I am going to be away from my PC this week because of the holidays and I am currently working on 5 websites getting prepared for the RED Epic camera shipping in January.  I am pretty much guaranteed to forget to DropBox some important file so I started looking at remote desktop connection apps available for the iPhone and iPad.  There are a bunch of good ones out there but I settled on Wyse PocketCloud because it is a universal app for the iPhone and iPad.

It has very good reviews in the app store but one thing people mentioned was poor documentation for the PC/Mac side of things.  It turns out the documentation is just incredibly hard to find on their website.  It took me about ten clicks to get to the PDF that explains in detail how to set everything up.  Here is a direct link so you don’t have to go through the same trouble: www.wyse.com/pocketcloud/pdf

Here are a couple important steps the PDF mentions that I couldn’t find anywhere else:

• You probably have to turn on Remote Desktop Control on your PC in System Properties/Remote
• If you don’t have a password set to login to your PC you have to change your security policies: www.mydigitallife.com/security-policies
• You may need to login to your router and add port forwarding for Remote Desktop Control.  The PDF gives detailed instructions for many different routers.

BUGS:

Even with everything set up correctly (I think) auto discovery on my iPhone would hang with the spinning wheel icon.  If I clicked “skip” it would go to the connections screen and my PC would be listed there.  Strangely auto discovery worked perfectly on my iPad.

Seems to work great so far.  Very convenient to be able to use remote desktop with both WiFi and 3G.  I’ll post more once I’ve gotten the hang of it and used it a bunch.

I have always found the search function on Twitter more interesting then twittering itself.  With almost 1 million tweets per hour coming in from around the world it is necessary to carefully filter out the ones that are interesting to you.  Fortunately Twitter gives us a nice set of powerful search operators.

• twitter + search – containing both “twitter” and “search”
• “happy hour” – containing the exact phrase “happy hour”
• love OR hate - containing either “love” or “hate” (or both)
• beer -root - containing “beer” but not “root”
• from:alexiskold – sent from person “alexiskold”
• to:techcrunch – sent to person “techcrunch”

Now these can be used by themselves but their real power comes when stringed together with the OR operator.  Say you want to get some real time info on Apple’s new iPad.  If you just type “iPad” into twitter search most of your results will be people re-tweeting give away promotions.  Using a search string we can try to filter out the boring tweets.  Type in: iPad -giveaway -win.  This is a simple string but immediately filters out most of the annoying tweets.  This is still quite a barrage so let’s get more specific.

Let’s see what people are saying about the iPad’s chip: iPad + chip.  Maybe we also want to see what apps are out there: ipad + app OR apps OR application. How about accessories?  ipad + accessory OR accessories. Now, because all of these have the word iPad in common we can actually put it in one long string: ipad + chip OR app OR apps OR application OR accessory OR accessories.

We can also see what the tech sites are saying about the iPad: ipad + from:gizmodo OR from:engadget OR from:macrumorsrss OR from:wired. What are people saying to Walt Mossberg and Leo Laporte about the iPad? iPad + to:waltmossberg OR to:leolaporte.

These are fairly simple strings because they all return results with a unique word: iPad.  Things get a lot more complicated once you go more general.  Say you are a fan of Apple and want to stay up to date on the buzz of their products.  We can enclose strings with quotations and link them together with the OR operator.  Let’s see if there are any rumors about iPhone 4.0 floating about: “iPhone + 4.0″. What do people think is the best iPhone app? “iphone + best + app” . Let’s also see what the latest Apple rumors that are floating around: “apple + rumor”. What is Steve Jobs saying these days?  “steve  jobs + says”. How will the iPad change the world?  “iPad + will + change”.  String them all together:

“iPad + will + change” OR “steve  jobs + says” OR “apple + rumor” OR “iphone + best + app” OR “iPhone + 4.0″.

Now we just sit back and let the tweets come in!  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can use the from: and to: operators in these longer strings.  If anyone figures out how to do it let me know.

Full list of search operators here: www.help.twitter.com/entries/71577-how-to-use-advanced-twitter-search-operators

Focal Lengths are Absolute

When it comes to lenses it is important to remember that focal lengths are absolute and it is the field of view that is relative to the format you are shooting. This means that a FF35 still shooter will think of 24mm as a very wide lens while someone who regularly shoots in the 2/3″ format will think of 24mm as a fairly long lens.

I have used an image shot on 645 medium format 120 film with an 80mm lens to demonstrate this. You can see that on medium format 80mm becomes a fairly wide lens. On 2/3″ format 80mm becomes telephoto.

Focal Lengths and Field of View Equivalents

Unfortunately there is no metric to describe the all important field of view so we have come to rely on field of equivalents or “crop factor” to describe whether a lens is wide, medium or long. If you are used to shooting in a certain format you have learned to associate a certain field of view with the focal lengths of your lenses. Say you are a FF35 stills shooter and you are trying out the RED camera for the first time. You throw the 25mm RPP on and you notice it looks longer then 25mm usually looks on your Canon 1D. What you can do is multiply the 25mm RPP by the S35 – FF35 crop factor (1.62) and you see that it has the same field of view (field of view equivalent) as a 40mm lens on your Canon 1D. Going backwards gives you the ‘crop factor’ if you want to put your Canon 25mm lens on the RED camera. Multiply your Canon 25mm lens by 1.62 and you see that the image circle will be cropped to the same field of view as if you shot on your 1D at 40mm. You have probably heard APS-C (very close in size to S35) cameras referred to as 1.6 crop cameras. This is where that term comes from. Some of the more common crop factors are listed below.

• 2/3″ to S16mm = 1.24
• 2/3″ to S35 = 2.47
• 2/3″ to FF35 = 3.56
• S35 to FF35 = 1.62

DEPTH OF FIELD ACROSS FORMATS

BULLET POINTS:

• depth of field becomes shallower as a lenses f-stop decreases.
• at the same f-stop, lenses with a longer focal length have shallower depth of field.

DEPTH OF FIELD

It is especially important when shooting on Scarlet and Epic to understand exactly what affects depth of field because of all of the sensor formats, windowed sensor crops (for high speed) and the multitude of lens mounts available to the DSMC system.Depth of field refers to the section of an image that appears acceptably sharp or in focus. While other factors can have an effect on depth of field once a final image is being viewed (see circle of confusion below), it is important to remember that the cinematographer/photographer ultimately only has control over the depth of field created by the lenses focal length and aperture. There are the two absolutes that determine depth of field:

• depth of field becomes shallower as a lenses f-stop decreases.
• at the same f-stop, lenses with a longer focal length have shallower depth of field.

This explains why we talk about the difficulty of getting shallow depth of field on cameras with smaller sensors like the 2/3″ Scarlet. 16mm is a very wide lens on S35 but becomes a medium lens (S35 equivalent of 40mm) on the 2/3″ Scarlet. Lenses that we use to get the extreme shallow depth of field S35 is known for, like an 85mm, become very long telephoto lenses (S35 equivalent of 210mm) on 2/3″ and only usable in specialty situations.

The depth of field created by the lens remains the same no matter what size sensor you put behind it. It is the need to use unusually wide lenses (thus deeper depth of field) due to the small sensor that makes it harder to get thin depth of field.

VIEWING SIZE, DISTANCE AND CIRCLE OF CONFUSION

The size an image is viewed at and the distance from the screen does effect the perceived depth of field. You can see this in the strip of images we used above. When the huge medium format image is shrunk down to that size everything appears to be in focus. When we effectively zoom in to the S35 format the background now appears slightly out of focus.

This effect is fairly small and only apparent in drastic cropping situations. The cinematographer/photographer really has no control over what size the final product will be viewed at so it is generally not taken into consideration when shooting.

Video SLRs really came out of nowhere and delivered an image that had previously been limited to cameras costing 10 times as much.  This low cost also means working around issues like aliasing, moire, no on board sound, and ” jello effect” but thousands of shooters have found this to be an acceptable trade off.  What these HDSLRs offer that previous digital cinema cameras under $25,000 could not, are larger sensors that allow for much shallower depth of field and amazing low light performance.

If you are used to shooting on 1/3″ sensor cameras (HVX200) or 1/2″ format (EX-1) this chart shows how their sensors stack up to the HDSLRs:

Looking at this chart it is easy to see why it is harder to get shallow depth of field on the HVX200: you need an incredibly wide lens (the HVX200 lens is 4.2mm on the wide end) in order to get a wide shot on that tiny sensor. As we know, one of the few absolutes in the lens/sensor equation is that the wider you go the deeper your depth of field gets (at the same f-stop and distance to subject).

For more on depth of field and field of view equivalents read here: www.bitzinmotion.com/depth-field-view-equivalents

Further reading:

• Canon 7D Footage
• Canon T2i Footage

Disclaimer: sensor sizes are estimates as the actual size changes camera to camera.

We know Buzz is tightly integrated with Google Maps so it occurred to me that I could probably just add the location there and hopefully it would show up in the Buzz “nearby” list.

Google Maps is only set up to recognize businesses as locations but there is nothing to stop you from adding say, your local dog park.  All you have to do is go to this url: www.google.com/local/add and type in the address and description of the location you want to add.  As far as I can tell you need an actual address and can’t add just the GPS location like you can in Foursquare.  The only downside is that Google needs to confirm the location by calling your phone number with a pin number you then type in to verify the listing.  Unfortunately your phone number then shows up as the contact for that location on Google Maps.  I haven’t figured out a way to get around this yet.

After adding the Balboa Park Playground as a location to Google Maps it showed up in the Buzz “nearby” list about half an hour later.  Very cool.

Hopefully Buzz will make it possible to add any location, GPS or address,  from within the app itself but this is an acceptable workaround for now.