Posted 1 day ago

Stunning 14bit raw footage from EOSHD using Canon 5D3 with Magic Lantern firmware. It’s an impressive proof of concept. The dynamic range is so great that shots often look like HDR images.

I’m curious whether this will filter down the line to the 550D/T2i models I use. At the time I started using them, they were the ideal cameras for Magic Lantern firmware, and the 5D was still difficult to reverse engineer. Today that relationship between models has been reversed.

I still have my eye on the Blackmagic 4k camera with a Super 35 sized sensor and global shutter. The 2.5k BMC camera I own and love rather desperately wants me to buy it a 17-55mm image-stabilised lens. I’d rather just swap to the larger sensor, which works well with my existing lenses.

Posted 1 week ago

This short for Chanel happened to catch my attention. It is set at the first Chanel shop in 1913. Directed by Karl Lagerfeld. Starring Keira Knightly.

It depicts a weird world where everyone is fabulously wealthy and improbably beautiful, where a hat shop literally becomes an overnight success. It is a world absent depth. It’s a film composed of moving photos. There is no dirt. The road is made of fabric. The world is a set. Rather than cinema, it is a fashion shoot with movement and talking. Main street is a catwalk. I think I would have preferred it pushed to be more fantastic as it is already so two dimensional and stagy. It needs surrealism. Or bulimia. Something to break the spell of kitsch in this dirt-less world where nothing bad can ever happen. Perhaps a customer leaves the shop to be run down by a motor car.

Granted, it’s marketing. I suppose it’s purpose is to flatter their clients, which it effectively does by presenting them as the real designers, taste-makers, and absolute power brokers. In the long tradition of the global super rich, let us continue for another 100 years.

via mentorless

Posted 3 weeks ago

The most beautiful report from NAB, on the exciting new cameras from Blackmagic Design, a design company with a philosophy, ie. a company like Apple.

Watch new footage from John Brawley: casually shot Pocket camera footage taken while going grocery shopping, Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera - Market

Posted 1 month ago

BMCC footage looks great at 200% with a touch of noise reduction and sharpening. You don’t try a stunt like this if you are using an HDSLR, which will maybe let you manage a 115% increase in size. Why? The Blackmagic camera has a reputation for sharpness. And a 10-bit ProRes image contains so much information compared to a DSLR, that when you half it, it’s still leagues ahead. That’s my guess. For context - as a rule - you *never* blow up an image by 200% whether it’s film or photography.

View image at actual size.

Shot with Blackmagic cinema camera with Canon 100mm f2.8 IS lens. ISO 800. ProRes. Film

(Source: Flickr / bradbelltv)

Posted 1 month ago

Stunning Holi festival promo for Madhya Pradesh Tourism. Gorgeous colours and extreme slow motion.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Posted 1 month ago

Bitcoin Explained. Short video looking at the decentralized digital currency. By Duncan Elms.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Posted 1 month ago

Came across web site I designed in ‘98. Very flat, super tiny (640x480). 15 yrs later ‘flat’ becomes fashionable. http://is.gd/klMhxE

At the time, it was the only thing graphics cards and dial up internet could support.

Then the technology wheel turned again and I left web design and came back to film and video as technology changed that world too.

Today flat is just a style that is different from Apple’s ‘deep, transparent and shiny’ Mac OS X style - itself based on the development of more powerful graphics cards, displays, and broadband that could handle it.

Posted 1 month ago

- First footage from the new Phantom Flex4K - “Let me know when you see Fire” from Gregory Wilson

Watch NAB 2013: First Look at the Phantom Flex4K for camera overview and specs.

Posted 1 month ago

Audrey’s eye. Cinema camera still. HDSLRs bring 35mm optics, but BMCC and 10bit ProRes *deliver* the image.

View image at actual size.

Shot with Blackmagic cinema camera with Canon 100mm f2.8 IS lens. ISO 800. ProRes. Film.

Posted 1 month ago

MōVI is a very exciting camera stabilisation system that really does look like it will significantly change both Hollywood and documentary film. Currently $15k, with a simpler, lighter model coming for about $7k in the future. As a mechanical device, there are sure to be cheaper knock-offs from China in a year or two. Impressive work by Vince Laforet and crew. The taxi shot is phenomenal.

More:

MōVI from Vincent Laforet
MōVI in Action (Quick Video) from Vincent Laforet
ROAM from Freefly

Posted 1 month ago

If you look at the graph closely, you can see the inflection point where Gideon took over in 2010, stemming off the recovery by imposing austerity policies that predictably flat-lined the economy. Good thing he isn’t a doctor or we’d be dead. Today Osborne delivered a new budget based on exactly the same policies, ushering in several more years of rising deficit, rising debt, stagnation and decline.

(Source: neweconomics.org)

Posted 2 months ago

Leaked audio recording of leading Nobel Peace Prize nominee Bradley Manning describing his response to the July 12, 2007 Baghdad Apache airstrike video that documented the killing of two Reuters journalists.

Manning is currently being held in Guantanamo-like conditions and undergoing a secret trial. The audio of this video was secretly recorded and smuggled out from that trial.

(Source: youtu.be)

Posted 2 months ago

SEARCHING FOR STEEL trailer from the Guardian.

I believe it was Donald Rumsfeld who years ago said their model for Iraq was El Salvador. I thought it was weird at the time because I was in university in the 80s and El Salvador was mostly known for death squads, which are basically door-to-door terrorists. It didn’t occur to me that Rumsfeld meant they were actually installing death squads as a matter of policy, to turn the Iraq catastrophe into the El Salvador catastrophe on purpose. That would be insane.

You can watch the whole documentary on the Guardian site.

It seems the implication is that torture is and has been a matter of government policy for some time, at least insofar as Donald Rumsfeld is involved. Sad. Terrifying.

This is why The War ON Terror is the War OF Terror. It is not a war to end terror. It is the multiplication of terror. The policy is described as, “Fight terror with terror.” (It’s like Four Lions.)

Today drones effectively terrorise whole populations in Pakistan and Yemen, as revealed by a recent report by Stanford University. Democracy Now has a full news report. And here is a demonstration of a Hellfire Missile, which is what drones fire at people’s houses. It is powerful enough to obliterate a tank.

Posted 2 months ago

Current response to Blackmagic Cinema camera

image

After several weeks - I still really like the Blackmagic Cinema camera! I’m coming from a context of shooting with a cheap DSLR (Canon T2i) with Magic Lantern firmware and Cinestyle. I don’t like the crushed blacks look, although I often appreciate it in others. I saw a digitally remastered version of the African Queen and about 50% of the screen was black. I prefer a more graduated look. The BMC is similar to Cinestyle in providing a lower contrast look, although obviously with greater latitude and on a codec that is 10-bit and has 4 times as many colours. I’m surprised that so much of the value of the camera is the codec. Brilliant to edit with. Very fast. You can colour correct, stabilise, speed change, add effects at any point (2012 iMac).

I wonder how much more raw provides over ProRes. For cinema, shoot raw. But for documentary, it’s difficult to improve on ProRes, which means you are shooting in an editing format. You could just plug in the drive and edit on the SSD! I’m investigating raw now. I’m suspect raw provides 2% more for 92% more work. In the sun it matters; it grey old England? Perhaps not.

The BMC really does need light, as John Brawley has emphasised. In an unlit interior, it produces images just as bland as an HDSLR. But as a person moves to the window, the image comes to life in an extraordinary way.

image

In contrast, the other interior shots are too bland to share, even as evidence of blandness ;-)

I don’t like any of the battery solutions as they are clunky. I think I’d prefer a belt or something to clamp on a tripod leg or monopod. I need to shoot in a documentary context where a tripod is too slow. And I need a viewfinder because on a bright day, you can’t see anything on the screen, and you can’t wrap your coat around you anywhere near well enough. And I am told wearing a black cape looks eccentric. I’m looking at this viewfinder from Grid.

I learned yesterday that the IS only stabilises images when the camera is recording. I thought it was broken. I didn’t shoot because it was too shaky ;-)

If it weren’t for the 8bit H.264 codec on the HDSLR, it could be a very capable B camera. (<-Not really intended as a backhanded compliment.)

There are no sound meters. You could record directly to camera, but you need a tiny mixer to set levels and pre-amp. The audio on the camera is automatic: it has a hard limiter and perhaps even automatic gain control. On the other hand, the Rode VideoMic seems to work well enough, although the cropped sensor pushes people away from the camera - unless you want to go wide and shoot fat-heads. I need to figure out why the radio mics didn’t work.

If you are used to shooting with HDSLRs, it’s an amazing camera. And like an HDSLR - at the moment you have to put up with things - like unfinished audio processing, or not being able to view clips on camera, or not having a good battery solution, or using separate sound recording.

I can’t think of anything else off the top of my head. I love it despite it’s deficiencies. We’re going on a date this afternoon.

Posted 2 months ago

Nick Hanauer’s banned TED talk on wealth inequality in America. Who’s a ‘job creator’?