Notes On Video

What difference does a lens make? | Den Lennie | F-Stop Academy Den compares Canon L lenses with some Zeiss lenses I prefer the warmth and resolution of the Zeiss lenses.  I think they manage to retain detail particularly when the image is zoomed in even at 400%.  They seem top hold more contrast also.  To be completely fair I did not put every focal length up like for like as I don’t own the full set of Canon Primes but if you are looking for a great set of affordable cine primes then the Zeiss ZF.2 will give you a lot of bang for buck.  Live 4K in Remote Sports Production Is Still a Way Off | Brandon Costa | Sports Video Group “It’s not about technology, and it’s not about equipment [in sports],” said Jerry Steinberg, SVP, field operations, Fox Sports, during a panel on the future of 4K at last week’s Content & Communications World convention. “In the television business, and I emphasize business, it’s about eyeballs. Whether it’s sub fees from homes...

BOSCPUG Screens Side By Side with Director Chris Kenneally Advance RSVP is required to attend: boscpugdec6.eventbrite.com Save the Date! On Thursday, December 6th, BOSCPUG is excited to bring you a special event exploring the digital cinema revolution as we pose the question,"Can Film survive our Digital Future?" We will begin with a private screening of the documentary SIDE BY SIDE , followed by a Q&A and reception with CHRIS KENNEALLY (Director) & guests. B & H Black Friday Deals Bryce Bayer c1929 - 2012 Known as the Bayer Filter, Bayer’s invention is still used in nearly every digital camera, video camera and camera phone on the market today. The Bayer Filter array was patented in 1976 (U.S. Patent No. 3,971,065) and features a checkerboard arrangement of red, green, blue filters that enable a single CCD or CMOS imaging sensor to capture color images. Father of the Bayer filter dies aged 83 - HD Warrior

B-Side: How a Bunch of First-Timers Made a SAG Ultra-Low Feature Without Blowing Up the Garage | Amos Posner | Filmmaker Magazine We planned to not fix anything in post. Anyone who says “Fix it in post” during production should have to donate a dollar to the crew beer fund. If you don’t plan to fix anything in post, you’ll still have lots to fix. Don’t invite more.  The Making of legendary skateboarder Danny Way documentary, Waiting for Lightning | Webinar | Adobe Thursday, December 13, 2012 | 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM See how the video pros behind Waiting for Lightning used high-performance Adobe post-production tools to document the life of Danny Way, one of the world’s most visionary skateboarders. This presentation will cover Bandito Brothers’ digital workflows which relied on After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, and other Adobe Creative Cloud tools to tell the story about how much abuse the body can sustain, how deep you have to dig to survive family troubles, and how ...

MATT ALLARD SHOOTS ‘THE IRON PSYCHE’ USING THE NEW KINERAW S35 CHINESE CINEMA CAMERA | Dan Chung | DSLR News Shooter The Iron Psyche was shot on the Kinefinity Kineraw camera. This camera records 2k 12bit RAW files to either Cineform or Cinema DNG. The camera used was an engineering sample and not a production model. It was edited in Adobe Premiere and the sound mix was done in pro tools. The EOSHD Blackmagic Cinema Camera Shootout | Andrew Reid | EOSHD Until now I was very satisfied with my FS100 and the DSLRs but going back to them after the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is very difficult. They look way too digital. 12bit raw is like looking out of a window. Truly film-like. The colours all look odd on the DSLRs now – compressed 8bit just doesn’t cut it any more. This is the first time DSLRS (and the FS100) are completely outclassed on image quality by a $3000 camera. Gopro3 vs 5D3 vs GH2 vs Gopro2 camera test  | TobyLoc | Vimeo Please note this test is slightly usele...

Sony 4K cameras: PMW-F55; PMW-F5; XAVC 4K codec; NEX-FS700 4K interface unit | Rick Young | Vimeo David Young, Product Specialist from Sony Europe, discusses the latest announcements made by Sony of the new 4K capable cameras, the PMW-F55 and PMW-F5, plus the newly announced XAVC codec and 4K RAW recording interface unit for the NEX-FS700E. FS100 – Ferrari Profile | Sam Morgan Moore | Blog Tuning the Sony NEX-FS100 : And that is how my FS100 camera is tuned right up. My colour profile is designed for minimal grading.. which means minimal banding, which means a smooth file. But it is contrasty – it wont bear an exposure error, and will get noisy if you up the ISO. This is for accurate shooting and using lights or reflectors when you need them. Creating a Beauty Light with a Book Light | Shane Hurlbut | Hurlblog A book light is simply a bounce source that is diffused with another layer of diffusion. It creates an image of an open book. Your light is positioned 45 degrees ...

Blackmagic Cinema Camera Problems Solved? Camera Shipping Update: 11/15 | Grant Petty | Blackmagic Forum The good news is that we got a small shipment of sensors that the sensor supplier had tested with their new test setup and they were all ok when we built cameras with them. This is good because they will now be able to see sensors that are contaminated and not ship us anything that's unable to be used to build a camera. Also, the sensor supplier has done a small run of sensors at the new company that's bonding the glass and they got almost a 100% pass rate, which is also great. This means they finally have a solution to bonding on the glass that looks like it will work. Sony F5 and F55 pricing released, by mistake! | Alister Chapman A rough conversion of the prices gives us the following: PMW-F55 Camera Body £23k/$36k PMW-F5 Camera Body £13.6k/$22k ASX-R5 Raw Recorder £4k/$6.5k Sony not doing well financially | Photo Rumors After their stock hit 32 years ...

I wrote about the Final Cut Pro X presentation at Tuesday nights BOSCPUG meeting, and completely left out a part of the meeting that was perhaps as educational as Abba Sahpiro’s talk. Because in addition to that talk, several film makers talked about – and some even showed - their films at the event. To start things off, Dan Berúbe invited two filmmakers who had shown their films at last weekend SNOB Film Festival to get up and briefly talk about their films. Steve Riley came all the way from Texas with his film Shooter . Steve is a professional photographer by trade, and this is his first film. You can see the trailer on YouTube : Shooter Noel Barlow said she is a couple of years out of film school, and directed and produced ‘Giddy in Love,’ a story about a quirky librarian who is ‘looking for love in all the wrong pages.’ With a cast of 12, she described it as a labor of love. Film website : Giddy In Love Director Marie Della Croce and DP Ben Consoli showed their s...

Last nights Boston Creative Pro User Group  meeting featured Abba Shapiro giving a run down on the new features in the 10.0.6 update to Final Cut Pro X . If you haven’t been following Final Cut Pro X ’s evolution, the latest recent upgrade featured a number of UI changes and enhancements, many of which seem to address the complaints that many Final Cut Pro 7 users had when they first tried Final Cut Pro X: Want a preview window as well as a Timeline viewer? FCP X now offers that as an option. Had problems with multi-channel audio? FCP X now lets you Expand Audio Components and start adjusting the individual channels. Frustrated that FCP X didn’t remember the In and Out points for a clip once you start working with another clip? Now FCP X remembers them for you! Found the Magnetic Timeline a little frustrating? Now you can put clips beyond the end of the timeline – it actually inserts a blank slug. You can also move clips that are linked, without having the linked cli...

A Portrait of Stockholm | Den Lennie | F-Stop Academy Shooting with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and Zeiss lenses: Why Zeiss? Several reasons really; I like the metal construction as this makes them extremely durable. The ZF .2 are Nikon mount and have built in aperture ring which really does make a tremendous difference when exposing because you can adjust the aperture ring smoothly rather than in stepped increments when using Canon less with electronic iris control. I had two fader ND’s a Heliopan 77mm and a Genus 82mm and a series of adaptor rings for each lens. I’m also using a cheap nikon to canon adaptor that I bough at B&H earlier this summer. Blackmagic Cinema Camera post workflows | Oliver Peters | digitalfilms After Effects offers another solution. You can open CinemaDNG image sequences, make adjustments with its camera raw importer, and then render out final, graded movie files. Naturally, plug-ins like Magic Bullet Looks add more options for custom styles. ...

“GAME CHANGERS” PART 3: CAMERA AND LIGHTING | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine The third part of the series about the production of the low-budget indie movie Game Changers , with filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer): Eckstein : The thing that surprised me is how we’ve been lighting the film. We’ve been pretty sparse in what we have been doing, and I am definitely not a believer in “don’t light.” I love lighting. I think about lighting all the time, it’s totally the thing I’m most passionate about. But it was kind of surprising how much we were working with practical lights and just reshaping practical lights rather than bringing in a ton of our own fixtures. I think that is something that would have been different with the AF100. Every Little Thing You Love | Overdue Films | Vimeo The BOSCPUG SuperMeetUp took place last Friday. Unfortunately, I was only able to be there for the first half hour, but I did get to see a great short film,...

Blackmagic Cinema Camera Shipping Update: 11/7 | Grant Petty | Blackmagic Forum Blackmagic continues to update on the progress of the camera, and the problems they have had with the sensors. Evidently the sensor manufacturer switched from one company to another for the bonding of glass to the sensor between the initial test run and the production run. Odd. Our current understanding is that the company that has been bonding on the glass is crap and they have been contaminating the glass when bonding it. Because the sensor suppliers test process was also bad, it meant that no one really knew what was going on and it's been weeks and weeks of confusion. Shooting with the TS3Cine | Justin Hamilton | Vincent Laforet In the end, we came away with some good shots, mostly thanks to the skill of the skater we were working with.  The lesson learned for us was that camera motion is just as important in hi-speed as it is at normal frame rates.  A static camera is a boring camera...

Upcoming Events in Boston This Friday, 9th November is the  BOSCPUG SuperMeetUp .   Then on Tuesday 13th is another event:  BOSCPUG   Visual Storytellers Meet  Featuring JOE FINDER (PARANOIA) & WYNDHAM LEWIS (NURSE JACKIE) Rule Boston Cameras Events: Wed Nov 14: 10am-12noon Maximizing Mass Tax Credits For Your Production : Boston-based Entertainment Attorney, Emily McNamara, answers all your questions about the Massachusetts Film Tax Credits and how your production can take advantage of these valuable incentives. Wed Nov 28: 10am-12noon Canon Full Cinema EOS Line-Up And 4K Workflow : Canon's Technical Speicalist, Ken Rowe, introduces the latest in the Cinema EOS family — the new C100 and C500 cameras and EF Cinema prime lenses — providing a brief overview of their features and a review of the C500's 4K workflow. Thu: Nov 15: 6-8pm Recipe for Success: Jan maliszewski on Directing Cook’s Country : Emmy-nominated director...

Are the F5 and F55 going to be game-changers? | Alister Chapman | XDCAM-User The very thought of 16 bit raw with 14 stops of dynamic range is making me drool, these cameras will seriously encroach on F65 territory and give the Arri Alexa a very hard time indeed, heck even the F5 will give the Alexa a very hard time. A clear sign of just how significant these cameras are is the way Red have slashed the prices of their Epic and Scarlet cameras. Canon C500 is Shipping, but Canon's RAW Implementation is Unlike Any You've Seen Before | Joe Marine | No Film School Basically, instead of sending out an Alpha along with the RAW, it’s sending the other green channel. Since Canon is not starting out with a 16-bit image pipeline like RED and Sony (Canon is only doing 10-bit at best), they are trying to save as much detail as possible by locking in certain attributes. These engineering hacks have worked in the past for Canon, who always seems to pull out better image quality than t...

CHECKING OUT SONY’S NEW NEX-EA50H AT ABEL CINE TECH: ERGONOMICS AND LOW COST TOO | David Leitner | Filmmaker Magazine It proved a joy to operate, too. A rocker switch built into the EA50H’s handgrip drives the 18-200mm at three fixed zoom speeds: slow, slower, and snail’s pace. Perfect for subtle pushes during interviews. A selector switch for the three speeds resides conveniently on the side of the lens. No menu diving required. (Uniquely, there’s also a low-profile, spring-loaded slider switch on the barrel of the lens to operate the zoom on e-Mount cameras lacking handgrips with rocker switches.) Panasonic GH3 real-world test (pre-production firmware) | Andrew Reid | EOSHD Now for better news – the GH3 maintains the insane resolution of the GH2 in video mode. This aspect of the image in 1080p is well up there with the best 1080p cinema cameras costing many times more. It resolves more than the Sony FS100 and has a better internal codec especially in 1080/60p (with nearly do...

Red, Sony and Canon 4K | Michael Sutton | WideOpenCamera Mike Sutton takes a look at the 4K options: The next thing Red needs to do is to have 4K video outputs on the camera.  You cannot tout resolution yet be highly compressed without any other codec options.  I don’t see how these go hand in hand.  If image quality via resolution is everything, then surely resolution aficionados would want the ability to tap off an uncompressed RAW feed.  I have a feeling that RED will put out another camera much sooner that people expected. 8-Bit is Still 8-Bit, Why DSLRs Are No Match for the 12-Bit Blackmagic Cinema Camera | Joe Marine | No Film School People have done as much as possible to argue against the test that was performed with the Blackmagic Cinema Camera by Marco Solorio and OneRiver Media. That test compared the 5D Mark III and the BMCC, and even though the superior resolution and dynamic range of one of those cameras should have been obvious, many still pr...

“GAME CHANGERS” PART 1: GETTING STARTED | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine Filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) are currently shooting a low-budget independent feature film, Game Changers, a drama/comedy about two video-gamers who are approaching their late twenties. With an initial target budget of $30,000, Game Changers might be better described as a shoestring budget feature, given that they began shooting with only half that amount raised. Thread: Attitude adjustment... | Jim Jannard | RedUser Red announces new prices: Now… here is the new pricing:  5K EPIC-X Brain- $19,000 5K EPIC-X Monochrome Brain- $20,000 5K EPIC-M Brain- $24,000 5K/4K Scarlet Brain- $7,9504. 5K RED ONE M-X Battle Tested- $4000 (includes CF or SSD recording module). The RED ONE is End of Life. Battle tested is all that will be available from here on out. RED Cuts EPIC Price in Half: EPIC-X Now $19,000, SCARLET Under $8K, RED ONE Goes 4.5K for $4K | J...

SONY ANNOUNCES F5, F55 AND OTHER TOYS | Michael Murie | Filmmaker Magazine As interesting as the new technology – and promised 14 stops of dynamic range – is, these two cameras also show that Sony has been listening to, and are making a serious effort to woo customers. While the image quality of the PMW-F3 was widely lauded, it wasn’t a shoulderable camera – without a third party rig – and while the LCD Panel was good quality, it wasn’t in the right position when you had the camera on your shoulder. Sony has reworked the design, added a shoulder rig option, and will offer three EVF options; an improved LCD EVF, an OLED EVF and a 7″ LCD. Introducing the PMW-F55 | Sony Europe Richard Lewis, Cinematography Product Specialist, provides a detailed, hands-on tour of the new CineAlta 4K cameras. All the key features, including the flexible modular structure, multiple recording formats, menu controls and important accessories are shown. The 18 minute video also demonstrates recording...