HDR video accomplished using dual 5D Mark IIs, is exactly what it sounds like

9 09 2010

Are you ready for a wave of HDR to crash over the consumer electronics industry, leaving nothing but oversaturated photos and full-to-the-brim Flickr groups in its wake? We’ve got a sneaky suspicion that Apple’s inclusion of HDR in the iPhone is one of those telling warning signs that you ignore at your own risk, and now we’ve got HDR video to cower from behind our fast-aging current gen devices. As you might expect, HDR video looks just like HDR stills (an underexposed and an overexposed image combined into one), except in motion. The effect has been accomplished by Soviet Montage Productions, who used two Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLRs and a beam splitter, which allows each camera to look at the exact same subject, to accomplish the effect. They’re short on details on the post-processing end, but we’re sure there will be “an app for that” before too long.





Android Notifier sends notifications to your desktop

9 09 2010

If you’ve ever used Android for any period of time, you know that the notification system can be both a blessing and a curse — it’s one of the most powerful, useful, and flexible approaches out there, but if you don’t keep up, your menu bar can stack up into a mess of cryptic numbered icons. So we were really hoping Android Notifier could help us with that — it pipes notifications to your OS X desktop over WiFi or Bluetooth. (Linux support is coming soon, and the project is looking for a Windows volunteer.) While it works as described — we had it up and running with Growl on our iMac in just a few moments — it’s also unfortunately a little limited: only phone, SMS, MMS, and voicemail notifications are sent, and clearing them on the computer doesn’t clear them on the phone, which sort of misses the point. We can’t knock it too hard, since it’s free, it works, and we’re sure the developers will extend it soon enough, but until then our quest for the perfect continuous client… continues.