Notes On Video

Sony FS700 test footage. Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis, MN | AlokaKasina | Vimeo More slow-motion footage from the Sony NEX-FS700 . Some of it is quite good, but after about a minute it feels like the novelty wears off. We're all going to be sick of slow-motion by the end of the year: Footage captured with a prototype Sony FS700. In-camera 240fps_1080p and 480fps_720p. Compressed to H.264, 720x1280, 23.976. How to Set Up the Canon 5D To Shoot Video | Michael Britt | Photo Cine News A setup video for the Mark II (not the III): I just put up a short video about how to set up the Canon 5D MKII for Video. I’ve put some of this information out before in our book and some other blog posts but this time I go step by step through the menus for capturing video. I do this in my Intro to DSLR Video seminar and decided to provide this video as a resource to my students, Samy’s Camera customers and PCN readers. If you have a Canon 5D Mark III, and want to shoot underwater, you can now ...

For the last couple of years, Zacuto has been hosting a camera shoot-out where they get a bunch of cameras, shoot some test video, show the results to different people, and then release a web series on the making of, and the reactions to the footage. For the latest go-round, the Boston Creative Pro Users Group is hosting a showing in Boston. Here's the details: BOSCPUG is proud to host the Boston 2K screening of the Zacuto REVENGE of the GREAT CAMERA SHOOTOUT 2012, featuring footage shot with cameras including the ARRI Alexa, Canon C300 and 7D, Sony FS100, F3 and F65, Panasonic GH2 and RED Epic. Headed by Bruce Logan, ASC and featuring Rodney Charters, ASC, Polly Morgan, Nancy Schreiber, ASC, Mick Jones, Johnny Zeller and other industry cinematographers. DATE : Thursday, June 13, 2012 TIMES : 7PM - 9PM (doors open at 6:30PM, Screening begins promptly at 7PM) WHERE : Theatre 1/Space 57 at the new Revere Hotel | Boston Common 200 Stuart Street Boston, MA 02116 (formerly...

6 Filmmaking Tips From The Coen Brothers | Cole Abaius | Film School Rejects Tips from the Coen's: Don’t Be Afraid to Offend “‘Taste,’ says Joel, ‘has never been something we’ve worried about.’ ‘We’re not big on taste,’ agrees Ethan, his grin broadening even further. ‘And actually, if you don’t pander to undue sensitivities then it ends up usually not being much of a problem. In The Big Lebowski, we dumped the crippled guy out of the wheelchair, and no one seemed to mind that. Everyone was saying, You’re going to get a huge amount of mail from disabled people about this. Selectively De-Animating Video | Jiamin Bai et.al. | Berkley.edu Interesting paper (and demo) about technology for greatly simplifying action in a sequence: via Jack Nack : We present a semi-automated technique for selectively de-animating video to remove the large-scale motions of one or more objects so that other motions are easier to see. The user draws strokes to indicate the regions of the video th...

A Cautionary Tale for the FCP Switcher | Walter Biscardi | Creative Cow Walter very publicly broke up with Final Cut when FCPX came out. He switched to Avid, but here he documents the many problems he ran into with the kind of work they do. Now he's trying Premiere Pro: In short, Avid has opened up the workflow on the front end of the process by allowing editors to work natively with multiple formats via AMA, but on the backend the software itself throws up a lot of roadblocks when trying to conform and export a timeline from the application. I describe as "We've made it a lot easier for you to start editing, but good luck getting your project out of our software." If you're going to finish your project inside Avid, you're good to go. But when trying to get outside the software, the tightly controlled database gets in the way. PART TWO…”In two minds” | Philip Johnston | HD Warrior Philip continues to be in three minds about whether to switch to Final C...

Adobe After Effects CS6 | Jeff Foster | MacWorld A big thumbs up for the new After Effects release: If you held out updating After Effects from CS5 or earlier, I urge you to consider this upgrade—or get left in the dust. That sounds like a strong statement, but I believe it's justified. After Effects CS6 is the most important upgrade the program has received since the first major update in version 7. It's not just a bunch of additional features and add-ons, but rather a truly rebuilt, reworked, and enhanced powerful compositing and motion graphics creation tool. Studying 3D Camera Tracker | Jerzy Drozda Jr | Maltaannon A tutorial on After Effects Camera Tracker: Some time ago I’ve posted a short introduction video on YouTube about the new 3D Camera Tracker available in After Effects CS6. I’ve got a lot of comments and questions since then, so I decided to make a more in-depth video on the various aspects of match-moving. If you tried solving a 3D camera on your own ei...

What’s in a Name? | Alexis Van Hurkman | Blog For those interested in color grading, an interesting discussion about the use of the in-phase indicator as an approximate guideline for the angle at which human skin tone may fall: To clarify, I would never and have never suggested that this line is a strict guideline for human hue. In my “color correction handbook” I wrote and illustrated more pages then my editor may have wished about the subtle variations of human skin tone, color interactions between a subject and the illuminant of a scene, and how the in-phase indicator under discussion is merely a general signpost. Like speed limits, nobody follows them exactly, but they let you know you’re around what you ought to be doing. Review of Sony NEX FS700 Part 2: Pros and Cons | Philip Bloom | Vimeo Philip finishes up his review of the Sony NEX-FS700 , listing the five "cool" things he likes best about the camera, and the four "no so cool" things: Cool: 1. Pric...

Behind The Lens – Episode 1 | F-Stop Academy In this episode, a discussion with Philip Bloom & Rick Young about how they got started in the business: "In this 5 Part Webisodic Video Series Cinematographer Den Lennie and Director James Tonkin host discussions with leading figures from the Indie and mainstream film community in Europe. Behind the lens - perspectives on Digital Cinematography is an insightful look at modern Cinematography and digital production" “Jump-start your production with Prelude CS6″ with Wes Plate, seminar recording and notes | Todd Kopriva | Adobe The webinar on Prelude I watched last week can now be seen in replay from this page: What is Adobe Prelude? Adobe Prelude is an application for ingesting, logging, and optionally transcoding tapeless media and assembling clips into rough cuts for use in an NLE (a nonlinear editing application). In addition to the summary in Wes’s presentation, both video2brain and Lynda.com have summaries that...

The Five C’s of Cinematography | Matthew Jeppsen | Fresh DC It's not about the gear, it's about: 1. Camera Angles “Camera placement is determined by narrative significance.”This is very important. Why are you looking at what you are looking at? Is it because it looks good, or because we need to see it to move the story along? It should always be to move the story along and never solely because it looks good. 6 Crowdfunding Mistakes That Can Kill a Campaign | Scott Steinberg | Mashable What to avoid when you start your crowd-funding campaign: 1. Nobody Knows Who You Are Among the most common reasons campaigns croak is the lack of a meaningful brand identity. Projects with existing followings or known personalities attached (e.g. Wasteland 2) often do well. Unproven or obscure projects, such as Class of Heroes 2, don’t fair as well. In fact, according to Kickstarter, 75% of projects fail just in the video game space alone. It makes sense that building and maintaining tr...

Review of Sony FS700 part1 live! | Philip Bloom | Blog Philip posts the first part of his video review of the Sony NEX-FS700 : The review is broken up into two parts. This one focuses on initial impressions and the super slow motion function. Part two is coming shortly in the next couple of days and focuses on the pros and cons of the camera. It's advantages and limitations, an examination of the image and it's low light performance.. Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 | Antony Bolante | MacWorld Another review of Premiere Pro CS6 : With the introduction of Prelude and SpeedGrade—not to mention the advent of the Creative Cloud—it’s tempting to define Premiere Pro CS6 in terms of a larger video workflow. [...] CS6 extends the performance gains of CS5 to a wider range of users, particularly mobile editors with the proper laptop configuration. But what makes CS6 a worthy upgrade is its focus on enhancing its raison d’être: more fluent video editing. After Effects CS6 (11.0.1) updat...

Yesterday I sat in on a Webinar on SpeedGrade given by Product Manager Patrick Palmer . For those that haven’t heard, SpeedGrade is the color correction tool that Adobe acquired recently and have added to their Creative Suite CS6 . Interface If you’ve seen other Color Grading tools like DaVinci Resolve or Apple’s Color , then SpeedGrade will seem somewhat similar with it’s primary and secondary layers, color scopes and three-way color corrector. It’s also different in that it doesn’t have some of the unusual interface elements; like the nodes for organizing effects in  Resolve . Does this mean it’s easier to be a color grader in SpeedGrade than in the other tools? While it may be a little less intimidating to use, particularly as it’s interface more closely resembles Premiere than say Color resembled Final Cut Pro, it’s still an extra, complicated step that’s more art than science. Like other CS6 tools, you have a project panel on the left, timeline at the bottom...

Canon EOS-1D X Has Begun Shipping to a Select Few [CR2] | CanonRumors The Canon 4K DSLR may be shipping to some lucky people: I’ve received good info that production samples of the Canon EOS-1D X have begun shipping to preselected lucky photographers. I’m told it’s for Euro 2012 and Olympic photographers, so they can get familiar with the camera. FULL review of Sony FS700 this week! In meantime here are some shots I did in SUPER SLOW MOTION  | Philip Bloom | Blog Philip is working on a review, and has posted some footage: The FS700 is not a replacement for the excellent-image-producing but a wee bit plasticky and frustrating FS100. It’s a model up. Is it worth the upgrade? Have they improved on some of the more annoying aspects of the camera? Will I buy one?! All these questions will be answered by Friday, so stay tuned! Sony FS700 Forman Birger Mount & 240fps Slow Motion Prototype Tests | Mark Forman | Vimeo More slow-mo video shot with the NEX-FS700 . Review: Ad...

Adobe Premiere Pro basics Tutorials | CreativeCOW Just starting out with Adobe Premiere CS6 ? CreativeCOW has an impressive collection of tutorials: Premiere Pro Basics (CS6 & above): 23 Dynamic Trimming In this tutorial, Andrew Devis looks at a couple of options that can help you to see your edits dynamically as you edit them. Andrew shows how to use and edit the 'Play Around' function as well as using the 'Loop' function so that the play-head will play a specified amount of time before and after it was placed allowing you to place it over (and edit) transitions on the fly. ADOBE Premiere Pro CS6 “Not impressed so far” | Philip Johnston | HD Warrior Meanwhile, Philip has encountered some issues with upgrading to CS 6, including tech support problems; " Why do Adobe employ these people who clearly do not know what they are doing, " and hardware compatibility issues: The Quadro FX4800 for Mac was available May 2009 and there is no mention of this ...

Yesterday's  review of the Manfrotto Video Monopod  prompted some interesting comments from readers: Billy May wrote: "I have 2 Manfrotto 561BHDV1's and use them pretty much everyday... TIP: WD-40 cures the stutter in the ball socket instantly." Paul Antico of Anticipate Media wrote: "it's the one piece of kit I use the most, support wise." Paul went on to add that to minimize the judder he: "loosened screws at the base. Minimized it. Could have removed it completely but wanted a bit of stiffness." John Marc Green  writes: "I shot an entire short film with one of these and a 5D Mark III. it is best used as a replacement for a shoulder rig, not a tripod alternative. It's much better than hand held shooting when you want a "living camera" look but need stable support such as when shooting video with a DSLR and prime lenses. There's a reason Still Motion uses them for shooting weddings. They're great for docume...

As good as in-camera stabilization and FX stabilization software might be, getting a good, steady shot can still be difficult, especially if you’re holding the camera for long periods of time. That’s why tripods are still vital pieces of equipment. But a good tripod can be large, heavy, awkward, and require large amounts of space to setup. That’s why I’ve been intrigued by the idea of shooting with a monopod. I recently spent some time with the Manfrotto Video monopod, and while I don’t think it’s perfect for all occasions, I can see it as a useful tool for certain situations. At almost six and a half feet when fully extended, it's a seriously tall device! Design The Manfrotto 561BHDV1 monopod features a very thick and sturdy support arm made up of four extensions. These are released using clip-releases that are easy to release and set; a necessary feature for those working quickly or in tight spaces. Most impressively, it extends to 6 feet and 5 inches tall; taller than any...

Last week’s free Adobe webinar of Adobe Prelude featured Wes Plate , Product Manager for Meta Data workflows. Wes started by explaining the history of Prelude’s development. Prelude evolved from a pilot project for BBC and CNN who shoot lots and lots of video and needed a file based interface geared towards journalists, camera people, producers and assistants, for logging footage before going into post-production. Such a tool would feature creation of searchable temporal metadata in a friendly interface geared towards non-editors. The resulting tool, Prelude ingests file-based materials (i.e. it will copy and convert them to another format) and it can be extended by partners to support different media management systems. It does not work with tape. Availability Prelude is included in Production Premium, Master Collection, and the Creative Cloud. While it’s not really sold separately, it is available through their volume-licensing program, and the licensing minimum is just one l...