Penultimate for iPad update – wrist protection
What a wonderful update waiting for me this morning – Penultimate with wrist-protection!
The problem of capacitive multi-touch screens is that they don’t lend themselves to scribbling notes with your finger or an appropriate stylus. Natural note taking (and believe you me, I know a thing or two about that), involves resting your wrist on the surface, as you scribble on. Capacitive screens register that and you end up with a number of extra scribbles where your wrist rested.
Penultimate is a cheap app available from the iTunes store and puts forth a digital canvas on which you can scribble your thoughts. It works great for the most part, but before the update this morning, the following could be your experience while scribbling notes.
Enter wrist protection! The app actively monitors the surface of the iPad screen for what it can interpret as a wrist (by calculating surface area I presume). And to my utter delight, it works like a charm. It manages to detect my wrist as I scribble away, every time. Kudos to the devs. Apps like these make me so glad to own an iPad. My productivity will certainly go up a wee bit more now.
AND to enhance your iPad note taking experience, might I recommend Pogo Sketch stylus? Made for capacitive screens, it is quite portable, and yet very usable.
Socialite (formerly Eventbox) ideal mate for Google Reader
For the longest time I resisted RSS feeds, dismissing them as too cumbersome to keep track of, and rather too concise for my needs. Over time though, with the plethora of sites I keep track of, not to mention the trackers and feeds for breaking news on CNN, BBC, I decided to make the shift to RSS. I toyed with subscribing to individual feeds in Firefox, but soon gave up on that idea. With around eleven feeds, I couldn’t keep a history of older feed stories, as well as, mark them as read/unread. I looked to Apple Mail, but apart from a marginal improvement from Firefox (in terms of history), I didn’t see a benefit.
Enter Google Reader. It does it all, aggregate feeds into one feed, and allows for a history as well as marking the same (starring in Google terms). I can access my feeds and read/unread status from any computer/device. Wonderful, but only restricted to the actual GReader site. That was until I found Socialite (formerly Eventbox).
Socialite supports Google Reader in it’s entirety, allowing one to subscribe to a feed from the client, unsubscribe, mark as read/unread, star/unstar, etc. With Growl support, this is by far the best Google Reader RSS feed client for the Mac. What’s more, this client integrates support for various social networking APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. A definite MUST try.
AVCHD Lite vs Motion JPEG – editing ease on the Mac
UPDATE: 11/05/10 – Thanks to your insightful comments, I have written a new article on AVCHD editing on OSX.
With the new camera come a whole slew of editing questions – which format is better, which format lends to easy editing, which format produces the best audio/video… To better educate myself on this topic, I have been trawling the web, finding resources, reviews, experiences of ZS3 users, as well as shooting sample videos using my ZS3 and editing the same on my Mac. It turns out that Motion JPEG is better overall, in terms of quality of audio/video and ease of editing – the two most important benchmarks in my opinion. Intrigued? Read on. Word of caution – this is aimed solely at the hobbyists – people who shoot videos for personal or family leisure. Professionals, well you are just way off base here.
AVCHD Lite is the 720p cousin of the more famed AVCHD format pushed by Sony and Panasonic. Recording at 30fps, at a variety of Mbps (9-17), it is a newer format being implemented by many Point and Shoot cameras. The main pro of shooting in this format is the smaller file size on the card. Everything else touted as a pro, is actually a con. AVCHD uses frame blending (the main reason why the file sizes are smaller) to capture video. It encodes one full frame every X second, the rest being all deltas, which is GREAT for file sizes, but is horrid for editing when converted to another format.
MJPEG or Motion JPEG was the first generation of video compression available to the users back in the day, and arguably is the least efficient way to compress video, but it is on the flip side, the fastest to decode and edit. This is due to the fact that each frame is encoded separately using JPEG compression. It takes the least amount of processing power to encode, edit or playback. It is indeed very wasteful in terms of space consumption. An eight minute sample will take 2GB of space in 720p setting.
Before we start, editing an AVCHD Lite video is NOT natively supported with any of the OS X based video editors. Some have pointed that Final Cut Pro (FCP) can edit the AVCHD files, but I can confirm that it actually converts the MTS video to ProRes 422.
Test Setup
I shot three sequences of videos in low light, out in the snow, and indoors – well lit. All shot in AVCHD Lite format, SuperHigh settings (17Mbps) with Dolby Digital stereo audio, with auto focus in manual settings. I used iMovie ’09 and Final Cut Pro. The former imported the MTS files as AIC (Apple Intermediate Codec) and the latter as ProRes 422 (HD) files. The time taken to convert the MTS files to AIC and ProRes 422 were nearly 80% of the length of the clip. For instance, a clip of a minute took 40 seconds to import to iMovie and FCP.
I repeated the same set of videos with MJPEG, auto-focus and manual settings. There was no conversion necessary and all clips were natively imported in iMovie ’09 and FCP.
The movies were then spliced together, and output as an HD MOV file with bitrate of 9100kbps and two pass encoding. I can post the other setup variables as well. The encoding took the same amount of time, since working with AIC and ProRes 422 is the same as working with MJPEG (native).
Initial Reaction
Video
The time taken for video conversion notwithstanding, the MJPEG format seemed to be a clear winner of the two. Not only was the video sharper, featuring more vibrant and true-life colors, and much less noise (especially compared to the AVCHD videos converted to ProRes and AIC), but also, the quality of the output encoded video was clearly much superior. I could already notice artifacts and loss of quality on the ProRes and AIC encoded videos but this got trebled (nearly) in the final product. The end result seemed to be shot with a normal non-HD camera.
Audio
There was no appreciable difference in terms of audio quality. Even though the AVCHD Lite format supports Dolby Digital audio input, after encoding and compression, there is no discernible difference between the AAC encoded audio from AVCHD Lite and the stereo 2-channel audio recorded with MJPEG.
Preliminary Conclusion
Clearly from an editing standpoint, on the Mac, MJPEG is the clear winner. The editing ease and persistence of quality and low level noise in day-to-day videos makes the benefits of AVCHD (eg. longer recording times) moot. Even though with MJPEG videos are limited to 8 minutes per recording, and translate to roughly 2 GB file (per 8 minutes of video) on the SD card, it more than offsets this lack of compression, with the ease and ability to edit and encode the video on one’s tools of choice be it basic trimming with Quicktime, or Timeline based editing on iMovie and FCP.
My recommendation is a resounding yes for MJPEG. Keep a couple of 16GB SDHC Class 6 cards handy though.
Panasonic Lumix ZS3/TZ7 Videos with Snow Leopard
This holiday season, my not-so trusty Sony Handycam SR300 succumbed to the black LCD syndrome. Really tired of spending upwards of $150 each time, getting it repaired, I decided in favor of moving to a new and better camcorder. The governing factors in the choice of a new video device were:-
- Price (200-300 USD)
- Recording format (easily editable on the Mac)
- Optical Image Stabilization
- HD Capabilities
- Form Factor
I trawled through Camcorderinfo.com with these specifications in mind, and searched high and low for an appropriate camcorder fulfilling my criteria. Unfortunately, none of the camcorders listed could match all of the criteria. They were either too expensive, or featured really poor HD quality. Furthermore, they either recorded in AVCHD or in MPEG-2 (both of which though capable formats, aren’t natively supported in OSX).
I took my queries to the CCInfo forum, where an enthusiastic post by a forum regular got me interested in the Panasonic Lumix ZS3 Digital Camera. Yes, you read right – a digital camera. I was highly skeptical at the onset, but I read on, and researched a lot, and it seemed that the ZS3 was indeed a camera that could indeed break through the Camcorder/Camera barrier and combine the features in one highly functional device. A few specifications of this PAS.
- Optical Sensor Resolution: 10 MP
- Optical zoom: 12 x
- Motion Recording: AVCHD Lite (720p) & Motion JPEG (720p)
- Audio Recording: Stereo 2.1
- Lens: 25mm ultra-wide-angle lens
- Maximum Aperture Range: F/3.3-4.9
- Minimum focal length: 4.1 millimeters
- Maximum focal length: 49.2 millimeters
- Optical Sensor Size: 1/2.33″
- Display Size: 3 inches
- Width: 4.1 inches
- Depth: 1.3 inches
- Height: 2.4 inches
- Weight: 7.2 Ounces
As I mentioned, I was very skeptical of the poster’s claims that he had supplanted his regular HD Camcorder (Sony) with this Point and Shoot camera. To help me better understand and decide, I searched online for some unedited HD clips from this camera, as the ones I found on Youtube and Vimeo stuttered on my MacBook Pro. However, I did find a few which looked gorgeous on my MBP, and the decision was made, with the assistance of Digvijoy, my brother, who spoke highly of the camera as well, and goaded me into finding a deal, and biting on it.
The Camera was delivered this Monday thanks to expedited Amazon Prime Free shipping, and till now, my reaction has been cautious but optimistic (I will blog about the various facets I have noticed, another time). The low light photography that everyone complained about, is definitely a problem. The pictures are underexposed even with the flash enabled. I have however, found a workaround that works beautifully. Video, is rather impressive, and the colors quite vibrant, but more on that later too. One thing I haven’t yet been able to fathom is how to improve the microphone sensitivity on this camera. The audio captured by this device needs to be post-processed to get to an acceptable level. Luckily, since I am editing video on the Mac, I am easily able to tweak the audio with my tools of choice – FCP or iMovie.
