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Friday, May 03, 2013

Quick Links

SIZE MATTERS — JONAH KESSEL FIELD TESTS THE CANON C100 IN BURMA
| Jonah Kessel | News Shooter
It does have things that aren’t perfect about it but, for me, the benefits far outweigh the negatives by an enormous margin. While the C300 is without doubt a better camera, I’m not convinced its the best camera for people like me.


How to get sound from the Canon 5D Mk III to the Ninja 2 | Hireacamera | Vimeo
Unlike most camcorders, the 5D Mk III with its new Firmware update doesn't export the sound digitally through the HDMI. Here we show you how to get around this and what you need to watch out for.


GUESTS: Kanen Flowers, Jessica Sitomer, Paul Korver, and Gary Symons
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Words of Advice from a Master: Ridley Scott | Vincent Laforet
Ridley Scott has filmed quite a few of my favorite films – namely what is very likely my favorite film:  Blade Runner.  His background in art direction, his eye and its palette for color and light are exquisite:  Black Hawk Down is a perfect example of that.


Oblivion discussion panel, with Claudio Miranda, ASC, DIT Alex Carr, and Technicolor David Waters. Hosted by Jon Fauer, ASC | Sony Professional | Vimeo
Academy Award winner Claudio Miranda, ASC, and accomplished Digital Imaging Technician Alex Carr discussed their experiences shooting Universal Pictures, Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise. Learn the digital workflow and Cinematography techniques used to create this major motion picture.


Creating the Look: Woods – Part 2: Primary Color Correction – DaVinci Resolve 9
| Blackmagic
Intended for beginners, this series of tutorials walks you through creating a look in DaVinci Resolve 9.1 using multiple nodes. Topics covered include working with nodes, setting primary color correction, using secondary color correction, adding a power window, and using the tracker in DaVinci Resolve.


NAB 2013: Rodney Charters, ASC | NextWaveDV
We sit down with Rodney Charters, ASC and discuss how he got started as a Director of Photography, projects he’s worked on, lighting tools he uses and his thoughts on 4K.


New Thoughts on the Mac Pro | Larry Jordan
On numerous occasions, I’ve had reassurance from Apple that a new Mac Pro is “coming later this year.” But what that new computer will look like or do, is totally unknown. It is clear to me, however, that it will be totally different from the Mac Pro we know now.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

Quick Links

Canon 5D Mk III Firmware with Atomos Ninja 2 | LensProToGo | Vimeo
In this video, we take an initial look at the new Canon 5D Mk III Firmware teamed up with the Atomos Ninja 2.


Canon 5D Mark III finally gets a clean HDMI out…. | Den Lennie | F-Stop Academy
The new update from Canon means you can finally record a clean HDMI out and record to an Atomos Ninja 2 – this means you can shoot in ProRes 422 albeit 8 bit. The fact is when Canon released the 5D MArk III the new CODECS were a vast improvement on the old h.264 that we all had to deal with on teh 5D Mark II and 7d.


3.5k Canon 5D Mark III raw video with Magic Lantern and latest updates | EOSHD
These past days I’ve been trying to make myself useful to Alex at Magic Lantern, testing the DNG raw video recording on the 5D Mark III with a nightly build of Magic Lantern.Here’s what the video quality looks like in the DNG video modes at 30fps.


Making Digital Video Look Film-like | Mastering Film
One of the first exercises in the process of making video look film-like is to deinterlace. Interlacing is the process in which lines, known as fields, are drawn for every frame of video. NTSC DV and 60i HD have a frame rate of 30 or 29.97 fps. PAL DV and 50i HD has a frame rate of 25 fps.


Problems Uploading to YouTube From Final Cut Pro X | Larry's Blog
In early April, Google changed the APIs that control uploading to YouTube. These changes broke all automated upload systems – meaning uploads originating anywhere except a Browser – including Final Cut Pro X.


The Changing Economics of Hollywood Script Rewrites | The Hollywood Reporter
Writers received a mere $500 each to sit with Cohen for an hour and bounce ideas off the star. That's a far cry from the $250,000-a-week sum a studio might pay one of Hollywood's top-tier scribes for a production rewrite


The World According to Steven: Insights from Soderbergh (with video)
| Film Society of Lincoln Center
“Cinema is under assault,” Steven Soderbergh told an audience in San Francisco over the weekend. He said that the Hollywood studios are to blame and that moviegoers are their accomplices. "Fewer and fewer executives in the industry love movies,” 


Creator of the Steadicam will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame on May 1st | The Verge
Garrett Brown, who created the original Steadicam rig in 1972, recently told NPR that he decided to create the device because he loved the stable look that could be achieved when using dollies to move a camera, but found them awkward and cumbersome.


Robert Moog, EDM pioneer, inducted into Inventors Hall of Fame
| Los Angeles Time
If you’ve listened to any music in the last 48 years, chances are you’re familiar with the Moog Ladder Filter, whether you know it or not. Idiot savants might know the invention by its government identifier: Patent No. 3475623.

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

A Day Of Mac Troubles

I just spent the last day trying to help a friend diagnose their Mac problems. They had tried upgrading their Mac Mini to Mountain Lion and the install process got hung half way through, objecting to the hard drive.

Somehow the hard drive became corrupted and the install process asked whether we wanted to choose another disk, get help, or try the Disk Utility to repair the drive. But even if we chose the repair option, it wouldn't let us repair the hard drive.

The next thing to try would have been to boot off the SuperDrive and try and repair the hard drive, except that the internal SuperDrive had stopped working a few months ago. I thought about buying an external SuperDrive, but when I did a Google search and the consensus seemed to be that you can't boot from external SuperDrives.

Then I discovered this article: Make a bootable USB flash drive to run & repair Mac OS X | MacYourself.

I thought that sounded like a great idea, and went and bought a 32GB flash drive. BIG MISTAKE. The installation took forever, and then the machine ran like it was in super sold molasses...it was virtually impossible to do anything, it took so long for any task to complete. After several hours of going through the install process and trying to get Disk Utility to work, we gave up.

And then I had a brainstorm...why not use a regular external hard harddrive? And why didn't I just do that in the first instance? I have no clear answer...I guess I just got wrapped up in the first solution.

Fortunately, after taking out the USB Flash drive, attaching an external hard drive and rebooting, the Mac came back at the beginning of the install process, and let us install the OS onto the new hard drive. It even let us run the Migration Assistant and copy files from the internal hard drive to the external. Interestingly, the internal still seems to work; the OS install just doesn't like it.

Things seem to be okay at the moment....we just have to figure out whether we can reformat the internal drive and copy everything back to it....but we'll try that next week.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Quick Links

The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito | Michael Murie
| Filmmaker Magazine
Esposito: We both felt like we weren’t telling some of the stories that we thought we would be telling when we got out of journalism school. We decided one of the ways to find and tell those stories would be to drive around the country and go off the beaten path and really look for them.


New Firmware v1.13 for Sony PMW-F5 & PMW-F55 | CineTechnica
In case you missed it over the weekend, Sony has released firmware version 1.13 for both the F5 & F55. Along with a few bug fixes, this update also includes much-requested features like adjustable Exposure Index (EI) while shooting Raw, and remote start/stop trigger. 


Shane Hurlbut ReturnsdoddleTALKS Tech
Director of Photography Shane Hurlbut, ASC, returns to doddleTALKS Tech to discuss how he approached selecting cameras for his new film Need for Speed, and by testing those cameras, how he found that they had their own unique digital emulsion.


Kessler Pocket Jib Traveler "Backyard Review" | Anticipate Media | Vimeo
I recently received the new Kessler Pocket Jib Traveler which is a single rail ultra portable crane/jib no bigger than a slider, weighs only 5.5 lbs, is made of metal, condenses to 26" in one piece, and that extends past 5 feet in length. I decided when I was stuck at home with no vehicle one day to take it for a spin in the backyard for a quick video review. I received requests from so many listeners of the NeedCreative Podcast to do one, hence this "Backyard Review", a video supplement to said Podcast.


"The Changing Landscape" (with Philip Bloom) | Need Creative Podcast
In this 44th episode of the NeedCreative Podcast, your host Paul Antico is joined regular correspondent Ben Consoli to interview very special returning guest, Philip Bloom. Hailing from the UK, Skype managed to make Philip sound very far and then extremely close as the show went on, which is just the way we felt as we went through a journey of fantastic subjects with Philip, who has been in this business for a very long time.


Sony’s Action Cams Get a Firmware Boost: Now Sport 60P Video
| The Photoblographer
Also, new accessories:
The major new features are 1080p 60P video shooting (which means that you’ll be able to slow it down a lot in post) and a mode change that can be done via their PlayMemories app. However, that feature is coming in June.


How We Did It: SNL "Bathroom Businessman" | Alex Buono
Since most of this script takes place inside a bathroom stall, my director, Rhys Thomas, decided right away that we’d have to build the stall on stage rather than try to shoot on location.  A real stall is just too small and impractical; we needed to get a camera inside the stall, which meant pulling the stall apart.  Once we pulled the trigger on a set build, we decided to build the office on stage, too.  


A quick roundup of April's best free Final Cut Pro X tutorials | FCP.co
With not much news on a quiet Monday, we thought that it was a good opportunity to take a look at the best free Final Cut Pro X tutorials that have been published this month.


NAB2013 DISCUSSION PANEL REPLAY: IS DSLR VIDEO DEAD? | News Shooter
In the first of our discussion panels, originally streamed live from the Teradek booth at NAB2013, Matt Allard hosts Andy Shipsides from Abel Cine, Jason Wingrove, and Paul Schnieder as they discuss the question ‘is DSLR Video dead?’ With the growth of cameras such as the C300, Epic and Blackmagic, cinematographers are moving away from the DSLR, but does the EOS 5D still have a use?


NAB2013 DISCUSSION PANEL REPLAY: DOCUMENTARY SHOOTING, HOW DO WE MAKE IT PAY? | News Shooter
In the second of our discussion panels, originally streamed live from the Teradek booth at NAB2013, Dan Chung hosts a panel to discuss the current trends in documentary shooting and how to make a living doing it. The panel includes documentary filmmaker Jared Abrams from Wide Open Camera, Chinese Producer/Director Yi Han, Andrea Allen from Vimeo, Steve Weiss from Zacuto and Jem Schofield from theC47.

Why the time for 4K has come | Sony
What is really making filmmakers sit up and take note is that they are beginning to understand how 4K can work for them. They are realizing how ultra high resolution images can provide viewers with a more immersive and compelling viewing experience. 4K also gives them more flexibility. Single shooters in particular, delivering on HD or even SD, now have the ability to generate multiple shots from one camera position by cropping into their 4K images. 

Monday, April 29, 2013

Quick Links

“How Do You Get Anybody to See It?” Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver and 21st Century Filmmaking | Filmmaker Magazine
“The new technology allows people to make films very, very cheaply, but it also unhinges the vital connection that has existed for over 100 years between capitalism and motion pictures.” Filmmakers are now free, he explains, to “make movies the same way you can make poetry, songs, paintings. You can make it for no money.” 


Magic Lantern Team Discovers 2K RAW Video Capability on the 5D Mark II and III
| PetaPixel
In what may very well be the most exciting Magic Lantern development ever, the team has discovered a RAW DNG output in live view on the 5D Mark II and 5D Mark III. What this means is that, in the near future, 5D Mark II and III owners may be able to record crystal clear 2K RAW video that blows H.264 output out of the water and then some.


The Canon 1D C review | Andrew Reid | EOSHD
The 1D C is a frustrating camera and I want to fall in love with her, but she happens to be a pain. You can’t have a camera review without a car analogy too, so it’s like having a Ferrari engine in a hover craft. It should really be in a car. Did that work!?


Canon 5D Mark III uncompressed HDMI sample footage | EOSHD
On whether it is really 4:2:2 colour sampled as Canon claim I have my doubts. I don’t see any difference to the internal recording to suggest 4:2:2 and I doubt the sensor is sampling 4:2:2 from high resolution in video mode like a C300.


Shooting And Editing Canon Log With The C300 And C100 | Erik Naso
Here is the plan. I’m working on breaking down this and one more spot from shooting to editing them. The second spot was also shot in Canon log but I used the Canon C100 as well. I didn’t have the Canon C300 yet and rented the C100 for a week to try it out when it was first available to rent.

Time Lapse Intro: Part I | Vincent Laforet
I was commissioned to do a Time Lapse Tutorial series late last year that was just recently published by Canon and people really seem to be enjoying it so I thought I would share it on this blog as well. You can find the first video below and then go to Canon’s site for the remaining episodes.  


Have Aaton Gone Out of Businesscinescopophilia
We have been contacted by someone that has direct contact with Aaton on commercial and personal levels, and they have revealed it is indeed a bleak outlook for Aaton for the immediate future.


Nathaniel Hansen: A documentarian ready to learn from his ‘Elders.’
| Boston Globe
AMONG THE MANY outstanding documentaries in the 2013 Independent Film Festival of Boston, Nathaniel Hansen’s The Elders stands out as both commonplace and remarkable. It consists of interviews with ordinary people, ranging in age from their 70s to their 90s, and confirms the truism that with old age comes wisdom — and a lot of great stories.


Finally good news: Sony doubled its profit forecast! | Sony Alpha Rumors
Sony had “luck” because the depreciation of the yen helped them out. Also the financial service division had a stronger performance than expected.