Production

Relaying Light: Using Diffusion to “Fix” Natural Light

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

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.

NAB 2013 Reflections

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.

A Softer Approach to Modern LED Panel Style Lighting.

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

The Padcaster

Every year at NAB we see new and improved hardware accessories for taking mobile device video to new levels. Now, we have the Padcaster. The Padcster consists of an aluminum frame containing a rubber insert that will accept any second generation iPad or newer. The outer frame edges contain several threaded mounting holes (both 1/4-20 Read More

Replay XD Showing New Accessories at NAB2013

Here at NAB 2013, Replay XD is showing some new accessories for their action cameras. The new $39.99 dive housing is waterproof to 60 meters(197 feet). The standard lens is made of acrylic. An optional all glass lens is available for $19.95. The ReView is a 4.3 inch portable field monitor that includes a detachable Read More

Quick Look: 2K/4K Recorders for the Canon C500

Quick Look: 2K/4K Recorders for the Canon C500 So you’ve gone and booked a gig with the Canon EOS C500, and you wish to partake of the camera’s detail-rich, uncompressed 2K or raw 4K goodness. You’ll need something to record that on, as the C500 doesn’t capture 2K or 4K internally. The two most common Read More

Review: Canon EOS-1D C HD/4K DSLR

In the beginning… there was the Canon 5D Mk II. It wasn’t the first HD-capable DSLR, but it was the first one good enough for serious work. Once Vincent Laforet’s “Reverie” went viral, there was no putting the large-sensor, low-light, super-shallow-depth-of-field genie back in the bottle—no matter how soft the images, how prevalent the aliasing, and how much bother it was (for the two years prior to firmware version 2.0.3) to deal with 30p images in a 24p world.

Fast-forward five years: Canon’s EOS-1D C, announced at NAB 2012, is now shipping. It’s a full-frame DSLR with an 18 Megapixel sensor, full-frame and crop-mode HD recording, and true 4K at 24fps: 4096×2160 pixels. Yep, 4K in a DSLR package. And it’s only… $12,000.

My First Lighting Class; or How I Learned to Light

Recently I taught my first lighting class, for Abel Cine, at Sony DMPC in Culver City, California. It got me thinking about how I know what I know about lighting, and why I seem to be able to explain it. One of the worst lessons I learned in film school was three-point lighting. I understand Read More

Sony F55: Turning Sub-Menus Back on Without a Viewfinder

There are times when you’ll want to use a small camera like the Sony F55 without a viewfinder–say, if you’re mounting it on a crane, in a car or on a Steadicam. Apparently it’s possible to accidentally disable the data overly on the Sub Main SDI output, and Sony has released a set of instructions Read More