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EOSHD tests the new Magic Lantern Unified on 5D Mark II | Andrew Reid | EOSHD
Testing a beta of the next version of the Magic Lantern firmware hack adds high frame rates and HDR:

HDR video alternatives between low ISO / high ISO frames and then you blend them in post. Brilliant feature. On fast motion you can get a bit of ghosting, I recommend a faster shutter speed to avoid that. More on this feature on EOSHD soon.

Eve Hazelton lighting tutorial two: Using lights around the house to add that extra sparkle | Philip Bloom Blog
Eve offers some interesting, low cost, ideas for lighting:

#2 – Fairy lights! It’s Christmas. Don’t try stealing them off the tree just yet, but do go bag yourself some in the sale to keep in your lighting kit. We all know Phil loves a bit of Bokeh! and when you are shooting at a shallow DOF with these lights in the background its easy to see why! The beautiful out of focus discs of light can add colour, interest and of course movement (gentle twinkling of the lights – I’m not talking disco! – eeek!)

I don’t want to be an AE anymore! | Kyra Coffie
| The Avid Assistant Editor's Handbook
While there's no one sure way to make the transition from assistant editor to editor, this post looks at some common aspects of the journey. Most of this applies to any creative work:

Becoming a crunch time editor sorta falls into the luck category because some company is looking for someone at that moment and they can’t find anyone and take a chance on you and you know you can do it, but they don’t know that yet. You impress them with your editing chops and all of a sudden you are an editor. That has happened a few times to people that I know and you just have to be in the right place at the right time.

Five Things Professional Creatives Need in Their Contracts | Ron Dawson
| Dare Dreamer
Contracts? Who needs contracts?! Some interesting advice here; I wish someone had told me about defining revisions years ago; would have saved me a lot of frustration on more than a few projects:

Revisions. How many revisions of the project are included in the original fee? What is the cost for editing time for any changes afterwards? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read on forums or Facebook groups about videographers dealing with clients who want so many changes it will be ten hours worth of work. If you have a paragraph like this already in place, you can refer to it when they start listing all the changes.

GoPro Timelapse Commute to Federal Court | Rick Macomber | Vimeo
Short video shot with a GoPro HERO2 camera:

So I wanted to do a fun test with my GoPro Hero as I was hurdling toward Federal Court on a breaking story of a jury verdict coming down on a man charged with terrorism. It usually takes me about 45 minutes to get to Boston from Salem but with one photo taken at 4 second intervals it only took about 34 seconds! And just like the good ol' days, Federal Court still allows media to pull right up on the sidewalk!

Sony: 4k from Lens to Living Room | John Sciacca | Blog
Sony has the studio, the cameras, the projectors and the TVs; but they really expect us to buy a new Bluray player?!

But, your current Blu-ray player isn’t going to play any of these new 4K discs. When I posed this question to Sony execs at CEDIA, they responded that moving to 4K is beyond a simple firmware kick-in-the-pants upgrade but rather will require getting a new player; just as when someone wanted to add 3D enjoyment capability

After Effects Tuorials
A couple of After Effects Tutorials:
Photoshop and AE: Refine Edge Command and 3-D Motion Control
| Richard Harrington | Blog

In this installment of PS and AE, Richard Harrington shows to use Adobe Photoshop and After Effects together to get great 3D extrusion. He'll take some photos and split them out into 3D space, as well as use the Refine Edge command and the content-aware fill option to quickly build your layers to pop out and move around in the 3D camera.

Isolating a Subject with Roto Brush | Video2Brain
A 12 minute video (it's free, from part of "Adobe After Effects CS5: Learn by Video", which is not free):

Rather than using conventional, tedious rotoscoping, you can apply Roto Brush strokes to a layer to make a background transparent and isolate a foreground subject. You'll also see how to use the Refine Matte properties to improve the result, place the isolated foreground subject over a copy of the original layer, and apply an effect to only the foreground layer to obscure a face with the Mosaic effect.

“Swede Fest” Celebrates Low Budget Film Remakes in Video | Richard Ober
| Videomaker
Be Kind Rewind was a fun movie, though the idea was maybe funnier than some of the actual execution. I'm not sure I'd want to sit through an entire Swede Fest...

Swede Fest was launched in Fresno, California in 2008 and is held there and in Tampa, Florida, every six months. While it is a film festival, it’s like no other film festival you’ve ever seen, or entered. As described on the Swede Fest website: “Swede Fest is the only film festival dedicated to sweded films. A sweded film is a summarized, low-budget recreation of a popular movie, starring you!” The organizers go on to say about sweding that “it’s a great way to promote filmmaking in your community. Anyone can make a swede, it’s easy and a lot of fun!”