Tech With Mike First – News and analysis of emerging media and graphics technologies and products.

Logitech’s MX Creative Console

Mike McCarthy November 19, 2024 No Comments

Logitech recently released the MX Creative Console, a new interface device targeting Adobe users. I got the opportunity to see it in person at the MAX conference, and have been testing one myself since then. The device has a rather unexpected design, with two separate parts that are sold together. There is a dial and roller, with four solid buttons, that connects wirelessly to the system via Bluetooth. Then there is a panel of 9 LED buttons, with dedicated next and previous buttons, which connects via USB-C. They are designed to be used together, with the LED buttons displaying and controlling the function of the separate dial, but are independent pieces of hardware. They can each be used by themselves, but they do function more effectively together, and can be set up in a variety of different ways.
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Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen7

Mike McCarthy November 5, 2024 No Comments

I have had the opportunity to review Lenovo’s ThinkPad P1 Gen7 laptop. It is the first Core Ultra system I have used, built with Intel’s new chiplet design architecture. It also has a new memory module design, and a discrete NVidia RTX GPU, in a 16″ formfactor. And as a ThinkPad, it is a no nonsense design in a solid chassis, with a little red TrackPoint stick in the center of the keyboard.
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Adobe MAX 2024-Miami

Mike McCarthy October 16, 2024 No Comments

Adobe held their MAX Creativity Conference this week, hosted in Miami for the first time. This led to some concern due to the recently occurring Hurricane Milton, but the event was held as scheduled, a few days after the storm ravaged the state. So thousands of people from across the US and around the world descended on the Miami Beach Convention Center to learn more about upcoming technological developments in Adobe’s new software, and be inspired by the work of fellow artists and Adobe users.
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Editing Stereoscopic VR180 Content

Mike McCarthy October 8, 2024 No Comments

Canon has been creating a number of dual fisheye lens upgrades for their existing line of cameras, and they recently sent me an EOS R7 camera with Dual 3.9mm Fisheye Lens to try out. These dual lens attachments project both sides of the captured stereoscopic image onto the large single sensor, in a side by side configuration. The resulting recordings can then be processed via a variety of methods, and viewed in a VR headset for an immersive experience. But exactly how to do that is worth examining, and the main reason I wanted to check out the camera in the first place.
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Shooting VR180 Content with the Canon EOS R7

Mike McCarthy October 1, 2024 No Comments

Canon has been creating a number of dual fisheye lens upgrades for their existing line of cameras, specifically their mirrorless cameras, but including the C400 which also has an RF lens mount. These dual lens attachments project both sides of the captured stereoscopic image onto the large single sensor, in a side by side configuration. The resulting recordings can then be processed via a variety of methods, and viewed in a VR headset for an immersive experience. 180 degree VR only offers half of the potential view of 360 degree video, but is far more practical, because you only have to fill and record half of the potential perspective, and 360 video viewers rarely look backwards anyway. Continue reading →

IBC 2024 News

Mike McCarthy September 16, 2024 No Comments

IBC, the International Broadcasting Convention, was held in Amsterdam this week. Many media and technology vendors make new product announcements and releases at the conference, so I like to track those developments, at least the ones that are relevant to my work. Last week’s Adobe releases were early IBC announcements, but there were numerous other interesting developments over the course of the week.
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Adobe Video Announcements

Mike McCarthy September 10, 2024 No Comments

Adobe has made a number of software announcements for IBC, primarily focused on Premiere Pro and After Effects. The most visually obvious upcoming change in Premiere Pro is the new Spectrum UI, which offers higher contrasts at a wider variety of brightness levels. The text labels should be more readable, and ideally things will be easier to navigate.
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My Experience at NAB 2024

Mike McCarthy April 17, 2024 No Comments

The National Association of Broadcasters held their annual convention in Las Vegas this week. The NAB Show attracted 65K attendees and 1300 exhibitors from 41 countries showing off their products in an exhibition that spans four halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The North Hall is closed for construction right now, as part of an ongoing major remodel of the entire complex.
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GTC 2024 – NVidia Announcements

Mike McCarthy March 19, 2024 No Comments

NVidia had their big GPU Technology Conference this week in San Jose. As the third largest company in the world (by market capitalization value) NVidia’s profile has risen dramatically over the last couple years, primarily due to their position in the datacenter and AI processing world. As such, their flagship conference becomes less “graphics” related every year, as their products push more into those other spaces. This year had very few media and entertainment focused sessions, and even those where usually very AI centric. Generative AI is where graphics and AI meet, and some amazing work is being done in that area, but I would still classify much of that as “art” as opposed to “storytelling” as the tools have not matured that far yet, to give the user enough control over the process to tightly steer the end result. My friend just won an AI film festival, but optimizing for the tools available was still steering their workflow more than their story was.
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Dell Precision 5480 Mobile Workstation

Mike McCarthy December 12, 2023 No Comments

It has been a few years since I have tested and reviewed a laptop. Technology has progressed in the meantime, and systems are dramatically more powerful than they were four years ago, although GPUs have improved more than CPUs by most measures. I recently had the opportunity to test out the new Dell Precision 5480. This is Dell’s highest end, small form factor laptop. It is a 14″ system, packed with a 14-Core 13900H CPU, 64GB of DDR5 memory, and an RTX 3000 Ada generation GPU. There are lots of laptop options out there with a 13900H CPU, with 6 hyperthreaded performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, for a total of 20 processing threads, but not very many of those are in a small 14″ frame. And the RTX 3000 Ada is even harder to come by. With 4608 CUDA cores, 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and nearly 20 TeraFlops of processing power, the RTX 3000 GPU is the physical equivalent of the GeForce 4070 Mobile, but with professional level drivers. So this little laptop system packs a punch.
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