Ultra Mobile video production was never easy but over the last year I’ve been experimenting with a 360-degree camera and I’m now 100% sure that you’ll find journalists, social media and YouTubers bringing this into mainstream use in 2018. Its too simple to fail. Record everything, hands-off, and edit later.

Take a look at the video below. In March this year I had the opportunity to join a Land Rover Discovery 90 cross-country dash in Germany and, as any decent video producer would do, had to decide which equipment to take. I needed to be extremely mobile so rather than a standard video camera I reached for a 360 camera, the Ricoh Theta S and a tall monopod. I shot over an hour of video, but didn’t really take much notice of where I was looking because when you shoot in 360-degrees, you’ve got everything covered. I estimate that over 95% of the data I recorded  didn’t make it into the video below.

I didn’t want to produce a 360-degree video. Why? Because they can be hard work for the viewer and we know by now that viewers will lose interest if a video requires any sort of waiting, or effort. What I did is called overcapture which is the process of extracting standard video from a 360-degree video.

Overcapture describes the process of selecting scenes from a 360 video and converting them, flattening the view, to a ‘classic’ video format.

Cyberlink have supported me with free versions of PowerDirector for the last 3 years after my requests for test software. Cyberlink have no editorial control over this post and have never requested a promotional post from me. [Search for PowerDirector because there’s no link to find here.] Read on

Cyberlink introduced their View Designer feature into PowerDirector 15 in late 2016 and I’ve played with it ever since. This process is the future of social video and MoJo video. Mobile Journalism take-up of 360 source is going to be huge. New compression techniques and faster, bonded upload speeds are going to give the editing rooms huge amounts of data to play with and they’ll release the local reporter from camera production duties. No pointing required – this is hold-and-shoot.

Here’s a video I recorded with a simple Ricoh Theta S back in March 2017. I recently produced it into this version. Other versions might follow but feel free to ask questions and to contribute to a discussion below. Is 360-degree video important?

A few weeks ago Intel posted 2 videos featuring Chromebooks and they appear to be part of a bigger campaign to push ARM out of the market. Clearly Intel thinks that there’s something big worth fighting for here. The videos lead to a set of 15 Intel-commissioned reports from Principled Technologies that are all available to the public and listed below.

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At first glance, the Dell XPS 11 has it all. It’s sleek, convertible, and has a 2k screen! It’s one of the thinnest and, dare I say, sexiest, Ultrabooks ever released. But will a novel keyboard design be its Achilles’ heel?

The Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus is here and I’ve been using it for four days. It’s a fantastic little machine with a few things that you’ll have to watch for; Micro ports being one of them, the screen being another. Yes, that 3200×1800 screen has not one, but two down-sides.

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For more details, links images and videos, see the Asus Fonepad information page.

At GDC 2013, Intel announced that their next-gen Haswell graphics will support a new bit of tech called PixelSync as well as DirectX 11.1. PixelSync on Hawell graphics enables two rendering techniques called ASVM and AOIT which can cost a standard GPU up to 80% of it’s performance but runs smoothly with Haswell’s integrated graphics. The developers behind Grid 2 are using Haswell’s new tech to bring graphically rich games to the masses.

The Dell Inspiron 15Z Touch is here for a review (with an Nvidia GT630M GPU) and out of the blue, a Samsung Series 5 Ultra Touch (with SSD) turned up today too so as is the law around these parts, I unboxed them for you. Actually I took 15 minutes to take a good look at both and, ahem, dropped the Samsung Series 5 in the process!

I’ve been doing a lot of testing on the Dell XPS 12 over the last 4 days.

Here’s a 16 minute video of my findings. If you’re interested in Ultrabook Convertibles, take a look at this video because it covers some ergonomic issues as well as a detailed look at the Dell XPS 12. [Specs, images, videos and more info in our database here.]

As always, I welcome discussion below. What do you think of Ultrabook Convertibles and what device impresses you the most?

Here’s the list of Ultrabook Convertibles and here’s the list of dockableUltrabooks – the form factor that won in our recent poll.