Panasonic thought it was April and NAB time today, and so they had a bunch of press releases. Among them was their new high-end prosumer/indie camera, the HMC150. This is a pretty nifty camera, an upgrade over the HVX-200, which was the indie filmmaker’s darling so far. This camera uses 3CCD 1/3″, which creates as much background blur as the HV20. Not very much that is. On the other hand, it records full HD at 30p and 24p, and also native 720p and 1080/60i. It’s expected to cost $6000.

The most interesting point here is that Panasonic goes AVCHD and the tapes are a thing of the past. I did fully expect that all prosumer cameras will be AVCHD for this next generation. I now expect Sony’s and Canon’s announcements to also be AVCHD-based.

The AG-HMC150 sounds sweet with its 3.5″ LCD screen, but two things really bug me to the point that I want to throw this camera to the head of its product manager:

1. No internal (swappable?) hard drive in addition to its SDHC card slot. This makes the camera even more expensive, and honestly, not as convenient as Panasonic would like us to think it is. Panasonic is a big flash manufacturer, so they want us to buy, buy, buy SD cards. Freaking douche bags.

2. According to the press release, it uses 13 mbps for 1080/60i (1440×1080). This is not enough. We’ve seen that res/bitrate on many other cameras and quality was not even better than the HV20 which is a $700 camera nowadays. Panasonic should give at least 18 mbps to 1080/60i and 24 mbps (full AVCHD spec) to 1080/24p/30p (1920×1080).

And 1080/60p would have been nice too, at around 40 mbps (even if they had to go over the AVCHD spec). But I understand that it might be a bit early for 1080/60p (the next big version of Blu-ray will support that, but that’d be in years from now).

But honestly, these two points above, are really stinky. I can’t wait to see what Canon has to offer for their next-gen prosumer line. I have $3000 to spend.

A guy claims that youtube’s Anonymous Anonymous videos are all censored. I don’t know if this is true or false, but I know that even on Digg now their posts are “buried” and never see the light of the front page anymore. I don’t know if this is just coincidental, or people had enough of the Anonymous Anonymous group, or if organized Scientologists fight back the same way as the group does. Hopefully Youtube clears up the situation.

Regarding Anonymous Anonymous’ actions, while I fully support their opinions about Scientology, I don’t think they go the right way about it. If they want some action against this for-profit “religion” (for the record: I personally don’t consider it a religion), they should write to their congressman, raise money to post ads, and educate people to not join the cult. Picketing outside the Scientology offices proves and brings nothing at the end. Scientology is what it is, and it’s not going to change, so picketing outside their offices is a waste of time.

I know that fans of “Jericho” wouldn’t want to hear this, but these 7 episodes on the second season is the end of the road for the show. I hope they conclude the series without a cliffhanger on the 7th episode.

Apparently, the ratings were terrible for a season opener, and it can only go downhill from now on. Some will say that the 3 leaked episodes was the reason, but I don’t believe so. Only Jericho fanatics would try to pirate these episodes, and they aren’t many of those. Even if there were 1 million fewer viewers because of the leaked episodes, 8 mil viewers overall would still not be good enough. Jericho needed a good 12 mil as a starter to hope for about 9 mil at the end of its season and hope for a renewal.

To add to this, the show had a downgrade: camera equipment. It looks like a damn soap opera now. No film-look at all. It just looks red and ugly, no dynamic range or color spectrum. At the beginning, I thought it was just me, but then I saw that others noticed too. In fact, I was a bit surprised that people actually did notice! Some say that because they went digital it makes the show look cheap, but it’s not the digital part that makes it cheap, but the fact that they use cheap cameras that probably don’t have good lens support. There was almost no DOF in the new season opener.

So that was CBS’ plan for “Jericho”’s comeback? Make it cheap, cheap, cheap? I feel that CBS stabbed us in the back. Oh well, business is business.

I called my little bro today and to my surprise he told me that he started watching “Heroes” and “Lost” for the first time. He is still on the second episode of “Lost”, but he is loving it so far. But he wanted to know more. He asked me how many episodes are around, and what I know about them. I told him that I won’t spoil it for him. But he insisted. True story:

Eugenia: You have to watch it yourself, Lost is a puzzle, if I spoil it for you, you won’t enjoy it as much.
Teo: But I want to know who gets off the island and who dies.
Eugenia: Sorry, I can’t tell you. There are deaths and twists, but you gotta watch it yourself.
Teo: Does the doctor die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Does the hot brunette die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Does the fat guy die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Does the pregnant woman die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Do the Chinese die?
Eugenia: No. They are Koreans btw.
Teo: Does the old guy with the scar in the eye die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Does the blonde guy who killed the bear die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Does the father with the kid and the dog die?
Eugenia: No.
Teo: Then no one dies!!!!
Eugenia: Yes they do! You forgot 4 main characters, and 3 of them die.
Teo: No, I mentioned them all.
Eugenia: No, you didn’t.
Teo: Yes, I did. I don’t remember anyone else.
Eugenia: Then it’s a good thing they died.
Teo: ….

This survey essentially saying that most people now want real smartphones (that are able to run real applications and such) and don’t want to deal with simple basic feature phones anymore. Good to hear. I’ve been saying that feature phones will be bust since 2004.

Update: Holly shit. Quoting Engadget about the telco immunity vote last night: “McCain voted for telco immunity, Obama against, and Clinton didn’t vote at all even though she was in the area for Tuesday’s primaries.” This is the difference between someone who gets paid by lobbyists, someone who doesn’t want to get paid by lobbyists and votes with his head rather than with his wallet, and someone who doesn’t give a shit about the whole thing. Obama for president! This is the first time in my life that I’ve been so political, and the reason for this is because this time I am actually getting inspired by a candidate. Obama inspires me as much as JFK did (and I am not even an American). Previously, I was always apathetic on politics, no matter in which country I lived so far (and I’ve lived in 3-4 countries). Nevertheless, it’s so damn sad that telcos got immunity on the spying thing. People say more and more that we live in the beginning times of “1984″, and I think they have a point.

When I read articles like the following, they indeed make me sad and uneasy about the whole situation:

“I can fairly say now, that I’ve never been more ashamed to be an American. In addition to being subject to the leadership of the worst presidential administration in American history, Congress just voted to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that were complicit in illegal surveillance activity against Americans.“

Hopefully, Obama can fix Bush’s mess ups. Here’s another nice video from Creative Commons’ and Stanford’s Larry Lessig about Clinton vs McCain:

Rico Bergholdt Hansen re-posted his amazing shots on Vimeo as a new video after some of my suggestions. HD version here.

* What a stupid show “Terminator” is. So this guy had his house burned down and he lost his AI computer program that he was working for years. 2-3 weeks later (in the show’s timeline), he already had re-written from scratch the AI chess program and he was ready to compete at a Chess competition. Not only it’s not possible to write alone such a complex software “that learns” in 3 weeks, but even if he had done so, it would still be full of bugs and not ready for the competition. If the writers instead had said that the guy had a backup of the software in a safe location I’d believe them, but re-writing from scratch software in such a little time shows how the writers have no fucking clue what they are doing. It’s so fucking pissing me off having clueless people writing technology shows. You see, the people who watch sci-fi, are usually technologists and geeks. And that’s an audience that you can’t serve them shit. They’ll go elsewhere.

* “Prison Break” instead had a great episode tonight. Very intense. Too bad it will be canceled, I don’t think it will get lucky this time.

* Very interesting analysis from an MIT media professor about “Lost” and “Twin Peaks”. He claims that the puzzle factor of these series is what people want, and no matter how many people are crying foul and shout “give us answers”, in reality they don’t need answers, but even more deepen puzzles. From the moment you give them the ultimate answer that resolves the show, their interest is over for that show. This is what happened to Twin Peaks after the Laura Palmer murderer was revealed: the ratings went downhill. Not everyone likes puzzles, but everyone is intrigued by them, at least in the beginning. Because of this, such shows can lose as much as half their audience over the years, but the ones who will remain, will be fanatics.

* I’ve grown to hate John Locke. And on the upcoming “Lost” episode it will be shown what an ass he is, and that he doesn’t really know what the hell he is doing. Bleh.

* This is the story of Anonymous’ Los Angeles chapter against Scientology, in HD. I love their masks. “Remember, remember… the fifth of November…”

Gray cards allow you to set the right white balance, while at the same time they help the camera guess the right exposure, shutter speed, aperture and gain. Doing color correction in-camera with a gray card creates no artifacts & it’s more accurate that when using digital color correction on post. More information here.

While gray cards are mostly used indoors (very good to calibrate exposure on low light among other gains), you can certainly use them outdoors too if the light conditions are weird (e.g. snowy surroundings, shooting under shadowy trees, cloudy days). Buy an “18% percent” gray card for $4. The smaller ones (more convenient to carry, but not as good for outdoors) cost $2. I made a video to show off the capability.

Here’s how you use them:
1. Place the camera at the place you will be shooting from.
2. Place the gray card vertically (without an incline, facing at the lens) on the spot you will be shooting at. If outdoors, place it as far as you can, as long as it still fills the frame when you zooming-in to it.
3. Put the camera into the non-automatic mode, and select the “Custom white balance” setting. All Canon camcorders allow for custom white balance (even the cheapest ones), but most of the cheaper non-Canon cameras don’t have this feature. If that’s the case, then you can’t use a Gray card, you need a camcorder that’s more serious than a toy (sorry, I had to pick at JVC).
4. Zoom-in all the way to the gray card to fill the frame (nothing else should be shown in the LCD screen or viewfinder but a dark gray color). At that point, set the custom white balance (according to your camera’s manual).

That’s it, shoot using that setting and enjoy true whites that are not yellows or reds. If the lighting conditions change (e.g. you moved from a very shadowy tree to a less shadowy place, or if the sun changed position a lot, or if you moved to another room), you will have to redo the four steps above.

I am out of review article jobs these days, so I have lots of time to watch TV now. I don’t like reading much (I have a hard time focusing for more than 2 minutes at a time), although I might just read the new “Firefly” novel that got released recently (dunno yet).

So I asked for the Gold Edition DVD box of “Twin Peaks” for my Valentine’s gift. I am eager to watch “Twin Peaks” as I’ve always heard good things about it but when it used to air in Greece I was snobbing it. Apparently, if you like “Lost”, you will like “Twin Peaks”. Same eerie mysterious atmosphere. Netflix does not carry all the DVDs, so I am (hopefully) getting this off Amazon for $80.

I added “Space: Above and Beyond” on our Netflix queue though, and I will use their online watching facility to watch “Earth 2“. Hopefully Comcast won’t cut us out because of the downloading bandwidth…

While reading some of the customer reviews on the “Twin Peaks” Amazon page, someone mentioned “The Prisoner“. I had never heard of that TV series. I did some googling on it, and after reading what was it about, I found the premise and mystery around it very interesting. In fact, without even having seen the series, I feel that this could be a very good remake for the TV if talented writers are hired. Instead, we get a remake of “Knight Rider”.