Orson Welles and His Brief Passionate Betacam Love Affair [Filmmaking]

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apple, camera, documentary, film, format, phone, player, sony

Published Dec. 18, 2009 at 10:00 p.m.
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In January 1985, the phone rang. The caller announced that he was Orson Welles and that he wanted to have lunch with me. Thus began one of the most extraordinary and bittersweet adventures of my life ... Sometimes the journeys we take through this life begin and end in the most unexpected ways. My encounter with Welles in the last days of his life centered on a common interest: Sony's new one-piece camcorder, the Betacam. It had just come to market and Welles, always the genius filmmaker, had

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Toys and Games To Buy Smart Kids Whose Parents You Actually Like [Gift Guide]

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amazon, format, iphone

Published Dec. 2, 2009 at 3:20 p.m.
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Here they are, 10 toys and games painstakingly selected for coolness and/or inoffensiveness (plus two of the worst ideas), running the gamut in age range and price. Pick through, and you'll find something nice for the brainy little snot ... If you hate the gallery format as much as the Grinch hated Christmas, click here ... Battling Helicopters: There's no better way to learn the mysteries of heavier-than-air flight than to spin up a few air hogs and have them shoot each other out of the

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Time's Manhattan Project Will Explode Like the Atomic Bomb It Is [Rant]

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apple, format, medium

Published Dec. 2, 2009 at 2:36 p.m.
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TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld got a sneak peek at Time Inc's "Manhattan Project", a digital magazine designed to run on tablet computers, including the fabled Apple tablet. And it's going to rock because that's exactly what people crave for: INTERACTIVE MAGAZINES!!! ... People from the 80s. All the five who survived wearing their hair spray and shoulder pads and striped shirts and silk undapants. You know, the kind that get inside your buttcrack and itch, which is precisely the sensation I get

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With an Eye to the Future, Try Raw Photos Today [Photography]

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aperture, apple's, camera, camera's, cameras, canon, canon's, cnet, film, format, lens, nikon, olympus, olympus', panasonic's, photography, point-and-shoot, portrait, slr

Published Dec. 2, 2009 at 1:36 p.m.
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If you enjoy photography, don't make the mistake I did ... Using my then-new SLR in 2005 and 2006, I photographed everything from my new son to otherworldly canyons we visited in Utah. The only problem: the photos were taken only in JPEG format ... JPEG is fine as far as it goes, and indeed for most folks it will suffice. But having rediscovered my enjoyment of photography in the digital era, I wish I'd used the raw image format that comes with SLRs and higher-end compact cameras ... My initial

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Gifts for Retro-holics Who Yearn for the Old Days [Giftguide]

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35mm, amazon, apple, camera, film, format, iphone, ipod, mp3, oled, phone, photography, slr

Published Nov. 21, 2009 at 12:00 p.m.
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Are you trying to find a gift for one of those crazies who's always going on about the superiority of vinyl, or who dresses like a character on Mad Men ? Here are some ideas for the retrophile in your life ... BTW, if you hate the gallery format as much as the Grinch hated Christmas, click here ... Leica M7: DSLR schmee SLR. Digital photography still can't match the old-school beauty of film, and Leica's M7 35mm camera is one of the best and most gorgeous out there. It's the kind of gift

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Flash 10.1: Full Flash for Everyone But iPhone, Actually Playable HD Vids [Flash]

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apple, format, iphone, netbook

Published Oct. 4, 2009 at 11:01 p.m.
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A ton of good news about Adobe Flash 10.1: Full Flash is coming to Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, WebOS and Windows Mobile. and it'll be actually GPU accelerated, meaning you can play back YouTube in HD perfectly ... But the bad news? ... Nothing for the iPhone. "Still a closed device and not much progress there," Adobe told us as they gleefully detailed that Flash was invading basically every other smartphone. Also, we gotta wait until mid-2010 for the full rollout ... But, betas for Windows

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Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ Review: An HD Video Decoder That Actually Works [Review]

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1080p, amazon, apple, format, player

Published Sept. 25, 2009 at 9:30 p.m.
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Seagate built this second-gen FreeAgent Theater+ to be equally Mac and PC friendly, and to decode any video file you throw at it, regardless of resolution, framerate or other variable. Despite a crappy interface, the mission is a genuine success ... The Price ... $150 without drive; $290 with 500GB drive included ...

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iTunes LPs Should Be Lossless [ITunes]

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apple, apple's, format

Published Sept. 9, 2009 at 9:13 p.m.
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The iTunes LP is Apple's attempt to recreate the "feel" of buying a physical record in an intangible format. Without lossless audio as a part of the package, though, iTunes LPs are much less than an album ... If Apple really wants to recreate that "feel" of buying a record, I have to feel like I'm buying something that isn't just higher quality, but also permanent. If I buy a lossy AAC file from the iTunes store today, not only do I know that it's inferior to the same $15 CD, but also that I'll

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Giz Explains: Why Tech Standards Are Vital For Apple (And You) [Giz Explains]

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apple, apple's, format, iphone, ipod, mp3, sony

Published Sept. 2, 2009 at 3:20 p.m.
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Tech standards are important. They're, well, standards. They shape the way the world works, ideally. So if you wanna influence your little world, you probably wanna shape (or maybe even create) standards. Take Apple, for example ... They Call It "Open" For a Reason ... One of the more excellent aspects of Snow Leopard, actually, is its full-scale deployment of OpenCL 1.0—Open Computing Language—a framework that allows programmers to more easily utilize the full power of mixes of different

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Canon 7D DSLR First Hands On: 18 Megapixels, 24FPS Full HD Video for $1900 [Digital Cameras]

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aperture, camera, camera's, cameras, cameras', canon, format, iphone, laptop, large, lcd, lens, nikon's, phone, photography, portrait, slr, tripod, wide angle, wide-angle

Published Aug. 31, 2009 at 11:00 p.m.
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Yep, it's real. The Canon 7D is an 18-megapixel semi-pro DSLR that shoots 1080p video in 24—or 30—glorious frames per second for $1899, kicking Nikon's previously unchallenged D300s where it hurts. But it's also an odd little beast ...

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