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Scarborough Life Videos

Here are a number of short videos I've put together about events that I've attended in Scarborough.
So far there's the boxing day fishermen vs firemen football match, the Leeds Arms men-only pork pie making contest, the new year's day dip and a celebration of the opening of the new balcony at the Rowing Club.

Hotel reviews

I have decided to do short video reviews of the hotels I stay at when I'm away on business (it's a hobby). Here are the ones I've done so far:

Quick Tut: Bike Dolly

Here's a quick vid I did showing you how to use a bike as a dolly (a filmmaking term for a camera mount on wheels used to get smooth motion:

Bike Dolly from Steve Green on Vimeo.

Step away from the Camera!

Do you want to know what really annoys me? Programmes on television where they make it look as if the camera is being operated by an amateur. You know the sort of thing: unsteady pans, poor framing, sudden zooms in the middle of a shot.
The thing is, no-one else on the production is made to be so slack. The lighting is perfect, the sound is pristine, the make-up is great. If a director made me work like that I'd be ashamed.
I'm with Mike Figgis on this one: if you can't think of a good reason to move the camera, put it on a tripod. (From Digital Film-making)

Ipad world

So, how does the iPad measure up to my vision of the ideal device?

It would be about the size of a current netbook, with a 9 or 10” screen [Yes]. It doesn't need to be especially thin – most current netbooks are fine[It's very thin]. It would not have a keyboard although you would be able to attach one[check]. The casing would be robust and scratch-proof – rubber, or leather, perhaps?[No, no, no!] The screen would have a cover like the sony reader[No]. It would have a fold-away stand so that it could be operated flat or tilted up like a screen and the stand would have non-slip feet so that it wouldn't slide around on slippery surfaces[No]. The stand would also allow it to be used in portrait or landscape mode.[No]

What would it be like to use?

Firstly it would take a maximum of 2 seconds to be ready to use when I turned it on (or opened the flap or whatever)[Dunno]. This is really important – I seem to wait spend half my life waiting for machines to boot up or come out of hibernation or whatever. It would also always, always always respond immediately to my input. This does not mean that everything happens instantaneously, it just means that it would tell me immediately and accurately when an operation was going to take some time and the multi-tasking would work properly so that it would always respond to my input. Neither windows nor Linux does this at the moment. It would have a multi-touch screen [Check] and would automatically flip between landscape and portrait modes a la iPhone[Check]. It would be always connected via the most appropriate method without me having to tell it what that was – that is, it would have mobile 3G, wifi, network connection blah, blah and would automatically choose the best and cheapest one available (a bit like RDS radios do) [Well, it's got them all - just have to wait and see whether it's Smart enough to figure out which one to use].
It would have a camera that would normally be housed in the casing but that could be teased out on a bendy bit of cable so you could point it in the right direction.[No camera!]
It would be location-aware (i.e. gps)[Check]

I make that 6-4 to the iPad - not a bad hit rate. The reviews have been a bit grudging so far but they were for the iPhone too(What no 3g? Only 2Mpixel camera?). What Tech journalists don't seem to get is that it's not about the specs, it's about the way that Appler puts them together. If they've got it right then people will beat a path to their door (including me).