Canon has announced that it plans to offer a firmware upgrade for its EOS 1-D C that will add support for 25p recording at the camera’s maximum 4K resolution. Canon add that this is in response to requests for the feature from European shooters. The EOS 1D-C captures 4K (4096x2160) video using 8-bit motion JPEG compression and has the ability to also simultaneously output an uncompressed Full HD (1920x1080) YCbCr 4:2:2 signal to an external recorder, via its HDMI terminal. Full HD video can also be recorded directly to CF cards, at frame rates of up to 1080/60p.

Canon have, of late, tended to “advertise” their firmware updates in advance, so please don’t try to click-through to upgrade yet. This one will only be available in April but will be free to EOS 1-D C owners.

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Wetpixel member and equipment designer Andrej Belic has kindly agreed to share his thoughts and images from the recent BOOT Show. The show, held in Düsseldorf, Germany, attracted 226,300 visitors in total, 45,000 of which came from 50 countries other than Germany. There was a total of 1,674 exhibitors from 63 nations showing their products. Andrej was able to visit all the major housing manufactures and distributors, and also found time to give us a quick guide to the plethora of new rebreathers that have come to market recently.

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The Marine Mammal Science journal has posted an abstract of a paper that shows a group of dolphins trying to collaborate in order to support a dying member of their pod. The Korean researchers witnessed the event in the East Sea off the coast of Ulsan, in South Korea. During a survey, they saw 10 long-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus capensis) trying to save the life of another adult by forming a raft to keep the stricken dolphin afloat. One of the rescuers actually turned over to better support the ailing dolphin, while another used its beak to try to keep the dying dolphin’s head up. These behaviors have been seen in individual animals in the past, but never as a collaborative exercise.

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The goal of bringing 4k video to future broadband networks, while also making streaming HD video available even on bandwidth-constrained mobile networks, has come one step closer with adoption of the H.265 standard, also informally known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), by the ITU yesterday. The new standard will enable publishers to stream 1080p video with about half as many bits as required today which could also mean that in places where there is good broadband connectivity, 4K streaming could be possible with connection speeds of 20-30 Mbps of bandwidth. A team within the ITU continues to work on developments within HEVC including support for 12-bit video, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 chroma formats, scalable video coding as well as stereoscopic and 3D video coding.

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CBS News has aired an interview with Edith Widder, oceanographer and marine biologist, who was part of the team that captured the first footage of giant squid in their natural habitat off the coast of Japan. In it, she talks about the techniques that allowed the team to get the groundbreaking footage:

“Unfortunately, we do go out with remote-operated vehicles that do scare them away, but the submersibles and the camera system I was using are unobtrusive and I think that will allow us to see a whole lot more. … We were exploring in a different way than ever before,” she said. “In the past we were scaring them away. (Our team) used a red light that they can’t see and an optical lure to draw them in towards us.”

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