The News

Craig Newman is trying to decide between the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and the Pansonic GH4:
The battle of the compact cameras: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera vs Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 | Entendre
In this year’s equipment budget, after all the other necessary upgrades / purchases, there is enough to get one of these two cameras. I have been switching between the two on a daily basis and… I really don’t know.
If I needed a production camera, the Panasonic would win hands down, but that’s not my need.


Are Passion Projects a Waste?: 6 Filmmakers’ Perspectives | The Music Bed
A recurring topic in our conversations with independent filmmakers is how personal/passion projects have either launched, sustained, or saved their careers. For some people, like Hunter Hampton, personal projects have kept them from jumping off a creative cliff. For others, like Khalid Mohtaseb, passion projects have become a surprisingly effective marketing strategy.


Free Forms and Legal Resources for Filmmakers & Video Pros | PremiumBeats
Chase Jarvis has a detailed post on why you need location permits for photo and video shoots. He shares his personal experience in location scouting for a Lululemon shoot. He also explains that most businesses and towns actually want productions to come to their locations because it is free marketing. So be patient!


Top Ten Screenplay Essentials | The Script Lab
2. Outline Before WritingKnow at least how the story ends, begins, as well as the screenplay’s five major plot points before writing the script.


Dissecting the recent Adobe Creative Cloud outage | Pro Video Coalition
If you were signed in and working then the outage Adobe suffered most likely didn’t cause any issues. It was those who had to log into the Creative Cloud for any reason, be it accessing files, downloading any apps or reauthorizing a computer that saw problems. You can run the Creative Cloud apps on as many machines as you want but you have to log out of one and log in on another when moving from say one desktop machine to another desktop machine.


RØDE’s PinMic takes lavalier microphones to a new esthetic level | Pro Video Coalition
PinMic, the least obtrusive body mic I’ve ever seen, short of hiding a conventional lav inside clothing. With the PinMic, absolutely all components and cabling stay inside the clothes, except the microphone element itself, which connects to the rest via three tiny pins, which perforate the shirt or dress non-destructively.


10 Unconventional Steps to Get Your Indie Film Out in the World | IndieWire
When producer falls in love with that script and hires a casting director, thank your lucky stars that you're going to shoot a real feature! Meet a lot of talented up-and-coming actors for coffee. Hire a few and reject others. Even the ones you reject will go onto great success (e.g. Jason Siegel, Johnny Galecki). 


Avid ships their new Media Composer with new licensing options | Pro Video Coalition
Obviously the biggest news is the different pricing options that includes both subscription (“rent it”), perpetual (“own it”) and floating (“lease it”) options in the mix. I didn’t come up with those terms, that’s in the What’s New blog post. Flexibility is good but what has to be noted is that with the perpetual “own it” license you have to buy an Avid Support plan at $299 per year in order to get any updates.


Aerial drone photography near the arctic circle | SkyPixel
I returned a few days ago from 10 incredible days of flying a DJI Phantom 2 quadcopter in Iceland. Iceland’s natural beauty is nearly unparalleled, and I felt fortunate to be able to wander around the country with a camera that could be moved both horizontally and vertically in space. Iceland’s latitude is 66ºN, which means that it just brushes up against the boundary of the arctic circle. It is a challenging place to fly because of a few key issues. 


Coloring expert Patrick Inhofer offers a color grading course:
NEW! The Color Correction Home Study : Is it for you? | Tao Of Color
If you’re serious about learning color grading – would you turn down an opportunity to sit next to a professional colorist for a few days? Especially if he was offering you to take home the same film he was working on for you to explore on your own?That’s what this Home Study offers you.

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