All the video and AR/VR updates from CES.
🔗 Click here for this episode's links, tools, and tactics
📺 Watch the video version of this episode
All the video and AR/VR updates from CES.
🔗 Click here for this episode's links, tools, and tactics
📺 Watch the video version of this episode
Let's talk about all things video and CES. Welcome to Video Signals. Twice a week, you get a newsletter with 5 links, 3 tools, and 1 tactic. This is the video and audio version of the newsletter. So let's jump into it. So this edition's a little bit different. CES is over. So I kind of went through a bunch of updates that I could find and tried to gather the ones that are the most video-centric/also that talks about virtual reality, augmented reality. And then a couple of just interesting things overall out of CES. There wasn't anything that was like really mind-blowing. In the opening of the email, there is a link to a TikTok that has 34 tools. If you want a quick 90-second highlight reel of interesting things from CES, go check that out. And also, as always, all the links for this, you can get in the newsletter, and on the blog post version in the description on YouTube or in your podcast. All right, so first up, I kind of grouped these by categories, so there's more than like the usual 5 links in this edition. And they're kind of grouped by categories at CES. So the first one is camera stuff at CES. So their most interesting thing was a device from SeeMo that plugs into the HDMI output of your camera. And you plug it into your iPhone or iPad, and it turns your iPhone/iPad into a video monitoring device and a recorder. So it's of a replacement or an alternative to an Atomos Ninja device, where you could have a monitor/recorder. You could do that with your phone or tablet with this device. Camera-wise, there wasn't really anything more interesting than what we talked about last week, the Panasonic S5 Mark II. So there wasn't anything new camera stuff that came out that was more interesting or more useful than that. That said, there was a camera from PTZOptics. They have a new studio camera that you can remotely control, as you can kind of do with all their cameras. But they had a new camera out. There's a 4K webcam from Razer, the Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra, and there's an 8K cinema camera from Bosma, which I have not heard of that company yet. But they did announce an 8K cinema camera in a box format. I believe it was around$3,500. Next grouping of articles was metaverse and AR/VR-related. So there's an article on Microsoft with some updates from them on the metaverse and that they're a bit bullish on the metaverse. There's a VR headset. There's a picture in the link that was more- headset is not really the term. It's more like a headset that wears you. It's a huge monitor that you kind of stick your head in. And so instead of having to wear a headset, you can put your head in this monitor and have an augmented or a virtual reality experience. And there are a couple of augmented reality glasses at CES that look pretty normal, like regular glasses, that you wear, and it's an augmented reality experience. third grouping is just more of a roundup of just interesting things that were not really video-related but just interesting things from CES. So Lenovo had a foldable laptop-tablet concept device that basically was one big foldable screen with a magnetic pop-on keyboard that you can pop on it, or take off so you could either have a really big screen. You could fold it in half, have a tablet. You could take the keyboard on or off, turn it into a regular laptop. So a really kind of clever device that had a lot of flexibility. It was a concept device. So no word if they're actually going to manufacture that. There was a lot of wireless things, like wireless video, wireless HDMI. So there was a TV on display that was both wireless, like it had a battery pack in it. So there was no power cable, there was no HDMI cable. And it could also stick on surfaces automatically. So you just kind of stick it to a wall, and it uses some sort of vacuum technology to just stick there so you don't have to mount anything. I got a link to a roundup that has some interesting devices. One was a telescope that can reduce light pollution using AI. It also had an eyebrow printer, and it had a showcase from Hasbro, whether you can 3D print your face and make custom toys. And then also linked are a couple of roundups of just overall interesting finds from Mashable and The Verge. Okay. So that's it for CES stuff. Yeah, like I said, I didn't really find anything super interesting or mind-blowing from it. Okay. So next up, fourth link, we've got Mastadon, the Twitter alternative everyone's going to. They've seen a 30% drop in active users over the last month or so. So definitely got a lot of hype when Twitter was going crazy. Not that Twitter isn't still going crazy. Less so now. But they got a lot of hype but not really getting as much traffic as it used to be. You can kind of see how that happens. Like everyone goes to the new platform, checks it out, makes an account. I made an account, never posted anything and have never been back to Mastadon. Also, Twitter did not blow up, Twitter did not disappear. It's still there. So for now, I think it was a lot of craziness and buzz from what was going on with Elon Musk on Twitter, and it's maybe calmed down a little bit, though, obviously, anything could change at any point. And last link, in one of last week's editions, I mentioned that TikTok was rolling out some features that supported longer-form videos, where you could play your video full screen if it was a horizontal video. And it was definitely another tactic to try to take some of YouTube's space of having long-form video. So they released another feature that also helps with long-form video, where now if you tap and scrub the timeline through long video, you can see a little thumbnail image on the bottom, so you can get a better sense if you're scrubbing through video of like where you're stopping and scrubbing. They didn't have that before. That's kind of standard on YouTube. They didn't have that before. So they just added it. All right. Now, let's talk about our 3 tools. First tool, we got Runway. This is a web-based video editor with AI tools. So it's got some AI functions like image prompts, where you could type in and get an image. It could also expand an image. So if you put in an image that you have and you need to make it like bigger, it can use AI to generate what it thinks would be the wider version of that image. And then it could also do object tracking and removal using AI. Next tool we've got is Sked Social. So this is a social media scheduling tool, but it has a lot more Instagram-specific features. And they're all much more focused around Instagram. And third tool is Turbo Ad Finder. So you can search and save Facebook ads and kind of scout out, see what's working, spy on other competitors, see what they're using, and then save and kind of build groupings of those ads. I will say, be sure to check out Facebook's ad library, which is free. I think Turbo Ad Finder has a couple other features, but Facebook's ad library is free, where you could search and see what ads other companies are running. All right. And lastly, we've got our 1 tactic. So this one, we got a list of 10 frameworks where you can take 1 idea and run it through each of these frameworks and come up with more ideas, at least 10 other ideas. I'd say you can come up with a lot more ideas. So the 10 frameworks are: 1 an introduction 2 a deep dive 3 a how-to or a process 4 a curation or lists 5 analytical or data 6 observation or contrarian 7 X vs. Y 8 problem, product, solution 9 news or a topical 10 people or a case study So as an example, if I wanted to do videos about Final Cut Pro, I could apply the framework with an introduction. And it could be"An Introduction to Final Cut Pro". For a deep dive, it would be"J and L Cuts in Final Cut Pro". Something that's a bit more specific. For how-to/process, obviously, Final Cut Pro, that's an easy one to come up with, but"How to Edit with Proxies in Final Cut Pro", or getting to something specific with what we're doing. Curation Lists,"5 Tips to Speed Up Editing in Final Cut Pro". Analytical Data,"Best Export Settings for Final Cut Pro". So you can see, it goes on and on. X vs. Y,"Final Cut Pro vs. Premiere." So you can kind of take any of these frameworks, apply it to whatever topic you're doing, and use that as a launchpad to come up with more ideas. And that is it for this issue of Video Signals. As always, wherever you're watching, please hit the subscribe button. Or wherever you're watching or listening, please hit the subscribe button. Let me know what you think of this. You can either reply in the email or hit me up on Twitter. I am@C47 on Twitter. Thanks for watching or listening. I'll see you in the next Signal.