Notes On Video

I only just saw this, but Google - and others - have been celebrating Lucille Ball's centennial birthday. Ball had a long career that began in film, but she was best known for her television work. She also was the first woman to run a major television studio, but most importantly, she was my grandmother's favorite comedian. Lucille Ball Remembered by Hollywood | The Hollywood Reporter Lucille Ball | Wikipedia

5D Mark III, 1D Mark V & 1Ds Mark IV Tidbits | CanonRumors It definitely continues to be a hot time for rumors, with Canon getting into the game now. CanonRumors reports that 5D Mark III 's are "in the wild and an announcement is imminent." It seems like only three days ago they were saying that the 5D Mark II replacement would be coming out in Quarter 1, 2012. Oh wait! It was three days ago . They also print " A Very Detailed 1D Mark V Spec List [CR1] " which lists the video as H.264 and having HDMI out. Which seems to squash hopes for a higher compression rate (like MPEG2 @ 50 Mbps like the pro camcorders Canon produce) or some sort of RAW or HD-SDI output. It does list 1920 x 1080 at 120, 60, 30, 25, 24 fps, and those high frame rates could be interesting. Sony HXR-NX70 Firmware Upgrade coming early 2012 | Philip Johnston | HD Warrior Philip reports that Sony will have a firmware update for the small, rugged HXR-NX70 early next year that wi...

SonyAlphaRumors continues it's stream of rumors on the upcoming Sony announcements. The latest stories bring a short user report of the NEX-7 and the Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 lens. It's unclear whether the lens is an E- or A- mount. I am assuming it will be an A- mount, but maybe not. Even more exciting is additional details about the NEX-VG20 which will have a 16 mega-pixel sensor, support 60p/60i/24p (no 30p?), and will have audio level controls.

(SR5) The video revolution is coming: A77/NEX-7/VG20 with FullHD 60p and full manual controls! | SonyAlphaRumors SonyAlphaRumors continues it's run of news about impending updates to Sony's camera lineup, this time with the news that the new DSLR A77 , mirror-less mini Nex-7 and the large sensor consumer camcorder NEX-VG20 will support the AVCHD 2.0 standard: This means that all those camera (!) will be able to record FullHD videos in 1080 60/50/25/24p at 28Mbit/s! It is also reported that the cameras will have full manual controls while recording video. Now if the NEX-VG20 just had manual audio controls too, it would be a pretty awesome little camera! Apple updates QuickTime security for Leopard, Windows | Philip Michaels | Macworld Apple posts QuickTime 7.7 , which is a security update for Leopard users. They have also posted QuickTime 7.7 for Windows for users running Windows XP (SP2 or later), Vista , or Windows 7 . Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 L USM fisheye ...

The  Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM Fisheye Ultra-Wide Zoom Lens [$1,499] is in stock at  B & H [they say they have limited quantities] No one seems to have reviewed it yet, though here is a write-up from September when it was introduced: PopPhoto : Hands On: Canon EF 8-15mm F/4L USM Fisheye UPDATE : About a minute after I posted this, DP Rodney Charters tweeted a couple of pics of the 8-15 in action on a 60D : MobyPicture: First use of the long awaited 8 to 15 Canon on Shameless MobyPicture: On a short hand mount MobyPicture: On a 60D UPDATE 9:00PM : And it's out of stock again! But there is a review of it on YouTube :  Canon EF 8-15mm f/4 L USM fisheye Hands-on Review

Facebook's Mysterious Hire: The Guy Who Designed Much of the iPhone | Marshall Kirkpatrick | ReadwriteWeb More on the purchase of Push Pop Press by Facebook which I wrote about yesterday . This article makes it seem like they were buying Push Pop's co-founder, Mike Matas , who was a former Apple designer: Matas designed the camera, photos, maps, settings and battery display for the iPhone. The iPhone doesn't ship with very many apps and Matas designed at least four of them. He also designed the Photos app for the iPad. He designed Time Machine and Photo Booth for the Mac. He's not Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guy at the very top, but he's pretty high profile none the less. 3D Mic Pro and immersive audio | Vincent Laforet | VincentLaforet Vincent has been playing with the 3D Mic Pro from Mitra , and is really impressed by it. These unusual microphones capture a stereo image, and according to Vincent, the mics are essentially identical, but the 3D Indie ...

A couple of months ago a company called Push Pop Press appeared out of nowhere with an electronic book called " Our Choice ." I was intrigued by it not because of the book, but because there were hints that they were developing a publishing tool that they might make available to others. During an online chat at TED.com Mike Matas,  User Interface Designer at Push Pop Press gave the following answers[4] about whether they were going to make a publishing tool: A. The tools we are building are not a development environment but are a layout tool (and much more user-friendly), but we can’t announce any specific details on the product quite yet. A. We are building a publishing platform that we plan on releasing to the public in the future. Right now it's in private beta and we are working with authors to create books with our tool. Clearly I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. Facebook just bought the company, but not to get into publishing electronic books as th...

If you're in to storyboarding on your phone, well now you can do it on your iPad too. Cinemek has released  Cinemek Storyboard Composer HD , an updated version of their existing iPhone storyboard program: Storyboard Composer [which sells for $19.99]. This week it's on sale for $4.99!! WHATS NEW IN STORYBOARD COMPOSER HD Multi view option when iPad is turned vertical. Scenes can now be organized in scene view. Users can exchange .CSC files between devices and to other users. Users can now add their own logo to be displayed on PDF’s. QuickView thumbnail preview. I reviewed the iPhone app here: Hitchcock - iPhone Storyboard App

In this webinar learn how to set up the Final Cut Pro X interface for efficient color correcting. It will also cover how to use video scopes, how to color match a series of clips, and the best way to stay within video safe levels Agenda includes: Color balancing during media ingestion. Setting up the user interface for color correction. Exploring the video scopes. Color correction filters; Which are new. Which to use. Which to lose. Presenter : Ben Brownlee is a VFX artist, digital media specialist and instructor with 11 years of production experience across a number of disciplines. August 4, 2011 @ 10:00 AM PDT to 11:30 AM PDT Filmmaking Webinars : Color Correcting Inside Final Cut Pro X

Dashwood Cinema Solutions has announced the version 3.0 update to Stereo3D Toolbox LE — the light edition counterpart to Dashwood's professional Stereo3D Toolbox plug-in for stereoscopic 3D mastering. Stereo3D Toolbox LE is built on Noise Industries' FxFactory platform and designed to work with Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro , Apple Motion and Apple Final Cut Express applications. The v3.0 update qualifies additional platforms, including the new Final Cut Pro X release.. "Stereo3D Toolbox Light Edition is perfect for any 3D enthusiast just stepping into 3D waters. It's very easy to use, and budget-friendly. The version 3.0 release also includes a variety of new features and is already qualified for Final Cut Pro X," says Tim Dashwood. Features include: convergence adjustment and vertical, zoom and rotational disparity correction tools, "autoscale," a preview screen within the user interface, and the ability to output clips to popula...

YouTube Creator Playbook | YouTube YouTube has produced a guide for YouTube publishers: We're excited to provide Partners and creators with a new resource that compiles important tips, best practices, and strategies that helps creators build audiences on YouTube. We hope you find the information helpful to your creative process and that we can help you take your channel to the next level. Charging a Premium for Movies, at a Cost | Michael Cieply | New York Times While studios have raised prices - thanks to 3D movies - attendance has continued to fall: ...it will be the 17th consecutive annual increase in a business whose prices have outpaced the effect of general inflation by more than half since 1999. Theater attendance has fallen by about 10 percent in that period, or even more when measured as a share of the growing population. Apple TV now streams purchased TV shows, Vimeo videos | Jonathan Seff | MacWorld A software update for the second generation Apple TV adds...

SonyAlphaRumors has information about a big upcoming announcement from Sony with new lenses (16-50mm A-mount, 55-210 E-mount, Zeiss 24mm f/1.8) cameras ( A77 and the NEX-7 ) and camcorder; NEX-VG20 . The NEX-7 has been rumored since the arrival of the NEX-5 and 3 , and was always supposed to be a more sophisticated version of the small mirror-less camera design. Whats more interesting to me is the impending announcement of the NEX-VG20 . How will this differ from the existing model? Will it just be a chip upgrade? My guess is that it will also add 24p support, since nearly all of Sony's high-end consumer camcorders now support 24p. The other complaints about the NEX-VG10 were the menu control system, but I doubt that will change significantly. We shall see... SonyAlphaRumors: (SR5) Huge Sony leak!!! EOSHD : Sony NEX7, A77, A65, NEX5N and VG20 video camera to launch August 24th  The current Sony NEX VG-10

This past weekend I saw " Cowboys & Aliens " (it was okay, not terrible, not great) but Canon has sent out a press release about the other comic-book based action movie in the theaters right now, announcing that many of the action shots for " Captain America: The First Avenger " were shot on the Canon 5D Mark II . The DSLRs were used for several POV shots including a car chase and crash, and a high-speed motorcycle pursuit. “The challenge with a lot of action photography is getting the camera in the right position,” Jonathan Taylor, second unit director/director of photography noted. “I’m always looking to get the camera into impossible to reach places because those kinds of shots make action sequences much more exciting. Most 35mm motion-picture cameras and even the leading digital cinematography cameras are just too big to get into interesting positions.”

Last week I posted a short article about how I was debating shooting an upcoming project in 24p. As luck would have it, I had pretty much made up my mind I was going to try shooting in 24p when I went to the Rule Boston Camera Pub Night last week and Tim Mangini , Director of Broadcast at FRONTLINE, gave a presentation called " CRASH & BURN: Making docs on a tight turnaround, " which was all about logistics and dealing with content for documentary film making. One of the things he mentioned was that they deal with a lot of different acquisition formats, though their final output is 1080 60i. But that wasn't what caught my attention. Afterwards he was talking about working with a producer from England who had shot some material in 24p, and who had then had a lot of problems converting the material to 25p (for showing in Europe.) It was suggested that you're better off shooting in 30p and converting to 25p (or 24) than shooting in 24 and going to 25 (unless y...

Adobe Warp Stabiliar. A Poor-Man's Cineflex? | Tom Guilmette | TomGuilmetter.com Abandoning Final Cut Pro for Adobe CS 5.5 , Tom finds lots to love in the Warp Stabilizer. The warp stabilizer is not a replacement for proper camerawork. You will still need to acquire good looking footage using tools like a tripod or dolly/slider. But this plugin is very good and will open doors to creative technique never before possible without tons of post time and processing power. Vimeo to take on Brightcove, Ooyala for video hosting | Ryan Lawler | Gigaom Vimeo comes out with the $199 Vimeo Pro which offers: ...features that aren’t available to free users, including customizable “portfolio” websites and players, review pages that can be shared before a video goes public, advanced reporting and analytics, social media sharing tools and advanced privacy settings. The $199 a year gives you 50GB of storage and 250,000 plays, though additional storage and plays may be purchased. This could ...

Happy Birthday Selectric! Today is the 50th anniversary of the IBM Selectric typewriter and to celebrate, this week the Post Office announced a stamp. The fact that this announcement happened the same week the Post Office announced plans to close over 3,000 offices might remind us that the Selectric itself stopped production in 1986. One archaic technology celebrating another. In a post at the Smarter Planet blog, Gordon Bruce retells the history of the Selectric , and how it grew out of a design with a cylindrical type element: There was a guy by the name of Bud Beattie who was a development engineer and it was his job to get this thing to work. He went home and his wife was complaining about a light bulb that had blown. He screwed the light bulb and like in the cartoon, the light went on. He quickly got a grease pencil, drew circles, and divided it up. This is it!” Changing the typing element from a cylinder to a ball was the solution. Interestingly, while the Selectric was...

The Ultimate Table of Formats-- Aspect Ratios | Film Center An exhaustive list of different moving image formats with year introduced, year abandoned, aspect ratio and frame area. Imax, RealD earnings disappoint, stocks plummet | Ben Fritz | Los Angeles Times More proof that interest in 3D is declining? The news comes as returns from 3-D screens in the U.S. and Canada for many movies this summer have been unimpressive, including “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- Part 2,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “Green Lantern.” Overseas, however, people remain more interested in paying extra to see images pop out of the screen. Clues for Building a Good Armature for a Stop Motion Puppet | Carlos Lascano | Zacuto I'd love to try my hand at stop-motion....if I only had the time! According to my personal experience, the most reliable and easily achievable materials for good quality armatures are wood and wire. If the budget allows you to hire a professional to cre...