Notes On Video

Inside Canon Japan 2013 | Creative COW In November 2013, I went on a Canon Optics Press tour to Japan with a small group of journalists, to meet with and interview a number of leading Canon executives. We also enjoyed a hitherto-rare event: a tour of Canon's optics factory in Utsunomiya, which has ordinarily not been open to outsiders (even several Canon employees on our trip had never been) where we met many of the people responsible for making those lenses and saw the processes that go into creating them. Say Goodbye to Old 5.1 Audio and Hello to the New Immersive Sound Standard | Cinescopophilia Now, Study Group 6 has developed a system for the next-generation ‘immersive’ and ‘personalized’ audio system, which will allow TV audiences to be ‘enveloped’ in the sound as it traces the source of the audio track both laterally and vertically across the screen. SC6Dual TRRS input and headphone output for smartphones |  RØDE The SC6 is an input/output breakout box for...

Only 7% of U.K. Films Earn a Profit, Claims BFI Report | Filmmaker Magazine Only 7% of British films released from 2003 to 2010 were profitable, claims a BFI report issued this week at London’s Screen Summit.  Visual Effects on a Budget – Don’t Fix It in Post | Filmmaker Magazine Visual effects supervisor Scott Squires appeared this week in an online webinar for Moviola.com entitled “Visual Effects on a Limited Budget.” His number one tip? – Don’t fix it in post. The Best Thunderbolt Expansion Peripherals for Editors | Jonny Elwyn So I’m thinking of upgrading my trusty MacBook Pro later next year, but it only comes with 2 USB 3.0 ports and 2 Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI port. So I’ve already begun looking into how to expand it’s usefulness through all these nifty Thunderbolt peripherals you can get these days. Here is an epic run down on some of the best available Thunderbolt devices. The final part of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera review…includes a look at...

10 MYTHS ABOUT MAKING IT IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY | Studio System News #3 BEING AGGRESSIVE IS A KILLER IN THE INDUSTRY. You would think, after reading #2, that being aggressive WOULD be a killer. After all, the “don’t” in that myth was someone who was very aggressive. But he wasn’t just aggressive; he was obnoxious. Aggressive is calling again when you don’t get a call back, getting your project made even though there are doubters, or putting your hat in the ring for a job that might be a bit of a reach. IS TV THE NEW CINEMA? From 'Scandal' to 'House of Cards,' Pundits Continue the Debate | IndieWire TV is good enough now, as Nussbaum says here, that it's no longer necessary to grade on a curve. Yet embracing the notion of the Third Golden Age (GA3) often seems to make people less rather than more critical. Safe in the arms of PBS or HBO, they relax and accept things that they would be tensely be on guard against if they were watching a network. ...

This just came in; a new slider company. Looks like a pretty solid system... Minneapolis, Minnesota – Trost Motion today announced the availability of a new kind of camera slider, tough enough for antarctic expeditions but so precise that it can be used for long lens and macro photography. Although it weighs only 15 pounds, a Trost™ can support fully-kitted RED and Alexa packages up to 560 pounds. Camera motion is so precise that it opens a new world of product photography – slow tracking shots across the face of a wristwatch, the bubbles on top of a caffe latte, or a gemstone set in a ring – all of these shots become possible and repeatable. Trost™ sliders can also be combined in a 2-axis configuration, giving camera operators remarkable flexibility and lightning-fast setups. “The design of the Trost™ slider was informed by three principles,” said Derek Trost, Lead Designer at Trost Motion. “Smooth, flawless camera movement; durability and reliability in the field; and a s...

New Blackmagic Camera Specific Metabones Speedboosters | Cinema5D Another look at the new Speed Boosters for the Blackmagic cameras: So, what do these adaptors offer in terms of increased light sensitivity and angle of view? The Blackmagic Cinema Camera Speedbooster offers a 0.64 angle of view increase, and a 1 1/3 increase in light sensitivity. The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera Speedbooster offers a 0.58 increase in angle of view, and a 1 2/3 increase in light sensitivity. 10 Common Elements Of Award Winning Screenplays | Raindance Film Festival 2. Heroes Have A Second Problem To Solve In your bog-standard Hollywood movie, the cliche is of the action hero shot in the chest, the bullet stopped by an object in their chest pocket. Usually this is a copy of the Bible, or a picture of the girl they left behind. SNL Editor Adam Epstein: 6 Pieces of Advice for Editors and Other Creative People | Tribeca Film 1. WORK CLEAN Oh, hi there – it says here that you’re an “artist”...

Continuous Three Light Setup with Special Effects Lighting | The Slanted Lens A really interesting tutorial, both on lighting, creative visual effects, and types of fog : Today on The Slanted Lens we will use a continuous three ight Setup with Special Effects Lighting to create lighting for a superhero shot using a simple set, smoke and cookaloris or cookie. We will demonstrate the different hang times of the three Rosco smokes. We will show how to make a clookie or cookaloris and how to use it. We will show our lighting breakdown for the shot. Last of all we will show a very simple way to fly a cape. This has been a great shoot. I have a better understanding of the different Rosco smokes and how to use them. I hope you will find this helpful. Turbo.264 HD – a quick and dirty guide for Mac based editors | Matt Davis Turbo.264 HD by Elgato is a Mac application sold as a consumer solution to help transform tricky formats like AVCHD into something more manageable. Rather than de...

I don't make a practice of picking out continuity issues in movies, and I know how hard they can be to eliminate. Still, it can sometimes be fun to find them....particularly if something doesn't leap out at you right away and you have to go back to recheck whether what you thought you saw actually happened. Such was the case the other day as I was watching the first Colombo episode:  Prescription: Murder . In one scene, a character (actually, the murderer) picks up the phone, and then hangs it up, and the chord very obviously sweeps around the front of the phone. Actually, the chord almost stands out too much; it's reasonable to assume they put the handset on the "wrong" way so that the actor could easily pick it up - now there's a funny little prop staging detail that probably wasn't even picked up on until they came to shoot the scene. Anyway, he hangs up (frame 1): And about five seconds later (during which we're assuming no one made ano...