Notes On Video

Producing a Low-Budget Short Film and Pitching a Movie: Run Like Hell | Filmmaker Magazine Red Giant has unveiled their latest low-budget, effects-rich short; Run Like Hell. It’s billed as a short film, but it’s really intended to be a teaser for a full-length movie director Stu Maschwitz hopes to make. Maschwitz is a visual effects wizard who worked at Industrial Light & Magic before co-founding effects house The Orphanage.  Run Like Hell (the script) | Slugline You can get a copy of the script for the Run Like Hell trailer here. Run Like Hell is a hilarious feature film in development, inspired by the cult classic video game. As the director attached to the project, I teamed up with producer Adrian Askarieh and Red Giant Films to create this teaser. Step one was writing the script. New Sony A7, A7R and RX10 – exclusive hands-on look at video quality | EOSHD Andrew looks at the video quality of the three new Sonys, and decides the A7r is the best of the thre...

Gareth Jones creates piece using 3D plug-in FreeForm | Mettle FreeForm makes 3D movement in character animation much easier, especially head rotation. For example, the head can be placed on it's own layer, FreeForm applied, and the head can then be shaped in 3D using FreeForm's control points and tangents. A displacement map can also be applied in FreeForm to add more volume and detail. VIrgin Media from Gareth Jones on Vimeo . Product Review: Sorenson Media Squeeze 9 Pro | Larry Jordan The application can take you as far as you want to go in improving the quality of your compressed videos. Keep in mind, however, that like any powerful tool, you will need to invest time to learn how to use it well. One of the things that impresses me about the Sorenson website is that they have already taken the time to provide the tools you need to learn the application. A warning about OS X Mavericks from Adobe: Adobe Premiere Pro @AdobePremiere Though #PremierePro CC sup...

Last night I went to a talk by Vincent Laforet. The event was sponsored by Rule Boston Camera, Canon and the PBS show Frontline . I’ve heard Vincent speak before, and some of this talk was a rehash of past material; his years at The New York Times , the amazing pictures taken at the top of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the helicopter shots of New York, and Reverie ; the first movie shot with the Canon 5D Mark II, it was all there. But Vincent added in a new element from past talks. In this one he looked at what’s going on with the internet, social media, and the advancement of technology, and tried to make sense of it all and offer suggestions for how to have a creative career in this new world. Learn all the Rules, and then break them He had some fascinating stats on the volume of media being produced and uploaded to social networks every hour of every day. Hundreds of thousands of pictures are uploaded to Facebook, and hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every...

‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the aesthetic politics of filming black skin | The Washington Post Increased sensitivity of digital cameras makes it easier to record darker skin tones: For the first hundred years of cinema, when images were captured on celluloid and processed photochemically, disregard for black skin and its subtle shadings was inscribed in the technology itself, from how film-stock emulsions and light meters were calibrated, to the models used as standards for adjusting color and tone. #166. Are the new Zeiss / Sony lenses for the A7 camera too expensive? | Dear Susan Sony announced some new E-Mount lenses that are a bit more expensive than their previous models, and some people are complaining. This article explains why they are worth the money, though I like the first sentence best: Short answer: NO. They’re a bargain. The end. And then the article goes into a lot of depth about MTF curves. You were warned: In brief : Zeiss have re...

NEW SONY A7 AND A7R CAMERAS ARE FIRST TO ALLOW FOCUS MAGNIFICATION DURING VIDEO RECORDING | News Shooter More on the positives of Sony's new cameras, though we're still waiting to see how the actual video looks: It has always been small details such as these that have put professional filmmakers off using DSLR-style cameras. However, the video features in the A7/A7R pair (Zebra, clean HDMI, audio and focus control), and the new RX10 (3-stop ND, Zebra, clean HDMI, audio control) suddenly make them very appealing prospects. Lets hope the video quality is better than Sony’s current NEX cameras. The Realities of Video on Demand | Moviecope A film that’s in post now, for example, a filmmaker should be thinking ‘From around January or February 2014, I want to be on exclusively the transactional sites when I’ll do marketing push one.’ And they need to make sure that their pricing is consistent; it just sends confusing signals to the market if it’s £2.99 on one site for a 48 ...