Here’s another detailed tutorial from the ever-useful Ken Stone site, this one on how to use 4:3 footage in 16:9 projects (and vice versa). High-Definition native widescreen camcorders are now a relatively cheap commodity, yet so many video projects still require a standard-definition 4:3 aspect deliverable. And if you’ve done any amount of video production work, you’ve probably been called upon to mix a variety of formats from disparate cameras in projects. Thankfully, this article walks you through the basics and also presents a number of very inventive suggestions and real world examples that you can immediately put to use in your productions. The tutorial is written for Final Cut Pro users, but the ideas presented transfer well to other NLE’s. Highly recommended.

UPDATE: Official specs are out in the wild. Consider this article deprecated (good discussion follows however).

The long-awaited Sony XDCAM EX officially launches on Thursday the 6th at IBC in Amsterdam, and we’ll (hopefully) get a closer look at some real, detailed specs. In the meantime, here are the details we’ve been able to glean on this very interesting camcorder. A little bird told us…

*The official model designation of the XDCAM EX is “PMW-EX1″. In the past few months I’ve noted several instances in which Sony has used the phrase “EX series”. To me that is a clear indication that other models will follow. So perhaps we’ll see a feature-limited CMW-EX1 in the near future.

*The camcorder will feature three 1/2″ progressive chips, possibly CMOS since they have been noted as “new” and “low-power”. No specifics on whether or not they’ll be full native 1920×1080, or 1440×1080 like the XDCAM HD 1/2″ series of shoulder mount cameras. My guess is the latter, Sony traditionally seems to be very protective of “pro” series cameras, and probably wouldn’t risk undermining the XDCAM HD shoulder-mount series by putting too many gizmo’s in this offering. If the XDCAM EX does drop with full raster chips, that might pose a problem for NLE software. Does Final Cut Pro and the like even support XDCAM HD media at 1920×1080? Though I suppose in FCP you could just drop the clips into a timeline with ProRes 422 as the render codec. The other question about the chips…if they are in fact CMOS, will they feature a global (non-rolling) shutter design?

*The camcorder records to solid-state ExpressCard media, currently available in 8, 16, and 32GB capacities. It has two slots. At full HQ (35Mbps, VBR) you’ll get 2.5 minutes per gigabyte. At 25Mbps CBR, expect to fit 3.5 minutes per GB. So two 16GB cards will net you 90 min @ 35Mbps variable, and 115 min @ 25Mbps constant bitrate. Double that for 32GB cards, rinse, repeat.
Continue reading ‘Sony XDCAM EX Pre-Launch Specs’

In yet another blow to the Blu-ray disc format, Canadian electronics manufacturer Venturer announced their forthcoming $199 HD-DVD player. Finally, the all-important sub-$200 number. This is the sort of player that WalMart might carry. The SHD7000 plays 1080i via HDMI, supports Dolby TrueHD audio, and has Ethernet and a SD DVD upscaler. Expect it this holiday season at major North American retailers.

In the meantime, Toshiba has a 5 disc HD DVD rebate offer on all their hidef players. Buy any Toshiba HD DVD player and they’ll give you your choice from a limited selection of discs. More details and the rebate form below. Continue reading ‘The first $200 HD DVD player, eh?’

Another handy Creative Cow tutorial for After Effects users, this one explains how to create a realistic swinging chain using AE Expressions.

AEPortal also has an extensive list of After Effects Scripts and Expressions resources.

Over at Ken Stone’s tutorial site, Mark Spencer has an awesome video tutorial on preparing still images in Adobe Photoshop for use in 3D montages and animation. The tutorial is aimed at Apple Motion users, but the concepts shown will work for an Adobe After Effects user as well. Mark quickly and succinctly explains how to use Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso tool to create a rough selection of your subject, and then how to fine tune that selection by painting in Quick Mask mode before lifting your cutout to a new layer. He finishes by demonstrating how to fill in empty area of your image with the Clone Stamp tool, and saving it out as a PSD for use in Motion (or After Effects for that matter).

The tutorial is entitled “Motion 3 - Photoshop Prep for 3D Animation”, unfortunately it’s an embedded video and there is no simple direct link available. You’ll have to look for it on the index page. For more information on how to do 3D photo animation in Motion, Mark recommends Ripple Training’s “Motion 3 Fast Forward” instructional DVD.

In the early 1900’s, a Russian filmmaker by the name of Lev Kuleshov came to the conclusion that two disparate shots edited one after the other are processed “together” in the minds of the audience. He conducted a test in which he showed an inexpressive shot of an actor along other images; a small child, a corpse, and food. The actor’s face remaind the same, but the audience tended to “see” different expressions in the same face. For example, many noted sorrow, desire or hunger in the expression of the actor. In fact, audience members later “raved about the acting…. the heavy pensiveness of his mood over the forgotten soup, were touched and moved by the deep sorrow with which he looked on the dead woman, and admired the light, happy smile with which he surveyed the girl at play. But we knew that in all three cases the face was exactly the same.” At the time, the experiment served to show the usefulness and power of film editing, demonstrating how the viewer tends to bring their own emotions to the edited sequence of images and attributing their reactions to the actors.

The Kuleshov Effect is well understood by modern cinematographers…a good example is how it was used skillfully by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey to inject emotion into the character HAL. Kubrick carefully played off the actors performances, lending the perception of deeper “acting” to the otherwise inanimate character. That’s just smart filmmaking. Watch Alfred Hitchcock give a simple example of the phenomenon below.
Continue reading ‘Editing, Manipulation, and the Kuleshov Effect’

Storage company Seagate plans to offer solid state flash drives next year in a variety of applications. These are not the flash-enhanced SSD+HDD hybrids that are already available, they are talking about full-on Flash SSD storage. No specifics on storage sizes are available at this time.

I believe that SSD storage will be a wondeful enhancement to aftermarket disk capture solutions like the Focus Firestore…they are lighter, more rugged, silent, and consume less power. Since they have no moving parts, you now can have many of the advantages of P2 storage in a commodity camera. Think HV20 + SSD Firestore = Cheap Crash Cam. How far we have come since the early hard disk storage! Unfortunately, all those advantages will most likely come at a premium price point. Here’s to hoping there won’t be a flash shortage and prices remain reasonable.

Move over MacGyver, Rescue Tape is on the scene. It’s as if Super Glue and Gaffer Tape got together and gave birth to a fast self-fusing, waterproof, airtight, heat-resistant silicone tape that can be removed without leaving sticky residue. Looks like a useful addition to any filmmaker’s kit.

I read yesterday that the Wachowski brothers (you know the ones…filmmakers behind The Matrix, and one of ‘em thinks he makes a nice lady as well) are “using a new camera” in the filming of Speed Racer to create the effect of the entire frame in focus at one time. Which is ironic when you consider the countless indie filmmakers jumping through countless hoops to get a shallow depth-of-field look. If they had called me, I could have rented them a stock Sony FX1 for a lot cheaper…but I digress. On a more serious note, Susan Sarandon (starring in the film) is gushing over this new technique, stating in an interview;

“They’re doing something where they’re layering film so that the front and the back are in focus like a cartoon and they’re also doing two dimensional and three dimensional stuff and mixing and everything is very, very saturated with some new kind of film, so they actually have to treat the actors in some way so we can hold our own with the background.”

Sounds tedious. And interesting. Which may account for the fact that the intarwebs are abuzz with this (tiny and unsubstantiated) bit of news. Unfortunately no real details have been shown or explained. Just this mysterious layering technique. I even read one commenter say in a definitive statement that they are shooting Speed Racer on the (forthcoming) Red Digital Cinema camera. Surely we would have seen this first at Reduser, no? Stay tuned, I’m sure that Larry the cross-dressing director will clear everything up shortly. Expect the film to be released sometime in Spring of 2008.

This particular tutorial is not new, but is a good reference for those just getting into multicam editing with Premiere Pro. It’ll take you through the setup and basics of your first multi-angle edit in PPro.

NASA has signed a contract with The Internet Archive to digitize and publically host over 50 years of images, video and film. Wow.

Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released as the five-year project gets up to speed, he said. “I don’t think that any of us know the depth to which a lot of these assets are stored. You finish one project and you open up another box filled with things you’ve never seen before.”

The Internet Archive currently manages 5 petabytes of storage across three continents, and has pledged to add whatever capacity is necessary to complete the project. The History Channel is going to have a ball with this…

Shane Ross has posted a fantastic review of CalDigit’s new HDPro RAID solution. This 4 Terabyte (500GB x8) RAID5 editors dream performs in the upper 300 MB/s read speed (Shane’s average: 385 MB/s), which should catch the eye of all the uncompressed junkies out there. That’s enough for multiple streams. Write speed wasn’t shabby either. He also tested out the protection ability of RAID5:

“… I set it up to capture uncompressed 10-bit, and about 5 minutes in…I YANKED A DRIVE OUT! … But, it kept merrily match capturing…not missing a beat. When it was done I saved my project and set about fixing what I intentionally broke. I pushed the drive back in and went into the RAID SHIELD software and unlocked the drive and the software went about rebuilding the Raid. Again, that took about 3 hours. But the footage I captured was still intact and played fine.”

Currently you’ll need a PCIe computer to use the HD Pro, with PCI-X support in the works. There’s also an Express34 card interface for the unit, for Macbook Pro users. The HDPro starts at just under $4000 for 2TB, and goes all the way up to the 6TB model at $8K. Thanks Shane for the great review on what looks to be a solid offering from CalDigit.

FreshDV writer Kendal Miller’s review of the Zacuto Camcorder Shoulder Mount System is in the September issue of DV Magazine and also available online at DV.com.

“…the Zacuto system is a counterbalance for handheld cameras such as Panasonic’s HVX200 and Sony’s Z1U. Everything is built on and around the company’s base plate and rod system. The base plate—completely universal with extensive adjustments on both the horizontal and vertical axis—can be easily adjusted to accommodate any camera. You can thread together the lightweight rod segments (available in lengths from 1â€? to 12â€?) to add or subtract length without resetting the system.”

The Zacuto system is an incredibly well-engineered and robust solution for both tripod and handheld usage. It is well-suited to fully outfitted 35mm adapter rigs, and serves as an invaluable base for all your disparate-branded accessories. This is not your momma’s run-of-the-mill handheld attachment, this is a full-on base for your fully-configured camera rig. The FreshDV crew shot with a HVX200 + Brevis 35mm lens adapter (fitted with the PL-mount option), huge 85mm PL cine lens (compliments of Fletcher Chicago) and a variety of matteboxes and follow focus units. The Zacuto rig handled everything we threw at it, and made camera rig build up and breakdown a joy. We were particularly impressed with the extensibility of the unit…Need some extra space on the front of the rods? No problem, just thread on another rod extension. Need a place for the external monitor? Use the Zamerican arm, a multi-articulated support arm whose joints can be locked in place using a single point of adjustment. What, you wanted that monitor upside down? Unlock, rotate with one hand, lock, done. It really is that simple to use. And to top it all off, the gear is beautifully machined and built. Read the review at dv.com for all the juicy details. I’ve also included more full rig pictures below.
Continue reading ‘FreshDV Review of Zacuto Shoulder-mount System’

 Interview with Gary Bettan of Videoguys [52:38m]: Download

We had the opportunity to interview Gary Bettan of Videoguys recently. We discuss the background history of The Electronic Mailbox/Videoguys, and how they stayed on the cutting edge of digital video and editing since the 1980’s through today. Gary talks about how they led the forefront of video editing back in the day, from simple video faders, to deck-to-deck editing equipment, character generators, and finally to computer-based editing in the late 1990’s (long live the Intel Pentium Floating-Point Error). We then talk about the ways in which Videoguys is helping lead the video editing community in today’s rapidly-evolving industry. One way in which they are helping the PC community is the Do It Yourself computer-building tips they offer; Videoguys will build and test a DIY editing workstation, then publish specs and tips for those who wish to build their own system. Gary also dishes on his experience with the Canon HV20 camcorder and Blackmagic Intensity Pro I/O cards, the advances in Adobe CS3 Production Suite Premium (yay for Blu-ray and Flash authoring options!), new developments in HD formats, new solid-state storage cameras and the V1U/Firestore issue, and storage and card solutions for ncompressed HD and HDCAM editing solutions. A very informative interview, and we thank Gary for his time.

I wanted to take a moment highlight their DIY cookbooks, like this DIY 5 Update. This particular article discusses building a Dual-Core PC editing solution, with detailed specs and options for five different systems ranging in price from $1000 all the way up to $2500. They break it down to specific components and part numbers, the price noted for each part, and notes on overall performance. This is an excellent resource to the build-it-yourself community. You can reach Videoguys at www.videoguys.com, or on the phone at 800-323-2325.

You can listen to this podcast by subscribing to the FreshDV iTunes Podcast Feed or our non-iTunes Podcast Feed.

Anthony Burokas has posted a lengthy review of Panasonic’s “Professional” AG-HSC1U, a compact camcorder that records AVCHD to SD media cards. The HSC1U is the “Pro” big brother of the consumer HDC-SD1, and comes at a $1000 premium. A few highlights:

*The included 4g SD card limits you to 40 minutes of HD video and 5.1 audio recording at best quality.
*Comparing footage vs Sony HDR-FX1 HDV, the AVCHD shows more compression artifacts.
*”Dismal” battery runtime, charger curiously uses swapped colors to indicate charge status. Green means stop?
*Stereo mic in, component, AV, and HDMI out. USB 2.0 to transfer footage.

Anthony concludes by stating “The camcorder is okay, but, aside from color space, the Pro model offers nothing more than a higher price tag- currently about $1000 more than the consumer HDC-SD1, which retails in the $800’s now. The current implementation of AVCHD on this camcorder is a far cry from anything else that tries to call itself professional, let alone actually is.” He also takes a look at the VW-PT2 SD Media Storage device (featuring a 40g hard drive). A very informative review.