The News

Low light testing with the Digital Bolex D16 | Red Shark News
With tests like this, the question becomes more than one of pixels and stops. The question is ultimately, am I pleased with the way this camera is handling the light / image I put in front of it? In this situation, I'm going to say yes. I was particularly impressed with the ability, at 200 ISO, to pull an image out of the 5-7 foot-candle region (if you squint you can actually recognize a couple of the albums in the corner!)


Andrew Reid over at EOSHD often has an interesting perspective on things. And sometimes he's just confusing: obsessing over some details, and ignoring others completely. In other words, he's just like everyone else; he's just a little more vocal about it.
Anyway, he sort of likes the Olympus OM-D E-M1.
Why the Olympus OM-D E-M1 is better than expected for video (Review) | EOSHD
The E-M1 only shoots at 30p. Hey you, come back! It’s not all bad! Yes 24p is the fabled film frame rate which apparently is good enough for Hollywood but not good enough for consumer’s holiday videos. Makes sense to me!? So the engineers have chosen to serve us a frame rate which isn’t as useful as 60p for slow-motion and not as good looking as 24p and not even a video standard in half the world due to PAL regions but actually maybe Olympus are not so stupid after all?


Making you lav mic invisible | Cinema 5D
Bad audio can ruin your production. Audio is 50% of the end product, it’s therefore critical to capture good audio. The key to good audio? Mic selection, placement and segregation from you source and it’s surroundings.


Want some 4K sequences to play with? Elemental offers some in different formats here:
4K Test Sequences | Elemental
Ultra-high resolution 4K video, generally 3840 x 2160, is on the immediate horizon and poised to enter the mainstream. However, bringing 4K to the masses faces an obstacle: a dearth of quality test content. Elemental decided to address this problem with recreations of classic test clips using a RED® Epic 4K camera. These clips are available for download, in ProRes and compressed MP4 formats, compliments of Elemental. Enjoy!


DAVINCI RESOLVE 10.1 NEW FEATURES | Ripple Training
DaVinci Resolve 10.1 was recently announced with a flood of new editing and workflow enhancements.  Resolve 10.1 adds support for Final Cut Pro 10.1; the ability to assign and preview multiple camera takes while editing;  3D steroscopic workflow; better handling of PSD files; new organizational features; new Color Page enhancements; more accurate XML translation and much more.  The movies on this page will walk you through all the new features of Resolve 10.1 and what they mean to your workflow.  For our full DaVinci Resolve tutorial click here.


Interesting story about the closing of a VFX house in India. But I'm not sure that we should draw too much from one example (just read the next item; sometimes a business is simply run badly.)
Imageworks India Goes Down | VFX Soldier
In fact when I started this blog, I was the only one in the VFX world that made the bold prediction over 3 years ago that VFX in India wouldn’t succeed. I fought like hell against people who said I was wrong and at times I wondered when I could officially say I was correct.


Maybe Blockbuster was badly run...though I think it would still have gone out of business due to the digital world. Also, the chart doesn't track iTunes and illegal movie downloading.
Did Netflix Really Put Blockbuster Out of Business? This Infographic Tells the Story | IndieWire
So while it's easy for Blockbuster to blame Netflix for its demise, the truth is much more complicated. As the infographic's authors put it, "it looks better to lose a war than to lose from sheer incompetence." We've got to agree with them there.


DIV III Project sows seeds for DIY Film Community | Hampshire College
The film, focused on “the dangers of youthful ignorance,” has involved more than 50 students, faculty, and others in the Five College community since production began last fall. Conversations between Charalampidis and Shirish Bahattarai 11F, co-producer of The Games We Play, sparked the idea of building a long-term collaborative plan based on developing a film studio-like group on campus.


Editors on Editing featuring: Brent White | YouTube
Brent White, A.C.E. editor, discusses his approach to editing comedy over the years.


David Carr offers a different take on Philip Seymour Hoffman's passing
The Wrestler | Remembering the fights that Philip Seymour Hoffman won | David Carr | Medium
Now that he is gone, much has been said about his failure, about his fall. I don’t really see it that way. He got in the ring with his addiction and battled it for two decades successfully, doing amazing film work for years and doing the hard stuff to keep ambitious theater alive in in New York.


A look at Sony's XAVC format:

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