Ah, musical parrots. While I continue to obsess over Hatebeak, the heavy metal parrot, here’s a video that claims to show a beatboxing parrot: At first, I thought this might be faked, but it does appear to be the real thing, and having known a few parrots, these birds will do far stranger things vocally. […]

In our last episode, I was assembling my fantastic new portable Shuttle PC in glorious comic book form. I got as far as booting Ubuntu Linux off a CD, but obviously I wouldn’t want to stop there. Next steps: getting the onboard NVIDIA RAID working, and making a lean, livable Windows XP install I won’t […]

A lot of people now split their recording time between on-location and studios, which for many people means buying two separate audio interfaces. Also, despite the fact that their needs are simple, they often wind up with interfaces that either don’t do quite what they need or, at the opposite extreme, are complete overkill. That’s […]

It would be unfair to mention the free Magical 8-bit Plug-in without acknowledging who created it: the insanely talented Japanese chiptune band, YMCK: YMCK Official Site [English] YMCK Events [Japanese] YMCK @ Myspace And, most importantly: YMCK Music Videos @ YouTube Their style is a unique mash-up of the tightly-quantized, hyperactively cheery iconic Nintendo music […]

Have you shot any new source material lately? Don’t be one of those VJs who turns up with the same archive.org clips to every show. You don’t need expensive gear to get interesting results, you don’t even need to go outside. Just point your feed reader at Make:Blog and find yourself a cardboard box. Strobist, […]

CDMotion favourite VideoThing has just updated their Ghetto 360 Video Experiment with a new high quality glass bauble and some test footage on YouTube. I’ve experimented with shooting sideways, and also stuck cheesy video effects on a couple of shots for no good reason. Hope you enjoy. Shooting sideways: Looks cool. Cheesy video effects: If […]

Shooting underwater can be great fun, and has the advantage of taking the viewer outside the realm of their normal vision, so if your image quality isn’t so hot it still looks special. Commercial waterproof enclosures tend to be rather expensive, but they’re not your only option. My first underwater shoot was a security camera […]

Jeff Carlson reviews Final Cut Express HD 3.5 for Macworld.com. (Note that our full reviews at Macworld are now largely online-only and free.) This is a significant release in that it delivers a number of features from Final Cut Pro and is Universal for Intel Macs, bringing both the Express and Pro suites from Apple […]