Tag: video

  • Should lecture capture be used to relieve classroom over crowding?

    This is my newest column for the October-November issue of Streaming Media Magazine: At the beginning of this school year, Echo360 Inc. CEO Fred Singer wrote an editorial for The Huffington Post extolling the virtues of lecture capture. He observed that the lean economy “won’t allow institutions to simply erect new buildings and hire qualified…

  • trashcanland – screen caps from your 80s childhood

    Those of who enjoy the retro video curation of Network Awesome or the VHS mining of Everything Is Terrible, but don’t want to commit whole minutes to watching whole clips might like a tumblr I just stumbed on to, trashcanland, which strips minds the impacted VHS landscape to unearth the best 1/30 of the second.…

  • Network Awesome – Curating YouTube for the video geek

    Man, I could lose days browsing this site, Network Awesome. The site editors pour through YouTube finding the best retro videos that bring me back to my prime video viewing years as a teenager and young adult in the 1980s and early 90s. Home video and cable television were just becoming mainstream in those days.…

  • Video and the power of connection

    This is my latest column for Streaming Media Magazine: These days we all do it. We meet someone new in person or online and then we do a search of his or her name on Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Perhaps we want to stay in touch, or maybe we’re interested in learning more about what…

  • Death of the Flip camcorder doesn’t mean camcorders are obsolete

    I was certainly surprised today when I learned that Cisco is shutting down its Flip camcorder division. The Flip camcorder has only been with us about four years, and Cisco has owned the company for only two, all the while the Flip has pretty well stood on top as the best selling camcorder in the…

  • For concert audio the Sanyo Xacti beats the Sony NEX-5, hands down

    One of the most impressive features of my Sanyo VPC-CG10 camcorder has been its audio recording quality. But sometimes you don’t realize how good something is until you have a chance to compare it. This weekend I made an inadvertent comparison and I came away all the more pleased with the CG10’s audio performance. On…

  • Seduced by the siren call of the Sony NEX-5 camera

    After hemming and hawing for about six months I finally took the plunge and bought a Sony NEX-5 interchangeable lens compact camera. As I wrote when the camera debuted, I was concerned about a few apparent drawbacks: a new lens mount and the lack of in-body image stabilization. You see, the reason I made the…

  • Zoom finally adds HD video to a portable audio recorder, but still no mic input

    I’m always complaining about how most consumer-level camcorders don’t feature microphone inputs, or even decent mics. My Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 has pretty good mics for camcorder of it’s size and price. But because the mics are on the camera and there’s no input to add an external mic, they’re still inappropriate for interviews or any…

  • Considering video/still convergence and Sony’s NEX-VG10 interchangeable lens camcorder

    Back in May I wrote about the vexing mix of features in Sony’s new NEX interchangeable lens digital cameras. While visiting a big Chicagoland electronics megastore I finally got my hands on the NEX-3 and NEX-5 cameras and came away liking them more than I expected. Though I only got to play with them for…

  • The best camcorder is the one you have with you

    There’s a common idea amongst serious photographers that it’s a good idea to always have a camera on you, because you never know when you’ll see the stuff of a great picture. Seeing as how it’s often impractical to always have an SLR or other larger camera with you, many photogs adopted smaller point-and-shoot cameras…