Many have learned the hard way that camera bags can be a major target. If you travel frequently and are looking for a bag that is very unassuming and provides excellent protection for valuable gear, Tenba recently announced two new additions to their lineup: a shoulder bag and a traditional backpack. These bags are part of their Roadie II collection. Both were introduced at NAB 2012 and I was able to get a walk-through of both bags from Peter Waisnor. More »
Ever wished you could just chat with one of your filmmaking heroes, hear their thoughts on various films, and get a list of recommended viewing? Well this comes pretty close to doing that for me. A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is a 4 hour documentary film produced by the BFI (British Film Institute) back in 1995. In it Scorsese takes you through almost 70 years worth of American films, mentioning notable picks, not only for their aesthetic merit but by how they reflect cultural tensions of their day as well as changes in the art of film. If you’re ready to watch some great stuff, discover new filmmakers, and learn something beside one of the masters of our artform, check this out: More »
Welcome to the world of public camera testing, Jim. The wild west camera shootout that Jim and Co. were planning to have at RED Studios Hollywood on June 4th has been cancelled. It seems all of the “grief” that he’s been getting over the situation isn’t worth the trouble, and he and RED “have better things to do.” Surprisingly, Steve Weiss entered REDUser forum territory to explain the choices that had been made for the Zacuto camera test, and the fact that RED had been offered many times to come to the shootout, manage their own RED Epic, and control the post-production method used for that camera. More »
TVLogic, a well-known display maker, introduced a few new products at the 2012 NAB show and I was at their booth to check some of them out. They’ve also developed and designed a “retina display” EVF which uses the same LCD screen that Apple uses for the iPhone 4S. I had a chance to speak with Wes Donahue from TVLogic and Karel Suërs from Alphatron about their products. More »
The Canon 5D Mark III, Canon C300, and RED SCARLET Shoot a Nighttime Bike Race Side-by-Side
Remember when video cameras had sensors that were one third of an inch? It was damn hard to shoot anything at night. But now there are a million cameras (well, not a million, but a bunch) with Super35-size sensors. So while you can actually get a decent exposure while shooting a bike race at night now, not all sensors are created equal. Here’s the Canon 5D Mark III, Canon C300, and RED SCARLET filming the same bike race. The first pass of the video has no key (so you don’t know which is which), and then they show you the second time around: More »
What do you get when you map footage from your DSLR onto volumetric data from a Kinect? How about strange, exciting, sweetness! A very enterprising fellow by the name of James George has developed the RGBDToolkit, a workflow that allows you to marry the two tools with some very intriguing results. You shoot through a DSLR attached to a Kinect, and after calibrating both devices to a checkerboard, you can start creating some incredible imagery. But don’t take my word for it, check these videos out: More »
This is a guest post by filmmaker Robin Schmidt a.k.a. El Skid.
It’s been a while since I wrote part 1 and part 2 of this series and much has happened in between. For the indie filmmaker the camera buffet suddenly grew a few extra tables and it’s interesting to see which, if any, of the new cameras we’d have chosen to shoot on back in November in preference to the RED Epic. More »
Zeiss recently added a 15mm T/2.9 and a 135mm T/2.1 to their CP.2 line. Now they’ve decided to bring back the Super Speed name and are coming out with 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm T/1.5 lenses. It seems that the 50mm and the 85mm are the same design as the old CP.1 lenses, except they’ve opened them up to be faster – but the 35mm is supposedly a new design. Zeiss is also introducing a new line of zooms that will accompany their CP.2 line, and the first of these is the CP.Z 70-200mm T/2.9. I talked with Richard Schleuning of Zeiss at this year’s NAB about all of their new products. More »
When Sony’s FS700 camera was first announced, it was rumored to be under $10k, with some folks pegging it at $8k. When the European version’s price came out at roughly 8,000 euros (~$10,500) the promise of being under $10,000 transformed into “probably around $10,000″. So what am I going on about? Well, the price has finally been confirmed in the U.S., and it’s just as hoped for — $8,000 dollars for the camera body, or $8,600 with an E-mount zoom lens. With this announcement, I figure it’s a nice moment to check out some more test videos shot with the camera that look at how well it handles whip pans, high contrast lighting, auto-focusing situations and more: More »
Pay-Per-View…Or not. It seems that Mr. Jannard has a bone to pick with the people at Zacuto, and he wants the world to see in 4K. He’s unhappy with the tests (I couldn’t see the newest test at NAB thanks to technical difficulties) since the final output for all of the camera shootouts thus far has been 2K, and it levels the playing field for those cameras that can’t shoot above 1080p. With more and more theaters moving to 4K projectors, it is important to at least consider if 4K should start to be included in the near future. Unsatisfied with anyone else who does camera testing, Jim has decided to do his own camera test in 2K and 4K and is inviting other camera manufacturers to RED Studios in Hollywood on June 4th. More »
Atomos Unveils the Ninja 2 External Recorder with 800 X 480 Resolution Screen and HDMI Pass-through
At the recent NAB show, Atomos, the popular external recorder company who made a splash with the Ninja, introduced an updated version called the Ninja 2. Along with the new 3.0 version of their operating system, Atomos has made metadata a priority, much like the new Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Tagging clips is an essential part of the new OS, and I had a chance to talk with Matt Ivey from Atomos about the Ninja 2 as well as other products, including the very handy Connect HD-SDI and HDMI pass-through converters. More »
On Feb 1, 2008 Mark Cuban posted to his blog about a far-fetched, impossible-to-execute marketing concept that he desperately wanted film studios to adopt, in order to leverage the value of free giveaways to combat the crumbling theatrical marketplace. Digital was exploding, distribution was becoming a fractured nightmare, and studios were scrambling to adapt.
The idea was staggeringly simple: give away the film’s soundtrack for free. More »
The Battle of the Preamps: 5D Mark III vs. D800 Audio Recording
Audio recording internally to DSLRs has been mediocre at best. It’s great for scratch audio when you’re doing dual-system sound, but for the most part, it’s a real pain. I’ve been testing the 5D Mark III and the D800, but one of the tests I wasn’t able to do as thoroughly as I wanted was to test the internal audio recording of both cameras with a proper microphone. I know that many out there would ask why you’d ever plug directly into the DSLR without some other external preamp box, but sometimes (like at NAB), having the least amount of equipment that can fail is best. I met Dave Dugdale at NAB, and in this video he takes the time to test out both the Nikon D800 and the Canon 5D Mark III for the quality of their internal audio recordings. More »
Not everyone who reads NoFilmSchool is an expert – in fact most of us are still trying to learn something – and that’s really the reason why we hope people keep coming back each day. If you’re new to filmmaking, your editing experience is probably very limited – and it can be overwhelming starting from scratch. One of the most important things you can do if you aren’t very experienced is to learn good habits right from the start. This isn’t limited to editing, but also shooting and managing media. There’s always more than one way to do something – but there are certainly wrong ways to do many things that can lead to mistakes or slow you down. In terms of editing, organization is something every professional editor will stress above all else. Embedded below is a video describing that process. More »
As if low-cost furniture and a TV set weren’t enough, it looks like IKEA has created their own still camera. Probably the greenest still camera ever made, it was handed out at a design expo in Milan. Supposedly this will end up being sold in stores (whether that includes U.S. stores or not isn’t clear), but the fact that they’ve simplified and reduced the cost of something as complicated and expensive as a digital camera shows just how far we’ve come, as it’s no thicker than a folded piece of cardboard. More »
'The hardest part is dealing with failure' - Academy Screenwriters Discuss Their Craft
What are the highs and lows of being a screenwriter? What kind of misconceptions do people have about screenwriting? How do you find your voice in an assignment or get through writer’s block? Academy screenwriters offer their views on these questions and more in this interesting six part video-series at the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences website. With screenwriters like John August (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Lawrence Kasdan (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat), and Marc Norman (Shakespeare in Love) sharing their thoughts, there’s lots of great food for thought: More »
Canon recently announced a firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark III, and that led the way for the great folks at Magic Lantern to begin porting their hack. Already a big hit on the Mark II and other Canon cameras, Magic Lantern could open up specific features many believe Canon should have included in the first place. Chuck Westfall has said that the 5D Mark III and the 1D X might never get a full, clean HDMI, mainly because Canon (obviously) puts more money and attention into the video features on their expensive video-centric Cinema EOS line (though he also says they are always listening to consumers). Most of all, they want to keep the two product lines separate, and possibly the only hope for this feature (and others like it) is for something like Magic Lantern to unlock the hidden power of the camera. More »
Jeff Cronenweth, ASC, has worked on a number of big Hollywood films, notably Fight Club, The Social Network, and more recently The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – which we’ve talked about here before because of its interesting post workflow. Besides feature films, Cronenweth has also shot and directed quite a few music videos and commercials – which is where his collaborator David Fincher also got his start. He shares insights about digital filmmaking and his working relationship with notoriously take-heavy Fincher in this four-part Oscar Q&A provided by Creatasphere. More »
Need a Black-and-White Digital Cinema Camera? Ikonoskop Announces the A-Cam dII Panchromatic
This is an interesting item – Ikonoskop, the folks behind the A-Cam dII (a raw shooting HD camera previously covered) recently announced a black and white version – the A-Cam dII Panchromatic. By using a monochrome sensor, it aims to give folks looking for great black and white footage a new option with “an amazing range of gradations”. Want to see some sample footage? Check this out: More »
Ten minutes of glorious 48fps footage from The Hobbit was recently shown at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. It’s unfortunate that RED couldn’t show any footage at their NAB booth, but I’m sure fans of the series were delighted to get a glimpse of Peter Jackson’s new epic film (pun intended) shot on RED Epic in 3D at 48fps. We’ve talked a little bit about frame rates before, and what they mean for our industry, but this is the first time a film of this scale is going to be filmed and exhibited at 48fps in 3D. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the 270 degree shutter is helping things, as the results aren’t impressing many of those who watched it. More »
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