The News

INTER BEE 2013 LIVE SHOW REPLAY: SONY NEX 18-105MM F4 SERVO ZOOM LENS SHOWS PROMISE | News Shooter
If you have a NEX mount camera, I think this lens looks really interesting, the $598 Sony E PZ 18-105mm f/4 G OSS Lens:
The new lens seems well suited for run-and-gun shooting with its constant f4 aperture and Optical Steadishot coupled with a nice mid-wide to mid-telephoto zoom range. Autofocus seemed quite snappy although it did struggle from time to time in the low light of our set. Manual focus is fly-by-wire which works quite well, but is no substitute for a ‘proper’ manual focus ring. It should be available before the end of the year.


3 SIMPLE BUT CRITICAL FILMMAKING TIPS FROM RON HOWARD | Fast To Create
Challenge your story idea. Imagine yourself asked to watch it. Really imagine others committing the time to view it. Understand what you and your friends would appreciate about a movie version of your idea, then go for it.


HEVC H.265 Royalties Are Killing It Even Before It Takes Off? | Cinescopophilia
Is High Efficiency Video Coding, HEVC or H.265 as it is also known the Y2K Bug of the fimmaking revolution? Is H.265 the supposed replacement for the H.264 codec a lot of noise, a lot of hype, a lot of attention with the possibly of it never actually doing anything? Quite possibly so.


5 Reasons to Stop Using a Paper Shot List | Dare Dreamer
With Shot Lister you can instantly change the plan with a flick of the finger. Want to shoot your pickup shots at the end of the day? Don’t draw arrows everywhere, just drag and release. Your actress suddenly taking an hour longer in makeup? Just add more time, and the app recalculates your schedule without your needing to do arithmetic in the margins.


Ask the Screenplay Doctor: Joining a script writing group | New England Films
One writers’ group in the Boston area is Harvard Square Scriptwriters. Last month I was invited as a guest speaker by Genine Tillotson, the Director of HSSW, to discuss screenwriting and the business of screenwriting. For this month’s column, I spoke with Genine Tillotson about HSSW.


Fenwick has a new project | Chris Fenwick
In the subsequent months I recommended to my office that we move all of our projects to Final Cut Pro X. I would be lying if I told you that the move was simple. However, the difficulties were not in what the application could and could not do, but instead the major difficulties were caused by individuals who did not want to let go of the past.


Product Review: Final Cat Pro Utilities | Larry Jordan
Final Cat Pro created a suite of ten services for FCP X. Services are built into the operating system, they accept input from the user, process it, then do something with it. (The technical term is “inter-process communication.”) Spotlight is a service, so is spell-checking. Services can be applied across the entire operating system, or localized to one specific application. In the case of Final Cat, the services apply only to Final Cut Pro X.


New Technology Coming to Cinema EOS | Canon Rumors
Secondly, it seems there’s a possibility of a full frame Cinema EOS camcorder coming down the pipeline.  While you can currently get full frame 4K recording (16:9 crop from the full frame sensor) with the EOS-1D C, the C100, C300 and C500 are Super35 sensor cameras.


Roundtable: 5 Top Cinematographers on Why 3D Is 'Unnecessary,' Refusing to Give Advice to Actors and Film vs. Digital | The Hollywood Reporter
In THR's first Cinematographer Roundtable, Barry Ackroyd ("Captain Phillips"), Sean Bobbitt ("12 Years a Slave"), Bruno Delbonnel ("Inside Llewyn Davis"), Stuart Dryburgh ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty") and Phedon Papamichael ("Nebraska") reveal the biggest surprises about being a DP, the directors who have inspired them and why the movies they shoot aren't always the movies we see.


Good audio is always a good idea:


Footage from the $5,499 PXW-Z100. Great...if you have a 4K display;



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