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Camera Support
Review: Vinten Vision blue3 Camera Support System

The Vision blue3 is the third Camera Support System in the blue series, sitting somewhere between the original Vb, and the Vb5 I reviewed last year. The “blueBridge” Small Camera Adapter (SCA) is Vinten’s take, and an extremely well thought out one, on a Centre of Gravity (COG) lifter, a subject I talked about briefly last year in the Vb5 review. The only thing that has changed between the Vb and the Vb3 is a different spring rate. The sticks, case, spreader and head are in all respects identical down to the last detail, but for that spring change. So, if you want all the details, refer to my original Vb review. For this review of the Vision blue3, I’ll skip the usual format and concentrate on the Vb3’s place in the blue hierarchy, the measurable differences between their individual spring rates and, additionally, the effect of using the blueBridge SCA with them both.

Post Production
Making the Sony F55 Look “Filmic” with Resolve 9

I’ve spent a long time learning to make HD footage look “filmic” without really knowing exactly what that meant. I’ve just picked up a bit of insight, however, and it’s permanently changed how I look at video and color. I’ve shot a number of projects using an Arri Alexa in WYSIWYG mode — for which I’m considered a bit of an oddity — but with it I can get great results with no more than minimal grading and clients love walking away with ProRes files whose look is 90% there. My problem is that I now have to do this with other cameras as Alexa’s price point is considered “high” in my market due to the release of several newer, cheaper and fairly capable cameras. I love the Alexa look, but my current task is to figure out how to get close to that look when the production doesn’t have the budget to rent one — or, more likely, in the event the production company owns their own camera.

Show Reports
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.

Canon EOS
Review: Canon Cinema EOS C500

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…

Canon EOS
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.

Canon EOS
Review: Canon Cinema EOS 1D C

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.

Acquisition
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.

Post Production
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.

Production
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.

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