (including the new Windows 7 phone) nor Apple support Flash, we’re talking 33% of the market. Symbian only supports Flash Lite, which, again, doesn’t support most Flash sites. That’s 64% of the smartphone market that does NOT support Flash.

Tablets

Apple has sold 14.5 million iPads. Galaxy Tab with Android has sold 2 million. That means 75% of the tablet market, also important to this discussion of mobile saturation of Flash, does NOT support Flash. “But 25% does” you say. Yes it does, but not well:

Advent said it was pulling Flash from it’s tablets due to poor performance. Poor performance is also seen with Droid 2 devices.

It’s clear that the processor heavy needs of Flash simply do not make it a good fit for mobile devices. As mobile devices have begun to outsell PCs, developing your brand’s messaging in Flash is leaving out an enormous majority of customers. As tablets begin to replace laptops anf HTML5 becomes a growing solution for rich media sans Flash, it will be interesting to see on which side of the argument  software and hardware manufacturers like Google, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola fall on. What will be MORE interesting is which side of the argument marketers, developers and designers fall on.

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