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The RED community is buzzing about a new development called ‘FLUT’ that recently popped up one of the Red User Forum threads. What is ‘FLUT’ you ask?
FLUT is the brainchild of Graeme.
The “F” in FLUT stands for “floating point”.
If you haven’t clipped RAW, you haven’t clipped any ISO. Move your mid grey anywhere you want without fear of clipping.
FLUT includes another new color science. That’s right. Number 3. Better than number 2, which was better than the original.
FLUT includes a new color space- REDcolor (more accurate than before)
FLUT includes a new gamma- REDgamma (more info from RAW than before)
Since an r3d is RAW, you can re-grade any old footage with the new color science.
FLUT works with the Mysterium sensor. It works better with Mysterium-X sensor.
So, it sounds like it’s an improved colorspace technology that replaces older quantization algorithms with full floating-point support, and is specifically designed to work with the data coming from RED Camera Sensors.
More information & demonstrations will be available at “RED Day” February 13th 2009, and “FLUT” is set to be released in the SDK and REDcine-X soon.
I missed this when it first came out in June, but it seems the US Postal Service has deployed an augmented reality tool on their PriorityMail website that overlays a 3D box onto the webcam image, aiding you in choosing a box of proper size.
“When any new technology comes along like this a lot of people gravitate towards it,” said Garry Pessia, senior account director at AKQA. “There’s definitely a buzz factor. At the end of the day, it all boils down to is it useful to consumers and can they get use of it. We've seen that going way back with the first uses of Flash. That stuff goes away if there’s not an actual utility.”
It’s probably one of the first truly useful public AR systems I’ve seen, although I imaging most people find simple rulers much simpler to deal with, and less crash-prone.
Computers in China are a rapidly growing industry, in particular due to the recent involvement of the chinese government into “modernizing” the populace. While the regime in control might be oppressive, artists and animators aren’t letting that get in their way, as evidenced by the five great indie animations selected by NeochaEdge.
Below are 5 of our favorite indie animations from 2009. Even if you can’t understand Chinese, you’ll enjoy the visual feast. (A special acknowledgment must go out to Plidezus — founder of AnimeTaste and contributor to NeochaEDGE– who as a leading independent animation expert in China has turned us on to many of these throughout 2009).
See the five videos at their site.
via NeochaEDGE: Top 5 Chinese indie animations of 2009 – Shanghaiist.
Here’s the links for today:
Incogna’s Shopachu.com website implements a complex computer vision algorithm to allow users to “Find Similar Products” with nothing but an image to go on, and uses the power of NVidia’s CUDA libraries to make it happen in real-time.
Visual Guided Navigation starts by analyzing the patterns, shapes, texture and color in images to help cluster and associate similar-looking images. This process is complex and computationally intensive, with many variables that have to be taken into account, such as lighting, camera angle, background noise and photo quality. In fact, this sort of computer vision problem is still an intensively researched topic today, and Shopachu is one of the few commercial deployments to have scaled the algorithms successfully.
See a video demonstration of the system after the break.
XKCD is back with another great infographic, this time demonstrating the power and strength of the various Gravity Wells associated with our solar system.
xkcd – A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language – By Randall Munroe.
As 2009 comes to a close, we wanted to take a look back at the big events of 2009 and recap what worked, what flopped, and what amazed us all in 2009. Companies crumbled and new companies everged from the ashes. Software died, only to be replaced by newer and better offerings. Technology changed the face of cinema, the power of the personal computer, and the capabilities of visual effects artists worldwide. 2009 was a big year and the list was huge, much bigger than I had originally expected, so we trimmed it down to a few key events of the last year.
Read on for our recap, and chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
In a truly bizarre find on Steve’s Politics Blog, he found a chart included in an article by Stephen Johnson titled ‘The Trouble with QSAR (OR How I stopped Worrying and Embrace Fallacy)” that includes the truly unexplainable chart shown above. And yes, you’re reading those axes correctly: Total US Highway Fatality Rates vs Metric Tons of Lemons imported from Mexico.
Lowe writes, ‘The most arresting part of the article is the graph found in its abstract. No mention is made of it in the text, but none has to be. It’s a plot of the US highway fatality rate versus the tonnage of fresh lemons imported from Mexico, and I have to say, it’s a pretty darn straight line. I’ve seen a lot shakier plots used to justify some sweeping conclusions, and if those were justified, well, then I’m forced to conclude that Mexican lemons have improved highway safety a great deal. The vitamin C, maybe? The fragrance? Bioflavanoids?
‘None of the above, of course. Correlation, tiresomely, once again refuses to imply causation, even when you ask it nicely.’
via Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons : Steve’s Politics Blog. via Chart Porn
Six Revisions has gathered up their 50 best Photoshop Tutorials of 2009 into one simple list covering a wide variety of features.
Looking back this year (2009), we have had some incredible tutorials that have taught hundreds and thousands of people new skills in Adobe Photoshop. We’ve been searching the web from America to Germany to the UK and have managed to compile a list of the 50 of the very best Photoshop tutorials this year.
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