we hope you all know that october is breast cancer awareness month. in collaboration with our associates at social media marketing shop attention pr (see the mattel ken post) and their client esteé lauder, the visual mercenary group helped launch their breast cancer awareness facebook application. the app was the hub of a global banner campaign - which we also produced - that tied into a wordpress administrative back end. it’s pretty cool seeing pledges in many languages and alphabets.

the bca facebook app

this of course was all part of the bigger ‘connect, communicate, conquer‘ campaign. this latest online strategy brought together eleven of the world’s top bloggers -  including Jane Cuoto, Sharon Cuoto and Audrey McClelland (Mom Generations); Gala Darling (Gala Darling); Laura Kenny (AOL StyleList); Wendy Lam (Nitrolicious); Peter Shankman (Shankman); Amanda Steinberg (DailyWorth); Rachel Sklar (mediaITE, shown above); Renee Styler (Good Enough Mother) and Annie Tomlin (Bella Sugar) - to help bring breast cancer awareness to the online forefront.

so go ahead and check out the app and the great photography. the only pledge you need to make is to yourselves to maintain awareness and good health.

the panasonic ag-3da1 3d camera

so craig and i (along with rob from macnrg) were at the panasonic intensive at the entertainment technology expo last week and had an up close and personal look at the new 3d camera from panasonic: the ag-3da1. let me say, it’s a pretty impressive looking camera. this is the first digicam of it’s kind incorporating a dual lens system in a single housing. at $21,000 it’s not cheap, but then again it’s not that expensive either - if you’re starting from scratch. panasonic of course recommends you get it with their bt-3dl2550 monitor, which will add another 10k to your receipt.

the ag-3da1 in action at the entertainment technology expo

of course the one major benefit of having two lenses in a single housing - as opposed to two cameras mounted on a 3d rig - is that it inherently removes certain factors for error. since the two lenses function as one there is no need to check separately for 1) vertical deviation, 2) angle deviation, 3) difference in brightness and color, and 4) rotation. the two integrated optical systems of the ag-3da1 eliminate the need for those manual adjustments, because they’re performed entirely inside the camera recorder.

the camera has two 1/4 inch sensors (the rep said that had they gone with bigger ones the price would have been dramatically higher) and the codec in use is the mpg-4 avc/h2.64 - which works great with apple. in the side by side visual test they showed comparing to the mpeg-2 hdv codec, the winner was clearly the avch, but i’d love to try that myself too. i know we’ve seen artifacts with the hdv even shooting with larger ccd’s.

the ag-3da1 in action at the entertainment technology expo

in our little 15 minute test, we found the camera to be very easy to use. basically the major things we had to worry about was parallax, convergence and divergence - along with composition, focus and exposure of course - but between the camera and monitor/glasses station that panasonic had set up, it seemed pretty painless. now if we only had a spare $32,000 somewhere…