Notes On Video

Douglas Trumbull, Natalie Wood's Last Director, Returns With Sci-Fi Project | The Hollywood Reporter The innovative filmmaker, inventor (Showscan) and Oscar recipient's new 10-minute project was made in 4K 3D and at a high frame rate of 120 frames per second. (By comparison, The Hobbit was made in 2K 3D at 48 fps. And James Cameron’s high frame rate test from 2011 went as high as 2K 3D at 60 fps.) How Douglas Trumbull Made a 4K Film in 120 fps Stereo 3D | Studio Daily Trumbull shot with Canon C500 cameras in a 3D camera rig from 3ality and recorded raw data at 120 fps. Live-action elements, including actors, were shot in front of green screens in Trumbull's studio for later compositing into 3D environments. WE BET EVERYTHING ON FCP X – HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED | Gabe Cheifetz | CrumplePop In the two years since FCP X was introduced, there has been what FCP.co refers to as “The Plugin Explosion.” With a running start, and thanks to FCP X’s remarkable Effects archi...

Adobe Photoshop CC Has Already Been Pirated In Just One Day | FStoppers If true, that didn't take long: With the constant need for validation and continual updates through the cloud, many felt it would be difficult to pirate something that requires constant contact for it to stay updated. However, it took no less than a day for pirates to get around it. Adobe beats profit expectations, mulls subscription changes  | C|Net Adobe Systems beat analysts' profitability expectations by 3 cents per share in the second fiscal quarter, ratcheted its Creative Cloud subscriber total up 221,000 to 700,000, and is considering new measures to mollify those who don't like the subscriptions, the company said Tuesday. Adobe CEO admits need to 'tweak' Creative Suite's cloud-only policy | The Register "While we will still continue to offer CS6 on a perpetual basis, the feedback from our community is important, and we are evaluating additional options that will h...

5 Things I Learned at Alex Buono’s Visual Storytelling Tour | Jon Connor | Kessler University Lighting is such a crucial part of filmmaking. It’s also one of the most neglected and misunderstood. Watching shorts Alex shot as the DP of the SNL Film Unit, then having him show us why he chose to light things a certain way and then watching as they lit the scene in front of us as he peppered in practical tips and tricks while simultaneously fielding any questions we had was worth the price of admission alone. How To Bring a Cinematic look to a Small Budget Commercial, part 4 | Ryan Walters | Zacuto Part 4: Story-boarding On A Small Budget Before I begin story-boarding, I will either create a formal shot list, or I will have a rough idea in my head of the shots I need to tell the story. Then when I visit the location, with the script in hand, I will begin the story-boarding process using yet another iPhone app, Artemis. Product Advisory for the EOS-1D X & EOS-1D C | CanonR...

10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky | Filmmaker Magazine 5. Be present, all the time. There is no difference between preparation and being on set. When I am filming, I am completely there. In every moment you are making a picture, every day, every hour, I am a hundred percent there. UPDATE - Free Webcast: The Anatomy of a 4K Feature | ProVideoCoalition Join us on June 27th at 11:00am PDT for this free webcast 4K is on the tip of everyone's tongue…but just how feasible is it today? Join us for a re-broadcast of a "How we make movies" event from RED Studios, Hollywood. Recorded in front of a live audience, Director Jeremy Torrie & Gary Jackemuk, colorist and DI Artist, discuss the benefits and challenges of creating a 4K workflow for their film, Path of Souls, while adopting the latest technologies to finish the film remotely. Filmmaker picks a copyright fight with “Happy Birthday” | Ars Technica Filmmakers and TV producers have l...

Lynda Obst: Hollywood’s completely broken | Salon I'm not sure everyone has stopped buying DVDs to steal the video online. Some of us just bought a lot of their favorite old movies, and then stopped buying when nothing interesting came along: There it was. Technology had destroyed the DVD. When Peter referred to the “transition of the DVD market,” and technology destroying the DVD, he was talking about the implications of the fact that our movies were now proliferating for free—not just on the streets of Beijing and Hong Kong and Rio. JVC launch a 4K camera with Nikon mount which gets almost everything wrong | EOSHD The sensor – the size of 1.25 inch is no-man’s land territory for lenses. Smaller than Micro Four Thirds but larger than Super 16mm, it conforms to no common video standard at all. It’s also completely unsuited to the photographic Nikon full frame lenses JVC requires you to mount on it. It isn’t suited to DX glass either. JVC ANNOUNCE JY-HMQ30 4K LARGE SENS...

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...