4K is coming
It’s incredible – I’ve been looking at the iPad 3 retina display and thinking about video. It’s very good to see 1080p, but looking at other demos, I want to emulate that ‘looking through a window’ effect. Not just HD video, but full-on 2048×1536 pixel-for-pixel video, filling the screen and providing an uncanny, hyper real...
Sharpening tools
I’m off on a little job next week where my dear FS100 must be left behind, along with all that lovely glass I’ve been collecting. I will revert back to the Sony PMW-EX1R, which feels odd all of a sudden because it’s just a big black sausage, no extras needed. All in one. Sweet. Now,...
Tonalizer – a scalpel, not a bullet
Now we’re all shooting flat, how do we get our rushes looking their best? By grading. From the giddy high end of DaVinci down to the humble color board in FCPX, grading is the price we pay for creamy highlights, rich shadows and that ‘expensive’ cinematic look. And I’m in love with a new tool....
Steelies
Commercial Building Sites (and other locations) require PPE – Personal Protection Equipment. A hard hat, steel capped boots and a high visibility jacket at a minimum. It’s a code: you can tell a trade or function by the colour of helmet, you can tell if someone’s safe in an environment by the colour of their...
The Light Fantastic
Just back from a manic week, shooting in Beirut, Cairo, then to Cambridge and finally to Edinburgh. We were shooting documentary style, interviews and GVs (General Views) or B-Roll, and Cutaways. The schedules were fluid, the locations unseen, and everything needed to be shot at NTSC frame rates. Immediately, my favourite camera for this sort...
FCPX – partying with your Flaky Friend
Okay, report from the trenches: Final Cut Pro 10? Love it – with a long rider in the contract. I’m a short-form editor – most of my gigs are 90 seconds to 10 minutes (record is 10 seconds and I’m proud of it). Turn up ‘Somewhere in Europe’, shoot interviews, General Views, B-Roll, get something...
Canon EOS C300 first impressions
A number of dealerships are hosting mini-events for video people to come and prod, poke, pet and stroke Canon’s new Digital Cine Camera – the C300. I popped over to Visual Impact in Teddington to see this fabled camera ‘on the hoof’ so to speak. A quick summary of the C300. I came out with...
Blade and a J-cut, two bits!
Final Cut Pro X doesn’t do J-cuts. It doesn’t do it at all, and whilst I am not an aggressive or violent person, I feel the need to sit on a naughty step for thinking what I’d like to do to this bit of software if it were something tangible. What am I talking about?...
If Apple called it iMovie Pro…
I’m very impressed with iMovie Pro. It’s very quick to edit with, there’s lots of powerful controls to do things that can be tiresome in Final Cut Pro, the interface is clean and uncluttered, and there are ways to bend the way the application works into a professional workflow – and by professional, I mean...
IP Videography
I’m shooting timelapse today – a build of an exhibition area. However, the brief posed some challenges that meant my usual kit would not just be inconvenient, but almost impossible to use. The exhbition area needed to be filmed from high up, but there were no vantage points a person could film from. It meant...
Down with DSLRs!
That’s it. Time out. I’ve had it with DSLRs. They may work fine for you. They’re not working for me. I’ve given it a year, at which point I’d promised to trade up, or trade out. As a videographer (a shooter who edits the material they shoot) in a field where there’s no rehearsals and...
Just can’t shake the DSLR bug
I have a particular client who wants me to shoot interviews that must NOT look ‘corporate’ and slick. He wants natural, evocative ‘folk 16mm’ or ‘one man and his Bolex’ sort of stuff and is very keen on my DSLR work. Well, today I finished up with a shoot – CURSING the bloody DSLR. It...
