Posts by Charles

This is my second year going to NAB, a trade show each year in Las Vegas that includes cinema and broadcast manufacturers. Every component of moving image creation is changing quickly; lenses, camera sensors and editing / post applications, so I felt it was necessary to get out to Las Vegas and handle these things before I decide to throw down the price of a car and wait for a brown box to arrive.

After hearing and seeing a lot about the Freefly MoVI in the past few days, it was one of the first booths I stopped at. The MoVI is a handheld gyro stabilizer. What this does is stabilize your shots with little motors that constantly counteract any movement. Upon grabbing it, the first thing you notice is it’s REALLY light, however, all that was on the rig was a 1DC ( DSLR ) and Canon Cinema Prime, not too huge. It was easy to toss around and it remained relatively smooth. There’s something that no one has really mentioned yet, you need an AC to pull focus and unlike a Steadicam rig, you need someone remotely operating Pan / Tilt. I went in thinking it could be usable as a one man operated piece, but really it’d be a stretch. EDIT : After seeing more about it, they are showing a mode called “Majestic” and there is a “Lock Off” mode for one man operation. We all know that proper film equipment is not cheap, so it’s price isn’t too high for professionals, but it’s absolutely too expensive to be a “Change Gamer” as some people have said. There is a lighter version for 7500 coming later in the year, but still remains too high to get in the hands of the masses such as the 5DMII. It’s a breakthrough for the professional market though. I’m still hunting to find video of it with an Epic mounted on it. I’d love to have one or try one out on a shoot, though. The only good photo I got of this was a man doing the Lion King with it as onlookers were horrified. I did take a little video of it as well.

It felt fitting to shoot this man handling the camera in slow motion. Also, those are the real sounds of the people at NAB.

Phantom announced it’s own 4K camera that shoots up to 1000fps at 4K, the Phantom Flex 4K. The image I saw coming out of this wild animal is really smooth and has reached a cinema quality level. They are even saying that it will shoot 23.976 sync sound speeds so you can shoot it as your main camera in 4K and the image will be comparable to that of any other digital cinema cameras. These will come in around 160,000 loaded up. Oh and the 2TB CineMag that holds the footage is around 35,000, wow!

At NAB last year Red announced “6K resolution for 6,000 dollars”, with a sensor upgrade on the Epic camera with a sensor called Dragon. Coming across a few delays this year they started swapping out sensors today, at NAB. They built a “clean-room” at their booth and were literally building cameras at the show. It was cool to see an almost “behind the scenes” look at what happens to the cameras in the factory. Being an Epic owner, I’m excited about this and will most likely go for the upgrade at some point soon. I also got to see some proper 4K footage on a 4K screen at their booth and it has to be seen to be believed. The best way to describe it is when Apple introduced “Retina” on the iPhone. Only time will tell if it becomes adopted for home viewing.

I didn’t have a lot of time to check out Adobe or Cinema 4D at NAB, but there is a lot of coverage here on what they announced prior to the show. Most of what they did at NAB was demos, since it’s software, not too much to handle. The big things they have announced are native support for Cinema 4D files inside After Effects, yes inside. This is one of the biggest announcements for me, since I spend a lot of time in both applications. Check out the link above to get all the details, but it’s really cool.

Canon didn’t have any new announcements at the show other than a new addition to their Cinema Prime family. If you follow Canon in the digital cinema world, or attended NAB last year, it was almost the exact same thing. Their lenses are great, their products are great, just nothing too shocking.

I did get to handle a couple lenses I am absolutely in love with, the Arri Zeiss Master 35mm 1.9 Anamorphic and the Leica 35 1.4. Collectively, they’re both a solid downpayment on a home.

Blackmagic Design once again drew a huge crowd with two new cameras that stunned everyone. One is a camera that is literally a little bigger than an iPhone called the Pocket Cinema Camera. It shoots 1080p Prores, has 13.5 stops of dynamic range and is only $999.00. On handling it, it’s absurdly small and light. I can see this camera as a replacement for GoPros in some situations when you need a better image. I also see it for a lot of people that want to do visual effects work in a small light package. If a video artist or someone that works in After Effects that’s experimenting visually, they can have this camera in their desk with a lens and a couple batteries and really get some incredible footage out of it. Things like this are “Change Gamers”.

The next camera they announced was the Blackmagic Production Camera. This camera is a super 35mm sensor with a global shutter and shoots 4K. Here’s the kicker it’s 4,000.00. I still haven’t wrapped my head around this camera, but this also has such an incredibly low price point, every studio will have one.

The one thing I think is great about these low cost RAW cameras is what’s going to happen in the hands of visual effects artists. A lot of the barriers to great imagery are completely gone now, which brings me to my takeaway.

What does all this mean? There aren’t any technical / visual limits anymore. I think now everyone has an opportunity to make great images and it’s in the hands of the artists now to make things happen. Sure we’ll all geek out on tech, but I feel like the DSLR movement is sort of over and now we have real robust tools made for making real stuff.

Christie DLP 4K Projector, looks like it’s rideable.

This guy was doing event coverage with a 3D Epic rig at 5K, no one has told him 3D is over.

The FT-ONE is a 4K 1000fps camera, to me it looks like it’s a bread warmer.

Grips are getting fired.

The nicest zoom lens at the show.

If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to respond. I did see a lot of stuff and just pulled a few of the stand out moments.

Sundance is going on right now, so I thought this might be a good time to post the trailer to Shane Carruth‘s new film “Upstream Color”. If you’re at Sundance and have the opportunity to attend the world premiere tomorrow, here’s the details, and I’m very envious of you.

Carruth is the writer, director and actor from a film called Primer. Of my all time favorite films, Primer rests comftorably in the top five. If you haven’t seen it, I’d suggest going here and downloading it, trust me it’s worth it. That said, Upstream Color is Shane’s newest film and as cryptic and mysterious as the teasers and trailer are, I have full trust that this film will be nothing short of amazing.

The synopsis for Upstream Color,

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism.

Trailer 1

You can view the teasers for Upstream Color and trailer for Primer here.

If Mr. Carruth stumbles upon this and is looking for someone to collaborate with on visual elements for upcoming films, I’m onboard.

Really digging this short piece by Gustavo Lopez Mañas. My favorite shots are the out of focus ones and the gold swirling in liquid. A great piece as we head into the weekend, get out there and shoot something!

Matt Pyke at Universal Everything has done some incredible work over the years. Every time they release something new I’ll watch it at least 10 times trying to figure out what’s going on. In my opinion, some of the most creative, colorful and technically complex visuals have come out of this studio. Interestingly, The Creators Project has done a short documentary on Matt, giving us a glimpse into his studio and way of thinking about his work. If you’ve got the time, it’s a great watch and if you’ve got a little more time head over to the Universal Everything site and Vimeo to check out the work.

A profile of the incredible Goldstein Residence by architect John Lautner, this makes me want to work a little bit harder today. I’ve been looking to move up to LA in the coming months, maybe I’ll luck out and this guy will need someone to watch his house for a few months.

The Sky Survey, 5,000 Megapixel image of space. There really isn’t too much I can write about this, other than you should probably be prepared to set your status to “Away” for a couple hours. Before doing that, check out the story behind it on the site as well as the iPad app. I’d imagine, if you can hook your new Retina Laptop up to a 1080p projector and shoot that on a wall, it’s going to look pretty impressive.

A year and many sleepless nights later I had amassed over 37,000 exposures. Even then, the work of unifying all the photographs took three months to complete and many hundreds of CPU hours. The data crunching consumed four terabytes of hard drive space and nearly equal amounts of patience but the end result seemed worth the wait.

Here’s the link to the Interactive 360, make sure to full screen it and enjoy!

I’ve been a fan of the work of London based motion studio Man Vs. Machine for a while. They always seem to create colorful and slightly other worldly work. Assembled is a selection of my favorite work, especially the new 4 Idents.

Also, they have an incredible name.

In 2005, I remember switching over to the Panasonic HVX200 camera and feeling like it was the coolest thing ever. It was really the first “affordable” camera that shot HD and was able to shoot slow motion, digitally, up to 60 fps in 1280 x 720p. This was when we were still squashing output to 720 x 480, 4:3, there wasn’t a Vimeo (really), internet video was slowly starting to ramp up and no HD options online. So, that’s the backstory.

Here’s where I’m going with this, the P2 cards that we used to store data on for the HVX were almost 1/3 the price of the camera, $1,200.00 for 8GB in 2007, thanks to a friend sending me a receipt. We’re now using 16GB SD cards in our 1080p DSLRs for something like $18.00.

Yesterday, RED dropped something that made me think, a 512GB SSD card that runs “Turbo”, which means low compression when shooting larger resolutions, such as 5K at 120fps. Red also states that it has faster offload times. This card price tag weighs in at $3,900.00 and it quite literally the size of an iPhone. My first thought was, this is incredibly expensive! Then I went back and looked at what we were paying in 2005/2006 for P2 cards. Relatively speaking, this isn’t that crazy for being on the “bleeding edge”. I’m not sure what they’re running inside the cards, but it’s definitely not an off the shelf SSD configuration inside there with the data rates the camera is capable of getting, sustained.

Of course cameras like the C300 and 5D Mark III shoot CF cards that are under 100 bucks a pop for 32GB, however they’re shooting 1080p. Which for a lot of stuff is enough and looks great, but they still don’t get high frame rates above 30fps at 1080p.

Just thought this was an interesting subject and something to think about regarding the future. What do you think? Are we going to be shooting on 2TB SSD cards in a couple years? Are those cards going to be getting fed an 8K resolution and are we going to be paying $4,000.00 again for those?

Also, I just checked on the Sony solid state cards, and they’re doing 1TB for $5,700.00. So I’m guessing it’s safe to say we’ll be using higher capacity, flash media in the near future. Always interested on hearing other people’s experiences and ideas about this sort of stuff.

The 2012 Land Rover Defender XTech. In the United States, we can’t get our hands on these and that’s a tragedy. In my opinion it’s one of the best designed off-roader / SUVs ever and now there’s an XTech version which is much more rugged and has a new engine. I’m not sure if I like the original or the XTech version more, but it definitely brought me around to posting about the Defender.

The thing that I truly admire about the design of this car, it’s simple and done right. There’s no weird pattern in the seats, the instrument panels are symmetrical and the exterior colorways are that of a machine. Sure there are a lot of technological enhancements and the glaring safety features missing. No airbags keep it from coming stateside. However, it has a timeless appeal to it. Of course, it’s diesel and weighs A LOT and with what we’re all paying for gas right now it’s not really an option. However, I’d ride my bike to the studio during the week and take this out on the weekends to offset my carbon footprint.

To realise the seamless 360° shots TMS developed and conceived their own unique camera system which enables to produce with a resolution of 17,720 x 1080 pixels. 7 projectors with 13.056 x 1080 pixels resolution.

The world that video projection has opened up, in terms of experiencing an environment, is truly incredible. Projects like this amaze and confuse me. On the technical end, there are so many puzzle pieces that have to fit just right, but then on implementation it’s simple and beautiful. We’re getting closer to full immersion of environments, whatever they may be, the future of this type of work is going to be incredible. I’d really love to experience something like this.