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First look of Canon C-300 | Paul Steinberg | Vimeo
C-300 with Directors Commentary
Paul was lucky enough to borrow a C300 from Canon Canada for a weekend and did some shooting with it. The two clips he has posted are essentially the same, but the second one has a commentary track added.

A couple sensitivity shots at the end of the video including a 20,000 ISO shot.

Details for my fellow nerds; Camera was left in 5400K, Canon Cinema mode | 50Mb/s

Lenses: 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, 17-35 f/2.8, 24-70 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8, 300 f/2.8

DSLR Lighting techniques from Eve Hazelton | Eve Hazelton | Philip Bloom Blog
Eve Hazelton, DP of the Underwater Realm, provides an introductory lighting tutorial:

First off – don’t just point a light at your subject and hope that’s enough. You are painting with light here, be a little more subtle! There are a number of problems with this shot – but first off we are going to tackle the lack of contrast between myself and the background…

A R3D Workflow | Chris Marino | Wide Open Camera
A workflow for RED with Premiere. Includes an observation about RED cameras reliability:

It freezes, stalls, crashes, or quits on you in the most unwanted situations. But, when Venus is rising and you have a mild barometric pressure that day, the camera miraculously works like a charm. I had the opportunity to DIT and edit/color a spot this past weekend and would like to share my experience with the workflow I used.

Size Matters: Sky News Beijing Bureau Cmaeraman Andy Portch Reports On A Year With The Panasonic AF101 and GH2 Cameras | Andy Portch | DSLR News Shooter
Andy recounts using these cameras in a number of different settings, and the pros and cons of each:

Shooting a progressive image rather than interlaced looks less newsy. Some prefer this, but I think it makes the footage less ‘real’ for viewers watching our news broadcasts and so for now we have reverted to interlaced shooting. The compact AF101 camera is not suited to every shoot. Long lens stuff is most difficult. I wouldn’t choose it for a live press conference or a shoot over the North Korean border. Juggling lenses is troublesome

INdTV spotlights Rick Macomber & A.T.C. | INd Television | Vimeo
Boston based DP and friend-of-the-blog Rick Macomber gets a nice shout-out from INdTV. They also show the video for group Air Traffic Cotroller which Rick produced at the end of last year: NotesOnVideo: Shooting a Music Video: Air Traffic Controller



Recently in After Effects | Rich Young | ProVideoCoalition
A collection of resources for the After Effect's artist:

Here’s another summary of the last week or so of some news on After Effects tutorials, plug-ins, and scripts—with a new training section on AE Scripts, a new danger in the orange and teal saga, and much more.

Moving Host edit from Final Cut Pro over to Premiere Pro CS5.5 | Danny Lacey | Blog
In this video Danny explains the steps to move a project from Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro without using XML:

In this video blog I’ll take you through the various stages I had to go through to transfer the film over. I couldn’t do this via the usual (and easier) route of XML, for technical reasons, so had to go about it in a slightly different way.
1. Setting up the Final Cut Pro timeline ready for export (video and audio)
2. Exporting the EDL and AIFF files
3. Getting Adobe project ready for import
4. Importing the EDL and AIFF (Audio) files
5. Linking the EDL with the R3D 5K video on the Premiere timeline

Wisdom for Editors from Leading Post-Production Professionals | Danny Greer
| Premiumbeat
Using Twitter, Danny asked others for advice for new or aspiring editors. He then assembled the advice into several categories (Client Relationships, Organization, Storytelling and more):

@Philiphodgetts If you don’t understand: ask! Don’t assume anything – confirm you’ve understood correctly.
@ericosterberg Be someone people can sit in a room with for 10 or 15 hours at a time and you’ll get many freelance calls.

Blackmagic Design Announces New Teranex Prices | Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic just bought Teranex, and now they have announced a huge price drop (from $70,000!) for the Teranex VC100. I still can't afford it; whatever it does!

Orlando, Florida, USA - December 13, 2011 - Blackmagic Design (www.blackmagic-design.com) today announced new prices for its Teranex VC100 dual channel video processor, now at US$19,995.

Pro Maintenance Tools 2.0.4 | Digital Rebellion
This tool for "cleaning up" Final Cut Pro and other NLE files, has been updated. This release added support for Avid Media Composer 6:

The suite contains tools to repair corrupt QuickTime movies, locate corrupt clips within a timeline, diagnose crash logs, manage plugins, repair Final Cut Pro projects, manage autosaves, salvage movie data from corrupt files, and much more.

Loud Television Commercials to Be Limited on Vote by U.S. FCC | Todd Shields
| Bloomberg Businessweek
The FCC brings in regulations against loud commercials; though as someone observed; they'll just find another way to be annoying:

The regulations affecting television broadcasters, cable and satellite companies cleared the commission today on a 4-0 vote at the agency’s monthly meeting in Washington. Commercials can’t be louder than surrounding programming under the rules.

New USB Card Readers Make Transferring Large Amounts of Data a Snap
| Richard Ober | Videomaker
Verbatim releases new card readers, some supporting USB 3.0:

These new readers support a wide variety of memory card formats and are 100% compatible with all USB ports. Verbatim indicates that the USB 3.0 device delivers transfer speeds of up to 5GB/second, while the USB 2.0 version transfers data at a rate of up to 480MB/second.

Sony NEX-7 In-Depth Review | Andy Westlake | DPReview
A pretty positive review of Sony's new NEX-7:

In the flesh, it lives up to almost all of that initial promise. The EVF is excellent, stills image and video quality both superb, and the handling is remarkably good for such a small camera. The use of three dials to control each of the main exposure parameters makes so much sense that it seems odd no-one's done it quite like this before. The fact that these dials can also be used to change a wide range of other settings, cycled through by pressing a button on the top plate, borders on genius. In fact the NEX-7 is so good in so many respects that any criticism almost feels like nit-picking. It's not perfect, but then again no camera is, and its imperfections can generally be overcome.

Behind The Lens: Steven Fierberg, A.S.C. | Debra Kaufman | Creative COW
A look at how Steven got into the business. Includes some useful tips about green screens:

I learned a lot about doing greenscreen when it was on film and had to be perfect, and used that knowledge on Once Upon a Time. Covering up areas of green that aren't in the shot is crucial because green spill is the worst obstacle to a successful greenscreen composite. For the same reason, you want to make the greenscreen as dark as it can possibly be and still be able to pull a matte. As I'd done on other movies, for Once Upon a Time I shot extensive tests of different exposure levels and determined the lowest possible level that would still allow the VFX people to pull a clean matte.

Cutting Yourself Out of a Corner | FilmakerIQ
Several clips from a EditFest NY panel with film editors Thelma Schoonmaker, Mark Livolsi, Sabrina Plisco, David Salter, and Allan Title. They discuss how they solved problems in editing projects:

In Part I, Thelma Schoonmaker discusses her experiences in editing an improvisational scene from “Raging Bull.”

The Explanation for Quantum of Solace from Daniel Craig | Lou Lesko
| Photocine News
I always wondered why Quantum of Solace was so bad compared to Casino Royale. Turns out they lost their writers...