Alternative Apple iPhone 3GS headphones / earphones as recomended by twitter followers

zbud_blackUPDATE 26.02.12:  I thought I’d update this post as there are a few more headphones on the market that will work as per the Apple iPhone headphones (and cheaper) for the 4 and the 4s. I had a look in my local tescos the other day as I have lost another set of Apple headphones and both sets of Addidas Seinheisers are out of action.

I bought these and they work perfectly KIT Sound iPhone Stereo Earphones with Microphonebut also while I was there I saw these Bliss Black Metallic Earphones available in various colours and for those (like me) who loses or breaks them all the time, pretty cheap to.

Please add anything else you find to the comments on this page to keep it up to date, thanks!

After not having too much success with a google search for an alternative replacement set of headphones for my iPhone 3GS I turned to Twitter for some advice. I got quite a response so I thought I would share the tweet recommendations. Note: I have popped into a reseller and they did tell me that apple would replace a faulty set still within the 1 year manufacturers warranty.

Apple [Link]
Replacements for the headphones that ship with the iPhone £21 and the in ear earphones are £59 on the Apple site.
Z.buds [Link]
These look awesome, durable, not to expensive and all the iPhone functions.
Griffin [Link]
SmartTalk and TuneBuds Mobile. Two solutions and not too expensive, both do not have volume control though.
Bose ipod buds [Link]
A little more expensive, in line microphone but no volume.
Klipse Image S4i Earphones [Link]
Looks like a good set of headphones, a little expensive although comes with a 2 year warranty, microphone but as far as I can see no volume control.
Etymotic hf2 Hands-free Headset [Link]
Again going for the sound quality higher end of the market, a little expensive mic, control, but again no volume.
JVC HA-KX100 [Link]
Affordable, mic and control but again no in line volume.

The GfK Insights Calendar – Crambed full of Insights, Infographics, Animations and Research Findings

GfK Insights Calendar

This year we have produced calendar review of the last year. It’s packed full of all the Infographics, Animated Videos and Charts we have been producing to support our PR and blog outputs. Have a browse and feel share the Insights.

We now have expanded the in house video production team with the addition of a motion graphics and 3D specialist so there’s some really exciting visuals and client deliverables just around the corner, all in a whole new league than any of our competitors.

There will be plenty more to come next year so watch this space.

 

How data visualisation techniques like Infographics, video, audio can help make sense of Information

For those who regularly visit my blog you will know that I run a small in house video production service for a very large research company. We have been using Infographics and illustration for some time in order to make better sense of information for client deliverables. It is clear that data and information can be simplified but often it still requires a degree of deciphering in order to fully consume. In the past the use of video has brought to life a simple verbatim or a timed reveal of a chart with a voice over lead the viewers eye around the visual. We now look to combining these techniques in order to produce the most powerful client deliverables through illustration, animation, audio and video.

On the GfK TechTalk blog we have begun a series of posts in order to show off these approaches, starting with an Information Overload graphic. Watch this space to find out what we are up to.

Creating a Mac for Video production – Your software requirements

I’ll quickly touch on Hardware as i have had various builds with quite different results. I have 3 different builds on 4 machines, 2 MacPros with 1TB hard drives and 2 x Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz, 10 GB of RAM. Another MacPro with a HD and a 1TB raided, this is an extremely efficient machine as the software is running on the system drive and the video projects running from from the raid. Then 4th and currently my edit suite is a 2.26 GHz, Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 16 GB of RAM with a 500GB hard drive, faster access speed to the drive and I have never had any issues while editing, although the sometimes windows in the VMware runs a bit slow and the HD sounds like its going wild but that could be the configuration.

Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut pro? That is the question. I shall be honest, I was always a Final Cut person up until my latest role. The main reason we switched to Adobe was for better integration with the designer who already existed in the company. In the early stages there were problems, mainly with the quality of exports but that has greatly improved. If you could export to WMV on the Mac version that would be great! The workflow of Premiere is very efficient but I have not used Final Cut Pro for a while. You decide!

First things first, get Firefox web browser installed. I’ve not had too much experience with other browsers and video but firefox plugins seem to be a bit more readily available. Once installed and you’ve punched through your proxy (if you have one) install Video DownloadHelper. I’m often asked to download videos from various site such as YouTube for use in presentations and this plugin makes it real simple! If there’s something on the page that you can download the icon lights up and its a couple of clips to download.

Upgrade your QuickTime to QuickTime Pro, it’s essential and despite my opinion that it is not as good as it used to be, you won’t get away without it.

Get some codecs installed, Perian is my first choice and makes sure you can open many awkward video files. If your source files come from all over the place then get the MPEG-2 plugin for QuickTime installed, people still bring me mpg files and it’s not worth the time or effort sourcing another software (should come as standard) Get Flip4Mac on there, go all out and get the HD version you’re only going to upgrade it later otherwise. I’ve never had any playback issues in QuickTime and the output options are very flexible and unlike a few years ago WMVs are pretty good quality and a small file size.

I always have VLC installed, it allows us to view back .mts files shot on our camera kits without the need to bring them ink the edit, great for logging and an area QuickTime falls short. Get to grips with the export options, sometimes gets you out of a scrape when files don’t play on other players.

I use Handbrake for ripping DVDs into an editable format, despite trying to single handily educate the world of focus group facilities with the understanding that DVD recordings are output and they should get up to speed with recording techniques, I still get footage from all over the world as a DVD. We have however built our own viewing facility that can record direct to drive with VoIP access to the respondent area.

I also install DivX and DivX converter for playback and conversion, some recorders record in divx so it’s quite handy. Also allows you to open in QuickTime, do a quick save as and drag and drop the file into your edit.

I recently added the free Mpeg Streamclip when I had some files from Japan that I could not open in QuickTime this saved my bacon, there’s loads of nifty little programs like this and the recent addition of the Apple App store for your desktop makes it a lot easier to browse apps that the old website.

As I mentioned, I have had 2 edit suites hard drives die beyond recovery recently which resulted in a loss of work despite having Back up solution. Make sure you have a good backup solution in place, preferably with support.

Introduction to Adobe Encore and authoring a DVD

The best way I found to get a handle on Adobe Encore was to send a project to it from Premiere Pro using Adobe Dynamic link. This sets up the majority of project setting from premiere and allows you to see the Encore interface populated rather than a blank canvas.

In Premiere Pro make sure your projects sequence is selected in the timeline. Then choose File > Adobe Dynamic Link > Send to Encore. This will send the project to Encore and create a Encore project.

Once in Adobe Encore you will get to grips with the interface far quicker being able to see the disc, the video and some basic instructions. When you check the project you will get some basic error see here,

Title Remote Not Set
End Action Not set

Quick guide to the windows that make up Encore. For the purpose of this demonstration I have flicked all the tabs / windows to those you will mainly use in the first stages of using Adobe Encore.

Here’s some quickfire settings to get something output to video nice and quickly.

Open Encore

New Project Settings

Trans coding Options

Once you have set up your project you will need to select the video you would like to author a DVD with. Open the folder in Finder containing the video, then under the Flow Chart tab drag and drop your video to the disc image, set your end action and title remote as above and you are set to build the disc.

How to convert powerpoint presentations into video with free software

I have had a lot of requests for the best way and a simple solution for outputting a Powerpoint presentation to video and what are the limitations in doing so. A few suggestions I had heard in the past was using Picasa, Accoolsoft PPT or Slideshare, I didn’t have much luck with Picassa or Slideshare so I won’t write about them. Accoolsoft on the other hand produced some very nice results and even allowed you maintain transitions, animations with slides and to embed videos in the presentation.

Usually I would do this in the edit suite, PNG a deck of slides and time the transitions to a voice over, sometimes this is not necassary it merely needs to change slide every 5 or so seconds.

Doesn’t like fade to blacks on the video
Doesn’t like the when clicked option when embedding a video into a slide.
Doesn’t like embedded videos when things are deep on a drive.

Procedure

Homepage for the Acoolsoft PPT to Video software, Click add in the bottom left hand corner of the page.

Navigate to the PPT file you wish to convert to video

The PPT is added to the Que click Next to continue

Select the format for the video output file. Quicktime (.mov) is a generic format that will playback in quicktime free player.

Many other formats are available and the paid version of the software opens this up further.

You can also refine the settings for the output video as below.


Resolution = Frame size for the video
Encoder = Video codec
Frame rate = frames per second
Bitrate = increased bitrate improves quality but also increases file size.

Set the transition time between the slides

Advanced settings allows you to alter layout and add background music.

Select the location for the output video and click Start

Digitizing your DVD / Film collection, software, settings, exports, codecs, file size etc

The other day a colleague, Ryan Garner! you may have heard him on Simon Mayos drive talking about iPad sales (tech expert) no big deal! said he was thinking about digitizing his DVD collection. It got me thinking, it’s about that time that hard drives are so big and compression routines so efficient that we all should start to think about having our films as files. I have a few DVDs as digital downloads and a few I have converted for my iPhone but with 160gb of ps3 hard drive sitting there doing nothing why haven’t I taken the iPod mentality with my DVDs and got them all on a hard drive. So it’s testing time.

I started by looking at the old iPod exports I had done a few years ago but I was after something that wouldn’t look to degraded on a 40″ TV. I remembered having a download available with my x-men origins DVD I bought recently and so download it to look at the file. It was slightly bigger at 8 x but still what would this look like on a 1080 tv, I was optimistic as it looked pretty good in full screen on the MacBook. So the next step was to play it from the PlayStation. No transfer need, see Media Streaming from an Apple computer to a PS3 using MediaLink….  No worries, here to help!

So, next to look at some software, exports settings and codecs. My preferred DVD ripping software is Handbrake on the mac but have a search on Softpedia or Download.com if you are using a PC for alternatives. Handbrake has a few export presets so I tried a few to compare results. When these exports are played back on laptop there isn’t much in the quality although the files sizes can differ dramatically. I exported another targeting the file size to around 700 mb, this produces a very low bitrate and a noticeable reduction in quality. I next produced an export with a targeted bitrate. Many video files on my laptop had a bitrate of around 1500 so I thought it would be interesting to see what file size this produced. The results were a medium size file, approximate 2 gig and a good quality. The test would be though which files I could play through the TV and still be happy with the quality. My opinion is that if you are after DVD quality videos you need to target the 4 to 5 gig file size with minimum compression. If you are happy to notice slight pixelation in your image and funnily enough this occurs on the flat chunks of colour then go-ahead and start reducing the bitrate.

There Is other software and codecs that do the same sort of job, DIVX has a very good compression routine and produces small file sizes in high quality, just make sure you check what file extensions your devices can playback before you compress your entire collection.

Using Video in Market Research, Reporting and Presentations

I have written a guest post on the GfK Techtalk blog on the many ways in which we are using video in a Market Research and what the future might hold. obviously not given away all the juicy bits but hopefully its a good read.
p style=text-align: left;a title=Innovations in video improve business decision making href=http://www.gfktechtalk.com/2010/08/26/innovations-in-video-improve-business-decision-making/ target=_blankRead it here/a/p
p style=text-align: center;
object classid=clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000 width=480 height=385 codebase=http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0param name=allowFullScreen value=true /param name=allowscriptaccess value=always /param name=src value=http://www.youtube.com/v/jH5fmL3sJrg?fs=1hl=en_GB /param name=allowfullscreen value=true /embed type=application/x-shockwave-flash width=480 height=385 src=http://www.youtube.com/v/jH5fmL3sJrg?fs=1hl=en_GB allowscriptaccess=always allowfullscreen=true/embed/object

p style=text-align: left;Also see the a title=GfK FilmWorks Youtube Channel href=http://www.youtube.com/user/GfKFilmWorks target=_blankGfK FilmWorks YouTube Channel/a/p
p style=text-align: center;code /code/p

Saving down graphics from powerpoint as a picture, png or jpg

I didn’t realise that this was an unknown to many but often there is a need to pull things out of PowerPoint for alternative uses rather than put them in. This is often the case for me when produce video reports where the findings have been visualised in PowerPoint. So, it’s as simple as this, File > Save As > under the naming form fill change the drop down to png or jpg and hit save, you will then be prompted current slide or every slide, choose every slide and each slide in he deck will be saved as a separate picture or image.

If you just require an element if the slide you can right click and save as image in much the same way.

Top tip,
If your output proposed use is a higher quality than the resolution of the ppt you can often scale up your deck to A3, any vector graphics will be re sized and the quality of the output increased. Go, File > Page Setup and adjust the page accordingly.

Should we be filming in HD for corporate / presentation video output?

The time has come to make the decision. HD or not to HD? And for those still getting mixed up, HD is High Definition and HDD is Hard Disc Drive, be sure you know the difference when you are purchasing you video camera! For a few reasons I have still been shooting in SD (Standard Definition) for corporate and by corporate I mean presentation video output (video for PowerPoint etc) File size being one, especially as I have footage backed up from my edit suite to a server daily and then an off site tape backup. Also, shooting to DV tapes provided a simple short term backup solution. Many of the videos produced are also not to be viewed on a television but accompanying information on a PowerPoint slide, so is often shown at in smaller dimension.

The thing is, more and more, stand alone presentation pieces are played on the desktop or from an online portal with the ability to display at full screen, now obviously standard definition is 720 x 576 against most monitor screen dimensions being at least 1024 px wide, in which case a SD is stretched to fit the screen causing massive pixelation.

A point to note that file compression is much better than it used to be so producing HD videos as mpeg4 with a h.264 codec has less file size implications and doesn’t cause your machine to grind to a halt when you try and play it back on desktop software.

My final point in my HD or not to HD argument that is fast leaning toward A HD win is that of Hardware. Even prosumer HDD cameras like the Everio have moved away from mere TV playback through your AV cables but not record in edit suite friendly formats. This means, drag and drop functionality that saves hours on your production work flow and produces better output.