Just got back from NAB 2009 in Las Vegas, NV.  One of the main highlights for me was the Red User event on Wednesday at the Rio. It was fun to meet and talk with other Red One users as well as see all the new stuff and even meet Jim Jannard. He’s a really neat guy — fun, down-to-earth, and inspiring.

The new Red primes were demonstrated with resolution charts projected and compared against Cooke and Zeiss primes.  The Red primes looked great!  No question that they were actually better on the edges — so sharp.  Very impressive optics.  They covered the full-frame 35mm range and were sharp, clear, and crisp throughout.

There were prototypes, with a very nice machined-metal look, on display for the Scarlet and Epic.  They were very dramatically lit, of course.  The flexibility, new accessories, size, etc. looked very promising.  It will be exciting to continue to see demo stills and footage from these cameras as they are nearing their release.

The Red demo reel for the past year was projected at 4K, and despite weaknesses of the environment, the reel looked magnificent!  The latitude, contrast, color, and resolution looked as good or better than anything I’ve seen projected, yet.  By the way, it’s online now, so here’s a link to the Red Reel. (Right click to save).

Also, there’s no doubt that seeing last year’s demo reel streamed in 4k resolution via 10 Mbps (yes, mega-bits) to 4k projection via Red Ray was also very impressive.  The compression technology and decoding has obviously been well engineered.

One of my other favorite’s from the week was definitely the CMOCOS motion control rig.  The movement was very impressive — controlled via inverse kinematics.  Movements could be made in a variety of very complex motions with smooth and accurate movement, and the rig could also be operator-posed.  For their demo at the Red User event, they had a Red One attached, of course — doing some pretty cool moves.

Those were some of the things I deemed most revolutionary There were a lot of other interesting and fun things to checkout at the rest of NAB, too, of course.  I enjoyed getting to see the Steadicam/Segway combo Transporter in person as well as a great Red One underwater rig good to 400′ and a swanky 3-D Red One rig. Along with all of that, there was plenty of great new post software, grip and lighting gear, and cameras as well. (Barry Green managed to find a Panasonic GH1 apparently, but I didn’t — the rep had not a clue). There was also some neat 3D stuff projected by Pixar and others, talks on Digital Cinema, changes in all things film and video, etc.  It’s always inspiring to see all the new stuff and think of the hard work and creative thought that goes into it!

It is a tricky question.  I’ve been doing so much preparation and bodywork on the 280Z and have not even gotten it painted yet, but I am already trying to decide which color to paint the bus when its day comes around.  I think that there is definitely an art to choosing a car’s color — certain hues and shades only work well on certain body styles, and some of these seem to work particularly well for a certain car.  Any thoughts or suggestions?  Which do you like?

Flat tax or “fair tax” — either one of these makes a lot more sense than the current, overly complicated system.  I haven’t completely studied all the implications, yet, but for the most part, FairTax seems like a really good idea — eliminating overhead, encouraging could habits, providing necessary revenue in a less painful manner.  Visit the site and sign a petition if you like, or just read more about it.

Here’s an image that I created with some Processing code after I was inspired by Anthony Mattox’s work mentioned in my previous post. It’s just a bit different, and I also have some fun ideas to tweak it and apply the concept to something else interesting.

Processing in progress.

There has been a lot of impressive work in the last few years toward merging the technical and artistic, one of my favorite areas of interest. I’m really impressed with both Processing and NodeBox. Processing is a Java-based environment that came out of the Media Lab at MIT and has a great setup for getting into coding graphical artworks and interactive media. NodeBox is a similar idea and is based on one of my favorite programming languages, Python! (How could a language named after Monty be anything but good?)

Some really neat work is being presented on blogs, Flickr, Vimeo, etc. created with these tools. Here are two favorite sites of mine:

• Anthony Mattox’s New Media Art & Design – make sure to check out his work, particularly Perlin Flow Ribbons.
• Jared Tarbell’s Complification.net — some of my favorites are Substrate and Sand Stroke used in several of his works.  

Progress is occasional, but here’s a new rough cut on my other page.

So the second version of the Kindle is up for grabs soon at Amazon and looks to have some nice improvements.  If I could get a bunch of books on it without spending too much (especially for anything that I have already), set it up for some good free content, and carry around some technical books and research papers — it’d certainly save some space.

Anyone have the first one (or a Sony Reader)?  I’d enjoy hearing any comments.  Is it easier or harder to read in general?  Does it save space or time?  Any worries about DRM?  Other neat ideas for use aside from commercial books?

The other day, just for kicks, I divided the rough amount of the current Recovery Act by the rough numbers for estimated unemployment (disregarding any argument of the accuracy or importance of these numbers) and figured that the current bill could actually pay over a $35,000 salary to each unemployed individual filed currently for the next year to do “something” — not sure what, but something productive and positive would be nice.

Is spending money that comes from the people that already have money issues really the way to fix anything, and does it really have to be done “right now?”  Things that take a long time to setup usually take a while to change, too.