NotesOnVideo

Thursday’s SMPTE-NE meeting at WBZ Boston was a panel discussion of the new, the exciting and the scary at NAB this year.

The Panel was moderated by co-founder of Avid, Peter Fasciano. and featured Bob Lamm of Broadcast Pix, Willis Peligian of the Willis Group, lighting expert John Gates of Gates Service Group, and Boston Creative Pro User Group’s own Dan Bérubé.

The NEX-FS700 looks interesting; I liked the FS100 but I really wished it had ND filters so that I didn't have to bother with ND filters in front of the lens. Sony has listened to me! (and lots of other people that mentioned this short-coming when the FS100 was released.) Oh, and thrown in the promise of 4K as well.

Last Tuesday I went to a lecture at MIT on "Documentary Film and New Technologies".

I thought that there would be a discussion of new technologies (DSLRs! WiFi enabled cameras!), ubiquitous filmmaking (cellphones! iMovie for the iPad!), new distribution (iTunes! YouTube!) and unique sources of funding (KickStarter!) Instead I got a rather esoteric discussion on how traditional funding sources have changed a little, and hints at interactive media replacing linear storytelling - with a dash of maybe.

At last nights Pub Night at Rule Boston Camera, Ron Risman [Cameratown] talked about Timelapses. Some interesting tips I picked up included:

Let's be clear; while I have aspirations to color grading, I'm still a novice. I've worked with the Three-way Color Corrector in Final Cut Pro 7 for quite some time; with varying success. I've also played a bit with the new color correction tool in Final Cut Pro X, and though it's different, it didn't make me feel like I could do much of a better job.

Three years ago I bought a new MacBook Pro. About a month after I bought the machine, it developed an odd problem: it would lock up, the screen would go on the fritz, and then it would shut down or freeze. After this happened a couple of times, it stopped booting entirely.

This part weekend, Paul Antico invited Rick Macomber over to play with his new Canon C300, and I thought I'd tag along to maybe learn more about the operation of the camera.

When I got there, Paul was saying that he thought that rather than just shoot some test shots, they should shoot a short video, and he had an idea. He then proceeded to outline a story about a man who's lost his job, has unpaid bills, and drives around to all these closed businesses. And as he's talking I'm thinking 'that's all very good, but where are we going to find someone to play this person?'

I thought I'd done a pretty good job of explaining the differences between the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle Thuderbolt [$227], the Intensity Extreme [$284] and the Intensity Pro [$189] card the other day, but it appears not, because at least Patrick Inhofer expressed confusion about it (but then, he is getting old...)

To recap, these are capture devices that support 10 bit HD/SD with HDMI, analog component, composite and S-Video connections.

I posted about the Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle Thuderbolt [$227] and the Intensity Extreme [$284] the other day, and I wanted to find out more about them. Here's what I have found out so far.

Yesterday Sony Europe held a chat on Facebook covering the three cameras they have announced for NAB, including the NEX-FS700. You can review the chat log here, but I've assembled the discussion of the NEX-FS700 into a more coherent - and readable - format below:

At the MIT forum "Documentary Film and New Technologies" I was taken by this answer from Patricia Zimmermann to a question about the difficulty - particularly with interactive work - of knowing which platform to use. I found the answer fascinating because it is really about the longevity of mediums. I look at the floppy disks I still have lying around, with documents created in old applications; should I be trying to preserve them? or should I be thinking of the medium as more like theater; something that exists for a moment - or a year - in time, and is then gone?

Last night's Boston Creative Pro User Group meeting at Rule Boston Camera featured pizza and beer, Carl Peer of Canon U.S.A. discussing the Canon 5D Mark III, and Rob Bessette, colorist at Finish Post discussing grading the short "Hustle" (shot on the Canon C300 and graded on DaVinci Resolve.)

At a recent Boston Creative Pro User Group meeting, Philip Hodgetts talked about meta data, the latest update to Final Cut Pro X, and demoed his utility 7toX for Final Cut Pro, which lets you take Final Cut Pro 7 projects across to Final Cut Pro X.

The user manual for the Canon WFT-E6 Wireless File Transmitter has appeared on the net and is available here: http://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/5/0300007175/01/WFT-E6_VIDEO_EN.pdf [PDF]

Canon 5D Mark III more news
A round-up of coverage on the 5D Mark III from around the web:

Last week Vincent Laforet spoke at a meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group about filmmaking with the Canon C300. The event happened at Emerson College's Bright Family Screening Room at The Paramount Center in Boston. Vincent started out the evening talking about his career as a still's photographer - he worked for The New York Times for several years - and showed some stunning examples of his work (he didn't actually mention it, but he has a book out of his still images: Visual Stories: Behind the Lens with Vincent Laforet (Voices That Matter). He also showed several tilt-shift images he had taken, claiming that he was doing it "before it got popular again."

Jay Ignaszewski, Northeast Sales Territory Manager for AJA spoke briefly at the Boston Creative Pro Meeting held last week (not to be confused with the one to be held tonight - it's been a busy month!) Jay spoke about updates to AJA's products, what they won't be announcing at NAB - since he doesn't know - and 4K.

I installed a 16GB upgrade into the iMac yesterday. It was probably one of the easiest memory upgrades I've done, but still wasn't quite as simple as it seemed in the diagrams on the Apple Tech Note.

I should note right up front that I'm bit of a techno-phob when it comes to doing hardware upgrades/installs, which I blame on the time I practically blew up a NuBus card on a Mac II.

Last week I went to an event at Rule Boston Camera given by Sennheiser’s David Missall. He provided a lot of tips, including this one on reducing handling and cable noise on lavaliere mics (especially cardiod mics - which are more susceptible - though omnidirectional's can suffer from it too.)

At today's Boston Media Makers meeting, Steve Garfield brought along a Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 3D [$945] to demo. He explained that if you want to stream video live from a video camera, it is getting increasingly hard to find cameras with Firewire ports - the way most people have been doing it for the last ten years. Now most of the video cameras output only an HDMI signal.