A few weeks ago I published an editorial on the new school of videographers that has recently started to emerge as profoundly as digital art photography did a few years ago. (OS) News are slow during holiday seasons, so I thought I put together an article with a small collection of some of the best examples of amateur cinematography for your viewing pleasure, as found on the popular with the movement site, Vimeo.com. Leave a comment with what you think of these clips, or even download them in order to watch them in full HD quality through your AppleTV, XboX360 or PS3.Note: The embedded Flash videos below are not HD. To view them or download them in 720p HD mode you must click their respective video titles and go to their dedicated Vimeo page.
HV20 - Rainy Day Cinematography
This little short clip alone has driven thousands Canon HV20 sales, the now legendary HD camcorder (more than half of all of Vimeo's HD clips were created with the HV20). This video is the most viewed HV20 clip ever, with over 50,000 views so far on Youtube, Vimeo and elsewhere. The teenager creator and his brother shown on the video used sandwich bags to protect the camera from the rain! Download the full quality video file of this clip after creating a Vimeo account, it's worth the hassle if you own a PS3/XBoX360 and an HDTV.
A Tribute to Nature
A beautiful nature video, with nice color grading effects.
Chaotic Dylan
My friend Marshall becomes artsy. Great atmosphere.
Another Morning Walk
Charlie McCarthy is possibly the only videographer that I know that has so much good footage, with most of it being ultra exceptional. In this list today he is the only artist with two videos featured.
Macro bubbles
Joey, aka Lucasberg, is known for his impressive macro videos clips.
Drifters of the deep
The most amazing creatures nature has ever created, drifting in our oceans. From the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
A Day In Fall 2007
A different look of Silicon Valley.
Digital Dream
Charlie McCarthy's second video on this list, inspired by a dream he had the night before he shot this.
Summer Rain
And the female touch in all this. Kelly has an amazing eye for photography and video.
Waalweg
A travel video in a way that only Fabian knows how to deliver.
The moon
The Canon HV20 behind a telescope!
What Lies Under
Slugs are cool. No kidding.
DOF35mmPro Nikon E f1.8
A video showing how far this community will go to acquire the "film look". TwoNeil tests his HV20 with his home-made 35mm adapter and a Nikon lens. Check this video too, which is the same backyard he used for the video below, but in Winter instead of Autumn.
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"It's tough being a journalist, especially if you're covering technology and living in Silicon Valley, because it seems as if everyone around you is getting fabulously rich while you're stuck in a job that will never, ever make you wealthy. What's worse is that all these people who are getting rich don't seem to be any brighter than you are and in fact many of them don't seem very bright at all. So of course you get jealous. And then you start thinking maybe you could find a way to cash in on this gold rush. But how do you make gobs of money when your only marketable skill involves writing blog posts?" Absolutely brilliant down to the last letter. Coincidentally, I hold no shares, interests, or anything, in any company whatsoever. I'm a freelance translator by day. Not that anyone cares, but hey, full disclosure and all.
2 
"A hybrid solution that takes the best parts of iOS's one-by-one acceptance and Android's expressed and obvious intents seems like a proper model here. In fact, Apple has many of the pieces in place elsewhere." This is a big issue. Nor Android's model (just list a bunch of confusing permissions), nor Apple's model (individual modal dialogs for each permission) is particularly workable - I doubt regular users check them on Android before installing an application, and in the case of iOS, Apple didn't think it was necessary to secure the address book, so every application has access to it without alerting users. Justin Williams proposes a hybrid solution.
"Although current discussion of the Linux desktop tends to focus on the disharmony around Unity and the GNOME shell, the true revolution on the desktop is taking place out of sight of users. The Wayland display server is expected to reach version 1.0 later this year, and is seen by many as the long term replacement for the X Window System, with real potential to improve and transform the performance of the desktop for Linux users."
Mozilla has announced plans to integrate its Firefox web browser with Metro for Windows 8 - including Gecko. "Windows 8 contains two application environments, 'Classic' and 'Metro'. Classic is very similar to the Windows 7 environment at this time, it requires a simple evolution of the current Firefox Windows product. Metro is an entirely new environment and requires a new Firefox front end and system integration points. The feature goal here is a new Gecko based browser built for and integrated with the Metro environment. Firefox on Metro, like all other Metro apps will be full screen, focused on touch interactions, and connected to the rest of the Metro environment through Windows 8 contracts." I haven't checked - does Microsoft allow different rendering engines?
"One of the things that the GNOME design crew have been focusing on recently is creating a new approach to application design for GNOME 3. We want GNOME applications to be thoroughly modern, and we want them to be attractive and a delight to use. That means that we have to do application design differently to how we've done it in the past.""This is the first real release of Wayland and Weston. Wayland is the protocol and IPC mechanism while Weston is the reference compositor implementation. The 0.85 branch in both repositories is going to be protocol and interface stable. We have a series of protocol changes on the table before 1.0 but this branch marks a stable point before we jump into that." Change is coming to the Linux world. And yes, I get the irony of using this particular icon, but it's the closest I could find.
Well, this is good news. "Germany will not sign an international anti-piracy treaty, despite having already agreed to it in principal, government sources in Berlin said Friday, February 10." with Germany on the side of reason - for now - we're a huge step closer to stopping ACTA.
"Microsoft today issued a brief statement promising to make 'essential patents' available to competitors at fair and reasonable licensing rates, and promised not to sue companies making products that infringe these patents. The actual patents themselves weren't disclosed, but Microsoft joins both Google and Apple in making recent statements on so-called fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory licensing terms. Such licensing terms designate certain patents as essential to complying with industry standards, making them available for licensing at (supposedly) lower-than-usual rates." This industry is dysfunctional."Like any space opera, the story of information technology is a very simple one. It is played out in a myriad of different ways by a revolving cast of characters, but it always has its loveable heroes, its predictably nefarious villains, innocent civilians to be saved, and bumbling bureaucrats that aren't inherently evil, but begin every story aiding the forces of darkness out of a misplaced belief they are preserving law and order in their corner of the galaxy." He might use Star Wars as an analogy (I strongly dislike Star Wars - Trekkie here), but it sums up very well how I feel about computing today.
"Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that allows graphics processing units and central processing units on a single chip to collaborate - boosting processor performance by an average of more than 20 percent."
