Notes On Video

Workflow video: Simple post processing of 5D Mark III RAW footage in OSX | Cinema 5D Sebastian here has found a much more straightforward way to post process the raw files from the 5D Mark III which allows us to skip the relatively cumbersome After Effects conversion process. This new process only utilizes Adobe Photoshop’s raw import module New 5D Raw developments – plus my low light comparison with Blackmagic Cinema Camera | Andrew Reid | EOSHD The 4GB file size limit of FAT32 prevents continuous takes over 40 seconds currently. I asked Alex of Magic Lantern about overcoming this and he says it is perfectly possible but not a current priority. There’s a lot that comes before it – even basic stuff like assigning raw recording to a physical button.  Wait! What? You can only record 40 seconds at the moment? How'd I miss that? Easier 5D Mark III raw guide in 4 steps | Andrew Reid | EOSHD For 1080p will need a 1000x speed card, preferably 64GB as some of the higher ca...

Space Monkeys, Raw Video, and Giving Us All You've Got | Prolost One of the best looks at what's going on behind the latest Canon 5D hack: But there’s a price to pay for recording 14-bit uncompressed raw. It requires crazy-fast CF cards, and you’ll only get 15 minutes of video on that 128 GB card, according to Cinema 5D, who graciously posted their workflow and samples, “after struggling for a day” to get it all working. Low light test of 5D Mark III raw vs H.264 | Andrew Reid | EOSHD The image is cleaner in low light with raw, with even exposures I rated ISO 12,800 coming out perfectly usable. I’m hesitant to say it as a matter of fact but based on my early observations the 5D Mark III seems to have surpassed the C300 as the ‘low light king’. Friendly’s “Build Your Own Burger” Campaign Shot with Blackmagic Cinema Camera | Blackmagic “It was my job to get the best images possible, and I couldn’t believe what the camera delivered in such an affordable and easy wo...

Canon 5D mark III RAW vs. Blackmagic Cinema Camera RAW | Cinema5D Lots of excitement about the announcement of RAW recording with the Canon 5D Mark III : What became clear is that both cameras provide very similarly capable RAW files. You can adjust everything and everything is possible. You can get similar details out of the sky and set all you like in post. Color temperature, tint, dynamic range, no problem. The 5D is just as strong as the BMCC, providing maybe a bit more dynamic range. BIG NEWS – Hands on with CONTINUOUS raw recording on Canon 5D Mark III | Andrew Reid | EOSHD Magic Lantern have done the seemingly impossible and given us a continuous raw recording mode on the Canon 5D Mark III. Once activated in the menus the 5D Mark III becomes essentially a full frame Blackmagic Cinema Camera and amazingly mine has not yet exploded. No more short bursts of raw, this is the real thing. Andrew has taken to Twitter to post some more enthusiastic impressions: Only just s...

Conversation Series: Blackmagic CEO Grant Petty Talks Pricing and 4K | The Hollywood Reporter “Too many manufacturers make products that are way too expensive or too complicated. You have to buy their service contracts … but often they are used as a way for the manufacturer to produce poor quality products and make money off the service Quick Note: Technicolor Color Assist now supports Apple’s Final Cut X | Vincent Laforet A quick note to say that the Technicolor Color Assist software which is a wonderful way to quickly set a look (or color grade/correction) on the set right there on the spot (on a shoot large or small) before those drives get shipped off into never never land… is now supported by Final Cut Pro X. 9 Tips For Low Budget Indie Filmmakers | DigiMediaDude Get a committed team.  Make sure it’s a small crew and tell them that no one will get paid (at least with $$). Own or borrow equipment.  Do not rent! Jacob Rosenberg’s Ten Rules for Filmmaki...

How We Did It: SNL "Djesus Uncrossed" | Alex Buono I’m reading the script for the first time, thinking – “We’re supposed to shoot all of this…TOMORROW?”  The script was written by Zach Kanin and Colin Jost – two of my favorite writers at the show – and the scale of the spot was massive.  It was essentially: Ancient Rome and the Holy Land, to be shot in New York City with a few hours of scouting. Canon EOS C100 review – an underestimated cinema camera | Cinema 5D Here’s a camera I can truly recommend. It has no big red labels screaming things like 4K, 12bit, or 3D for that matter (that was last year’s hype), in fact it has nothing too fancy about it: It’s HD, it does 30p max and has a mediocre file compression system. But don’t be fooled by technical specs, because this camera is superb within its boundaries and a surprisingly strong, well rounded tool from top to bottom. UPCOMING WEBINARS | Assimilate Shooting, Color and Post with the Sony F5, F55 and F65 Wedne...

Last night I went to one of the six screenings of films made in this years Boston 48 Hour Film Project . This year 84 teams started the event and 81 finished - 63 of them on time. Having watched a team make a film, and being aware of what goes in to this sort of thing, I really think that everyone did a great job. Not all of the films were brilliant; and it's probably not surprising that none of the films were really perfect, but it was still an interesting - and inspiring - night for aspiring filmmakers. Here's some more tips I gleaned from the showing: Plan your time: A significant number of films were 'late.' You have to plan out your post time, how long it will take to render that last edit (and leave yourself enough time incase there's a problem with that render) AND leave plenty of time to get to the drop-off point. Audio, audio, audio: The consistently weak part in many of the productions was the audio. Image quality was actually pretty good (thanks to...

The Independent Screenwriter: Larry Gross | Filmmaker Magazine “The independent screenwriter” — is the term a tautology or oxymoron? While the word “independent” is often applied to directors and sometimes producers, it’s rarely seen appended to the job title of screenwriter. Is that because so many independent directors write their own scripts? NBCUniversal: “Transmedia storytelling will be a part of Social TV” | IP & TV News I might be an old codger, but aren't people tired of this yet? Social TV will be equivalent to watching TV. The second screen, sharing with others as you watch, interactivity  – the “social” part of TV will all be part and parcel of the regular TV experience. KESSLER PARALLAX – A BRILLIANT SOLUTION TO AUTOMATIC PANNING ON A SLIDER | Dan Chung | News Shooter This week Kessler announced a simple add-on auto panning solution for their popular Pocketdolly and Cineslider. Essentially a bar attached to the slider that couples to a panning base o...

Ray Harryhausen , Effects Innovator Behind Jason and Sinbad, Dies at 92 New York Times Quick Links The Next Steven Spielberg Uses A Smartphone | Readwrite Blackberry has teamed up with famed Sin City director, Robert Rodriguez, to create a short film using the new Blackberry Z10. Former Cannes film festival winner, Park Chan-wook, used a smartphone to film Paranmanjan - it won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival.  Filmmaking on an iPhone: What are the benefits? | Kristian Day | Zacuto One of the finest products in the plethora of those that have flooded the market is the Zacuto iPhone Point N Shoot. On my television cooking show, Crowding the Pan, we shoot entirely on an iPhone 4S with a limited budget. This could be anywhere from zero dollars to $3000 an episode (depending on if someone is sponsoring us or not that week). The Real Deal on Redrock’s “One Man Crew” | Crew of One For interviews, this $1,495 rig looks int...

Today Adobe announced that they are moving to an all-rental model for their creative software. You'll be able to rent a single title like Photoshop for $10 a month ($20 after the first year), or get access to the entire Adobe collection for $50 a month (there's some discounts for the first year for current users.) I've been using Photoshop since version 1.0, and Illustrator almost as long, and I just switched back to Premiere from Final Cut Pro , so I'm not an Adobe hater, but I must admit that I'm not a fan of being forced into a rental model. I already wrote at some length about this last year when they first announced the Creative Cloud:  Are Software Subscriptions A Good Idea? Color me a little skeptical about Adobe's justification for moving to the rental model: on the one hand they say that maintaining the Creative Cloud and Suite was a distraction : Producing these different versions was a distraction, and this move, Morris told me, will “giv...

I spent much of the last couple of days following around a team working on the Boston 48 Hour Film Project . I intend to write more, but here's my initial impressions: Things will go better if your core team has worked together before. The most pressure occurs at the beginning (coming up with an idea and a script) and at the end (getting the edit together and done by the deadline.) The in-between part - the shooting - can go pretty easily assuming you have the gear you need and the crew know's how to use it. If your editors and VFX people aren't involved in the scripting and shooting they'll be in better shape for the sprint to the finish on the last day. Have a call time for Saturday morning already set; otherwise it will be midnight on Friday night, the script won't be written, and the cast and crew will be calling wondering when/if they are needed in the morning. Have permissions for locations locked down before Friday evening, otherwise you'll waste t...

SIZE MATTERS — JONAH KESSEL FIELD TESTS THE CANON C100 IN BURMA | Jonah Kessel | News Shooter It does have things that aren’t perfect about it but, for me, the benefits far outweigh the negatives by an enormous margin. While the C300 is without doubt a better camera, I’m not convinced its the best camera for people like me. How to get sound from the Canon 5D Mk III to the Ninja 2 | Hireacamera | Vimeo Unlike most camcorders, the 5D Mk III with its new Firmware update doesn't export the sound digitally through the HDMI. Here we show you how to get around this and what you need to watch out for. GUESTS: Kanen Flowers, Jessica Sitomer, Paul Korver, and Gary Symons |  Digital Production Buzz Shooting “Hero Punk” with Blackmagic Cameras Get Your Career Back on Track Cinelicious Loves Film Restoration and 4K! Apps and Hardware for Mobile Journalists Words of Advice from a Master: Ridley Scott | Vincent Laforet Ridley Scott has filmed quite a few of my favorite...

Canon 5D Mk III Firmware with Atomos Ninja 2 | LensProToGo | Vimeo In this video, we take an initial look at the new Canon 5D Mk III Firmware teamed up with the Atomos Ninja 2. Canon 5D Mark III finally gets a clean HDMI out…. | Den Lennie | F-Stop Academy The new update from Canon means you can finally record a clean HDMI out and record to an Atomos Ninja 2 – this means you can shoot in ProRes 422 albeit 8 bit. The fact is when Canon released the 5D MArk III the new CODECS were a vast improvement on the old h.264 that we all had to deal with on teh 5D Mark II and 7d. 3.5k Canon 5D Mark III raw video with Magic Lantern and latest updates | EOSHD These past days I’ve been trying to make myself useful to Alex at Magic Lantern, testing the DNG raw video recording on the 5D Mark III with a nightly build of Magic Lantern.Here’s what the video quality looks like in the DNG video modes at 30fps. Making Digital Video Look Film-like | Mastering Film One of the first exercis...

I just spent the last day trying to help a friend diagnose their Mac problems. They had tried upgrading their Mac Mini to Mountain Lion and the install process got hung half way through, objecting to the hard drive. Somehow the hard drive became corrupted and the install process asked whether we wanted to choose another disk, get help, or try the Disk Utility to repair the drive. But even if we chose the repair option, it wouldn't let us repair the hard drive. The next thing to try would have been to boot off the SuperDrive and try and repair the hard drive, except that the internal SuperDrive had stopped working a few months ago. I thought about buying an external SuperDrive, but when I did a Google search and the consensus seemed to be that you can't boot from external SuperDrives. Then I discovered this article:  Make a bootable USB flash drive to run & repair Mac OS X | MacYourself. I thought that sounded like a great idea, and went and bought a 32GB flash dr...

The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine Esposito : We both felt like we weren’t telling some of the stories that we thought we would be telling when we got out of journalism school. We decided one of the ways to find and tell those stories would be to drive around the country and go off the beaten path and really look for them. New Firmware v1.13 for Sony PMW-F5 & PMW-F55 | CineTechnica In case you missed it over the weekend, Sony has released firmware version 1.13 for both the F5 & F55. Along with a few bug fixes, this update also includes much-requested features like adjustable Exposure Index (EI) while shooting Raw, and remote start/stop trigger.  Shane Hurlbut Returns |  doddleTALKS Tech Director of Photography Shane Hurlbut, ASC, returns to doddleTALKS Tech to discuss how he approached selecting cameras for his new film Need for Speed, and by testing those cameras, how he found that they ...

“How Do You Get Anybody to See It?” Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver and 21st Century Filmmaking | Filmmaker Magazine “The new technology allows people to make films very, very cheaply, but it also unhinges the vital connection that has existed for over 100 years between capitalism and motion pictures.” Filmmakers are now free, he explains, to “make movies the same way you can make poetry, songs, paintings. You can make it for no money.”  Magic Lantern Team Discovers 2K RAW Video Capability on the 5D Mark II and III | PetaPixel In what may very well be the most exciting Magic Lantern development ever, the team has discovered a RAW DNG output in live view on the 5D Mark II and 5D Mark III. What this means is that, in the near future, 5D Mark II and III owners may be able to record crystal clear 2K RAW video that blows H.264 output out of the water and then some. The Canon 1D C review | Andrew Reid | EOSHD The 1D C is a frustrating camera and I want to fall in love with he...

Here’s some quick notes from the three speakers at last night’s Boston Creative Pro User Group meeting : Ben Consoli Final Cut Pro WorkFlow Ben Consoli of BC Media Productions started the evening off with a demonstration of Final Cut Pro X. He explained that he intended to show the workflow, not provide a training session as such. He said that the first thing he does when importing new media from a camera or card is create a camera archive of the material. He then demoed creating metadata in Final Cut Pro X , and how to add metadata, create Roles and use Filters. I’ve seen several metadata demos before, and I understand how they can be useful if you work in a certain way. Unfortunately, I have many bad editing habits, and I tend to just throw things onto timelines and start cutting, rather than go through and tag and divide things up before I start. Maybe if I had a production assistant I would be doing that more... That said, Final Cut Pro X can demo well. The Precisi...

ARRI Says: Don’t Believe the (4K) Hype | Studio Daily And just today I got an email from Best Buy introducing Sony 4K Ultra HD TVs Noting that ARRI is showing footage on a Sony 4K display in its booth, Shipman-Mueller encouraged viewers to take a critical look at those pictures."4K, right now, is way overhyped," he said. "What's more important than resolution is overall image quality. Once you have that, you can upres [the images] to 4K, and they look spectacular." (Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera) Footage in your pocket | John Brawley This footage was shot over about an hour at my local market on Sunday morning.  So yeah, it’s just home movies.    I was literally grabbing shots where I could whilst I was shopping !  But, you do get to see what one man can do with a pocket cinema camera and a 12-35 Panasonic m4/3 zoom.  The Why, The Where and The When to Move the Camera | Shane Hurlbut Motion is a very powerful tool in telling your story. It can ...

The Challenges of Shooting Global News Coverage with Matthew Allard on 4.17.13 | Rule Boston Camera | Vimeo I went to this talk last week, and it was really interesting...worth watching: Award-winning shooter and editor, Matthew Allard, shares his 23+ years of experience covering breaking news stories around the world — from major sporting events to terrorist bombings — while shooting almost exclusively with large sensor cameras.Currently based in Kuala Lumpur, Allard works as Team Leader/Cameras for the Asia/Pacific branch of AL JAZEERA, shooting with HD broadcast cameras including the Sony NEX-FS700, the Sony PMW-F3 and the new Sony PMW-F55 as well as a plethora of Canon DSLRs. Six Questions Apple Needs to Answer in 2013 | Scott Macaulay | Filmmaker Magazine Forget the Apple TV, where’s the Apple TV SDK? The iPhone has been Apple’s growth driver since its launch in 2007. But it wasn’t until the following year, when Apple opened up the iPhone operating system iOS to thi...

Sony E 10-18mm f/4 OSS (SEL-1018) - Lab Test / Review | PhotoZone Another review of this E-mount zoom lens, with some highs and a few lows: The build quality of the Sony lens is, again, impressive. It has mostly an all-metal body based on a metal mount. While this may sound like heavy stuff, it is an amazingly light-weight lens of just 225g. The inner lens tube extends slightly when zooming towards the long end of the zoom range. Both the zoom and focus ring operate smoothly. A plastic, petal-shaped lens hood is also part of the package. Mocha Corner Pin Tutorial | VACD | Vimeo This is a tutorial on how you can track motion in Mocha and apply the corner pin data on your After Effects projects. Why the Sony FS700 won NAB Show 2013 | Tony Reale | NextWaveDV Then I headed over to Sony to get the low-down on their 4K upgrade path. Low and behold, they had a Odyssey7Q hooked up to their FS700. That means Sony is embracing this as an option for FS700 owners. While talking abo...