Notes On Video

Sony FS700 test footage. Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis, MN | AlokaKasina | Vimeo More slow-motion footage from the Sony NEX-FS700 . Some of it is quite good, but after about a minute it feels like the novelty wears off. We're all going to be sick of slow-motion by the end of the year: Footage captured with a prototype Sony FS700. In-camera 240fps_1080p and 480fps_720p. Compressed to H.264, 720x1280, 23.976. How to Set Up the Canon 5D To Shoot Video | Michael Britt | Photo Cine News A setup video for the Mark II (not the III): I just put up a short video about how to set up the Canon 5D MKII for Video. I’ve put some of this information out before in our book and some other blog posts but this time I go step by step through the menus for capturing video. I do this in my Intro to DSLR Video seminar and decided to provide this video as a resource to my students, Samy’s Camera customers and PCN readers. If you have a Canon 5D Mark III, and want to shoot underwater, you can now ...

For the last couple of years, Zacuto has been hosting a camera shoot-out where they get a bunch of cameras, shoot some test video, show the results to different people, and then release a web series on the making of, and the reactions to the footage. For the latest go-round, the Boston Creative Pro Users Group is hosting a showing in Boston. Here's the details: BOSCPUG is proud to host the Boston 2K screening of the Zacuto REVENGE of the GREAT CAMERA SHOOTOUT 2012, featuring footage shot with cameras including the ARRI Alexa, Canon C300 and 7D, Sony FS100, F3 and F65, Panasonic GH2 and RED Epic. Headed by Bruce Logan, ASC and featuring Rodney Charters, ASC, Polly Morgan, Nancy Schreiber, ASC, Mick Jones, Johnny Zeller and other industry cinematographers. DATE : Thursday, June 13, 2012 TIMES : 7PM - 9PM (doors open at 6:30PM, Screening begins promptly at 7PM) WHERE : Theatre 1/Space 57 at the new Revere Hotel | Boston Common 200 Stuart Street Boston, MA 02116 (formerly...

6 Filmmaking Tips From The Coen Brothers | Cole Abaius | Film School Rejects Tips from the Coen's: Don’t Be Afraid to Offend “‘Taste,’ says Joel, ‘has never been something we’ve worried about.’ ‘We’re not big on taste,’ agrees Ethan, his grin broadening even further. ‘And actually, if you don’t pander to undue sensitivities then it ends up usually not being much of a problem. In The Big Lebowski, we dumped the crippled guy out of the wheelchair, and no one seemed to mind that. Everyone was saying, You’re going to get a huge amount of mail from disabled people about this. Selectively De-Animating Video | Jiamin Bai et.al. | Berkley.edu Interesting paper (and demo) about technology for greatly simplifying action in a sequence: via Jack Nack : We present a semi-automated technique for selectively de-animating video to remove the large-scale motions of one or more objects so that other motions are easier to see. The user draws strokes to indicate the regions of the video th...

A Cautionary Tale for the FCP Switcher | Walter Biscardi | Creative Cow Walter very publicly broke up with Final Cut when FCPX came out. He switched to Avid, but here he documents the many problems he ran into with the kind of work they do. Now he's trying Premiere Pro: In short, Avid has opened up the workflow on the front end of the process by allowing editors to work natively with multiple formats via AMA, but on the backend the software itself throws up a lot of roadblocks when trying to conform and export a timeline from the application. I describe as "We've made it a lot easier for you to start editing, but good luck getting your project out of our software." If you're going to finish your project inside Avid, you're good to go. But when trying to get outside the software, the tightly controlled database gets in the way. PART TWO…”In two minds” | Philip Johnston | HD Warrior Philip continues to be in three minds about whether to switch to Final C...

Adobe After Effects CS6 | Jeff Foster | MacWorld A big thumbs up for the new After Effects release: If you held out updating After Effects from CS5 or earlier, I urge you to consider this upgrade—or get left in the dust. That sounds like a strong statement, but I believe it's justified. After Effects CS6 is the most important upgrade the program has received since the first major update in version 7. It's not just a bunch of additional features and add-ons, but rather a truly rebuilt, reworked, and enhanced powerful compositing and motion graphics creation tool. Studying 3D Camera Tracker | Jerzy Drozda Jr | Maltaannon A tutorial on After Effects Camera Tracker: Some time ago I’ve posted a short introduction video on YouTube about the new 3D Camera Tracker available in After Effects CS6. I’ve got a lot of comments and questions since then, so I decided to make a more in-depth video on the various aspects of match-moving. If you tried solving a 3D camera on your own ei...

What’s in a Name? | Alexis Van Hurkman | Blog For those interested in color grading, an interesting discussion about the use of the in-phase indicator as an approximate guideline for the angle at which human skin tone may fall: To clarify, I would never and have never suggested that this line is a strict guideline for human hue. In my “color correction handbook” I wrote and illustrated more pages then my editor may have wished about the subtle variations of human skin tone, color interactions between a subject and the illuminant of a scene, and how the in-phase indicator under discussion is merely a general signpost. Like speed limits, nobody follows them exactly, but they let you know you’re around what you ought to be doing. Review of Sony NEX FS700 Part 2: Pros and Cons | Philip Bloom | Vimeo Philip finishes up his review of the Sony NEX-FS700 , listing the five "cool" things he likes best about the camera, and the four "no so cool" things: Cool: 1. Pric...

Behind The Lens – Episode 1 | F-Stop Academy In this episode, a discussion with Philip Bloom & Rick Young about how they got started in the business: "In this 5 Part Webisodic Video Series Cinematographer Den Lennie and Director James Tonkin host discussions with leading figures from the Indie and mainstream film community in Europe. Behind the lens - perspectives on Digital Cinematography is an insightful look at modern Cinematography and digital production" “Jump-start your production with Prelude CS6″ with Wes Plate, seminar recording and notes | Todd Kopriva | Adobe The webinar on Prelude I watched last week can now be seen in replay from this page: What is Adobe Prelude? Adobe Prelude is an application for ingesting, logging, and optionally transcoding tapeless media and assembling clips into rough cuts for use in an NLE (a nonlinear editing application). In addition to the summary in Wes’s presentation, both video2brain and Lynda.com have summaries that...

The Five C’s of Cinematography | Matthew Jeppsen | Fresh DC It's not about the gear, it's about: 1. Camera Angles “Camera placement is determined by narrative significance.”This is very important. Why are you looking at what you are looking at? Is it because it looks good, or because we need to see it to move the story along? It should always be to move the story along and never solely because it looks good. 6 Crowdfunding Mistakes That Can Kill a Campaign | Scott Steinberg | Mashable What to avoid when you start your crowd-funding campaign: 1. Nobody Knows Who You Are Among the most common reasons campaigns croak is the lack of a meaningful brand identity. Projects with existing followings or known personalities attached (e.g. Wasteland 2) often do well. Unproven or obscure projects, such as Class of Heroes 2, don’t fair as well. In fact, according to Kickstarter, 75% of projects fail just in the video game space alone. It makes sense that building and maintaining tr...