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A quick update on what to expect in the coming months for content and a discussion about some of the challenges and processes involved in the engineering behind cameras; mainly why Canon may have chosen to go with MJPEG for 4k video instead of h.264.

Site Content Update

I’ll try to be brief here since this isn’t really the focus of this podcast. I’ve been on a pretty good pace this year with content creation, 1 to 1.5 articles a week since late March. Unfortunately, that’s going to change at least until early January 2017.

There are two reasons behind this, first is my travel and family schedules, not to mention the holidays will be imposing a lot of time away from the computer and writing. Secondarily, as I’ve been writing content all year, I’ve been pushing off some of the more complicate and time consuming projects. Now I’m getting to the point where I have fewer simpler projects to deal with and have to start tackling the larger ones.

For example, I have 2 camera reviews on my plate; the EOS M3, and the EOS 5D mark IV. Writing camera reviews take me a concerted 2–4 weeks of dedicated work on testing, writing, and editing, never mind doing the photography and videography for them.

Beyond reviews, most of the rest of the content I want to focus on requires building test rigs and doing controlled testing and retesting. This in turn takes time, and then the results of the tests have to be analyzed and written up.

Long story short, I’m expecting my standard written articles (published on Mondays) to drop off significantly until at least mid to late January 2017. Among the bigger articles I’m looking at producing right now are:

• A review of the EOS M3
• A review of the EOS 5D mark IV
• A more in-depth look at rolling shutter effects
• Possibly an in-depth look at metering in continue AF versus one shot on Canon cameras.

As far as the podcast goes, I’m going to try to continue to stick to the every Thursday schedule that I’ve been using. However, even there I expect to have some gaps. Specifically I’m pretty sure I’m going to miss a couple of weeks in late October or early September. In addition to that I’m planning on tacking a step away from the podcast during most of December and early January in an effort to refresh and rebuild the creative juices.

Video Codecs in Cameras

The meat of this podcast is a discussion on some of the potential engineering reasons behind Canon’s choices in video codecs in modern cameras. I’m not even going to attempt to paraphrase it here as it would end up making this a massive post on it’s own right.

Chroma Subsampling on Wikipedia