Here’s a clever test video from Jonathan Yi that shows off the new Canon C300 camera. This short is humorous and informative…two things I like very much. It reminds me a bit of the tone and cleverness of the Sensible Digital Cinema series.

Jonathan has stated that Canon isn’t particularly thrilled with and wouldn’t endorse his video, which just goes to show you how little they know about their own audience. Remember, the Canon 5D MKII video mode was a happy accident. These guys are running a few years behind. Watch below…

Jonathan has also written a full article with his thoughts, you can read that here.

There is a free webinar today at 10:00 AM Pacific Time on Imagineer Systems mocha tracking for editors. Looks like a fantastic resource, so check it out if you are available. You can register for free here. They are also giving away a couple goodies, including a copy of mocha Pro. Details below:

DESCRIPTION
Complex effects can be handled in your NLE without needing to go into a separate compositing application. Animating those effects have remained for the most part cumbersome, especially for complex animations.

Motion tracking remains the most time effective way to animate a good number of effects, including screen replacements, object concealment and match-moving. All of these tasks have traditionally been the responsibility of a compositor, until now.

In this webinar we will use Imagineer Systems’ mocha AE and Boris Continuum Motion Tracker Unit to quickly and accurately perform motion tracking within an editing system.

We’ll see how to avoid any unnecessary trips to other software and we’ll look at the essentials of mocha’s planar tracker to give you fast and accurate tracking results on even difficult footage.

Finally, we’ll take the tracking data into different NLEs to show you how to use the tight integration in the Boris Continuum Motion Tracker Unit to solve some real-world problems.

AGENDA
Why motion track?
Planar tracking – How is it different then point trackers?
Choosing the best place to start tracking.
Creating a matchmove effect to add in-scene titles.
Tracking through noise and motion blur.
Exporting the data.
Matching position and keeping it real.
Simple screen replacement.
Corner pin tracking – difficulties and solutions.
Adjusting a troublesome track.
Applying the effect in your editing software.
Making it shine with the finishing touches.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND
Video Editors, After Effects Artists, Motion Graphics Artists, Anyone interested in learning more about motion tracking.

PRESENTER
Ben Brownlee is a VFX artist, digital media specialist and instructor with 11 years of production experience across a number of disciplines. Ben’s popular Curious Turtle video tutorials are also available for purchase in Imagineer’s webshop.

GIVEAWAYS & PRIZES
One lucky attendee will win a copy of mocha Pro, the ideal VFX complement for film/video post production, creative motion graphics and 2D-3D conversion pipelines.

One lucky attendee will win a copy of Motion Tracking For Editors Bundle which includes mocha AE v2.6.1 and Boris Continuum Motion Tracker Unit. This bundles supports FCP, Sony Vegas, Premiere, AE and Media Composer.

Mike Seymour will be live-blogging the Canon announcement, and also the RED announcement tomorrow. You can tune into that here. The Canon event starts at 3pm PST, and the RED event is at 6pm PST. Hat-tip to Prolost for the heads up.

Tomorrow is Canon’s much-hyped “historic announcement” in Hollywood, and Mitch at Planet5D will be blogging the event live. If you’re looking for minute-by-minute updates from the event, head on over there and bookmark Mitch’s live blog page.