So you may be noticing how almost every episode of the show looks a little different at the start. Sometimes the video introduction is good. Sometimes it is bad. Most of the time it is somewhere in between. I've become obsessed with getting it right. The video here shows 6 variations. Watch at the end when all 6 are side-by-side in a loop. I'm not done yet. Some of those episodes are yet to go up, as the whole Catalina release date has my whole schedule in chaos. But here is a run-down of these 6 variations and what is working and what is not. First, we have the <strong>Logitech Brio</strong>, a 4K (1080p really) webcam. I've been using this for a long while, but never happy with it. Look how washed out my skin is. The pixels are all mushy. I must do better. Next, I tried to use my trusty DSLR, my <strong>Canon T3i</strong>. It does 1080p and this may be the best of the bunch. The problem is there is no way to stream that into my Mac. I have to record to the SD card, film everything as best I can, then transfer via the card to the Mac. Doing it this way is a pain and while the image quality is great, the content will suffer as production never goes smoothly. Just to try it, I used my <strong>iPhone X</strong>. This was before I got the iPhone 11 Pro Max, but I don't think that would make a difference. The quality is definitely better than the Brio, but not as good as the T3i. And I have to record to the phone and transfer, which is a pain. OK, so I heard about the Elgato Cam Link 4K. It is a little USB device that takes HDMI in one end and outputs USB3 on the other. It turns any HDMI signal into a webcam. Yes! I wanted this for so long. Previous solutions just never worked. But what camera do I get to work with the Cam Link? My T3i can only be convinced to output sub-1080 on HDMI. I'd have to buy something new. I figured out the perfect camera, but stopped short of buying it because of the price. More on that later. Instead I got the <strong>Canon R800</strong>, a little camcorder that outputs 1080p. It only cost me $159. But my first attempt at using it was very disappointing. It looks almost as bad as the Brio! However, there are lots of YouTubers using the R800 and their video looks good. And Elgato even has a test video where they use it, and that looks good. So I played with the settings and found if I turned off "Auto" and switched to "<strong>Highlights</strong>" it looks much better. It actually looks 1080p, unlike the first try. But the other issue may have been my lighting. I have a lot of little lights. I keep adding more to try to get it better. I decided to spend $60 and get some real studio lights. Big ones. That seems to help. So the last example is the R800 with <strong>better lighting</strong>. I'm still not super happy with it. If I have more lights, why does it kinda look dark? I think the key may be in the settings. I'll keep playing with it. It could also be that "highlights" mode is working with the bright white shirt in the example. Maybe I need to adjust the exposure in some way that I haven't discovered yet. Oh, so I mentioned my ideal camera. I figured out that the <strong>Sony A6400</strong> is probably what I should get . It is a mirrorless camera with a 4K video mode that works well with the Cam Link. Plus I think the reason the T3i works so well, even though it is the oldest piece of equipment here, is just the basics: lens size and sensor size. It simply has a bigger lens and larger sensor = more light + larger sensor pixels. At least that is my theory. So the A6400 would be a modern version of that capable of pumping 4K through the Cam Link and making things look ultra-professional. But at a cost: $1,000. So I'm going to stick with the R800 for now and plan on an A6400 for later. The A6400 is all over YouTube and being hailed by many as the perfect "YouTube camera," which fits with how I want to use it.
iPadOS (AKA iOS 13) brings a ton of new features to your iPad and makes it behave more like a Mac. You can now switch between multiple slideover windows and have windows from the same app in a slideover. You can select, copy, paste and undo more easily when typing text. The Home screen can include both app icons and the Today widgets at the same time. You can swipe-type in a floating single-finger keyboard, add fonts, and use a column view and other new functions in the Files app.
A little-mentioned feature of iOS 13 and iPadOS is the ability to apply the same effects to videos as you can to photos. You can easily adjust light, colors, cropping, rotation and apply filters to entire videos, right in the Camera and Photos apps.
Couldn't wait to get outside and test out the 3 cameras and what they can do. Also: night mode.
Whether you just got a new iPhone 11, or you updated your old iPhone to iOS 13, you should take a look at these 10 new features. Several are settings you should turn on, such as low data mode for cellular, silence unknown callers and one that removes old Safari tabs automatically. You can also use video filters, swipe typing, new text gestures, Dark Mode and more.
So today is iOS 13 day. The update should be available within hours. One new feature of iOS 13 is Look Around. This is Apple's answer to Google Maps Street View, which is the only reason I use Google Maps sometimes. So it will be nice to have it in Apple Maps. To start, it is only available in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Honolulu. But more cities should roll out rapidly over the next few months. Perhaps Apple already has the data ready to go, but wants to see what happens with real iOS 13 users in those three locations for a few weeks. It is easy to jump to those cities and use the feature. Take a look and see how well it works.
Apple Arcade is the new subscription service where you can download and play a collection of games on your iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and Mac. The service has a wide variety of games, from arcade to puzzle to strategy and more. Learn about the basics of the service and take a look at four games available today: Sayonara Wild Hearts, Mini Motorways, Sneaky Sasquatch and Red Reign. You can play using the touch screen on your device, keyboard on your Mac or a game controller on any device.
If you use subtitles or captions under videos, you can set the style in most cases using a setting in System Preferences, Accessibility, Captions. You can choose from four styles: Transparent Background, Classic, Large Text or Outline. This works in iTunes and the new Catalina TV app and other places like QuickTime Player, provided the video you are watching has a subtitles or captions track.
Quick Actions allow you to do thing with files in the Finder by just clicking on a single button. You can use some preset Quick Actions or build your own in Automator. In this video, we'll look at two examples. The first will create a backup archive of a file. The second will speak the contents of a text file.
When you save or open a file in an app on the Mac, you get a dialog box with several buttons. You can use keyboard shortcuts inside that dialog to cancel, perform the default action, and do other things. You can choose a location using the keyboard, either with a single shortcut or by specifying a path. You can also navigate to any of the buttons using the tab key and spacebar.
You can create multi-column documents in Pages in either word processing or page layout mode. Using multiple columns in word processing is just a matter of a single setting, but you can adjust the columns as you wish. You can even have sections that use different numbers of columns. Page layout documents use individual text boxes that can be linked to form versatile columns. There are many reasons to use columns, such as to create a newspaper-style layout, wrap text around images, or fit long lists on to few pages.
Experienced Mac users know how to unleash the power of macOS and apps by using a variety of basic techniques. Learn how to master a new app by exploring the menu. Interact with objects using context menus. Customize your toolbars to reveal hidden buttons.
If you see your Macintosh HD and other drives on your Desktop, you can remove those to reduce clutter. Just go to Finder, Preferences and then click on the General tab at the top. Then you can uncheck Hard disks and External disks. It is easy to get to the top level of these drives already by just using Go, Computer in the Finder.
If you need to encrypt some files so the only way to acess them would be with a password, you can use one of two methods. By using Disk Utility you can create read/write disk images that can be opened on any Mac. But if you need to send some files to another person, you may want to instead use the Terminal to create an encrypted ZIP achive that will work on Windows as well.
You know how you can take a photo and apply filters, lighting and color adjustments, cropping and do other things? Well, in iOS 13 you can do that with <strong>video</strong>. This seems like the sort of feature that we shouldn't even have until 2024 or something. It is right there in the Photos app and it just works. We don't even have this on the Mac in the Photos app. Super cool! I love it.
