Kodak Zi6

We picked up a Kodak Zi6 when they first shipped a few weeks ago, and have been playing with it, taking it through it's paces and evaluating it for both professional and personal use. It's a small 720p HD "lifestyle" camera, capturing to digital SDHC media. They sell for around $170 on Amazon, including a set of rechargeable AA batteries and a charger. It doesn't come with a SDHC card, which is kind of silly, since you only get about thirty seconds of recording time with the built in memory. So be sure you've got some digital media ready to go when you get the unit. You'll need it.

It's an impressive little unit, for what it does, and for what it costs. It's almost completely automatic, with very few customizable settings. On the pro side of things, we were interested in this unit as an HD lipstick cam, being able to clamp or velcro it to just about anything. For the price it's just about disposable, so I don't get too concerned about putting it in harms way. The lens is fairly wide, but certainly not a fisheye. There's a small slider to switch the lens into macro mode, and you can do a digitial zoom if needed. No optical zoom.

I've been experimenting with using this camera as a reference camera for shooting things like people giving powerpoint presentations. Shoot the speaker with our Sony EX-3, tight, but shoot the room with the Zi6, giving a reference for exactly which slide the speaker was on at any given time during their presentation. It works pretty well for this, with a couple of limitations.

The biggest "Huh?!?" with this camera is that there is no "time remaining" indicator for the memory card. You have no idea how much remaining time you have. This sounds like a big deal (and it is) but on the other hand, you can put a 16gig card in there and be confident that your time remaining is "gobs," certainly enought to get you through a typical presentation.

The unit makes chirping sounds to indicate when you start or stop recording, and you can't disable them. This is could be bad in a pro situation.

So, over all, it's got come possibilities for pro use. I could see strapping this thing to a mountain biker or any other rough-duty location, and chances are it will perform fine. The HD video looks good, provided you've got a reasonable amount of light. (It drops down to 15 frames per second under low light situations.) The built in USB interface lets you load the footage into your Mac or PC as standard MP4 files.

What's been interesting, and unexpected, is how much we've been using this for personal use. We did a lot of recording over Thanksgiving and Christmas with this, mainly because it's just so easy to pick up and start using. Plus, you can stick it in your pocket, purse or glove compartment in your car and always be ready to capture video. The convenience factor has meant that we've been shooting a lot more video than we ever did with our Canon HV20. Havng no real zoom means it's not very practical for something like a kid's recital at school where you need to zoom in from the back of the room, but for family gatherings this thing is a lot of fun.

So, the bottom line, for us, is that this thing is a no brainer to have around for the price. We keep finding cool new ways to use it. The lack of features is somewhat frustrating from a pro point of view, but the size and low cost make up for a lot.

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Summer Movie Roundup

I've seen an unusually high number of movies so far this summer. Well, unusually high for a married guy with two kids, one of them a toddler. Somehow I've been able to make it to the theater this movie season, and I've got some opinions.

Iron Man: Loved it.
I knew absolutely nothing about the Iron Man character going in to this film, not really being a Comic Book Guy. But the previews were compelling, and Robert Downey Jr. is always fun to watch. Sure enough, his performance was one of the highlights of the film, portraying an accidental superhero convincingly.
I liked the film's solution to the universal "super powered suit power supply" problem. It was internally consistent. There was still the niggling issue of g-forces on your brain while flipping around in the suit, but hey, going to the movies is largely about suspension of disbelief.

And speaking of suspension of disbelief...

Speed Racer: Loved it.
Yeah, I hear you sighing is disbelief. How could I love this piece of empty claptrap, hated by almost every critic on the planet. Simple, really: When I was a kid I used to come home from school every day and watch the original Speed Racer cartoon. Every day. The Speed Racer movie was made for people like me, people with an intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of the TV show. Throughout the film, time and time again, I noticed countless subtle nods to the TV show, quick little shots, that I'm guessing the vast majority of viewers wouldn't even notice, and many of them made me laugh out loud.
That said, if you're someone who doesn't have a deep understanding of the subtle world of Speed Racer, then yes, I could understand how the film might come up short for you. But I have to ask the critics who were harsh, who criticized the film for a flimsy plot - Well what were you expecting? It's Speed Racer, for god's sake!
I also found the film to be quiet simply stunning, visually. Bold, unique and groundbreaking, very stylistic.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Loved it!
We're all big Indy fans here at the Bittner house, and there was a lot of anticipation leading up to this film, balanced with a certain amount of trepidation. Could Harrison Ford still pull of being Indy, with his advanced age?
To me, the great thing about this film was that it felt like an Indy movie, from start to finish. The pacing, the writing, the cinematography, the direction, the humor, all fit the Indy mold. They set out to make a solid Indy movie, not to break any new ground, and they did it. Yes, the thing with the aliens was a bit "out there" (ha!) but no more so than the Holy Grail, Lost Ark or Seeing Stones, if you think about it. And it fit in the tone of the era the film was set in, the 50's, with the space race and the rush to beat the Russians.

Am I going to easy on these films? Has a year and a half trapped inside my home with an infant made me soft, made me just so happy get out of the house that I'll love anything put in front of me? Perhaps. But I think not.

My wife is going to be dragging me to Sex and the City soon, so we'll see how that goes...

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"He said it right."

Reader Adam made a great point in the comments to the last post -

I still have people who try to write scripts that have had one too many English classes and try to write for the human voice with proper English. The problem is that nobody speaks in complete sentences.

Adam is dead-on right here, and we've run into this situation countless times over the years. These days, when we ask for a script from a client we frame it by asking for a "script outline" and tell them that we'll likely be fine-tuning it for the spoken word, then coming back to them for approval. That way, whoever is doing the writing knows ahead of time that there will be changes, and they're not as likely to get their feathers ruffled. Although sometimes they still get their feathers ruffled. 

This clip from The West Wing sizes up the situation rather nicely - 

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