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 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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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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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, 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 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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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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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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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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Cloud storage has been around for at least a decade, but I have been slow to really embrace it. This is for two reasons: trust, and bandwidth. But as both of those concerns get alleviated over time, and cloud based solutions (even beyond storage) continue to mature, I am beginning to move towards more cloud based functions and workflows. And there are a lot of different options out there for cloud storage, and they are not very similar to each other, so that is a lot of data and variables to sort through when trying to find the best solutions for your needs. So this is intended to be an introduction to some of the things to consider when weighing those disparate options.
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