Notes On Video

Sony’s Sub-$10,000 PMW-300 Is the EX3′s Successor | StudioDaily Sony announced the PMW-300 camcorder, refreshing its XDCAM line-up with a semi-shoulder mount camera that uses the same EX-mount interchangeable lens system as the PMW-EX3, meaning both 1/2-inch and 2/3-inch lenses can be used. And it adds the broadcast-friendly 50 Mbps MPEG HD 422 codec to its recording options. Behind the Scenes of the New Sony 4K Commercial | Sony Blog If you’ve seen the spot, you know this was no small production. But what exactly does it take to create something like this? As it turns out, it takes 4 days on location and a whole lotta people. Our team selected Miranda Beach in New Zealand as the main set (ironic, since our Cinematographer on the job is Academy Award Winner, Claudio Miranda. No relation). First impressions of the F55 | Sony Cinematographer and hugely influential blogger Philip Bloom got his hands on the F55 back in April and immediately set about making a short film ...

Saturday, June 15th @ High Output Studios, Massachusetts Coffee & Bagels 9:30 AM / Seminars 10:00 - 12:00 Noon  RSVP & Tickets: Working Methods Seminars Learn how brands work with agencies, producers, filmmakers, and content creators to create unique and engaging work in today's multi-platform media landscape. The seminar will also explore product placement in feature films, television and web content - and the rights and clearances involved when featuring products in a production. SPEAKERS & PANEL Eric Korsh - VP Brand Content, Digitas Arestia Rosenberg - Senior Content Producer, Hill Holiday Michelle Ferullo - Product placement specialist for feature films and TV. Moderated by: Margie Sullivan - Executive Producer, Redtree Productions

Tuesday was the Finale of the Boston 48 Hour Film Project . From something like 80 films, the final list had been winnowed down to 14 films. I'd already attended one of the six original screening nights, so statistically I should have seen at least two of these films, but I'd only seen one of them before. There were some great videos. The winner " All for Knot " was a great piece of acting, shooting and editing, and three or four of the other movies were almost as good. All in all, pretty impressive. Below are some of the best entries (unfortunately, I couldn't find a couple of other movies I wanted to include.) Anything from The2ndAct on Vimeo Behind the Scenes of "Love Hurts" from Ben Pender-Cudlip on Vimeo .

Adobe Premiere Pro CC and GPU support | Adobe Also, some customers may be aware that in the past there was a not-so-secret way of enabling non-supported GPUs by the ‘hacking’ or removal of a text file. This is no longer necessary in Premiere Pro CC. As long as you have a reasonably modern card with at least 1GB of VRAM, you will still be able to enable that card in the Project Settings dialog. TYLER STABLEFORD TALKS ABOUT HIS MOVE TO VIDEO, NON-PROFIT WORK AND THE FUTURE OF FILMMAKING | News Shooter Photographer, cinematographer and director, Tyler Stableford, like many others, started shooting video in 2009 after the release of the EOS 5D mkII. Over the last three years it has completely changed his business and landed him some big name clients but he’s still a storyteller at heart. I met up with Tyler at this year’s NAB show for a brief chat about his work. New Rokinon 16mm f/2.0 Wide-Angle Lens for APS-C and Micro Four Thirds | B & H Photovideo Rokinon has announc...

Zacuto C-Shooter Hands On Review | Erik Naso A review of the ($949)  Zacuto C-Shooter for Canon EOS C100/C300/C500 Cameras: The Canon Cinema EOS cameras are the most ergonomic camera I have used. So why use a rig for them? Well for a couple of reasons. If your trying to shoot ENG style then holding a camera with no rig can get fatiguing really fast. Try interviewing someone for over five minutes holding the C100 up without a rig.  Amazon Storyteller: A Sort-of-Free Storyboard Tool | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine On the face of it, it’s surprisingly easy to get started. The tool displays the script in a panel on the left-hand side. Click on a line of the script and the tool creates a new storyboard frame.  “Have You Been in Jail Recently?” Chris Doyle on How to Be a Cinematic Artist | Allan Tong | Filmmaker Magazine Doyle always carries this mindset when he handles a motion picture camera. “You see some words [in a script], and it says, ‘It’s ve...

A little rain in my Pocket | John Brawley John takes another look at the  Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera , which is expected to ship at the end of July. Using the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera with native m4/3 lenses I moved around pretty easily and unobtrusively.  Yes. The camera did get wet.  I tried to keep it dry, but it was inevitable. I shot mainly at ISO 1600, but the first few clips were shot at 800. BMCC prores test footage | Alex K Lin | Vimeo The Blackmagic Cinema Camera (the original, not the upcoming 4K ) My take on it is that the BMCC certainly has its own look. I think although Canon has avery mainstream and popular color matrix, rendering beautiful blushy skintones, the BMCC has very naturalrendering of skintones and film mode makes you start coloring with a nostalgic desaturated look... Product Review: Zynaptiq Unveil | Larry Jordan Can you remove reverberation? Maybe with this plug-in: As I was researching last week’s ...

There were so many interesting things that came over the transom yesterday it seemed necessary to do a special Saturday update: Raw is not log, log is not raw. They are very different things | Alister Chapman |  XDCAM-USER.COM An important difference: Raw simply records the raw, unprocessed data coming off the video sensor, it’s not even a color picture as we know it, it does not have a white balance, it is just digital “1′s” and zeros coming straight from the sensor. S-Log, S-Log2, LogC  or C-Log is a signal created by taking the sensors output, processing it in to an RGB or YCbCr signal and then applying a log gamma curve. 10 Most Expensive Mistakes Filmmakers Make | Elliot Grove | RainDance 2. Your Friends Can’t Act I know you think your script is pretty damn good (lets face – none of your mates have the balls or the know-how to tell you it sucks) and now you really want to squander whatever nest egg your producer has whipped together for your budget? The C...

Google: Online searches for movie trailers can predict box office turnout with high accuracy | Salon Trailer-related search trends four weeks out from a movie release provide strong predictive power for opening weekend box office revenue. Trailer search volume on Google coupled with both the franchise status of the movie and seasonality can predict opening weekend box office revenue with 94% accuracy. Sequel to Thunderbolt is all about 4K video | Ars Technica That, in fact, is Intel's overriding message. Intel's announcement blog post focuses heavily on the creation and consumption of 4K video, almost to the exclusion of everything else. To that end, Thunderbolt 2 doesn't include an increase in the total throughput the connection can provide, but it does aggregate the data channels together. Visual: Standard Frame Rates | Indie Tips 24p or 23.98 (or 23.976 if you want to get really technical) is the most common frame rate used for motion pictures and is gener...

Sony have announced some firmware updates and some special camera bundles. Special PMW-F3 Toolkit available now through August 26th! Sony doesn't say how you get the packages; contact your dealer I guess... In the PMW-F3G444 Kit, we've added an Optitec adapter to increase the range of applicable lenses to include the Canon EF series. The RGB output and S-LOG Gamma module, previously an option, are now standard equipment. The on-board XDCAM takes advantage of Sony's well-established post workflow. However, we've also included the Convergent Design Gemini 4:4:4 recorder in this package. The Gemini 444 offers several recording options that takes the PMW-F3 all the way to uncompressed RGB recording. This package has what it takes to tackle the most challenging of projects. Special PMW-F5 Package available now through August 26th! 1) The PMWF5KCLCD Kit features the PMW-F5 with the DVF-L350 3.5" LCD viewfinder. The second Kit, the PMWF5KCEL features the DVF...

Canon 1D C Internal 4K Workflow | Shane Hurlbut | Hurlblog We have run many posts about the 1D C and its powerful 4K in camera capture, but I have really never discussed the workflow. Many people have asked about how I am processing these huge files, and in the blog survey, you requested more about post workflow, so I thought I would go into how we roll it out. KISS (keep it simple stupid) is our mantra. THE SONY FS700 = A PERFECT DOCUMENTARY TOOL? | Sam Price-Waldman | News Shooter Ultimately, what steered me to the FS700 over the C100/C300 was the ability to use the Metabones Speed Booster, an adapter for Canon EF lenses that gives an extra stop of light and the effective field of view of a Canon 5D (not the Super35 crop factor, as with the C300).  So … Will We See That New Mac Pro Next Week, or What? | StudioDaily Will the Mac Pro be announced next week? Maybe! Apple CEO Tim Cook promised "something really great" in this category would be released in 2013 a...

Film look with the F55 on “Uncommon Enemies” |  Dennis Hingsberg DP Dennis Hingsberg talks about shooting with the Sony F55 : For setting exposure I used my light meter religiously along with the waveform monitor built into the ikan D7W. Most of the scenes I was lighting for a max contrast ratio of 5:1 but generally talent was lit between 2:1 and 3:1, or sometimes more depending on where on the set they were or how the light was suppose to be motivated. I kept middle grey in the low 30’s and any bright light sources from exceeding 60-65 IRE. the Scent | Stefan Müller | Vimeo Stefan Müller is an Independent Film director from Austria who recently purchased a Canon C100 and sent us a link to his "first real life test of the camera," a short film called "The Scent."It's nicely done - especially the dog's performance! It was shot using the internal AVCHD compression on the C100, using a Canon EF-S 17 - 55 f2.8 lens; a Rode stereo Video Mic Pro ; a Ma...

How to ensure your extinction: look at what newspapers are doing | Vincent Laforet First they came for the communists: This week the Chicago Sun Times made what might just be one of the most clearly shorsighted decisions in its history:  they let go of all of their photography staff. Is Digital Democratization Of Content A Myth? | Edictive So who has benefited from the digital revolution in TV and film?  Not the content creators, certainly. Even the production of DVDs has declined, with Blu-Ray not providing the expected boost to the DVD market.   Mainly, the distributors and existing corporate players have been the beneficiaries of the digital revolution.  It’s the video streaming websites, aggregators and distributors who are making the money. Why Final Cut Pro X's killer feature may be yet to come...  | Mike Fernandes | fcp.co Maybe Apple will help with that democratization thing...? Think about that for a moment. Let's say I am an indi...

I’ve been using Adobe Prelude to ingest media from my cameras for the last six months or so, and apart from a slightly rocky start, have been generally happy with the way things have worked. But I had an interesting ‘adventure’ last week with some media management issues. I had recorded an hour-long presentation (and some other material) using three cameras, and then used Adobe Prelude to ingest the content. Part way through one ingest, I ran out of disk space! I had to cancel the import, then spend several hours moving data back and forth to clean up enough space on the work drive to continue working. Once I had enough free space, I went back to Prelude and checked the last clip that it had imported, and then continued importing the rest of clips on the camera. Then I moved the clips to Premiere Pro and started editing. Half way through the edit, I realized that one of the clips was only 22 minutes long, not the hour-plus of the other two; I had just synced up the tracks, ...

FYI: You have until 8:15PM EDT today to buy the Bower 24mm f/1.4 Wide-Angle Lens fro $200 off (i.e. $499 down from $699.) It's available in several mounts including Canon, Nikon and Sony A Mount . Note that these are 'all manual' lenses. These lenses have gotten pretty good reviews based on their price. If you're only shooting video you might want to look at the special 'cine' version which has geared focus and aperture rings, and 'declicked' aperture ring. Unfortunately, that will set you back $749 .

Join Alex Buono at our official June BOSCPUG! | Boston Creative Pro User Group Saturday, June 15th Discounted prices for Alex's tutorials: BOSCPUG is excited to partner with Oscar nominee and DP of the Saturday Night Live Film Unit Alex Buono in Boston at The Art of Visual Storytelling Tour to deliver an intense educational overview of the artistic elements and core principles of cinematography. Taught by Alex, this all-day class features training that will dramatically increase the impact of your films. Designed for both DSLR and Cine-style filmmakers, this workshop will teach you advanced techniques for lighting, lens selection, blocking, camera movement, audio, workflow, camera settings, visual structure and more. ALEXIS VAN HURKMAN & DAVINCI RESOLVE 10 | Chris Portal A brief report from Wednesday's meeting of the BOSCPUG: The most interesting trend that came out of the discussion was, while most NLEs and 3rd party plug-in developers have worked over the year...

NBC's 'Saturday Night Live' Eyes Ultra-High-Def 4K | Hollywood Reporter Buono said that while more storage is required, 4K “has not [resulted in] a significant change in price.” The SNL film unit plans to continue to experiment with 4K going into next season, using new tools such as AJA’s Hi5-4K format converter. Councilwoman Castillo: Margo Guernsey on Making Her Feature-Length Political Documentary | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine Margo Guernsey has produced promotional mini-docs and videos for a number of non-profits, but for her first feature-length project, “Councilwoman Castillo,” she is focusing on the story of a hotel housekeeper, Carmen Castillo, elected to the City Council in Providence, Rhode Island. The project will cover Castillo’s first three years in office starting with her election in November 2011. Legally Speaking, It Depends: Ripped From the Headlines | Script It is usually not a question whether a sensational story that captures the p...

I’ve written about Adobe’s move to subscriptions before , but I thought I’d take one last swing at it, and outline the primary reason why I think subscriptions are bad for customers and the industry. There’s been a lot of defense of Adobe’s move to subscription pricing. The common threads of the defense seem to be: It’s a good deal – which it is if you were buying the Master Collection and upgrading with every release, then it is a pretty good deal (at the current subscription rate.) If you can’t afford $50 a month, you’re a loser – certainly, if you’re a professional video producer and can’t afford $50 a month for the tools you use day-in and day-out, then you might want to reconsider your career choices. (But if your video passion is more of a hobby than a contact sport, $50 every month, can start to add up.) You’re already renting the software, so this isn’t really a change – well yes and no; all things being equal - and despite frequent OS changes and equipment updates -...

"Arnold Worldwide" (with Nicholas Agri) | NeedCreative Co-hosts Paul Antico of Anticipate Media and Ben Consoli of BC Media Productions talk the latest news in video production. Then they are joined by special guest from major advertising agency, Arnold Worldwide, Nick Agri. Nick talks all about the world of advertising, from the creation of campaigns to his specialized role as in house creator of content.  Choosing the Best DSLR for Video | DSLR Video Shooter Will you be shooting stills and video or just video? Is your filming indoors or outdoors? Do you film day in and day out? Or are you more of a hobbyist? Do you film long for content or quick clips and b-roll? These are all important questions to know before you purchase a camera. For example, if you film a lot of commercial work you will probably be shooting interviews in small offices.  Damon Lindelof |  On Story Season 3 Episode 6 (26:48 Minutes) Damon Lindelof discusses his hand in some of the mos...

Adobe's decision to move to an all-subscription model with the Creative Cloud is still creating headlines - at least on the internet.  In an article titled  The Entitled Filmmaker  | NextWaveDV ,  Tony Reale  takes on those complaining about the extra cost they'll be paying, and labels them as the entitlement generation, suggesting they are pretenders to the title of "pro." He even goes so far as to label them as thieves as well: I promise you there are people complaining about Adobe’s change to Creative Cloud that have never paid for a single copy of Adobe software ever. Actually, that's a bit of a theme for Tony: Tony Reale ‏@TonyReale 21 May I'm very curious how many of the #CreativeCloud naysayers are currently pirating their version of @Adobe software. #justsayin... Now, he's not suggesting everyone complaining has never paid retail for Adobe's software, but obviously he thinks there's a high statistical likelihood that this is the c...