How “House of Cards” Restored My Faith That Quality Filmmaking Will Survive

Written by Art Adams on May 15, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

Television shows with strong compositions were my earliest influences, and I’m happy to say that there’s one show on “TV” right now whose compositions move me the way my early influences did: Netflix’s House of Cards. There’s a shot in episode 10 that dazzled me with its simplicity. Claire has just confronted Zoe in her Read More

OS X: Fixing AVCHD media to avoid the dreaded “CANNOT OPEN”

Written by Adam Wilt on May 10, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

If you’re using OS X and you copy AVCHD media folders to a NAS (network-attached storage) or a case-sensitive disk, you may run into problems: opening the media in 10.8’s Finder gives you “CANNOT OPEN” instead of a clip browser, FCP X can’t see the clips, and so on. Fortunately, you can fix this.  

Relaying Light: Using Diffusion to “Fix” Natural Light

Written by Art Adams on May 8, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

Diffusion doesn’t just soften light; it relays light. Here’s how I used a large piece of dense diffusion to light the inside of a car and hide the little known fact that the sun moves.

This spot was the first in a series of six that I shot two years ago for OnLive, a company that specializes in streaming gameplay over the Internet. They went through some rough times but now they’re back and they’ve decided to release these spots as part of a new ad campaign.

My lighting budget had to cover the needs of all six spots over five days, so I had to build an equipment package that worked for everything. This car was the only location that would normally have required some big lights to balance a dark car interior with a day-lit exterior and keep the quality and direction of light consistent over time, but we didn’t have the money for a generator and a couple of large HMIs. Fortunately I had two tricks up my sleeve: an Arri Alexa and a 12′x12′ frame of full grid cloth.

DJI Phantom – Flying Commercially in the UK

Written by DVi Contributors on | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

To me the Phantom is a tool to which I can attach a camera to take stunning photographs or video from an angle that is totally alien to us. To some and sadly a few of our newspapers the Phantom is a drone, a device which is seen as being used for surveillance, to strip away our privacy. As responsible pilots we need to act in a manner that doesn’t harm this emerging market for aerial video and photography. My fear is that sooner or later a member of the public will be hurt by somebody flying irresponsibly. The press that will follow will put all multirotor pilots in the spotlight in a negative way.

My involvement with multirotors has up to this stage been as a hobbyist. I was introduced by a friend to this technology about 18 months ago and have fallen in love with it. I was involved with building my first rig, went on to buy a Phantom and have almost finished building the larger DJI S800. From this point on my interests are of a commercial nature, I want to provide aerial footage to a niche and specific market. To do this though however brings about what appears on the surface to be another set of complexities.

Adobe Accelerates Shift to the Cloud

Written by DVi News on May 6, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

New Product Innovation to be Delivered Exclusively Through Adobe Creative Cloud LOS, ANGELES — May 6, 2013 — At Adobe MAX, The Creativity Conference, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today accelerated its shift to the cloud with a major update to Adobe® Creative Cloud™, the company’s flagship offering for creatives. Today’s update to Creative Cloud is packed with Read More

Adobe Unveils Major Update to Creative Cloud

Written by DVi News on | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

Includes Next Generation of “CC” Desktop Applications and Delivers FullyIntegrated Cross-Device Collaboration, Community and Publishing Capabilities LOS, ANGELES — May 6, 2013 — At Adobe MAX, The Creativity Conference, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a significant update to Adobe® Creative Cloud™, the company’s flagship offering for creatives. Available in June and packed with new features, Creative Read More

Powerful New Adobe Photoshop CC Debuts at MAX

Written by DVi News on | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

Milestone Version of The Industry Standard in DigitalImaging Anchors Major Update to Adobe Creative Cloud LOS, ANGELES — May 6, 2013 — At Adobe MAX, The Creativity Conference, Adobe (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Photoshop® CC as part of a major update to Adobe Creative Cloud™ (see separate press release). Photoshop CC pushes the boundaries of Read More

NAB 2013 Reflections

Written by Adam Wilt on April 27, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

In Ye Olden Days, every part of the production, storage, postproduction, and transmission chain was built around analog hardware following well-defined standards: 3.58 MHz subcarrier, 13.5 MHz digital sampling; format-specific tape decks, NTSC II encoding and OTA transmission. Moving to HD required replacing all of that with something new.

Now? Sensors and displays are hardware, but the stuff in the middle is a string of ones and zeroes. There aren’t hardware vision mixers any more, just T-handles driving encoders that tell DSPs what proportion of channel A to composite with Channel B. A hard drive doesn’t care if it’s storing 720p, 1080i, 1080p or 2160p, or whether the images refresh at 23.98 Hz, 50Hz, or 59.94Hz. You can wrap anything in a broadcast transport stream; it’s just bits.

How the Search for a Standard HD Camera Model Went Awry

Written by Art Adams on April 22, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

I’m a member of SMPTE, and as such I receive the SMPTE Journal fairly regularly. The latest issue contains an article that’s backed by the best intentions but, in the long run, poses an unintended threat to the film industry. The technical paper, entitled “Toward a Standard Model of HD Cameras,” details a very interesting Read More

A Softer Approach to Modern LED Panel Style Lighting.

Written by Bill Davis on April 16, 2013 | Filed Under Articles & Reviews

The new LED array lights that are sweeping the industry have a lot going for them. Fundamentally, they’re amazingly efficient turning most of the power applied to them into light rather than heat – the big problem with traditional tungsten lighting. The problem is that the most popular form factor, parallel rows of high output Read More