Notes On Video

Scary stuff; ( PhysOrg.com ) -- Hollywood movies have found a mathematical formula that lets them match the effects of their shots to the attention spans of their audiences. Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. [...] Cutting believes obeying the 1/f law makes films “resonate with the rhythm of human attention spans,” and this makes them more gripping. Films edited in this way would then tend to be more successful and the style of shooting and editing more likely to be copied. Films of Cutting’s own favorite genre, the Film Noir, do not generally follow the 1/f law, with shot lengths tending to be more random. By contrast The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and the 2005 blockbuster movie Star Wars Episode III (which Cutting ...

Canon has put up an information page with much more information about the functionality and operation of the upcoming EOS Movie Plugin-E1 for Final Cut Pro. Availability is now said to be early March .

The ninth annual Las Vegas SuperMeet will be held during NAB at the Rio Hotel and Casino on Tuesday, April 13, 2010. Doors will open at 4:00PM for the SuperMeet Digital Showcase featuring over 30 software and hardware developers showing off their solutions. There will also be the first Las Vegas SuperMeet Open Screen Theater. Tickets are on sale now for the "Early bird" price of $10.00 each (plus ticket fee) Early bird price will end March 16, 2010. Then it goes up to $15.00. $20.00 at the door The SuperMeet page has links to Hotle deals. You can register for FREE Nab Show Floor passes: use code PP01

Philip Bloom got his hands on a pre-production DXA-SLR XLR adaptor from Beachtek and he likes it. He's written a review of the unit which solves some of the problems of getting audio into DSLRs including: The SLR is an active adaptor and has pre-amps in it making it usable for just about all mics out there. It also has +48v phantom power so can power your mics that need it. There are also gain switches underneath the unit. There is a +15db switch for either of the two channels. A very key and incredibly neat feature is the ability to “disable” auto gain control on the camera. It does this in a very clever way... It activates an inaudible tone of 20 kHz to the left channel (when set to STEREO operation) that prevents the Auto Gain Control from increasing the gain to its maximum level One thing he laments is the lack of proper meters. The DXA-SLR will be available at the end of March for a list price of $399.

In addition to the comparison of CF cards , there's a couple of other interesting blog posts on the _mxr blog : My 7D workflow Outlines using MPEG Steamclip to recompress clips from the Canon 7D to ProRes for editing in Final Cut Pro . Cineform for 7D Outlines shooting in "neutral" profile and then importing using Cineform's NeoScene compressor. It seems he likes the way Cineform handles the image conversion better, but this method also mean's he's taking an extra recompression step (from H.264 to Cineform to ProRes) to get the best performance in Final Cut Pro . I'm perhaps most interested that he prefers using the "neutral" profile compared to using a "flat-look" profile (which a lot of other shooters have been advocating): [the] “flat-look” profile for your camera, which basically eliminates contrast by lifting blacks and crushing highlights when the camera sensor processes the image before compressing it. After playing...

Cinema 5D has a video with Brian Valente of Red Rock Micro talking about a wireless follow focus product they are developing with a target price for a "basic system" of $500. He wasn't showing anything, or specifically announcing it, just talking about what should be coming. It will be announced "shortly" and is "nothing like anything that is out there right now." As the guy says, focus is probably one of the biggest issues with DSLRs, so I'm really interested to see what they come up with.

As a Mac user, I kind of thought I knew how to format my hard drives (and whether to use Journaling or not), and I had thought that you should use Journaling for system and "work" drives (i.e. valuable data), but for drives you're using for video editing, it's better not to use Journaling. What you lose in security, you gain in performance. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to someone who told me I should always Journal the drives. Thankfully, Ken Stone's Final Cut Pro web site has an article " Formatting a Hard Drive for the Mac " and he lays down the law: Journaling is essential for OS disks (boot drives), but for disks used for video media, used for editing purposes, Journaling is not advised , as it can affect the speed of data being written. For video media (scratch) drives you would want to select the Mac OS Extended, no journaling. If you're not up on all the ins and outs of formatting and Journaling, definitely read the article ...

Ever read a press release and get to the end and you still aren't sure what the product the press release is written about actually does? It's one of my pet peeves. Matrox just sent out a press release: Matrox Enables State-of-the-Art HD Workflow for Quick News Delivery Using Matrox MXO2 Family of I/O Devices , and the two meaningful paragraphs seem to be: Matrox® Video Products Group today announced Matrox Vetura Playback, a new application on the Mac for convenient playback of H.264 and .mov files using any of the Matrox MXO2 I/O devices. Field journalists equipped with a Matrox MXO2 device that includes the Matrox MAX H.264 encoding accelerator can shoot and edit their stories, then quickly encode to a very high quality H.264 file faster then realtime. Via any internet connection, the small H.264 file can be efficiently uploaded to headquarters then ingested to a video server or played directly to air using another MXO2 device and the Matrox Vetura Playback application. ...

National Association of Photoshop Professionals

Canonrumors.com thinks the Canon 1Ds Mark IV might be announced next week, along with a new EF 24-70 f/2.8L IS lens. I'm interested in the 1Ds Mark IV if only because there's also been a rumor about a Canon camera saving video in RAW. If the 1Ds did that it would be a pretty amazing development; not that I'd be getting one, but you figure that what comes out in the 1Ds this year will turn up in something cheaper in a year or so.

You can find the Operating Guide for the Sony HDR-AX2000 at the eSupport page at Sony's website .

Over at the _mxr blog , there's a comparison of Cheap Compact Flast vs. UDMA cards . I've read posts before on forum's that hint at the faster cards resulting in better video quality (the theory being that the camera knows how fast the card is, and adjusts the quality of compression it is using.) But I've never seen any actual documentation of the cameras doing that, and it's interesting to see even some simple tests/comparisons like this: Conclusion? In my opinion rolling shutter stayed the same, bitrate didn’t significantly change and color stayed the same. Only thing that is annoying with slower cards is that they need some time to buffer.

Panasonic Broadcast announced last week a " Shoot It. Share It " contest for users of its AG-HMR10 AVCCAM handheld recorder. Through June 18, 2010, HMR10 users can submit a video demonstrating their interesting use of the handheld recorder for the chance to win prizes, including the Grand Prize of a 65” Viera Plasma Television with built-in SD card slot. The downside? The AG-HMR10 is a handheld recorder that costs $2,600.00! The battery-powered HMR10 records up to 12 hours of HD video on a 32GB SDHC card. Content can be immediately viewed on the handheld’s 3.5" LCD screen. With an HD-SDI in/out, the HMR10 can also serve as a standalone recorder for use with HD-SDI capable cameras, switchers and decks.

Panasonic Broadcast  is extending to September 30, 2010 the offer of free Grass Valley EDIUS Neo 2 editing software with the purchase of an AVCCAM camcorder or handheld recorder. The offer had been scheduled to end on March 31, 2010. The EDIUS Neo 2 software is included in the box at the time of purchase, but a user will need to activate it via the Panasonic PASS support web site All video professionals who purchased AG-HMC70, AG-HMC40 or AG-HMC150 AVCCAM camcorder or the AG-HMR10 recorder products after April 1, 2009 are eligible to receive EDIUS Neo 2 , and users who purchased after Oct. 9, 2009 are eligible to receive EDIUS Neo 2 Booster . EDIUS Neo 2 Booster software (Windows only), is valued at $229, and offers native editing of the AVCHD format. Note that Panasonic also has a free transcoder, available for download that converts AVCHD files to DVCPRO HD P2 and downconverted DV files for use with most existing professional editing packages.

Still no sign of the firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II, which is supposed to add 24 and 25fps support. Cinema5D blog says they are hearing rumors of a Mid-March release.

Also from B&H's latest newsletter, David Flores takes you through some different Redrock Micro DSLR rigs, from the $450 Ultrapor t and the $975 " Captain Stubling " bundle designed by Stu Maschwitz (filmmaker and author of The DV Rebel's Guide ,) up to the $1,470 eyeSpy Deluxe . I always gets a bit confused by all the different options and models of rig that are out there, which I think is why I have put off buying something. B&H : B&H First Look: Redrock Micro

Moshe Lehrer has written a hands-on review for the B&H Newsletter . It's a good overview of the camera, mainly explaining how it works and it's many features and functions. He seems to like the camera, though he noted problems with auto-focusing in low light, and didn't seem to think that the optical stabilization was any better than that found on other cameras (which is a bit of surprise since Sony added something new; the "Active" stabilization.) Right out of the box, the camera shot wonderful video in automatic mode. Zooming in was smooth, colors were natural looking and the autofocus worked fairly quickly,; though in lower light situations, it sometimes took a little while to get a sharp focus. [...] The optical image stabilization seemed to be on par with most other cameras in this range. Definitely acceptable. No complaints there. [...] In well-lit rooms, the images were colorful and well defined. Because the AX2000 can shoot in as little as 1.5 L...

Ron Proctor kindly explained how he assembled his 3D video (see previous post:" Low cost 3D video ") using Adobe Premiere : We started with two full color video channels (right and left) – anaglyph (the red/blue method) is not ideal, but it is accessible because you don't need a special screen (just special glasses). I'd like to try this with polarization or autostereo some time. For the anaglyph version, we overlaid the two tracks in a video editor and set the compositing mode to "screen" (also known as "add" in some editors). We removed the red channel from the right, then we removed the blue and green channels from the left. We also had to adjust the offset a little bit so the "focus" was on one of the middle birds. Whatever the two channels "line up" on will be the "focus," also known as the "screen plane depth." Whatever is in front of that will "pop out" and whatever is behind will ...

I got an email this morning from Vimeo with various news, some of which I'd heard before: They are now offering a mobile version for Plus users. They are supporting HTML5   Optional 1080P support And they are hiring ! (though not video producers!)

While there's some other expensive options for 3D, Ron Proctor & Amy Jo Proctor at Weber State University have put together a low cost rig using two Kodak Zx1 cameras! You can see the rig and sample video here , though they don't explain how they processed the video... [ UPDATE ] Editor/Videographer Daniel Phelps has done something similar , and you can see a video here .