The future of Sony - a suggestion

On second February 2012 two very large numbers presented themselves in articles online. The first, on Reuters, was that Sony are predicting that they are expecting to make a $2.9 billion LOSS this financial year, that's four years of continual losses.This is one of the biggest electrical company in the world who invented the Walkman, Trinitron TVs, the Playstation and er Betamax.

But in the last decade they really haven't been beating competitors to market with anything amazing. Blu-ray is a collaboration of companies and they have released nothing to compete with the iPad/Pod/Touch/Mac products. They hope to finally start making profit on their TVs in 2013, but that will partly be by selling off their LCD screen production facilities to Samsung for £600 million - hardly innovative.

It's hard to think of an electronic section Sony do not produce products for; VAIO laptops, stills cameras, broadcast cameras, TVs, mobile phones (just), etc. but I can't think of any product that is the market leader - they are no longer a Brand Leader. They are missing a fantastic opportunity to lead the way in DSLR video technology. They have a pretty good series of DSLR and extensive knowledge of video and broadcast requirements, so why haven't they produced a product like the Canon C300 or Panasonic AF101. Oh, sorry, they have. The Sony NEX-FS100E. Sorry again, but it isn't exactly the piece of equipment every cameraman want to get his hands on - unlike the Canon C300.

So Sony have making products but can't really work out what product everyone really wants. One person who was (and is) rather good at working this out is Mark Zuckerberg who had the other outstanding number on the 2nd February. He is set to earn $28 billion when Facebook is publically offered and I have been debating what a person could actually do with that amount of money. My suggestion would be for him to buy Sony, rename it Sony Inc. and start producing the products that some people pay Apple type premiums for at the moment.

Time - it’s never running at the right speed

Of all the various ways of measuring things, Time is generally the most important or critical, at least it is to me. Size doesn't matter, distance can be reduced or extended by speed and volume can be altered, sometimes by the flick of a dial. But Time, that little four letter word that I have given a capital "T", has a mind of its own and will never change, despite the best efforts of the Large Hadron Collider scientists.

Twenty-four hours a day, Time rules my world; where I have to be, what I have to do, what has to be finished, deadlines. I can't change these. I ask for one more minute to finish editing a piece and if I get it I lose a minute from the next Time period. The producer tells me we are on air in five minutes and EVS need the cut in three. I need six, but somehow I finish in four and we get to air. Yes! I beat Time, kind of.

So with all these Time pressures, why on earth do I love making Time lapse sequences? Because, let's face it, the world looks much better when slowed right down or sped right up. It's boring at normal speed, that's so everyday, so dull. In slow motion you can see things missed in real Time. Footage from the Phantom Flex or Hi-Mo cameras analyse movement in a beautiful and intriguing way.Timelapses truncate Time and let you see in thirty seconds what took hours or even days to actually happen. You can't comprehend that as a human, so to see a flower opening, a bridge being built or even the view from the highest building in the world (see Philips Bloom's fabulous film) is a miracle because it manipulates Time.

So I am bored of the speed at which I live and want to control it and if I can't become a Time Lord, then timelapse photography is the closest I am likely to get.To see some of my attempts to control Time go to my Vimeo site at http://vimeo.com/pukkatv/videos

What goes down must go up (in price)

A lot of people seems to be getting quite excited and Tweeting with nervous energy - the Canon C300 DSLR-in-a-video-body is about to be delivered to those who are happy to stump up around £10,0000 or $15,000 for a camera body. Of course for that money it won't work. You need to spend another few thousand on handy things like lens adaptors, storage media, cheese boards (don't ask) and so on.

Apparantly this camera will produce footage that looks as good or slightly better than the Canon 5D MKII but with proper video stuff like mic inputs and decent metering. But is the C300 five times as good as the 5D MKII that has been used to shoot prime-time drama (House MD) and now an Oscar nominated documentary (Hell and Back Again)? Well we won't know until the side by side reviews are complete and Philip Bloom gives his highly important verdict.

But if you can't wait, umm...wait. Don't buy a C300 yet because even more exciting is the overdue announcement of the Canon 5D MKIII (yes Mark 3). Canon may have delayed the launch of this so it doesn't effect the initial sales of the C300, because even if the new 5D only improves a bit it is going to be a very worthy video camera (that happens to also take superb stills by the way). And everyone will already own all the peripherals needed to shoot great video with a stills camera.So how do Canon pitch the new 5D MKIII?  Well I would double the price of the body up from around £1,600 for the current model to £3,200. It would still be almost £7,000 cheaper than a C300 (and cheaper than Canon's top of the range still cameras) and be within the reach of semi-pro operators, but it would make it look like a premium upgrade. Buyers wouldn't have to spend any extra on batteries, lenses or cheese boards.

Would I buy one at that price to shoot video? Probably not. I would get a Panasonic GH2 with a Driftwood hack for less than £1000 because it gives fantastic results and at that price I can employ a sound-man, an assistant and someone to make the tea.

Is there anything that can’t be copyrighted?

On 12th January 2012 a London Court came to the conclusion that one company had breached the copyright of another by using an image of a London Bus in front of the Houses of Parliament. In both images the London bus was in red but all the background elements were in a flat monochrome. But there the similarities end and you can see them both here.

The two photographs were taken at different vantage points, taken at a different time and even the buses are slightly different.According to a lawyer quoted by Amateur Photographer: 'His honour Judge Birss QC decided that a photograph of a red London bus against a black and white background of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with a blank sky, was similar enough to another photograph of the same subject matter to infringe copyright.' 

Image from iStockphoto

Ok so what about this image from iStockphoto. It ticks the same boxes as the two in the court case, so should iStockphoto remove it from their catalogue or will I be taken to court if I pay for an extended license and use it on the packaging of my new brand of Red Bus Chocolate Buttons?Debate about what can be patented or copyrighted started in the United States in 1790 when the first patent was issued and in England in 1449 when King Henry VI granted one to John of Utynam.

More recently in the world of TV, in the 1980's Quantel successfully destroyed the company that made a graphic design package called Pastiche that worked in a similar way to the Quantel Paintbox, the then market leader. Quantel proved in court that they had the patent for mixing colours in a palette, just like artists have been doing for thousands of years, and the Pastiche could not use this way of mixing colours. At the time there wasn't a viable alternative and the product died.

Unfortunately common sense rarely applies in case of copyright - I would like to see the "don't be so ridiculous" plea made admissible in court - something that Apple lawyers have made into an art form. So now I need a way of copyrighting every image I take or film without it costing me anything - ideas?

Will Google do an Apple?

Despite posting a lower than expected earning result last week Google still managed to earn$37,900,000,000 in 2011 of which 96% came from advertising . Now Google do a lot more than just offer a search engine, but the question is “why bother?”.

If you make such a huge amount from your core business isn’t it good business sense to jetison the less profitable sides that might be dragging you down. Apple had revenue of $24.67 billion in Q2 last year - yes just one quarter - with Macs and iPhones selling in huge numbers.

But desktops, peripherals and in particular software make up such a small part of the revenue that Apple will generally stop or reduce development in non-core products.

The most obvious example of this is their editing software Final Cut. When it was launched it ripped open the professional editing market and everyone from the BBC down jumped on the bandwagon. Now that wagon is going around picking up the Macs no-one wants because FCP is now FC Pro X (or FuCXed as some call it). It doesn’t sell millions of packages because there aren’t a million editors out here.

So Apple will call it “a revolution in creative editing” but I think it is rotten to the core and will gradually become a way of editing whatever you are watching on your iPad. It makes sense to ditch it - to me and the much smarter people at Cupertino.

So what will Google do when they see that they don’t really need to supply all these great aps that people love but not quite enough to pay greenbacks for? Hopefully they will say “we’re making enough, let’s give something back”, because if I lose Google Calendar my future looks as bleak as that of Final Cut Pro X.

What can you shoot these days? Part 2

In my previous blog I talked about photographs and video submitted to stock libraries being rejected due to copyright restrictions. I have discovered an association called PACA, the Picture Archive Council of America, who "represent the vital interests of stock archives" and have been doing so since 1951!

The association has compiled a list of  "properties and objects that may cause problems if shown photographically". These are mainly in America but some are not. It makes interesting reading and I notice that the Sydney Opera House is missing from the list.

ASMP, the American Society of Media Photographers offer a copyright tutorial which states that buildings may be subject to copyright restrictions "if they were built after December 1, 1990. Before that, buildings did not have copyright protection and were thus, by definition, in the public domain. Shoot away." Ah, so Sydney Opera House should be fair game then.

Of course I am not the first photographer to suffer from SOH syndrome. Simon Phipps managed to get an answer from Sydney Opera House back in 2007 which states, "The Sydney Opera House Trust manages the use of Sydney Opera House’s image and brand on behalf of the New South Wales Government. The Trust vigorously protects the commercial exploitation of its intellectual property and does not approve use of the SOH brand in commercial contexts where there is no association between the relevant business and SOH."

What I would like to know is how a building, especially one built with public funds, can be copyrighted. I wouldn't mind so much about the Opera House but it does fit perfectly in the 16:9 TV format. The (soon to be) tallest building in Europe, The "Shard" being constructed in London will be useless.

What can you shoot these days? Part 1

This is not a blog decrying the lack of targets for blood-lust hungry hunters but is about how you cannot film or photograph anything these days without written permission. Watch any news footage or television programme shot in the previous millennium and there were practically no restrictions on what you were allowed to cover - kids, iconic buildings, film stars, even the Queen was fair game.

Much of the work I produce is sold through stock libraries and each one has its own different rules and all of them have release forms available when you can identify someone within the picture or video. iStock is one of the most restrictive of all the stock libraries, possibly because it is owned by the omnipotent Getty Images. Material I have supplied but has been rejected for copyright issues include The Eiffel Tower at night (the light show is the problem), Sydney Opera House, a night time shot of London when a logo appeared over a total of 12 pixels (out of 5,800,000 or so) and macro shots of the Queen's image on a coin.

A photo of the "Boris" bikes in central London, which look great in their rack, was rejected because the bikes feature Barclays Bank logo. I Photoshopped the logo out, re-submitted and got it rejected again because the London Underground logo appeared in the background.

Timelapse footage of a glorious sunset behind the Millennium Wheel was rejected by iStock (although accepted by three other libraries) because it featured, yup, the Millennium Wheel.

I can see both sides of the coin (but I can't photograph it) and in ten years iStock have over 100 million images downloaded from their site, so they must be doing something right and their quality control is amazingly good. My concern (apart from not being able to get my images and video out to the iStock customers) is that the rich heritage that still and moving images have developed over the last 200 years may be eroded.

Fotolia and Shutterstock have a more relaxed attitude to copyright issues and search engines such as Google Images will find you almost anything, but would you feel happy using a photo sourced here in a TV programme that is being transmitted world-wide?

Without a court case to clarify each case, photographers and film makers will never be certain what they can shoot but one thing is clear, copyright free imagery is becoming an endangered species.