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...
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...
FCP-X – from ‘the editor’s NLE’ to ‘the content creator’s editor’?
The new version of Final Cut Pro has been announced, but we don’t get to play with it until June. Whilst the wild speculation is over, the Mac editing community still has to sit on the fence for a while whilst we find out just how revolutionary the new FCPX is. Don’t get me wrong...
Achieving ‘that video look’
Throughout the last 9 decades of cinema, Directors have been stuck with the same tired look forced upon them by the constraints of their technology. Cinematographers at the vanguard of their industry, disenchanted with the timelessness of film, are now looking to achieve that elusive ‘live’ look – video! The world of moving pictures has...
Thunderbolt or USB3? Daddy or Chips?
Thunderbolt (nee LightPeak) is being hailed as a ‘Paragim Shift’ and if it does what FireWIre did fifteen years ago, the moniker is well deserved. FireWire was a technology that was at the centre of the low cost Digital Video revolution: it enabled simple connection between cameras, disk drives and computers. Suddenly an Apple PowerBook...
TV Soup – or how video compression really works
A little while ago, I got embroiled in a discussion about editing footage from DSLRs and why it wasn’t always a good idea to desire editing the original camera files. I repeat a condensed version of rant here for some light relief – but please can you imagine it as delivered by the inimitable Samuel...
