Notes On Video

How Not To Market Your Movie | Jason Brubaker | Filmmaking Stuff Nobody cares about your movie unless they care about your movie. Stop sending long emails talking all about YOU. What’s in it for me? Really? You want to make another no-budget drama with no star talent? Usain Bolt Took a Bunch of Photos with a Swedish Guy's Camera. Who Owns the Rights to the Sprinter's Snapshots? | Krystal Bonner | Slate Under most countries' intellectual property laws, including the United Kingdom’s, the person who actually pushed the button owns the photograph, unless the work was made for hire. That means Wixtröm technically does not own the copyright to Bolt’s photos, unless he and the sprinter negotiated a rights transfer in writing. F3 Act II | The Sony Tech Guy | Pro Video Coalition A wrap-up on the updates to the Sony PMW-F3 which were announced a couple of months ago. Also the  CBK-MH01 which appears to "just" be a monitor hood; rather expensive at $619.95. ...

Anatomy of a Grade - Ep 09 - The "Bleachy Western Look" | Chris Hall | Vimeo A tutorial for DaVinci Resolve ; though I think you'll need to know Resolve to follow along: Colorist Chris Hall demonstrates a "Bleach Bypass" effect on a period Western film. Special thanks to DP Andrew Russo (awrusso.com/) for the great photography! Fixing A little “Got-cha!” in the LightWorks to Premiere Finishing Workflow | Peter J. Haas | aBlogAbout.Haas Peter is using an interesting workflow from Lightworks to Premiere : I’m currently cutting a feature documentary in EditShare’s latest Pro version of LightWorks, and we’re very interested in revisiting this workflow for finishing. We were running some tests yesterday and noticed a interesting little bug in the workflow we hadn’t noticed before. After a successful import of the AAF sequence into Premiere, the media relinking kept returning an error for files we knew matched. It didn’t seem to be an issue with the AAF, ...

If you were buying a camera at the moment, which one of those two would you pick? That is a question that seems to keep coming up the last couple of weeks, and I ended up discussing it again last night with someone trying to make that decision. No conclusions were reached; I think part of the problem is that the head says "The Sony NEX-FS700  [$7,999] is half the price of the Canon  C300  [$15,999], it doesn't make sense to get the C300 " but the heart says "Yeah, but get the C300 !" As I see it, the pros and cons of the cameras (compared to one another, not to other cameras) are: Sony FS700 Pros: Price (half the price) High Speed (Super-slow mo) Supports wide range of lenses 4K maybe[1] Cons: No idea what the 4K costs Support for Canon EF lenses limited by the lens adapter capabilities LCD panel positioning is limited AVCHD compression[2] [1] Still no info on when, what cost, and what cost for the hardware. [2] Some people think AVCHD isn'...

Big Ass Light Test at EVS | Chris Collins | Wide Open Cameras Testing different film lights; with example video: We decided to gather as many edison plug film lights and put them against one another. We tested tungsten lights, LEDs, HMIs, and flourescents. We kept it simple: we lit our subject, Simone, with each light without any diffusion and through a 2×3 silk. Everything took place inside a 12×12 black duvatyne tent. Everything was shot on a Sony Fs100 with Metabones adapter and Zeiss ZE 35mm. Take a look at the results… Canon EOS 7D Firmware 2.0 Available for Download | CanonRumors Finally! Manual audio gain for the 7D : *Note At the time of posting, the firmware was not available if you select Mac OS X Mountain Lion, select Lion instead. Quick review of the Sony PMW 200 and a ten minute challenge! | Philip Bloom | Blog The PMW-200  [$6,299] is billed as the replacement for the PMW-EX1 [$5,899]. Philip seems to like it: Unfortunately, having never shot with th...

Last night the trackpad on my MacBook Pro started to misbehave. It acted like I was double-clicking or just clicking, nearly all the time. Context menus would open randomly, and it kept selecting parts of the web page as I tried to scroll though it. This started out as a slight annoyance, and quickly got worse. While it was still - almost - manageable, I went into System Preferences to see if I could turn off or adjust some of the behavior there. That didn't work. I tried attaching a mouse. That worked for about five minutes, before that too was being stymied by the behavior of the trackpad, which was still detecting mouse clicks and presses randomly. It became worse and worse, and operating the computer became an adventure; it was like I had a mad three-year old clicking at things as I was working. Applications I was trying to launch were removed from the dock, other applications were opening unintentionally, and it was switching from one application window to another as I d...

DaVinci Resolve 9: How To Upgrade the Pain-Free Way (plus 5 favorite features) | Patrick Inhofer | Tao Of Color The biggest problems I’ve had is when I upgraded an existing database and started working within that database. All sorts of funkiness would happen. Features wouldn’t work, buttons wouldn’t activate, projects would get flakey. The easiest way to avoid those problems? Create a brand-new fresh database Backup the old database Upgrade the old database Import any existing project into the new database. “Anniversary Day” 1st Boston 3 Minute Short Film Challenge | Rick Macomber | Macomber Productions Rick has posted his own blog on the 3 Minute Film Challenge: Sean had what I consider to be the best light – the magic hour – for his story, as you will see below. I thought he dealt with the changes in the afternoon/evening light very well in the time he had to finish. The C300 also performs very well in low light conditions. The only lights we used on Sean’s sh...

Vintage VS New Lens Shoot Out! | Steve Oakley Check out 2 new lenses against some 20 to 30 year old vintage glass. Surprising results in shooting resolution charts and real world images. In the mix are the Rokinon / Samyang 35 1.4 and Tamron 17-50 2.8 against classic vintage glass : vivitar 28 1.9, vivitar 28 f2 and kiron 28 f2 The Art and Technology of the PMW-F3 | Sony | Facebook Sony has released a new brochure on the PMW-F3 : NEW! PMW-F3 brochure with case studies, latest firmware information, features, and much more. Click here to download it: PMWF3 Brochure (PDF | 7.37 MB) Skin Deep | Matthew Allard | Vimeo Matt shot this video using the Sony PMW-F3 . Nokia PureView 808 Review (vs iPhone 4S) | Andrew Reid | EOSHD Before the iPhone I was very interested in camera phones and Japan was leading the way with stuff like the Sharp 903. It had an optical zoom, auto-focus and 3MP sensor as far back as 2002. The initially very poor 2MP camera on the first generation iPho...

Extending SpeedGrade with SpeedLooks | Eric Philpott | Adobe A short interview with Jeff August of LookLabs, who sells these LUTs for SpeedGrade , and will be giving a free webinar on the 16th: What are SpeedLooks? SpeedLooks are specially designed LUTs which emulate the look of film. They are based on Fuji and Kodak film stocks and they give images character instantly. What gave you the idea for this? For a long time I’ve tried to give a unique look to interlaced video. I wanted my shows to look different from the way broadcast looked – to give video a more filmic personality. More Canon C300 CP's! | BrianCWeed | CinemaEOSUser Some Picture Profiles for the Canon C300 : TRUvid2 was designed to be bright, vivid, & punchy (but not in a cartoony way like you get with EOS Std); for when you need to deliver right away and you know there won't be time for color work. TRUcine looks great out of the box w/ nice DR, really hangs on to the highlights & will grade very ...

SpeedGrade for Aspiring Colorists: A Color Grading Primer for Editors | Adobe Thursday, August 16, 2012 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM US/Pacific I sat in on a SpeedGrade webinar before getting the software. I've since launched the program and become confused, so I'm actually looking forward to seeing how to use the program! Aimed at editors who want to add color grading to their workflow, this seminar will start with a look at the color correction tools in Premiere Pro and then move on to provide a primer in the powerful color capabilities of Adobe® SpeedGrade™ CS6. Open the full dynamic range of your footage and learn how to manipulate light and color to craft picture-perfect results. Now part of Adobe Creative Suite® and Creative Cloud, SpeedGrade gives you the power to push your stories further. Sign up for this live Ask a Video Pro session with award-winning editor and colorist Jeff August to learn more. Adobe Premiere Pro: Applying Audio Effects to Multiple Tracks | Clay Asb...

10 Premiere Pro Tips for FCP Editors | Clay Asbury | Premiumbeat A good resource for those starting out with Premiere Pro : Personally, I save my media/projects to a folder on my media drive (fastest drive). I put my Premiere Auto Saves & Previews/Renders on a seperate drive and back up the projects to Dropbox daily. Whatever strategy you choose, please back up your project! If you forget or need to change your scratch after launching the project, go to Project>Project Settings>Scratch Disk to make modifications. Premiere Pro memory settings explained | Digital Rebellion An explanation of memory management in Adobe's video products: Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Prelude, Media Encoder and Photoshop all use the same memory pool so the RAM is assigned between them. Premiere and After Effects are assigned the highest priority within the pool so closing these applications can improve performance in the other apps. A big addition to this site: The Educational Res...

Importing AVCHD media into Premiere Pro on Mac OS X v10.8 (Mountain Lion) | Todd Kopriva | Adobe A couple of problems with Premiere Pro and the new OS X release: It has come to our attention that Apple has made a change in Mac OS X v10.8 (Mountain Lion) that changes the way an AVCHD folder structure appears to the operating system once imported. This affects the workflow for importing AVCHD media into Premiere Pro CS6. We have also today discovered a bug when using Premiere Pro with Mac OS X v10.8 in which AVCHD media that has gone offline cannot be successfully relinked. Blackmagic Design Releases DaVinci Resolve 9 Public Beta for Mac, Windows and Linux! | Creative COW Blackmagic releases a Public Beta for Resolve 9 , as well as the Lite (free) version: New user interface improvements include a new streamlined project import, export and selection workflow, scrubbable media thumbnails to speed up shot selection, production metadata fields for entering on set shot notes and ...

Panasonic AG-HPX250 Delivers Master Quality In A Compact Size | Tony Muzzatti | Crews Control DP Bill Mills went on a 10 day safari to three conservation areas in southern Africa with the Panasonic AG-HPX250 ($5,595]: The HPX250’s is the first P2 HD handheld camcorder that records in 10-bit, 4:2:2 independent frame, 1920 x 1080 resolution in the AVC-Intra 100 codec. To most professional camera operators and cinematographers the importance of capturing in 10-bits is a must. 10-bit capturing allows for four times more precise color sampling, while also eliminating the video artifacts often seen in 8-bit device recordings. A roundup of the current Blackmagic footage | John Brawley | Blog John recently posted some footage from the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera , which raised some questions that he addresses in this post: The aliasing is not from the camera in this case, as you can see from looking at the very first clip. This was introduced by the post process. And there's...

I've been working with Premiere Pro CS6 the last few days. I had actually been meaning to give it a go with a project for some time, but just kept putting it off. Finally I decided I just had to do it, so I edited a half hour program with it. I probably should have started with something shorter. The good Before I get in to the problems, I want to note one important thing: it's easy to use and I like the UI. I say that as a Final Cut Pro 7 user who found Final Cut Pro X confusing and discombobulating. By comparison, I’ve so far found working with Premiere Pro very easy. The interface and method of working is close enough to Final Cut that I've been able to do this project without spending time reading manuals or watching tutorials. And the U.I. hasn't frustrated me, so I'm really happy about that. The bad On the other hand, I have had a very perplexing problem with performance. Specifically, jumping from one section to another can sometimes cause the pr...

If you're interested in attending this weeks Rule Boston Camera/Frontline/Canon event with DP Alex Buono of Saturday Night Live, you should register now. The event is filling up and could be full by event day: WHEN: Wednesday, August 1 5:30-6:30pm Food & Drinks 6:30-9pm Presentation with Alex Buono WHERE: WGBH Yawkey Theater One Guest Street, Brighton, MA RSVP : events@rule.com UPDATE: The event is now full

I must admit, at the beginning of the opening ceremonies for the Olympics, I really wondered what we were in for. The large green grass field with people wondering around? It looked like an over-budget school play gone horribly wrong. But then Kenneth Branagh appeared and things started to get interesting. James Bond parachuted in with the Queen, a giant ring was forged and then raised into the sky joining four others with sparks streaming from them (how did they do that?) The Artic Monkeys played Come Together while winged cyclists circled the stadium, and the large bed pans the teams had brought in with them formed the petals of a large flower that formed into the Olympic torch. And then they had fireworks going off all over and around the stadium. The show was an amazing combination of music, film, dancing and visual effects. And imagination. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am that they even pulled it off. I may not watch much of the rest of the Olympics, but...

THE WEEK IN CAMERAS: CANON GOES MIRRORLESS, BDCC ACCESSORIES AND A NEW SONY CAMERA | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine A look at the Canon EOS M , a little update on the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera and the Sony PMW-200 : Canon this week announced the Canon EOS M, a small camera that takes an APS-C sensor and stuffs it into a smaller body by doing away with the DSLR mirrorbox and using a new lens mount. The EOS M follows a trail blazed by Canon’s competitors — namely Panasonic and Sony. Sony has had a hit with their NEX- series cameras, and obviously Canon has been watching. July Color Correction | SpliceVine Patrick Inhofer did a series on color correction this month on Splice Vine , and it's wrapped up with an interview conducted with Patrick: The BBC documentary, Do You See What I See? and how it was talking about how a banana tends to always look yellow even under different colored lights. That’s right. Because we imbue meaning to these objects. These are thin...

Continuing from yesterday’s Part 1 , here’s the rest of the notes from this week’s Adobe Presentation by Adobe's Al Mooney at the Boston Creative Pro User Group meeting. Trimming Al explained that they had been told that trimming wasn’t very good, so they completely redesigned it. You can now select an edit point and trim using the keyboard; previously you could only select clips and then trim in the Trim Monitor. Edits can be done by keyboard, or by mouse and you can even select and edit multiple trim points at the same time. There's a check box in Preferences under Trim that you want to turn on: " Allow Selection tool to choose Roll and Ripple trims without modifier key. " This allows you to choose multiple edit points, and it will also make Premiere choose between modes as you move the cursor left and right over the edit point, "it’s clever, it says 'I think that needs to be a ripple in, that needs to be a roll, that needs to be a ripple out.'...