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A Quick Hands-On with the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera | CreativeVideo
CVP in the UK got to see the prototype of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera [$2,995.00], and offer some thoughts:
The first thing that everyone at CVP who hadn’t previously seen the camera at NAB said was “I really didn’t expect it to be that big!” – It seems that most people expect the Cinema Camera to be not much bigger than an iPhone, yet the reality is that it’s a fairly chunky unit that weighs in at a hefty 1.8Kg for the body only… At this weight it’s far heavier than an SLR and the lack of any natural handgrip position means that in standard form it’s really suitable for tripod mount use only.


A new hands-on report with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera | Andrew Reid
| EOSHD
Andrew Reid offers his interpretations of CVP's thoughts:
Raw (and even ProRes compared to highly compressed DSLR footage) allows you to bring up a hell of a lot of shadow detail. So even with a sensor rated at a native ISO of 400 relative to the native ISO of 800 on a DSLR or FS100, this is not so much of a problem. With gain applied to reach ISO 1600 and a fast aperture lens, I am sure the Blackmagic Cinema Camera will look great in low natural light conditions.


EDITOR ALAN EDWARD BELL ON “THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN” | Scott Macaulay
| Filmmaker Magazine
Editor Alan Bell talks about editing, and The Amazing Spiderman:
You know, I always find this interesting: on a little movie like 500 Days of Summer, the director shoots the movie over 21 days or something, and then he gets 10 weeks to come up with a cut. Then, you’ve got a movie like Spider-Man that shoots for well over 90 days, and he gets 10 weeks to come up with the first cut. But there’s a huge difference in terms of the amount of work and the type of work you’re doing in that 10 weeks!


Avid Media Composer/Symphony 6 Canon DSLR Complete Workflow 12min Guide
| Alex Walker | Wide Open Camera
Video tutorial on the Avid/DSLR workflow:
I’m using Symphony 6 here but the workflow is identical in Media Composer. We start with AMA native H.264 playback, then cut offline DNxHD36 files and relink to the originals, and then wrap up with encoding for the web using Sorenson Squeeze 8.5 and x264. The complete workflow through web delivery. Depending on your hardware capabilities you can choose to cut the h.264 files natively or transcode to an offline option to optimize performance.


Analyze the Frame: Reviewing your video footage on your computer7 | Tony Reale | NextWaveDV
Interesting article about how Gamma can be different on different hardware, and applications:
So now that we know what gamma is, there is one last thing to realize. Though we can change the settings in our NLE to adjust the gamma of the image, the decode of gamma is left to your video playback device. Be it a computer, phone, iPad, TV, etc. they all decode video differently. To make things even more complicated, not all video players decode gamma the same either. This is evident if you have ever opened up a video file in Windows Media Player and then in Quicktime. They look drastically different.


Apertus – The Open Source Camera | Philip Bloom
To me, the idea of an Open Source camera sounds about as exciting as an Open Source car:
“The goal of the Apertus project is to create a powerful, free (in terms of liberty) and open cinema camera that we as filmmakers love to use. The idea of using an Elphel camera for this particular purpose was born in 2006, found many followers over the years and ultimately resulted in this community driven project entitled “Apertus”.


DSLR Video Tips with Richard Harrington: Three-Point Lighting
| Adorama Photography TV | YouTube
A tutorial from Richard Harrington on the basics of lighting:
Three-point Lighting is a combination of a Key light, back light, and a fill light. Three-point light gives you full control over the light and shadows casting over your subject. Understanding the three-point lighting technique gives you the building blocks to advance with your photography.


Perfect Pixels: What’s new in Photoshop CS6 | Richard Harrington | Adobe.com
Richard did a one hour tutorial on Photoshop CS6 which will be of interest to anyone who works with video:
  1. The adaptive wide angle feature to improve your images
  2. Search features to find filters used in a project
  3. Blur tools to enhance and blur portions of an image to use as background plates
  4. Content Aware tools to scale and improve aspect ratios in images


Sony PMW-100 XDCAM | B & H PhotoVideo | YouTube
This is more of a promotional video than a review, but does provide some information on the PMW-100 [$3,480]:
With its high-quality MPEG HD422 (50 Mbps) recording capability, the PMW-100 can contribute to your creativity in many different applications including news gathering and documentary production.




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