January Newsletter

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Sebastian Pichelhofer

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Jan 5, 2012, 5:34:51 PM1/5/12

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Hello everyone,

This is the first 2012 edition of our newsletter, released every first Thursday of the month. Happy New Year to us all!

We had a busy December, with everyone contributing little bits here and there. But before we begin, how do you feel about our new logo? That one, at the top! Handsome, ay? Well, that’s not really our new logo, that’s a prank! Or almost a prank, because we feel we’re getting close now with some concepts - so tell us what you think before it’s too late!

A very important year

Ever had that feeling it’s a bit hard to talk to your friends about what Apertus is? A video explaining the project is under way. We’re putting our translation abilities to test there, and that’s not all. 2012 will be a very important year.

We’ve been discussing how to get help developing the parts we haven’t managed to produce just yet, such as the Dictator. A community-funding initiative involving 'kickstarter' can be a good solution, and being able to communicate what our project is about clearly is a first step that must be taken. That’s where the video fits in.

Of course, the Apertus community thinks big, so we want to ~~conquer the world~~ keep walking. Expect something BIG during these next months (you got it, didn’t you?), because we plan to get there before the world meets its end by December this year.

Community work

Meanwhile, we’ve had some nice work being done:

We’ve been conducting tests on how get a live preview of the video being recorded. The idea is finding a way of watching what’s on camera using not-so-powerful devices such as tablets, notebooks or smartphones, something that cannot be done by Elphel or ElphelVision yet. Follow the link for the benchmarks.

ElphelVision is being ported to Eclipse IDE, which has finer layout control and will eventually allow it to work fullscreen at any resolution. This’ll take a while, take a seat.

The GPL workflow is being improved by automating the boring technical steps, such as transcoding or Cinelerra’s XML rebuilding. This means people using GNU Linux will be able to focus only on the creative parts of doing videos by the end of January. Nice, eh? On the long run, we’re also starting to think about a specific Apertus-oriented distro that will cover the main steps of cinema production out of the box.

And we have a new exhibit at the video section! It shows how a DNG sequence can be interpreted as HDR video with some different tonemapping settings applied.

Problems with VLC version

There has been reports that newer VLC versions are not displaying the stream generated by the Elphel camera correctly. We recommend everyone to stick to the versions between 1.1.4 – 1.1.11 while we develop a fix.

That’s it for now. See you next month! As Austin Powers would say, ‘behave’!