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Adventure photography piqued my interest in the visual arts, and from there I grew into cinematography and fashion photography. I continue to enjoy travel and adventure, and photography nature as well. While following the startup film industry journal Red Shark News, some of the comments I wrote in response to some technology articles lead the chief editor to invite me to contribute to the journal, and since then I've been a regular freelance contributor there.
Rakesh Malik on the importance of embracing the dark side and using shadows to their full extent. In both photography and cinematography, the focus tends to be on exposure. That should come as no surprise, since cameras can figure out exposure on their own, so getting a "good" exposure is quite easy to do.
This year's BlenderCon included a series of presentations showing a preview of what to expect from Blender for the next decade. Here's what's coming down the pipe. A few years ago, the massive investments that companies like Epic, UbiSoft, Bethesda Softworks, and a few others made in Blender lead to a huge development effort.
Though Assimilate is no longer the big name that it was before Blackmagic Design so thoroughly disrupted the colour grading marketplace, it's still developing new features in Scratch. Assimilate decided to be the best dailies tool in the industry and it's done an excellent job at this. For starters, Scratch is cross-platform.
The Filmmaker's kit includes a Z 6 camera, a Nikkor 24-70 f4 lens, an adapter for Nikon's wide selection of SLR lenses, a Gudsen Moza Air 2 gimbal, an Atomos Ninja V, and a Røde shotgun microphone. This package costs $3,999.95, saving $1000 over buying each part separately.
2019 has been a very good year for AMD. It's taken 30% of the personal computing market from Intel, which it hasn't done in 12 years. For the first time since the Athlon64, AMD is the performance option, rather than just the budget one.
At Intel's HPC Developer conference, Raja Koduri revealed information about the Xe graphics computing architecture that he's been working on. There will be a version for mobile applications under the Xe LP brand, high performance for the gaming and datacenter/AI market called Xe HP, and an excascale variant called Xe HPC for supercomputing.
The IEEE's International Electron Devices Meeting is like the semiconductor industry's analog to IBC or CineGear. There, Intel revealed its ten-year manufacturing road map. First though, what went wrong? Intel has been THE leader in semiconductor manufacturing for years, so suddenly being behind TSMC and Samsung by an entire process generation is very unusual.
For those not familiar, ProRender is a production rendering engine based on the Vulkan API, providing what AMD calls "Full Spectrum Rendering" technology. Built using OpenCL and Metal, it's available for Windows, Linux and macOS, and it's also processor and GPU agnostic.
2019 was a great year for technology, and this year shows absolutely no sign of slowing down. With big announcements forthcoming from AMD this week, it looks like we have entered 2020 with a bang. As usual, SSDs will continue growing in capacity, while prices will continue to gradually decline.
First up is what Lisa Hsu calls the best laptop processor, the Mobile Ryzen 4000. The first 7nm x86 mobile. The ultra-low volt version packs 8 Zen2 cores AND 8 Radeon cores using the Vega architecture, and packs it all into a 15-watt envelope, in spite of a 4.2 GHz peak clock speed.