Notes On Video

New Creative Cloud pro video features now available | Adobe The updates to Adobe's Creative Cloud are coming out. The Prelude Live Logger iPad app sounds interesting: The 150+ new features in Adobe Premiere® Pro CC, After Effects® CC, SpeedGrade® CC, Prelude™ CC, Adobe Media Encoder CC, and Adobe Story CC Plus that were announced at IBC last month are available effective immediately via Adobe Creative Cloud. Today we are also delivering a new iPad app, Prelude Live Logger, which adds another tool to your arsenal for faster, more efficient production workflows. announcing the After Effects CC (12.1) update, one of several October 2013 updates for Adobe professional video applications | Adobe Among many other changes and fixes, this updates enables After Effects CC to run on Mac OS X v10.9 (Mavericks). This full update makes it unnecessary to install the previous After Effects CC (12.0.1) patch. Unlike the After Effects CC (12.0.1) patch, the After Effects CC (12.1) update ...

It was ironic that on my way to last night’s SMPTE meeting at Channel 5 Boston, I dropped off my cable TV box at a Verizon store. I am now officially cordless - no more cable TV for me! The only way I can see Channel 5's programming is on their website! The meeting was a presentation from Sony talking about 4K; specifically 4K TVs and projection. The message was; 4K is here, and NHK in Japan is working on 8K . They had a 65” 4K TV ($5K for 4K), the $650 “hockey-puck” 4K home video server (which only works with Sony content and a Sony 4K TV) and a 4K Projector (and it was not one of the big “Cinema” projectors, but one of their “home or business” units.) Up close the picture on both was very impressive. I’m still not convinced that you need 4K in the home unless you have a really large display, and/or sit very close to the display. It would make no sense to replace my 42” HD screen with a 42” 4K one. And, of course, given the lack of 4K material, buying a 4K display is mor...

Tomorrow night, Halloween, they are going to do a  recreation of the War of the World's broadcast at the Regent Theater in Arlington MA. Christopher Lydon, Joyce Kulhawik, William Martin, ChaChi Loprette, Laura Raposa, Allison Cahill and the rest of the cast are gearing up for a great night of entertainment as the live recreation of Orson Welles' WAR OF THE WORLDS lands at the Regent Theatre in Arlington at 7:30 this Thursday. Find out more at: The Orson Welles Complex Film Scoring & Music Seminar : Saturday, November 2nd High Output Studios Coffee & Bagels at 9:30 AM. Seminars from 10:00 AM – 12:00 Noon Creating the music and scoring for films is an art – but defining the sometimes-mystical quality that will help a music score succeed is difficult to quantify.  Join us for an open discussion with 4 top composers as they give you insight into how to approach scoring for films – from conceptualization to composition to orchestration – and the challen...

Blackmagic Design Cinema Cameras: Production Workflow Roundup | Premium Beat For a truly cinematic look it helps to shoot in a cinematic aspect ratio using anamorphic lenses. Redshark News offers some insights into working with the BMDCC cameras and anamorphic lens adaptors in this short post. In the video above DP Ryan Glover shot in Log Pro Res on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera with a Kowa/B&H 2x anamorphic adapter. EOS 7D Mark II Spec List Surfaces [CR1] | CanonRumors According to the rumor, the sensor is not yet confirmed, though it does mention it won’t be the same as the EOS 70D. Also a mention of innovative video features, something we’ve talked about previously. There’s not much new here as far as specs go, but at least the camera is being talked about. Consumer DSLRs “dead in 5 years” | EOSHD Until now the ‘smartphone problem’ had been pretty much isolated to the low end compact camera market. In my opinion this market is defunct and will vanish entirely withi...

I need another lens like I need another hole in my head, but a lens that does intrigue me is the new Sony E PZ 18-105mm f/4 G OSS Lens ($598). It's an E-mount lens, and it has at least four intriguing features: constant f/4 maximum aperture Optical SteadyShot image stabilization internal zoom operation powered zoom If you have a still camera, this lens probably won't excite you, but if you have a video camera such as the Sony NEX-VG30 , NEX-EA50 , NEX-FS100 or NEX-FS700 , this lens could be just what you're looking for. I have the NEX-EA50 camera, and it comes with the  18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 PZ OSS Alpha E-mount Lens  (as does the other cameras.) It's actually not a bad lens; zooms nicely, focuses pretty quickly, and it's nice and long. BUT, though it starts at f/3.5, it closes down to f/6.5 as you zoom. It also does something else when you zoom; it almost doubles in physical length. I don't know about you, but having a lens that extends as you zoom...

I've been experimenting with the DJI Phantom Quadcopter ($455.05) . One of the problems it can suffer from is a jello effect caused by vibration transferring from the airframe to the camera. This can be difficult to remove, as you'll see in the example below. Here, applying the Premiere Pro's Warp Stabilizer can actually make it look worse. I've written about the options for reducing this effect; one is to use some kind of anti-shake mount. These range in price and complexity from simple rubber insulators through to expensive brushless mounts. I tried a simple anti-shake mount, the  Anti Vibration Anti-Jello Vibration Isolator Low Profile Carbon Fiber Mount (below) and it does seem to make a difference. The two clips below show footage taken using the anti-shake mount. The first sequence is the "raw" footage; it still has some shaky moments, but that can mostly be removed using Premiere Pro/s Warp Stabilizer, as can be seen in the second clip. No...

Producing a Low-Budget Short Film and Pitching a Movie: Run Like Hell | Filmmaker Magazine Red Giant has unveiled their latest low-budget, effects-rich short; Run Like Hell. It’s billed as a short film, but it’s really intended to be a teaser for a full-length movie director Stu Maschwitz hopes to make. Maschwitz is a visual effects wizard who worked at Industrial Light & Magic before co-founding effects house The Orphanage.  Run Like Hell (the script) | Slugline You can get a copy of the script for the Run Like Hell trailer here. Run Like Hell is a hilarious feature film in development, inspired by the cult classic video game. As the director attached to the project, I teamed up with producer Adrian Askarieh and Red Giant Films to create this teaser. Step one was writing the script. New Sony A7, A7R and RX10 – exclusive hands-on look at video quality | EOSHD Andrew looks at the video quality of the three new Sonys, and decides the A7r is the best of the thre...

Gareth Jones creates piece using 3D plug-in FreeForm | Mettle FreeForm makes 3D movement in character animation much easier, especially head rotation. For example, the head can be placed on it's own layer, FreeForm applied, and the head can then be shaped in 3D using FreeForm's control points and tangents. A displacement map can also be applied in FreeForm to add more volume and detail. VIrgin Media from Gareth Jones on Vimeo . Product Review: Sorenson Media Squeeze 9 Pro | Larry Jordan The application can take you as far as you want to go in improving the quality of your compressed videos. Keep in mind, however, that like any powerful tool, you will need to invest time to learn how to use it well. One of the things that impresses me about the Sorenson website is that they have already taken the time to provide the tools you need to learn the application. A warning about OS X Mavericks from Adobe: Adobe Premiere Pro @AdobePremiere Though #PremierePro CC sup...

Last night I went to a talk by Vincent Laforet. The event was sponsored by Rule Boston Camera, Canon and the PBS show Frontline . I’ve heard Vincent speak before, and some of this talk was a rehash of past material; his years at The New York Times , the amazing pictures taken at the top of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, the helicopter shots of New York, and Reverie ; the first movie shot with the Canon 5D Mark II, it was all there. But Vincent added in a new element from past talks. In this one he looked at what’s going on with the internet, social media, and the advancement of technology, and tried to make sense of it all and offer suggestions for how to have a creative career in this new world. Learn all the Rules, and then break them He had some fascinating stats on the volume of media being produced and uploaded to social networks every hour of every day. Hundreds of thousands of pictures are uploaded to Facebook, and hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every...

‘12 Years a Slave,’ ‘Mother of George,’ and the aesthetic politics of filming black skin | The Washington Post Increased sensitivity of digital cameras makes it easier to record darker skin tones: For the first hundred years of cinema, when images were captured on celluloid and processed photochemically, disregard for black skin and its subtle shadings was inscribed in the technology itself, from how film-stock emulsions and light meters were calibrated, to the models used as standards for adjusting color and tone. #166. Are the new Zeiss / Sony lenses for the A7 camera too expensive? | Dear Susan Sony announced some new E-Mount lenses that are a bit more expensive than their previous models, and some people are complaining. This article explains why they are worth the money, though I like the first sentence best: Short answer: NO. They’re a bargain. The end. And then the article goes into a lot of depth about MTF curves. You were warned: In brief : Zeiss have re...

NEW SONY A7 AND A7R CAMERAS ARE FIRST TO ALLOW FOCUS MAGNIFICATION DURING VIDEO RECORDING | News Shooter More on the positives of Sony's new cameras, though we're still waiting to see how the actual video looks: It has always been small details such as these that have put professional filmmakers off using DSLR-style cameras. However, the video features in the A7/A7R pair (Zebra, clean HDMI, audio and focus control), and the new RX10 (3-stop ND, Zebra, clean HDMI, audio control) suddenly make them very appealing prospects. Lets hope the video quality is better than Sony’s current NEX cameras. The Realities of Video on Demand | Moviecope A film that’s in post now, for example, a filmmaker should be thinking ‘From around January or February 2014, I want to be on exclusively the transactional sites when I’ll do marketing push one.’ And they need to make sure that their pricing is consistent; it just sends confusing signals to the market if it’s £2.99 on one site for a 48 ...

5 Things They Don’t Tell You About Being a First-Time Director | Vulture You're standing in the way of your own movie. Something I didn’t know going in is that first-time directors are considered by financiers to be "deadly attachments," meaning that even if financiers are interested in your script and your vision, you are still considered to be a strike against their desire to invest in the film.  SONY RX10: A VIDEO JOURNALISTS DELIGHT? | News Shooter Dan Chung likes the look of the Sony RX10's video capabilities too: ...the RX10 has a number of features not seen together before now in a small camera. It has a built-in 3 f-stop ND filter, clean HDMI feed for outputting to a monitor or external recorder (via micro-HDMI socket), zebras (settable from 70% to 100%) and peaking for focus and exposure assist, a mic input and optional XLR audio jackpack, a headphone jack and an OLED electronic viewfinder. Review of the iPhone 5S 120fps super slow motion | Phi...

Sony RX10 Review -- First Impressions | Imaging Resource I'll admit that I didn't really look that closely at the new Sony still camera announcements yesterday, but now reading more of the press these cameras look to have some interesting video functionality. Reading this write-up on the RX10 it appears that it reads out the whole chip and has improved video processing, and it has built-in neutral density filters (at least that's what the articles say.) Is this going to be a killer video camera in disguise? At over $1,200   with a fixed lens you might be better to save your money for a real video camera, but it's intriguing. Will have to wait for more reviews: It didn't completely eliminate moiré patterns, but they were greatly reduced relative to just about every other camera we've seen, and there were no false-color artifacts to be seen anywhere. Not only that, but the video itself was very clean and crisp-looking, so the reduction in false color and ...

Way too busy yesterday... Cinematographer Zach Zamboni on Creativity and Shooting with Just Two Primes My interview with Zach Zamboni, a cinematographer on Anthony Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown has been  published over at Filmmaker Magazine . Zach spoke at Rule Boston last month and it was a very interesting talk about creativity and filming (there's a link to a video of the talk there too.) Phantom Anti-Jello Device This arrived in the mail. I haven't been able to do anything other than take it out of the package. There's no instructions; but I think i can put it together! Cooke Lenses Went to an interesting presentation by  Les Zellan , chairman of Cooke Optics and Jon Fauer, ASC (Publisher and Editor of Film and Digital Times) at Talamas last night. Les gave a fascinating talk about how Cooke lenses are made, what the Cooke "look" is, and also some details on new technology they recently announced. I was fascinated by his descriptions of t...

Reader Paul Antico reports: It looks like we will get Mavericks on the 22nd. (The Apple event has yet to be announced by Apple, but it has been confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, the loop.com, And the usual reliable sources.) I think we will see MacPros available for preorder, with sale anywhere from the 22nd to November (more likely). I think we will definitely see the long overdue Retina Macbook Pros with Haswell. (Mavericks definitely increases battery life on the current model however). And of course the new iPads. All of that said, Adobe is on track for a big CC update today; as early as a week and a half ago in their forums they still maintain that is the date by telling people there are various bug fixes in it to be addressed "in our next release on Oct 15th". UPDATE 12:00pm: Adobe Customer Care has tweeted: Adobe Customer Care  ‏ @ AdobeCare 3h   astralape Hi,we originally intended to release CC updates today Oct 15th however we need more time for ad...