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Canon C300 News Roundup
First the Good News:
EOS C300 receives coveted broadcaster approval | Canon Europe
The C300 receives the BBC's stamp of approval:

Canon has announced that the groundbreaking EOS C300, the first camera in Canon’s Cinema EOS System, has met the standards the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) requires from cameras tested to the European Broadcasting Union’s recommendation EBU R118 for High Definition TV production.

CANON C300: Trimming White Balance, Plus a Look at Daylight vs. Tungsten Color | Art Adams
This may not seem completely good news; it's an article about how the C300 white balance isn't totally "white," but it offers some tips to address this:

This isn’t unusual at all. A lot of cameras do this. Even the Arri Alexa white balances cyan, which is why I use it primarly on preset—and even then I have to pull some green out of the image to suit my taste. (For daylight I use 5600K CC-3 preset, and under tungsten light I use 3200K CC-2.) The Sony F3 is notorious for white balancing with a cold green cast, and I regularly warm it up by white balancing through 1/4 CTB and 1/8 plus green gel. The Sony EX1 and EX3 are similar, although not quite as bad.

Now, the Bad News:
C300 Aliased Fringe – Not so Awesome? | Paul Antico | NextWaveDV
Paul Antico writes about the color fringing problem with the C300:

However Paul Joy, a friend of mine in England, contacted Twitter about an issue that he had seen. I responded. He mentioned that he saw fairly bad green/pink and pixelated blocks that shimmer along hard contrast edges like the one I just mentioned. This info in hand, I took my C300 out and try to create the problem. And low and behold, I was able to do so, mostly by intentionally overexposing my subject and keeping it focused at the same time.

Defects in a Large Sensor Video Camera: Purple and Green Fringing on the Canon C300 | Joe Marine | No Film School
Joe Marine follows up:

It’s definitely not chromatic aberration, because it’s been shown to happen regardless of the lens (and it’s very clearly solid blocks instead of a smooth green or purple gradient on highlight edges). It seems to only be appearing on highly overexposed areas of the image – and not anywhere else.

The Rest Of The News

Canon and the h.264 encoding profile | William Patin | Blog
Interesting blog that speculates that Canon's DSLR lower quality image problems may be to do with encoding:

when it comes to h.264 encoding, there are huge differences from software to software and there are even more parameters influencing the encoding quality in the background of most GUIs. So what could be the issue for the poor output quality of Canon DSLRs? The answer seems quite simple to me: it’s the h.264 profile.

*UPDATED* 5D Mark III Issue with EF 200 f/2L IS Official Canon Response
| CanonRumors
Two Canon lenses, the Canon EF 200mm f/2.0 L IS USM Lens and the Canon EF 800mm f/5.6 L IS USM Lens, have problems with the Mark III. Canon has an official announcement:

“We have acknowledged that when using the camera with specific lenses, there is an abnormal noise during IS operation when the shutter button is pressed halfway (or remains pressed halfway), and we are now considering the countermeasures. We will let you know about the countermeasures as soon as they are finalized”

MacBreak Studio - Episode #158: DaVinci Resolve Part 1 | YouTube
I said I should do more with DaVinci Resolve the other day, maybe I should watch this...

Steve Martin is joined by special guest, Alexis Van Hurkman, to show Steve how to get started and navigate through Blackmagic Design's color grading software, DaVinci Resolve.

FCP X: Improving Performance | Larry Jordan | Blog
Final Cut Pro X performance tips article has recently been updated:

Another issue that affects performance is your graphics card. Earlier versions of Final Cut were totally dependent upon the speed of the CPU. Final Cut Pro X changed that by tightly integrating the graphics chip with video editing.
Don Smith pointed this out recently to me, when a reader complained of very slow performance on his MacBook Pro.

Help Desk: LUTs, Looks And Scene Files; What’s the difference? | Andy Shipsides
| HDVideoPro
Andy outlines the differences between these things:

LUT is an acronym for lookup table, which in computer science is a data structure used to replace a computation. In other words, a lookup table is a defined set of data that's used instead of actually doing much processing. In the video world, a lookup table does much the same thing; it's a set of data offsets that, when applied to an image, will alter it in some way.

Taiwan market: HDD prices expected to drop at end of April
| Ocean Chen, Taipei; Jackie Chang | DIGITIMES
Hard drive prices may soon come down:

Retail channels of HDDs in the Taiwan market will lower prices by about 10% at the end of April in order to adjust inventories and promote sales. Pricing for a 3.5-inch 500GB model is expected to drop from NT$2,200 (US$75) currently to below NT$2,000, according to industry sources.

Choosing Between Making Money and Doing What You Love
| Leonard A. Schlesinger, et.al. | Harvard Business Review
Leonard A. Schlesinger, the president of Babson College, Charles F. Kiefer president of Innovation Associates, and Paul B. Brown, a long-time contributor to the New York Times tell you why you should be happy in what you do:

Based on the research we did for our book, we're convinced that when you're heading into the unknown, desire is all-important. You simply want to be doing something that you love, or something that is logically going to lead to something you love, in order to do your best work. That desire will make you more creative and more resourceful, and will help you get further faster.

Why Film School Isn’t as Bad as You Think (But Still Not Required for a Career)
| Evan Luzi | The Black and Blue
It's that time of year when high school seniors are deciding what to do next:

I think film schools tend to get a bad rep online and in the blogosphere because so many of the filmmakers who end up at a keyboard are doing it without going through that system. As a result, they equate their ability to be successful without film school as it having no value for anybody.
But what they fail to recognize is that for some (not all, but some), it’s their yellow brick road to the emerald city of Hollywood.