» Posts Tagged ‘howto’
Daniel Plym shoots for the online entertainment mag Buzzine, and as a result he shoots a lot of red carpet interviews — on a DSLR. He’s responsible for both video and audio as a one man operation, and he manages to shoot dual-system without an audio guy. Here, he breaks down how he’s able to do this via the combination of a 5D Mark II, Sennheiser wireless mic, Zoom H4n, and the Pluraleyes plugin for Final Cut Pro. His tutorial is clear and concise — perfect if you’re not yet shooting dual-system but are thinking about doing so: More »
Stu Maschwitz’s tutorial on color correction is one of the most-clicked links on this site, month after month. His very helpful tutorial was recorded for the cross-platform plugin Magic Bullet Colorista I, but the techniques he demonstrated applied to color correction in general. Now, however, Colorista II is available, and the amount of control the $299 plugin gives you is staggering. When it comes to software, however, a lot of people will sell you a product and then try to sell you training for that product — but here’s over an hour of free color correction tutorials from Stu. This is great stuff for an unbeatable price. More »
Caleb Pike has posted a video at DSLR Video Shooter for removing horizontal banding artifacts from DSLR footage using Final Cut Pro’s “Limit Effect” tool. This technique should only come as a last resort, however, as the best offense is a good defense: shoot at 1/50 shutter speed in most European countries (or anywhere 50Hz electricity and/or PAL video is standard), and 1/60 in the US and other NTSC locales, and you should be fine. More »
Adobe After Effects is an incredibly deep compositing program that often flusters first-time users with its myriad panels and switches. It’s not the most intuitive program, and as such I don’t recommend taking the approach I did: banging my head against the wall until it made sense. Instead, why not take advantage of two hours of free training from Video Copilot? This video series came out a while ago (circa CS3), but 99% of it still applies to CS5. More »
My forthcoming (at some point!) project 3rd Rail takes place in a snow-blanketed New York City. From a production standpoint this poses significant problems, perhaps not as challenging as depopulating New York City like we did in The West Side (see also: hanging a guy from a 40-foot lamp post), but while we could use visual effects to overcome those problems in The West Side, snow and rain are more of a special effect that requires a practical approach (or just good luck with the weather). Here are a couple of really cheap methods worth considering if you need snow and rain but don’t have a large budget (or a direct line to God). More »
Once again, I’ve updated and expanded The DSLR Cinematography Guide to the tune of 5,000 words — it’s gone from 10k to 15k. While I’m tossing out numbers: according to Google Analytics, the guide has had 70,000 page views, with an average time spent on the guide of 11 minutes. That’s 770,000 total minutes, or 12,800 hours collectively spent reading the guide! I will take this as a confirmation (in addition to all the comments!) that the guide is helpful to a lot of people. Onto what’s new in this version: More »
Thanks to everyone for checking out The DSLR Cinematography Guide, which is up to 20,000 views since launching less than a month ago. While it’s great to get traffic for something, what I’m most impressed by is the average time spent on the page: 12 minutes. This is an eternity by internet standards, where most people click on something, find it’s not for them, and immediately click away. I’m sure many visitors to the guide itself fall into that category, which means the rest of you are spending double or triple that on the page, so I’ll take that as proof it’s helpful. And, of course, thanks to everyone who’s commented on the guide.
Today I made some revisions and posted some new sections to the guide; read on to find out what’s new. More »
In August I spent a lot of time thinking about DSLRs and their unexpected revolutionizing of moviemaking technology. Most digital cinematographers, I think, expected this sort of price/performance disruption to come at the hands of ex-Oakley founder Jim Jannard’s camera startup, RED. And while RED may still overtake the hybrid still/video market in the years to come, the fact is: the revolution is here, now. And so I spent a bunch of time researching DSLRs and the variety of accoutrements it takes to turn a still camera into something resembling a movie camera. Too much time, in fact; I spent months on forums searching for answers, after which I finally moved out of my apartment, took the money I saved by doing so, and bought a camera package and put it to work. The result of my research and experiences is below, in a tiny font:
The DSLR Cinematography Guide
I hope it’s helpful for anyone interested in making beautiful movies for very little money. More »
My three year-old MacBook Pro recently started emitting a constant racket from its left fan (which sounds something like this). Most people will tell you you need a new fan for $50, but I decided to try to fix it instead, and so far (it’s been two weeks nine months), the repair has worked great. As any google or youtube search for “noisy macbook pro fan” produces thousands of results, I hope this saves someone fifty of their hard-earned bucks during this, the winter of our hardships. More »
Ty: Like you stated though, all you need is a PC that runs iTunes (for now) With the new Apple TV, Apple Decides the Living Room Can Wait
Ty: Ah. Good point. Ever since switching over to Apple I've kind of taken fo… With the new Apple TV, Apple Decides the Living Room Can Wait
William: What I want to see is a device that will bury the cable companies. Time Wa… With the new Apple TV, Apple Decides the Living Room Can Wait
Koo: That's a good point -- all you need is another piece of Apple hardware tha… With the new Apple TV, Apple Decides the Living Room Can Wait