Observation Point

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Transient from Dustin Farrell (www.dfvc.com) on Vimeo.

"Transient" [tran-shuh nt, -zhuh nt, -zee-uh nt] Adjective. not lasting, enduring, or permanent; lasting only a short time; existing briefly. Philosophy. person or thing that is transient, especially a temporary guest, boarder, laborer, or the like. Electricity. a sudden pulse of voltage or current.

All footage available to license at 4K resolution. Contact: [email protected]

"Transient" is a compilation of the best shots from my storm chasing adventures of summer 2017. Most of the lightning footage was captured in uncompressed raw at 1000 frames per second with our Phantom Flex4K. This summer I chased for over 30 days and traveled 20K miles. My respect and admiration for storm chasers became even stronger this year. This is one of the most difficult projects I have ever attempted in my career. On several occasions I found myself uncomfortable either mentally or physically. Chasing storms with a Phantom Flex4K is stressful even when things are going well. There were at least 10 days where I returned home with my tail between my legs and nothing to show after a ten hour chase and 500 miles. There were also a couple of days that I drove home with an ear to ear smile that lasted for hours. Most of the lightning was captured in my home state of Arizona. I also spent a week in the Great Plains chasing with Chad Cowan. It was during this time that I captured a time-lapse of the massive super-cell shown twice in Transient. For some reason that damn super-cell refused to spit out a proper bolt.

Lightning is like a snowflake. Every bolt is different. I learned that lightning varies greatly in speed. There are some incredible looking bolts that I captured that didn't make the cut because even at 1000fps they only lasted for one frame during playback. I also captured some lightning that appear computer generated it lasted so long on the screen.

Technical info: The Phantom Flex4K is a camera that must be post triggered while shooting high speed. This works out well for capturing lightning because the camera is always recording and rewriting to internal ram. As soon as a bolt appears in my view finder I trigger the camera to save what has been stored in the ram. Shooting at high frame rates requires a lot of light. Therefore, I mostly used my Zeiss Otus 28, 55, and 85mm lenses wide open at f1.4. In all, I captured 10TB of data during this production.

Special thanks to Chad Cowan for many of the time-lapse shots in the video and to Mike Olbinski for the storm chasing advice and guidance.

Music licensed from Audiomachine

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Jupiter: Juno Perijove 06 from Sean Doran on Vimeo.

NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran

Original video: youtu.be/AuOy-shbQuM

Follow my Twitter for updates: @_TheSeaning

More Jupiter here: flic.kr/s/aHsm1dt5Mz

More stuff here: flickr.com/photos/136797589@N04/albums

Music by Ligeti

Soundtrack: amazon.com/2001-SPACE-ODYSSEY-REMASTERED-O-S-T/dp/B00337QJO8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496414164&sr=8-1

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The Infinite Now from Armand Dijcks on Vimeo.

Over the past months I've been working with Australian photographer Ray Collins to bring his amazing oceanscapes to life in the form of cinemagraphs, a blend between photography and video. Each cinemagraph is created from one of Ray's stills, and sets it in infinite motion, making a unique moment in time last forever.

These cinemagraphs inspired André Heuvelman from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra to get together with pianist Jeroen van Vliet to record a very moving custom soundtrack, which I combined with a selection of the cinemagraphs.

You can see the original cinemagraphs at armanddijcks.com/cinemagraphs-waves

Ray's images can be found at raycollinsphoto.com

André Heuvelman's music: andreheuvelman.com

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Spring from jamie scott on Vimeo.

This is a companion piece to my Fall time-lapse from a few years ago. I wanted it to be the polar opposite of the first one. Not just the Fall vs Spring. But wide shots vs close ups, everything in focus vs shallow depth of field, very cuty vs one shot, contemporary music vs classical, static camera vs moving camera.

I shot on a Canon 5D MK2 with a 24mm prime lens. To achieve the continuous motion I used the Dynamic Perception Stage One Slider.

All in all this took 3 years to shoot. I shot over 8TB of 5k footage. It's finished in 4k.

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FlightLapse #01 - MilkyWay from SkyProduction on Vimeo.

Flying through the night, while the world beneath us is at sleep, is a pretty common thing as a longhaul pilot. Late evening departures lead to far distant destinations like Singapore, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo or J’burg. Depending on the direction of the flight the crew and the passengers either have a short night up ahead if flying eastbound or almost eternal darkness if headed westwards. Read the full article on: beyondclouds.ch/2017/04/05/vuelo-nocturno-the-magic-of-flying-at-night/

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The Painter of Jalouzi from RYOT on Vimeo.

A film by David Darg & Bryn Mooser Filmed on iPhone 6s Plus Artists: Duval Pierre & Gerard Fortune

Check out the Behind the Scenes footage from Haiti: vimeo.com/140362660

© Copyright 2015 RYOT Corp.

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Barcelona, Spain from UrtheCast on Vimeo.

Captured by Iris, UrtheCast's Ultra HD video camera aboard the International Space Station (c) 2015 UrtheCast Corp

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Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it's unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective.

I've taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, as well as ignoring the laws of relativity concerning what a photon actually "sees" or how time is experienced at the speed of light, but overall I've kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.

Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / aswinehart.com Music: Steve Reich "Music for 18 Musicians" Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / eighthblackbird.org

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Astronaut - A journey to space from Guillaume JUIN on Vimeo.

What does astronaut see from up there? From the red soil of africa, the blue water of oceans, to the green lights of the poles and yellow light of human activity, discover, throught this journey to space, something astoundingly beautiful and strange at the same time.

I wanted to do something different from what has been done before with those shots. Something more dynamic and fast. After all, ISS travel through space at 28.000km/h! There are also more recent footage that have never been used (at least I think...) in other edits.

All the credit goes to the crew members of ISS expeditions 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, shot from 2011 to 2014. The international Space Station weigh 377 tons, orbits the earth at around 350km from the surface, and does one spin around the earth in 1h30, at 28.000k/h! At 1'11 we can see a little refueling shuttle desintegrating back to earth. At 1'20, it's a little telecom satellitte that is launch in orbit. The little green and purple lights you can see at 1'57 are respectively fishing boats and oil platforms offshore with the big city of Bangkok nearby.

All the footage (around 80GB of pictures) was processed throught after effects/premiere, denoised for some shots, removal of dead pixels for some shots, deflickering, and simple color grading (didnt want to change the already incredible look! just curves, saturation, and some blue crushing). Don't hesitate to comment and ask questions about the video!

Video courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center eol.jsc.nasa.gov/Videos/CrewEarthObservationsVideos

Editing: Guillaume JUIN guillaumejuin.fr

Music: Astronaut - Vincent Tone

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Unboxing the Amazon Fire TV. Quite disappointed that they couldn't manage their power well enough to not require a power brick. Apple TV clearly wins there (and in footprint as well).

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Beautiful.

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Great new release by Tulpa.

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Unboxing my new Lumu light meter for iPhone.

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How to Bootstrap Ember.js in a Ruby on Rails Engine

Today I ran into a couple of issues/gotchas while attempting to split out an Ember.js-based sub-project into a Rails engine. Here is how I was eventually able to get things going. This is accurate as of Rails 4.0.1 and ember-rails 0.14.0.

Create the Engine

rails plugin new --mountable vendor/engines/my_sub_project

Add Ember-Rails as a dependency

Your newly created engine should have a gemspec file in it, named something like my_sub_project.gemspec. Add the following dependencies to the spec:

s.add_dependency "ember-rails" s.add_dependency "ember-source", "1.1.2"

You will also need to update each of the configuration options that are tagged with TODO before proceeding.

Install Dependencies

You should now be able to call bundle install to install the Ember.js dependencies.

Bootstrap with Ember.js

Next, you should be able to execute bundle exec rails generate ember:bootstrap to bootstrap the engine with the Ember.js directory structure and basic files.

Except there is a bug in the current version of ember-rails that I have submitted a patch for, here. Until that has been merged, this command will error out. Feel free to use my branch to get going if it has not been merged by the time you read this.

It is important that you run the rails command with bundler, otherwise the generator will not be found.

That should be it!

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Using JSON with Devise::Invitable for Ajax Invitations

After banging my head against the wall for awhile trying to get an Ajax user invite form to work with Devise::Invitable, I finally stumbled upon the solution which was not overly apparent at the time (it is in hindsight, of course).

By default, Devise only responds to HTML requests and you don't really want to add JSON as a supported navigational format since you want authentication errors to be returned with a 401 status for API formats. However, if you override the default Devise::InvitationsController, you simply need to add JSON to the list of supported response formats:

class Users::InvitationsController < Devise::InvitationsController respond_to :html, :json end

You should read the section Configuring Controllers in the DeviseInvitable README to fully configure your custom controller.

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A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit.

http://www.steamclock.com/blog/2013/05/apple-objective-c-javascript-bridge/

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Some beautiful lupines I found on the side of a quiet little road in Maine.