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A Year with Large Sensor cameras | Philip Johnston | HD Warrior
Philip looks back at the large sensor cameras he's encountered this year, starting with the Panasonic AG-AF100:
My recommendation is to get a prime lens that is f1.4-f1.2 for producing interviews and don’t be scared to give the subject breathing space by shutting down the iris to f2.8 there is nothing worse than a person moving in and out of focus during an interview, 9 times out of 10 you won’t know that till you have started the interview wether they sway back and forth.


F65 "Behind the Scenes" | Sony
A five minute video on the F65, with an interview with Curtis Clark, ASC.

The Sony F65 | Video4
This F65 dealer has put together an information page on the camera. You can find most of this on Sony's page, but it's all in one place here:
Some camera manufacturers measure their sensor resolution on the basis of “K,” a unit that equates to 1024 horizontal photosites. So a 4K sensor might have 4096 photosites on every row. Unfortunately, the actual resolution is less because these sensors use Bayer color filter arrays. This design leverages two facts. First, the human eye is more sensitive to black & white (luminance) detail than to color detail. Second, the largest component of luminance is Green. In the Bayer array, 50% of the photosites detect Green light only, 25% detect Blue only and the remaining 25% detect Red only.


No Budget Porsche Spec Ad BTS | Alex Walker | Wide Open Camera
Alex explains how he got together some people to shoot a no budget spec ad:
I wasn’t about to just get some shots of the car driving by with a tripod and call it a day. For awhile now I’ve been really wanting to get a jib and put it in the back of a truck for some almost helicopter like moving jib shots. Those types of shots are usually reserved for folks with a budget so I felt that if we could accomplish these shots with no money it would appear as if we were a little more well funded. Trouble was I don’t own a jib and I had no time or budget. Solution? Twitter contacts. I’ve always felt that Twitter has been instrumental in getting me to where I am today but never has it felt as tangible as when this project fell together.


New Rules for the Ways We Watch | David Carr | New York Times
Carr, the media reporter for The New York Times, looks at the future of video:
So-called virtual operators — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google and Apple — have none of the legacy or infrastructure costs. Google has unleashed $100 million to seed new programming on YouTube, and Netflix is financing a series by the director David Fincher. That gaming device your children are playing with? That too is a network in the making. Traditional networks and cable providers have the content, but if they hold on too tight, they will miss out on vast new avenues of distribution and revenue.


Production Video #5: On Location | The Hobbit | Blog
Peter Jackson has been posting video blogs about The Hobbit. This one is about logistics for location shooting.



The Real Wizards of Oz Deserve Better Treatment | Eric Roth | Huffington Post
Interested in getting into the world of Visual Effects? This might turn you off it:
But for the artists who create the visuals and help tell the stories we all want to see, life and working conditions are often not a happy Hollywood fantasy. Here's a dirty secret no one in the industry wants to talk about: visual effects artists and professionals are the only major group of entertainment industry workers who are not protected from labor abuses or provided with health insurance and other benefits through collective bargaining. That's just not right.


New Xeon CPU Reported to Be Amazingly Fast | Hardmac
If Apple ever makes a new MacPro, it could be really fast...
According to such information, the new Xeon E5-2690 clocked at 2.9 GHz would be 1.5 to 2.2 fold faster than the fastest current Xeon X5690 clocked at 3.46 GHz.


Edward Burns, Director of Newlyweds, on the Changing Face of Indie Film Distribution | Edward Burns | The Daily Beast
Burns has been pioneering new ways to produce and finance low-budget independent movies:
Sixteen years ago as a film student at Hunter College, I made my first movie—The Brothers McMullen. While film technology has made rapid leaps and bounds since then—I shot my most recent film on a Canon 5D—the method of exhibiting indie films theatrically has seen little change over the years, and it is still as difficult as ever for independent filmmakers to reach a sizable audience in movie theaters.




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