Dell’s 8K LCD Monitor

Mike McCarthy   December 4, 2017   1 Comment on Dell’s 8K LCD Monitor

Dell’s UP3218K LCD Display is the first commercially available 8K display.  It runs 7680×4320 pixels at 60fps driven by two DisplayPort 1.4 cables.  That is over 33 million pixels per frame, and nearly 2 billion per second, which requires a lot of GPU power to generate.  Dell first announced the 32″ monitor at CES 2017, and it has been available since March.  I was offered one to review as part of a wider exploration of 8K video production workflows, and there will be more articles about that larger story in the near future.  For the moment, I will just be focusing on this product and its uses.
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GoPro Fusion 360 Camera

Mike McCarthy   November 27, 2017   2 Comments on GoPro Fusion 360 Camera

I finally got the opportunity to try out the Fusion camera I have had my eye on since GoPro first revealed it in April.  The $700 camera uses two offset fish-eye lenses to shoot 360 video and stills, while recording ambisonic audio from four microphones in the waterproof unit.  It can shoot a 5K video sphere at 30fps, or a 3K sphere at 60fps for higher motion content at reduced resolution.  It records dual 190 degree fish-eye perspectives encoded in H.264 to separate MicroSD cards, with four tracks of audio.  The rest of the magic comes in the form of GoPro’s newest application Fusion Studio.
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Adobe Adds Shared Projects to Premiere Pro

Mike McCarthy   October 18, 2017   No Comments on Adobe Adds Shared Projects to Premiere Pro

Adobe kicked off their Adobe Max conference with the release of their next major update to the video apps available in Creative Cloud. Most of the new features were publicly demonstrated at IBC last month, so this isn’t a surprising development, but there are some pretty significant changes that are worth discussing.
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GoPro Hero6 and Fusion Camera Launch

Mike McCarthy   September 30, 2017   No Comments on GoPro Hero6 and Fusion Camera Launch

I had the opportunity to attend GoPro’s launch event in San Francisco on Thursday for their new Hero6 and Fusion cameras. The Hero6 is the next logical step in their iteration of action cameras, increasing the supported frames rates to 4Kp60 and 1080p240, as well as adding integrated image stabilization. The Fusion on the other hand is a totally new product for them, as an action cam for 360 degree video. GoPro has developed a variety of other 360 degree video capture solutions in the past, based on rigs using many of their existing Hero cameras, but Fusion is their first integrated 360 video solution.
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Editing 360 Video in VR

Mike McCarthy   September 25, 2017   2 Comments on Editing 360 Video in VR

In the previous post we have looked at the process of shooting 360 video, and getting it processed into a single stitched equirectangular file.  Now we will look at what we can do with that imagery once it is formatted correctly.  Premiere has quite a few options for VR, with even more 360 editing functionality made possible through a variety of plugins that are available.
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Samsung Gear 360 (2016 Model)

Mike McCarthy   September 22, 2017   2 Comments on Samsung Gear 360 (2016 Model)

The first step in creating 360 videos, is recording with a 360 degree camera systems. These currently range in price from $100 to hundreds of thousands. Most of the basic principles of shooting and editing 360 VR are exactly the same for all of those systems, so it makes sense to start experimenting and learning with something that is not as expensive.  The simplest and cheapest 360 camera option I have found is the Samsung Gear 360.  There are two totally different models with the same name, usually differentiated by the year of their release.  I am using the older 2016 model, which has a higher resolution sensor, but records UHD instead of the slightly larger full 4K video of the newer 2017 Model. Continue reading →

Virtual Reality and 360 Video

Mike McCarthy   September 18, 2017   2 Comments on Virtual Reality and 360 Video

VR headsets have been available for over a year now, and more content is constantly being developed for them.  We should expect that rate to increase as new headset models are being released from established technology companies, prompted in part by the new VR features expected in Microsoft’s next update to Windows 10.  As the potential customer base increases, the software continues to mature, and the content offerings broaden.  And with the advances in graphics processing technology, we are finally getting to a point where it is feasible to edit videos in VR, on a laptop.
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Lenovo ThinkPad P71 Mobile Workstation

Mike McCarthy   August 16, 2017   No Comments on Lenovo ThinkPad P71 Mobile Workstation

Lenovo was nice enough to send me their newest VR-Enabled mobile workstation to test out on a VR workflow project I am doing.  The new Thinkpad P71 is a beast with a 17” UHD IPS screen.  The model they sent to me was equipped with the fastest available processor, a Xeon E5-1535M v6 with 4 cores processing 8 threads at an official speed of 3.1Ghz.  It has 32GB of DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, with two more slots allowing that to be doubled to 64GB if desired.  The headline feature is the NVidia Quadro P5000 Mobile GPU, with 2048 CUDA cores, fed by another 16GB of dedicated DDR5 memory.  Continue reading →