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Posts Tagged ‘Record’

Canon’s ISO 4 million multi-purpose camera was used to record fluorescent life in the Amazon

24 Oct

Award-winning artist and director Lynette Wallworth released her documentary Awavena in 2018 to critical acclaim. The project’s director of photography, Greg Downing, utilized numerous cameras during production, including the specialized Canon ME20F-SH multi-purpose camera.

Awavena follows the first female shaman of the Yawanawa tribe in the Amazonian rainforest. As part of the film, the crew documents an Ayahuasca vision quest and represents this experience using real footage captured in incredibly low light and CGI. Downing, with the aid of the ME20F-SH, captured footage of fluorescent insects and plants in nearly no light, something that Canon believes could have proven impossible for other cameras.

This week, Canon shared a video going behind the scenes with Downing and the ME20F-Sh camera. You can view this below.

If you’d like to view the trailer for Awavena, it can be seen below. Awavena is Wallworth’s second mixed-reality VR film, following up on the Emmy-winning film, Collisions. Wallworth says, ‘We engaged DP Greg Downing from XRez to film in the Amazon and brought the eminent Australian fluorescent biologist Dr. Anya Salih, my longtime collaborator, along on the shoot so we could film the previously unseen world of forest fluorescence as part of the vision sequence.’ Wallworth’s full artist statement about Awavena can be read here.

While the Canon ME20F-SH camera is getting a bit long in the tooth, its technical specifications and features continue to impress over five years since it was announced. The camera utilizes a 2.26MP CMOS image sensor, which was originally announced all the way back in 2013. The sensor has pixels measuring 19?m, allowing for 1080/60p video capture in light levels as low as 0.0005 lux at a gain setting of 75 Db, which is equivalent to over ISO 4,000,000. The ME20F-SH supports Canon’s EF and EF-S lenses. While Awavena represented Downing’s first experience with the ME20F-SH camera, he has long relied upon Canon cameras for his work and has been a longtime Canon Professional Services member.

Canon ME20F-SH camera

This is not the first time footage from the ME20F-SH has been featured on our site. In 2016, Ben Canales recorded video of the Perseid meteor shower using the camera. You can see that footage below.

In 2017, Canon outfitted an industrial done with the ME20F-SH all-purpose camera for nighttime surveillance. That video can be seen here.

As PetaPixel notes in its coverage of Awavena, the ME20F-SH has been used to record the aurora borealis in real-time and record bioluminescent coral over 1,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. You can check out these videos below:

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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MetaLog iOS App makes it easy to record metadata for your film photography

03 Aug

If you’re a film photographer with an iOS device, you might find Christopher Curzio’s new app helpful. The new app, MetaLog, is a photo and camera data logging program that makes it easy to capture metadata for your film photography.

Inspired by the desire to capture the film stock, settings and camera used to capture his film photography, Curzio decided to take matters into his own hands and develop MetaLog. You can keep track of multiple cameras and rolls of film at once, and quickly switch between them to record data for a new image.

The interface is fairly basic, but offers nearly all of the settings and variables you likely need: date, lens, aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation and even location coordinates. There are even fields for adding what accessories you may have used to help capture the shot, as well as a general notes field for additional details.

You can also keep an inventory of the gear you use, so you don’t manually type in those details every time; you can even include the serial number of your cameras and lenses.

Once the data is logged in the app, you can keep it there to reference once the rolls are developed or export the data as a CSV file.

MetaLog is currently available to download in the iOS App Store for $ 1.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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NASA Curiosity rover breaks its own record with new 1.8-billion-pixel Mars panorama

09 Mar

On March 4, NASA shared the highest-resolution panoramic Mars image ever captured by its Curiosity rover. The panorama features 1.8 billion pixels and is comprised of more than 1,000 individual images captured by the rover over the Thanksgiving 2019 holiday break in the US.

NASA explains that Curiosity captured two different panoramas using two different lenses: the record-breaking 1.8-billion-pixel panorama using the Mast Camera (‘Mastcam’) with a telephoto lens and a smaller 650-million-pixel panorama using a medium-angle lens. The larger panorama captured with the telephoto lens was not able to include most of the rover in the final image, but the lower-resolution panorama does include Curiosity amid the landscape.

Curiosity’s smaller 650-million-pixel panorama. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The Mastcam is mounted at a height of 2m (6.5ft) on Curiosity; it supports capturing color images and videos using ‘left eye’ and ‘right eye’ lenses featuring 34mm and 100mm focal lengths. The camera has a resolution of 2MP, which produces images with a 1600 x 1200 resolution. When recording video, Curiosity’s Mastcam can capture 10 frames per second. According to NASA, the rover’s 8GB storage can hold 5,500 or more Raw frames.

While the mission team was away on holiday leave from November 24 to December 1, Curiosity worked to snap images using Mastcam over a six-and-a-half-hour period of time spread across four days. The camera was programmed to take the images from between noon and 2 PM local time to ensure that the lighting was consistent for the eventual panorama.

The new record 1.8-billion-pixel image. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA explains this holiday break provided a rare moment of downtime for the rover, which typically does not stay in one place long enough to capture so many images from the same vantage point. The resulting 1.8-billion-pixel panorama, which exceeds the rover’s previous record 1.3-billion-pixel image, took ‘months’ to assemble.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Curiosity project scientist Ashwin Vasavada said:

While many on our team were at home enjoying turkey, Curiosity produced this feast for the eyes. This is the first time during the mission we’ve dedicated our operations to a stereo 360-degree panorama.

The public can download a full-resolution version of the 1.8-billion-pixel panorama in JPEG and TIFF formats from NASA JPL’s website here, as well as the 650-million-pixel version from the same link. At its highest resolution, the panorama has a massive 2.43GB file size. The space agency offers lower quality versions with file sizes ranging from 82MB all the way down to 350KB.

In addition, NASA has an online 360-degree viewer to present the panorama in full screen with a zoom tool.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Adobe announces record Q4 with annual revenue of $11 billion in 2019

14 Dec

Adobe has announced its fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal 2019 financial results, revealing that they set new quarterly and annual revenue records for the company.

During its fourth quarter, which ended on November 29, Adobe saw quarterly revenue of $ 2.99 billion, a 21% year-over-year increase. With that quarter finalized, Adobe has revealed record annual revenue totaling $ 11.17 billion, a 24% year-over-year increase over its fiscal year 2018.

Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen called the performance ‘phenomenal,’ citing both loyal customers and product innovation as among the reasons for its success.

The company reports growth across multiple business segments, including a 22% year-over-year Digital Media segment quarterly revenue increase to $ 2.08 billion. Adobe’s Creative and Document Cloud segments also grew during Q4 with revenues of $ 1.74 billion and $ 339 million, respectively.

Adobe expects its performance to continue trending upward through its first fiscal quarter of the new year. In Q1 2020, the company is aiming for around $ 3.04 billion in quarterly revenue with continued growth in its Digital Media and Digital Experience segments.

Looking outward at the full fiscal year 2020, Adobe is targeting annual revenue of around $ 13.15 billion with significant growth in its Digital Media and Digital Experience segments, as well as growth in its Digital Experience subscription revenue and bookings.

Via: Adobe

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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MIT project uses camera and AI to ‘record’ hidden objects using the shadows they cast

10 Dec

Researchers with MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have published a study detailing the use of cameras and artificial intelligence to recreate hidden actions based only on the shadows they cast. The method produces fairly low-quality results at this time but may be refined for future computational photography purposes that include helping self-driving cars ‘see’ hidden objects in their environment.

Shadows can reveal the presence of things a person may not be able to directly see; in the most obvious example, someone could, for example, perceive that a person is standing around a nearby corner because of the shadow they cast on the sidewalk. Though humans can perceive the movement of objects using their shadows, we cannot determine their colors and may not be able to determine their shape.

The newly detailed MIT AI can, however, recreate videos that include hints about an object’s color and shape based on the shadows it produces. As demonstrated in the video above, the AI was surprisingly capable of recreating the movement and general shape of hands and forearms in motion out of view of the camera. As well, the algorithm generated a video of hands moving large blocks and a small ball, recreating part of each object’s color.

This is the latest example of researchers combining cameras and artificial intelligence to produce seemingly magical results. This past summer, for example, experts with Facebook Research and the University of Washington unveiled an algorithm that can generate ‘living’ animations from individual still images.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Chinese camera cuts through smog to record details almost 30 miles away

15 May
In this illustration (a) shows the distance between the camera and the target on a map of Shanghai, and (b) shows what the target building actually looks like. Image (c) is the view of the target through the smog of the city, while (d), (e) and (f) show earlier technologies attempting to record the target. Image (g) is the result of the researcher’s improvements

Researchers in China have created a camera that can record through the atmospheric pollutants of Shanghai to pick out objects just 60cm (2ft) high at a distance of 45 kilometers (28 miles). The ‘camera’ uses laser technology to fire light of a specific wavelength at a distant object and then uses a sensor to record the light when it returns so it can produce a picture that shows shapes with some distance information.

The project is being carried out by scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, who have so far been able to record the form of a distant building with enough resolution to show the windows. The picture is technically a photograph, but not quite as we would expect to record with a normal visible light camera. The idea of the research is to produce an instrument that can ‘see’ further than is possible using visible light, and to be able to see in conditions visible light can’t get through.

At top left you can see the actual set-up of the LiDAR camera mounted inside the telescope, while the diagram top right shows what’s going on inside.

The scientists mounted a LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) camera inside a Cassegrain mirrored telescope and fired a near-infared (1550nm) beam from the top of a building on Chongming Island in Shanghai towards the K11 skyscraper 45km away in the centre of the city. As the scientists knew the distance and the speed of the light they were using they were able to calculate when it would return and thus isolate the image forming light from any other stray light in the scene.

An illustration showing how different methods of image extraction can be used to yield a more detailed image.

The quality of the image recorded is hardly going to serve for holiday pictures, but outlines, shapes and forms can easily be seen even when the atmosphere was too thick for visible light. The technology will be useful for seeing when we can’t see – through clouds, atmospheric haze and smog and for security surveillance.

This shows how the researchers are using distance information from the LiDAR to create depth maps of scenes that can hardly be seen with the naked eye

The researchers say they can improve the resolution and the range of their invention, and that they will be able to create 3D images in the future. Already with the range defining abilities of the LiDAR system they can incorporate depth and distance information into their images.

You can read the research paper as a PDF online.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Report: Multi-camera smartphone segment growing at record pace

06 Sep

If you thought multi-camera modules on smartphones were nothing but a fad, think again. Two recent reports by analyst firm Counterpoint Research and The Korea Herald tell a different story.

According to the analyst report approximately 42% of all smartphones sold globally in July 2018 featured a dual or triple rear camera. The firm estimates that the adoption of multi-camera modules will grow to 60% by the end of the year and says that “while the megapixel war has almost peaked, multiple sensors in phones is the new battleground.“

Graph: Counterpoint

Growth in the multi-cam segment has been fast paced, with penetration increasing from 15% to 42% in the last 12 months, and is highest in the price range from $ 200 to $ 599. In the “super-premium” segment ($ 800+) adoption has reached 100%.

The charge is lead by OnePlus, followed by Huawei and Apple. Google is the only premium manufacturer still betting on single-camera but is under increasing pressure to join the multi-cam movement.

A report by The Korea Herald confirms Counterpoint’s view of the market, stating that “Most major smartphone makers, including Samsung Electronics, Apple and LG Electronics, are reportedly preparing to roll out smartphones fitted with three rear-facing camera modules in a bid to step ahead in the premium segment.”

According to Samsung around 10% percent of its 2019 smartphones are likely to come with triple-camera technology. Unsurprisingly the performance increase through multiple cameras comes at a cost, though. At a manufacturing level the cost of a typical single-lens module is approximately $ 10. Dual- and triple-lens camera modules add $ 30 and $ 50, respectively, to the bill of material.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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DPReview TV: where to place a microphone to record great audio

08 Jul

There’s an old axiom in filmmaking which states that an audience will forgive a poor quality picture, but not poor quality sound. This week, Chris and Jordan bring in an audio pro to discuss different types of microphones, how to position them, and to demonstrate how a cheap microphone positioned correctly will outperform an expensive model placed incorrectly.

Make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get new episodes of DPReview TV every week.

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Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Nimbus Data ExaDrive pushes SSD capacity record to 100TB

21 Mar

Only a few weeks ago Samsung set a new record for SSD-drive capacity with its latest 30TB model. The achievement didn’t stand for long; US company Nimbus Data just shot past Samsung’s benchmark with the launch of a gargantuan 100TB drive.

The company says the “ExaDrive DC series raises the bar in SSD power efficiency, density, and write endurance”. At a 85% lower claimed power consumption than the competition (0.1 Watts/TB) the new drive is the world’s most efficient SSD which, according to Nimbus, means a 42% reduction cost of ownership per terabyte.

With a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours, or over 285 years, longevity of the drive should be ensured as well but the the ExaDrive’s selling point is of course capacity. According to the Nimbus press release the drive has “capacity to store 20 million songs, 20,000 HD movies, or 2,000 iPhones worth of data in a device small enough to fit in your back pocket.” As a photographer you’re unlikely to ever run out of space, even when shooting high-resolution Raw files or recording 4K video footage.

The ExaDrive DC100 comes with the same 3.5″ form factor, SATA interface and plug-and-play capability as most standard hard drives, allowing for easy installation. The ExaDrive DC100 will be available this summer. No pricing information has been provided yet but given it’s targeted at datacenter use the new drive likely won’t be cheap. More information is available on the Nimbus website.

Press Release:

Nimbus Data launches the world’s largest solid state drive – 100 terabytes – to power data-driven innovation

ExaDrive DC series raises the bar in SSD power efficiency, density, and write endurance

Irvine, CA, March 19, 2018 – Nimbus Data, a pioneer in flash memory solutions, today announced the ExaDrive® DC100, the largest capacity (100 terabytes) solid state drive (SSD) ever produced. Featuring more than 3x the capacity of the closest competitor, the ExaDrive DC100 also draws 85% less power per terabyte (TB). These innovations reduce total cost of ownership per terabyte by 42% compared to competing enterprise SSDs, helping accelerate flash memory adoption in both cloud infrastructure and edge computing.

“As flash memory prices decline, capacity, energy efficiency, and density will become the critical drivers of cost reduction and competitive advantage,” stated Thomas Isakovich, CEO and founder of Nimbus Data. “The ExaDrive DC100 meets these challenges for both data center and edge applications, offering unmatched capacity in an ultra-low power design.”

Optimized to Maximize Flash Storage Capacity and Efficiency

While existing SSDs focus on speed, the DC100 is optimized for capacity and efficiency. With its patent-pending multiprocessor architecture, the DC100 supports much greater capacity than monolithic flash controllers. Using 3D NAND, the DC100 provides enough flash capacity to store 20 million songs, 20,000 HD movies, or 2,000 iPhones worth of data in a device small enough to fit in your back pocket. For data centers, a single rack of DC100 SSDs can achieve over 100 petabytes of raw capacity. Data centers can reduce power, cooling, and rack space costs by 85% per terabyte, enabling more workloads to move to flash at the lowest possible total cost of ownership.

Plug-and-Play and Balanced Performance for Diverse Workloads

Featuring the same 3.5” form factor and SATA interface used by hard drives, the ExaDrive DC100 is plug-and-play compatible with hundreds of storage and server platforms. The DC100’s low-power (0.1 watts/TB) and portability also make it well-suited for edge and IoT applications. The DC100 achieves up to 100,000 IOps (read or write) and up to 500 MBps throughput. This equally-balanced read/write performance is ideal for a wide range of workloads, from big data and machine learning to rich content and cloud infrastructure.

“The release of such a high capacity flash device that is fully compatible with HDD form factors opens up the opportunity to turbo charge big data platforms while at the same time improving reliability, significantly reducing device count, increasing data mobility, and lowering the TCO of multi-PB scale storage platforms,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president of Storage at IDC. “Devices of this class will allow flash to cost-effectively penetrate a broader set of use cases outside of tier 0 and tier 1 applications.”

Superior Reliability and Complete Data Protection

The ExaDrive DC100 is protected by an unlimited endurance guarantee for 5 years. By doing away with confusing drive-writes-per-day restrictions, the DC100 offers peace of mind, reduces hardware refresh cycles, and eliminates costly support renewals. Embedded capacitors ensure that buffered data is safely protected if there is a sudden power loss. Encryption, multiple ECC processors, and a secure-erase feature ensure data security. The DC100 offers a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours.

Availability, Certifications, and Pricing

The ExaDrive DC series includes both 100 TB and 50 TB models. It is currently sampling to strategic customers and will be generally available in summer 2018. Nimbus Data has qualified the DC series in storage and server enclosures from major vendors. Pricing will be similar to existing enterprise SSDs on a per terabyte basis while offering 85% lower operating costs. Overall, the ExaDrive DC series will cost 42% less per terabyte over a 5-year period compared to existing enterprise SSDs. This TCO advantage factors in the superior endurance, balanced read/write performance, power savings, cooling savings, rack space savings, component reduction, and lower refresh costs.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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Adobe posts record revenue yet again, earning $2.08 billion in Q1 of 2018

17 Mar
Photo by Kevin

It’s starting to feel old hat by now: another quarter, another record-breaking earnings report coming out of Adobe. No matter how much people—present company certainly not excluded—gripe about Adobe’s move to the Creative Cloud subscription model, the software company is absolutely raking in the dough as a result.

The last record-breaking revenue report we shared out of Adobe came in Q3 of 2017, when Adobe announced that it had earned $ 1.84 billion that quarter. Now, in Q1 of 2018, the company is staring at that figure in the rearview mirror.

This quarter, Adobe is posting record quarterly revenue of $ 2.08 billion, $ 1.23 billion of which came straight from Creative Cloud in the Digital Media Segment. That $ 2.08B figure represents a jump of 24 percent year-over-year, and contributes to the 43 percent growth in YoY operating income and 64 percent growth in YoY net income that Adobe also revealed.

You can dive into the nitty gritty details in the release below, and see the full number-by-number breakdown in this PDF.

Press Release

Adobe Achieves Record Revenue

Creative ARR Exceeds $ 5 Billion in Q1 FY2018

Thursday, March 15, 2018 4:05 pm EDT | San Jose, California – Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today reported strong financial results for its first quarter fiscal year 2018 ended March 2, 2018.

Financial Highlights

  • Adobe achieved record quarterly revenue of $ 2.08 billion in its first quarter of fiscal year 2018, which represents 24 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
  • Diluted earnings per share was $ 1.17 on a GAAP-basis, and $ 1.55 on a non-GAAP basis.
  • Digital Media segment revenue was $ 1.46 billion, with Creative revenue growing to $ 1.23 billion and Document Cloud achieving revenue of $ 231 million.
  • Digital Media Annualized Recurring Revenue (“ARR”) grew to $ 5.72 billion exiting the quarter, a quarter-over-quarter increase of $ 336 million. Creative ARR grew to $ 5.07 billion, and Document Cloud ARR grew to $ 647 million.
  • Digital Experience segment revenue was $ 554 million, which represents 16 percent year-over-year growth.
  • Operating income grew 50 percent and net income grew 46 percent year-over-year on a GAAP-basis; operating income grew 43 percent and net income grew 64 percent year-over-year on a non-GAAP basis.
  • Cash flow from operations was $ 990 million, and deferred revenue grew 25 percent year-over-year to approximately $ 2.57 billion.
  • Adobe repurchased approximately 1.6 million shares during the quarter, returning $ 301 million of cash to stockholders.

A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP results is provided at the end of this press release and on Adobe’s website.

Executive Quotes

“Adobe’s outstanding growth is driven by enabling our customers to be more creative, work smarter and transform their businesses through our relentless focus on delivering innovation and intelligence across our solutions,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe.

“Our leadership in the large addressable markets we created, combined with Adobe’s leveraged operating model, contributed to another record quarter in Q1,” said Mark Garrett, executive vice president and CFO, Adobe.

Adobe to Webcast Earnings Conference Call

Adobe will webcast its first quarter fiscal year 2018 earnings conference call today at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time from its investor relations website: www.adobe.com/ADBE. Earnings documents, including Adobe management’s prepared conference call remarks with slides, financial targets and an investor datasheet are posted to Adobe’s investor relations website in advance of the conference call for reference. A reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP earnings results and financial targets is also provided on the website.

Forward-Looking Statements Disclosure

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including those related to customer success, product innovation, business momentum, our addressable market, revenue, annualized recurring revenue, non-operating other expense, tax rate on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, earnings per share on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis, and share count, all of which involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Factors that might cause or contribute to such differences include, but are not limited to: failure to develop, acquire, market and offer products and services that meet customer requirements, failure to compete effectively, introduction of new technology, complex sales cycles, risks related to the timing of revenue recognition from our subscription offerings, fluctuations in subscription renewal rates, potential interruptions or delays in hosted services provided by us or third parties, risks associated with cyber-attacks, information security and privacy, failure to realize the anticipated benefits of past or future acquisitions, changes in accounting principles and tax regulations, uncertainty in the financial markets and economic conditions in the countries where we operate, and other various risks associated with being a multinational corporation. For a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties, please refer to Adobe’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for our fiscal year 2017 ended Dec. 1, 2017, and Adobe’s Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q issued in fiscal year 2018.

The financial information set forth in this press release reflects estimates based on information available at this time. These amounts could differ from actual reported amounts stated in Adobe’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for our quarter ended March 2, 2018, which Adobe expects to file in March 2018.

Adobe assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update these forward-looking statements.

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

 
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