Posts Tagged ‘Featured’

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.

Review: Canon EOS C500 HD/4K LSS Cine Camera

The US$26,000 Canon EOS C500 joins the $16,000 C300 and the $6,500 C100 as the Big Daddy of Canon’s Large Single Sensor cine cameras. All three cameras share the same Super35mm-sized 4096×2160 sensor, the same general body design, and the “Canon look,” but diverge in their recording formats and output capabilities. The original C300 records 8-bit, 4:2:2 1080p using the Canon XF codec, and offers HD outputs on SDI and HDMI. It pioneered the “potato-cam” form factor,  with a superb side handgrip and a removable, tilt-and-swivel monitor unit. The C100 is a simplified AVCHD ‘corder with the same great handgrip, an integrated LCD in place of the monitor unit, and HDMI output only (no SDI). Read More…

Shooting 4K with the Canon C500: It’s All in the Details

I was initially thrown by the waveform display, which reflects the levels of the underlying log-encoded raw data at all times. Due to the log encoding most of the data was compressed toward the middle of the dynamic range, which is typical for a log curve, but that made it difficult to see what was happening to individual objects, like faces. Over time I learned that all I had to pay attention to was highlight clipping. If I set the exposure by eye based on what I saw in the onboard LCD and then checked that the clipped highlights were the ones I expected to be clipped (there’s always something clipped in a dark forest, usually the sky), I knew I had more than enough to work with in post. And I really liked the quality of the clipped highlights: they were white but not zingy, electronic white, similar to what I see on the Canon 5D Mk. III.

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.

Sony F5: Dynamic Range, plus interpreting it in Resolve

Sony gives us a lot of gamma table options in the F5 and F55. I recently had a chance to sit down with an F5 and map them all out, and in doing so I learned a lot about both gamma curves and how BlackMagic Resolve Lite handles them. I had no idea what I was getting into when I shot these tests. Usually I bring clips into Final Cut Pro, export them to Apple Color and capture waveform images from there, but according to Sony there are no current options to import XAVC HD directly into Final Cut Pro 7 or X. I’m not that familiar with BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve Lite, but I learned a lot… while putting a nice dent in both my forehead and the wall over my desk along the way.

Adobe CS6 DVi Workshop: Transitioning to Adobe Creative Cloud

Pete Bauer explains the process of transitioning from Adobe CS6 or other disc-based NLE applications to Adobe Creative Cloud. (runs just under 7 min.) This Adobe CS6 tutorial by Pete Bauer of Contrail Media walks you through the process of subscribing to and using Adobe Creative Cloud, which is an online subscription service that lets Read More

Adobe Creative Cloud for Video Professionals

The practice of installing new software on a DVD is going the way of the dinosaur. Top software companies are moving away from physical installation disks to an online cloud-based download system. Adobe is leading the charge with Adobe Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud is an ongoing membership that lets you download and install all of the Adobe Creative Suite 6 software, including Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop Extended, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Illustrator, and Flash Professional. You also get other creative software like Lightroom, Acrobat, Dreamweaver, and services like Adobe Story Plus for scriptwriting, production scheduling, and reporting. DVi contributing author Clay Asbury guides you through Adobe Creative Cloud.

NAB 2012 End Of Year Round-Up

DVi contributor Craig Chartier saw a lot of really cool stuff at NAB this year. Most of it wasn’t even shipping then, but everything is available now. Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Craig presents his “best products of the year” for 2012 in this four-page buyer’s guide. A lot of these items weren’t available for sale yet when they were first shown at NAB, but all of them can be bought right now, and the links to buy them from B&H, or directly from the manufacturer, or in some cases on Amazon, are included at the end of each description. There are no $10,000 items on this list. They are ranked in no particular order of importance and they cover several areas of production.

Adobe CS6 DVi Workshop: Using Adobe Premiere Pro with SpeedGrade and Audition

This Adobe CS6 tutorial by Pete Bauer of Contrail Media shows the round-trip process of taking a video clip through Adobe SpeedGrade that was deliberately shot at the wrong color temperature (i.e., a camera’s white balance was set to daylight instead of tungsten), because color temperature is something that Premiere Pro’s built in color correctors don’t explicitly have, but SpeedGrade does. Rounding out the workshop is a demo of a simple audio noise clean-up with Adobe Audition.

Twenty Premiere Pro CS6 Power Tips for FCP Editors

These power tips are geared toward the FCP editor and will you get up to
speed quickly with the nuances and new features in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6! Maybe you’ve come to Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium from Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer. If so, you’ll want to take advantage of the new features found in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. I myself am a switcher and a former Final Cut editor. Professional editors want a powerful, reliable app that can handle various workflows, and those new to editing want an NLE app that is easy to use and intuitive. In this article I’ll share some power user tips to make you more successful and comfortable with Premiere Pro.