Notes On Video

THE TRAGIC DEATH OF SARAH JONES LEAVES UNANSWERED QUESTIONS ABOUT SAFETY ON SET | VideoMaker Safety goes far beyond location permissions. A live film set is a dangerous environment. There are numerous dangers, from equipment in motion to cable littered floors to suspended light fixtures. Any producer, at any level, needs to take the proper precautions and measures to ensure a safe set for all cast and crew. Careful preparation and planning do more than ease the workload, it allows the crew to enjoy what they do. Indie-darling filmmakers: Vimeo has $10M with your names on it | C|Net The company is carving out a $10 million fund to directly invest in films that either premiere at one of the top 20 US film festivals or garner $10,000 in crowdfunded support on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, in exchange for giving Vimeo a window of time as the only place you can go to see the videos through its Vimeo On Demand pay-for-play platform. New York Times Movie Reviews, $11,000 a...

Interesting development in drones - judge rules that commercial drones aren't illegal. Now what will the FAA do? Judge rules commercial drones are legal, undoing six-year ban | The Verge Today Judge Patrick Geraghty dismissed a $10,000 fine levied by the FAA against Raphael Pirker, a Swiss drone operator who used a camera drone to film on the University of Virginia campus. "At the time of respondent's model aircraft operation... there was no enforceable FAA rule or FAR Regulation application to model aircraft or for classifying model aircraft as an UAS," the judge writes. Other News ‘This Is the End,’ ‘Now You See Me’ VFX Firm Closes Doors, 100 People Laid Off | The Wrap Modus FX, a Canadian visual effects vendor that counts “Now You See Me” and “This is the End” among its credits, is shutting down after six years. ...The company was undone after a number of projects it was slated to work on were delayed. Deluxe to close Hollywood film lab | Los Angel...

4K is here! Blackmagic Production Camera Review | EOSHD I’m not sure how long me and Miss Blackmagic are going to last to be honest. She has some very bad habits… She drinks ALL the juice in the fridge. I have run out. Her sister, the Pocket Camera went through about 6 Nikon juice cells in a day once. This one is much worse. Then there’s her weight. I have to be very delicate what I say here, but she’s a little on the heavy side especially when she is carrying around that big juice carton all day in her handbag. Want another opinion on the Blackmagic 4K camera? Here's our second, independent, review | Red Shark News Before we start, we're going to have to come to an agreement. That agreement recognises the fact that the Blackmagic Production Camera is a very serviceable little device, and the fact that it's very cost effective. So, should I happen to write something even slightly less than positive about this camera, I want you to assume that the mitigating words “...

Things seem to be heating up in the drone world. And I'm not just talking about Amazon deliveries or Facebook . Just back in December the FAA announced that it was - finally - going to get a move on about drone regulation, and picked six test sites to evaluate drones. So we're all on track for new rules by 2015, or 2017: FAA names 6 sites for testing drones  | USA Today The Federal Aviation Administration named six teams across the nation that will host the development and testing of drones to fly safely in the same skies as commercial airliners. The announcement represents a major milestone toward the goal of sharing the skies by the end of 2015, in what is projected to become an industry worth billions of dollars. Meanwhile, everyone's buying drones, so some people think the FAA is in danger of losing the war: FAA risks losing drone war | Politico The result, observers and drone users warn, could be a Wild, Wild West in the nation’s skies. As small dro...

So Sony has 4K projectors , $30K 4K cameras , 84" 4K Monitors , 30" 4K monitors , $16K 4K cameras , an $8K 4K camera (if you ignore that fact you have to spend a lot more to actually record in 4K), a $5.5K 4K camera , a $4.5K 4K camera , and they will shortly start shipping a $2K consumer camera, the FDR-AX100 . Which got me to thinking; surely they will come out with a 4K version of the NEX-VG30 body pretty soon too? They've already had the VG10, VG20 and VG30 in pretty quick succession, so it must be a popular camera design. Surely, the only question is when - it's not an NAB type camera, but surely before the end of the year? And what will they call it? - the VG40 sort of ties nicely to 4K...though maybe they should drop the '0' at the end? Except that Sony has killed the NEX brand name for their 'still' camera line, so it's likely that the new model will have a different name altogether... Sony FDR-AX100 But if an "NEX-VG40...

Reader Paul Antico has been experimenting with his new Mac Pro and different hard drives and reports  some excellent results with Toshiba drives: So I got a pile of Toshiba 2TB drives for backup (I just put them in a USB 3 dock) recently, and just today tested them for speed. (They are $75 each - 2TB for sale at B&H, Amazon, Microcenter... the price varies within $10 [ At the moment they seem to be about $86.00 - Ed ]). Keep in mind they are empty, but still: 180 Mb/sec. That’s FAST for a spinning HD! These drives are very highly rated too; they are Hitachi (toshiba bought the plant) [ Hitachi are reliable according to this failure rate chart - Ed ]and have historically very low failure rates. I have old drives like 7 year old 1 TB drives that get 80MB/sec.

Here's a Better Edit Room | Tribeca Considering that an edit suite is ideally an environment where creative debate and collaboration is taking place, the default way they’re designed is, in my opinion, insane. The counterproductive setup of a normal edit room, even at the biggest studios and nicest post-production houses is a study in separation and walls. Canon C500 vs. Film Camera Test | Shane Hurlbut If we were to compare the C500 and film side by side, immediately you can see more of the different tonalities in the background. The C500 kept a much cooler tone in the shadows and the background, while the yellow forklift comes across as a very punchy energized color. The film on the other hand is more grey in the background and the color of forklift kind of blends in the background and doesn’t stand out. A piece about director Billy Wilder: The Wilder touch | Cinephillia and Beyond Wilder's method is a combination of gags, familiar slaps, games with sweater sl...