Heri

The GF1 makes a great “B” camera for the 5Dmkii. However, you can’t setup custom picture style, which gives higher dynamic range on the 5D. Also, while the GF1 has less moiré and also handles better rolling shutter issues, its cpu compresses too aggressively video, with noticeable artifacts and lower image quality than its sensor can deliver.

If you are interested in video with the Panasonic GH1 or GF1, it’s possible now to hack the firmware and setup a higher bitrate, up to 50mbps. It’s high enough to prevent artifacts, such as the dreaded mud in low-contrast or moving shots. Since the GF1 can only get 720p video, I upgraded to “only” 34mbps though. 50mbps is overkill and is better suited for the GH1′s 1080p video.

The hacking process is very easy. I got Wine for the mac, which has its shares of bugs but does the job.

What I want now is being able to setup a custom picture style (i.e. get more control over the GF1′s color processing engine), apart from basic settings in the menu, and we’re all set. I pushed contrast, sharpness, color and noise reduction all the way down. But still not enough to color match a 5d and a GF1

I’ve been doing video work for the past 2 months, on the camera side; and it’s a tough ride. I can’t go through the fact that it requires so much time, and there doesn’t seem to be shortcuts to speed it up.

See this video

The video took around 3 days of work, in a space of 2 weeks. We arranged a first meetup in front of the city hall. Took roughly 30mn of footage. But audio was awful, with the loud fountains behind, even though I was able to format it into 30mn. We arrannged a second meetup. Audio is still not great, even though I had a new recorder. But now it’s a whole hefty 6mn.

In the meantime, had to order a much faster hard drive (a Seagate Momentus XD) and 4GB of RAM for the editing mac. And got PluralEyes. And had to go through heaps and heaps of web documentation, forum posts, and diverse web tutorials to “get” Final Cut, Motion and Soundtrack Pro.

Of course, there is a learning process, much alike the first time I wanted to try out graphic web design. But Photoshop and graphic design is different. It’s just one frame, and there are countless ways to speed up work. You can setup a workflow to quickly produce something in Photoshop in 30mn or so. But with video, I don’t think there is any time compression possible. You have to go in the field. You have to do subject research. When editing and with post-prod work, you have to listen and re-listen over and over again to the footage, trim it here and there, find creative ways to arrange clips, which takes an enormous amount of time. The only possible ways I can think of to speed up work are taking the laptop in the field and doing editing work in a café somewhere, right after shooting. Having formatted titles, intros and finishes could also help. Getting a 17inch macbook pro with a i7 CPU, 12GB of RAM, 512GB of SSD Drive (plus a 4GB RAID5 array on the ExpressCard), and a beefy video card could also help speed up decompression and conversion work. But again, there are no productivity heaps. I guess that’s just how video art works. The engineer in me sighs. And my creative side dies a little bit each time.

We’ll see for the next videos. That’s just my 2nd real video. I’ll try to do more, especially story-telling videos.

Après le quartier chinois, l’Inspecteur Épingle, une soirée d’été en fin de semaine. Il fait chaud, et les fenêtres et les portes ont été fermées, pour soi-disant ne pas déranger les voisins. Une trentaine de musiciens de la fanfare Texas Couscous s’apprêtent à jouer, et ils ne prévoyaient pas certainement de refroidir l’ambiance. On voit bientôt des déhanchements, une musique joueuse et une bonne humeur contagieuse qui ont encore plus réchauffé la salle.

Mais on ne se plaint pas, loin de là. Ça fait plaisir de voir de la bonne énergie positive, le genre d’énergie nous fait oublier les petites et les grandes choses de la vie quotidienne, et nous fait sourire et aimer la vie, tout simplement.

Version haute définition sur vimeo.

Une sélection de photos

C’est par hasard que j’ai entendu la musique. J’ai vu devant, un immense tuba, des tambours, des clarinettistes, des flûtes. Sur une marche plus haute, des trompettistes, des saxos, en tout une vingtaine de jeunes musiciens et musiciennes.

La musique était joyeuse, spontanée, toute une fanfare qui s’amusait à égayer une place centrale à Chinatown, comme si on était dans un petit village à faire la fête. De temps en temps l’un deux s’aventurait et déclamait un air différent; mais ce que j’ai trouvé le plus beau, c’est que l’ensemble du groupe arrivait à s’accorder dans cette joyeuse cacophonie.

Texas Couscous est une fanfare française avec plus de 25 musiciens. En guise de vacances, ils se sont mis d’accord pour voir Montréal et New York l’été 2010. Non, il n’y a pas d’agent ou de producteur dans le groupe, ils se sont fait éjecter du Vieux Montréal ou d’autres places comme le festival de Jazz, et ont fini par improviser un spectacle dans le quartier chinois de Montréal. L’espace était libre, il faisait beau, et c’était un vendredi en fin d’après-midi, un temps propice au flânage.

J’ai parlé à quelques-uns après leur performance. 3 viennent de la même école d’ingénieurs que moi, aux mêmes dates et parfois mêmes aux mêmes cours. Beaucoup viennent de Paris ou de Lyon, des villes qui m’ont marquée. Une autre a vécue 3 ans à Nairobi, et était allée au même lycée français que moi, dans la même période. Elle fait maintenant un doctorat à l’université du Québec à Montréal. Une est allée travailler à Madagascar, à un hôpital militaire.

La vie est pleine de surprises! On se laisse entraîner dans les rues de Montréal et par hasard, des pans entiers de votre vie vous assaillent, comme une cymbale qui sonne magiquement d’un coup. Ça laisse songeur l’espace d’un instant mais la réalité est bien là.

D’autres photos. Texas Couscous joue à l’Inspecteur Épingle le 4 Juillet en fin de soirée, et au Divan Orange le 6 Juillet. Je vous invite tous à venir!

3 groupes que j’ai trouvés bons aux francofolies de Montréal

• Mohammed, du slam (Québec)
• Danakil, du reggae (France)
• L’homme parle. Musique engagé, urbaine (France)

sur Flickr

In a case where you already have a compact camera, and looking to get better pictures, here is usually the process:

• you go to an online catalogue, and filter gear by price or by feature. Generally, Amazon, B&H and other outlets offer to select them by megapixels and other software features such as face recognition, battery etc.
• You try to optimize the feature set vs price
• You finish after 30mn with 3 or 4 potential cameras. 1 is taken out of the process because it’s ugly or you don’t like the brand.
• Now you have a chart of the features of 3 digital cameras. Next step is either a. talk to friends or coworkers or b. go to a review website like dpreview. There are countless dicussions and pages and finally there are long lists of pros and cons. Reviews on Amazon.com or B&H sometimes help.
• But you learn here and there new technical words. Serious users fight on online forums about the superiority of this camera which has a better implementation of the feature.

The local Quebec FICA group in Québec city organized 2 weeks ago a 3-day workshop featuring Mestre Cobra Mansa. He’s a true artist, a dancer with dazzling moves, a scholar, a musician, eager to share with us.

More pictures

Here’s an insightful document by F. Randall Farmer, on how you should think how and when a content is consumed by a user, instead of taking the easy way out on how you can make a web page “sticky”:

I’ve noticed it intuitively at Montreal Tech Watch or the other blogs I’m following on RSS, but here’s a post written by Nick Carr which sheds a new light on the audience shift on the web.

Admittedly, I am very late to the concept of blogging, having only started one about 18 months ago, but I did see the “power” and reach of blogging. You gather a few thoughts, and if there were a tad original and interesting, the “community” found it, commented on it, and re-blogged the post with other original thoughts. And once in a while, there would be conversations, where two or more bloggers discussing a hot topic.

It doesn’t happen nowdays, not anymore. I have the feeling nobody reads the entirety of a post anymore, and if they find something interesting, one of their first reactions is to put it on twitter or facebook or a bookmarking place like hacker news. A twitter/friendfeed discussion will then continue. The original post on the blog would then act only as a tinyurl reference, and not the central focus of discussion.

It’s easy to understand how we came up to this: It’s much easier to setup a twitter or an identi.ca account, than setting up a blog. It’s much easier to throw you current state of mind in 140 characters than writing carefully crafted paragraphs. And people do answer you immediately on microblogging platforms. Plus the fact that a user own their content on a tweet whereas it’s not the case on the blogger’s website.

For me, this means that the old dream of having a personal blog that would have a world reach, a presence on Google, and being able to reach out to the “community” and starting a discussion is dead. Yes, this old dream is a thing of the past. You will now just get heard on your immediate network (read: co-workers, immediate friends, family); unless it’s a professional blog, with a marketing plan and a sales team that would allow it to become the leader in a market. In a few years, we’ll probably just have a few huge web media companies, brand names such as Huffington Post, Revision3, Giga Omni Media which will have mass media influence, equivalent to the current omnipresence and power of Time or NYTimes.

You probably played a role in this, by having a twitter or a facebook account, and spending time adding links and notes here and there. The question left unanswered is: Is there a way to still keep the influence and the discussion? Probably not. Microblogging, social portals like Facebook are going to stay, and they’re the fastest-growing destinations on the Internet. Instead of fighting the change, you’ll have to embrace it. I’m looking forward to tools that would gather discussions, and highlight at the same the tinyurl’d web page. I’m looking forward for tools that would disseminate content on these platforms, but still keeping a trace (with a token for instance in the url) and show where it is going and landing. This is the kind of tool we’re heading towards to at TechEntreprise, but I won’t be surprised if there are new websites already working on this.

Original illustration: Atomization by Didier Bonaventure, a Montréal artist.

I’ve been working on TechEntreprise for the past 4 months, and while it’s not official or launched yet, I still want to share the project on this blog.

In the technology world of Montreal, I am mostly known for having started MontrealTechWatch, a blog whose tagline is “Technology and Innovation”. The blog covered extensively technology events, new projects and ventures, entrepreneurship. It was especially exciting since it followed the birth of the technology community in Montreal. I was there for BarCamps, for Blitzweekend, or for any other *camp or technology event.

This has been a wonderful learning opportunity, since it was my 2nd blog, and was also started 2 months after I decided to try out the “blogging” thing.

The blog grew then from a little place on blogspot to a full-blown wordpress blog, with its own customized template and domain name. I especially have to thank every person in the Montreal Technology community for giving their time and offering the gift of reading and interacting with MTW.

After a while though, it stalled … or should I say, I saw more opportunities about the concept. With its mix of tech news, jobs, events, articles, and also user comments, I foresaw the possibility of having a public place where everyone could contribute.

Here is a screenshot of TechEntreprise, on the Montreal network:

Visitors can signup, have a profile, contribute to news and public forum section. There’s also dedicated sections for jobs, events, groups, and articles. I especially like the events page, where you can see who is going to an event, and then have a look at their profile in case you want to meet them at the event.

I’m planning to open up networks in Seattle, Cape Town, HK, and other places like Boulder and Boston. And yeah other cool places too.

Now, where does it lead us? Here’s a mission statement from the website:

… bet that any city can become a technology centre, and believe that TechEntreprise can be a key resource and platform for this to happen…

The sentence is for now a bit incomplete since the final mission goes much more beyond that, but it should be more than enough for now.

Now, before TechEntreprise officially launches, I want to use my blog to gather my thoughts and share the different aspects of the project to you, such as technology, product design, marketing and also monetization (drum rolling on this last one) That’s about 4 to 6 posts for the upcoming 2 weeks. Hope you’ll enjoy the ride!