New Final Cut Pro!

There's a really good chance you already know this, but just in case you're that guy who's living under a rock in the GEICO commercial, a new version of Final Cut is apparently going to drop this Spring. NAB might just be all the more exciting this year if Apple has something to show (though early consensus seems to think that Apple won't show it on the floor, but perhaps at an event before NAB kicks off).

Larry Jordan, a Final Cut instructor and host of the Digital Production Buzz, was invited out to a "secret meeting" of "industry professionals" and shown the new software.  Larry doesn't reveal much, but what he does say gets you excited (if you're an editor, that is).

Combine this news with Apple's unveiling of Thunderbolt (an odd name for Intel's Light Peak connection) and you have some really exciting possibilities with the new Macbook Pros unveiled today. Basically think of Thunderbolt as this extremely fast connection capable of connecting monitors, drives and other devices together. A number of manufacturers are announcing support for Thunderbolt, so you'll see I/O devices from Blackmagic and AJA in the near future.  Also with the new Macbook Pros, for the first time, you have an Apple laptop with 1 gig of dedicated video RAM.  Some are upset that Apple chose only ATI cards for this release, locking out those wanting Nvidia's CUDA technology for CS5 and Resolve, but for those who are firmly rooted in Final Cut and Avid the video card news is exciting.  I also wonder if there'll be some sort of external PCI Express chasis that you can connect via Thunderbolt.  If so you could load it up with Nvidia CUDA-based cards and your laptop will fly with Premiere CS5.  Of course this is conjecture on my part, but there's a chance this can happen.

I assume Apple will add Thunderbolt to the Mac Pro, and the iMac as well.  If so, you can then see Macbook Pros and iMacs being serious editing machines with the ability to connect to drives fast enough to support multi-streams of HD video.  Granted you can do this now with FW800 drives, but we're talking significantly faster drives here (think beyond e-SATA speeds).

Suddenly there's something to be really excited about with Final Cut.  Of course I could just be setting myself up for disappointment, but that's nothing new.

Gamma Differences

Wow, so I've known for a while now that Quicktime X and 7 use different gamma settings when playing video. But until now the differences have been mostly minor. That is, until I compared something I shot the other day:

QT X on top, QT 7 on bottom

The video in Quicktime 7 (the lower one) most closely matches the way the footage was shot.  Yes, it's a little too red (and we really needed to adjust our fill light!) but that's not the point.  Color correction has yet to happen. Compare it to how QT X shows it.  Amazing!  I have to admit I haven't fully wrapped my head around this problem but it really makes me second guess things.

The bottom line is the way QT 7 plays back the clip matches the way it looks in Final Cut and the way it looks on my "broadcast" monitor.  But how will the client view things?  Scary...

Editblog's QuickTip of the Day

The Editblog is doing a Final Cut Pro tip every day this month and today's looks like a good one.  Ever wonder why Motion projects take FOREVER to render in Final Cut? Well today's tip might just speed things up.  Check it out here.

An In Depth Look at the AF-100 In Action

That's not how that brake light's suppose to look!

Stunning Good Looks over at the ProVideo Coalition has a nice fairly in-depth look at shooting with Panasonic's AF-100.  The article covers the strengths of the camera and the limitations, including a tendency to clip the chroma values of the camera.  As you can you see in the picture above, the brake lights of the car are suppose to be an orange red, not yellow.

The article points out the many strengths of the camera too, especially how the images benefit from the large sensor, but overall you can't help but feel a little disappointed about the limitations of the 8-bit AVCHD codec.   Bottom line, if you can control the lighting, the camera shines. But under many real world conditions the camera presents some issues to work through.

Read the article here.

Canon T3i

Canon's new T3i - picture from DP Review.

Canon has released an update to their Rebel line with the T3i (600D).  Looks like essentially the T2i with a flip-out screen (plus some "photo filters" like fake tilt-shift).  Most interesting is the digital zoom feature which seems to minimize quality loss as you zoom in.  Gizmodo has a write-up with a sample video featuring the digital zoom.  Check it out here.

Also check-out the always-great preview from DP Review.

Another Urban Exploration Video

Here's another cool urban exploration video featuring Steve Duncan, the star of "Undercity".  This one isn't quite as polished as Undercity, but it's still fascinating nonetheless.

Magic Lantern

One feature I skipped over with the Magic Lantern "hack" for your Canon T2i is bit rate control.  You can actually crank up the bit rate your camera records at and improve the quality.  It appears that the T2i likes 60 mbit/sec the best. Likewise you can actually lower the bit rate and get longer record times (up to 30 minutes potentially). I have to try this out.

Check out this link for a few videos that show the various data rates possible.

The Best Video Card for Motion

It's easy to get caught up in trying to make your system "Adobe CS5" ready,  or "Resolve" ready. Both of those involve the purchase of a second video card from Nvidia that will cost you $1,000 or more.  Premiere Pro CS5 and Blackmagic's Resolve both take advantage of Nvidia's CUDA technology.  But what if you're sticking to Final Cut Pro and do most of your graphics builds in Motion?  Eric St-Martin did some testing between ATI's 5870 and the Nvidia Quadro 4000 to see which comes out on top.

Who wins?  The ATI card.  It's not a surprising finding but it clearly creates two different camps for Mac Pro users and the video cards they stick inside.  If you want the best performance for Apple products, you're probably best sticking with ATI cards and specifically the 5870.  And hopefully, HOPEFULLY, down the road Final Cut will tap in to Apple's own OpenCL standard and the 5870 should scream even more.  But if you want to get the best performance for CS5 or Resolve, you have to go Nvidia.

The only middle ground seems to be that Blackmagic has certified with 5870's little brother, the 5770, as a "GUI" video card (meaning it can only be used to power the CPU monitors and not as GPU acceleration).  In some of the testing I've seen the ATI 5770 does a better job handling Motion than the Nvidia cards.  It certainly beats the Nvidia GT120, another Blackmagic approved GUI card.

To read more about Eric's testing, check out his site here.

Some Links

Some interesting links to peruse:

• Is Panasonic's AF100 hackable (ala the GH1)?  Maybe so, according to the original GH1's hacker.
• Fairly recently Magic Lantern added the T2i to its list of hackable cameras. This isn't a magical bitrate booster but instead adds a lot of useful features to the camera such as zebra stripes, crop marks (16:9, 4:3, etc), manual audio gain and many more useful features.  This of course carries a warning of USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.  If you're daring, check it out.
• Matt Jeppson is at it again with another great post about being careful what we wish for when it comes to the eternal quest for raw video.
• And @EOSHD (a great source for DSLR links) has linked to a comparison video showing the GH2 in its native AVCHD mode vs. the 40fps burst modes in 1080 and 3.8K modes. So yes you can shoot near-4K video with a GH2!  But for only 40 frames at a time (so not even quite 2 seconds if you edit in a 24p timeline). Not so useful at the moment, but maybe a hack in the future will take care of that?

Panasonic's AF100's Sensor Too Small?

Matt Jeppson over at FreshDV has a nice article up about the sensor size of the AF100, the latest AVCHD codec based camera from Panasonic.  The article covers just how much smaller the AF100's sensor is compared to the full-frame sensor found in the Canon 5D, but that it compares favorably to Super35 and the Red cameras.  Most interesting is when you compare the AF100, a sub-$5,000 dollar camera, with the Sony EX1 (a camera that sells around $6K):

The AF100 clearly surpasses (at least in terms of sensor size) the EX1, which was to date really the only affordable large sensor camera you could get your hands on. And it does all this without forcing you to make the myriad workarounds and concessions required when shooting DSLR.

Read the full article here.

Christopher Nolan Screenplays

This might be slightly off-topic for this blog but if you're in to shooting video, you're probably in to movies as well.  I'm a big Christopher Nolan fan.  I love the way many of this films are constructed in a non-linear fashion.  If you haven't seen "Following", do yourself a favor and rent it.  Anyway, the site nolanfans.com has posted all of Nolan's scripts in the PDF format.  Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of any (or all) of his films.

You can find the scripts here.

Final Cut Server Gone?

Remember the only thing Apple seemed to talk about at 2009's NAB?  Final Cut Server MIGHT be history.  Hardmac (via 9to5mac.com) seems to think that Final Cut Server and Xsan, both apps utilized by many video professionals, might be the next to go in what seems to be Apple's purging of its server applications and hardware.  I DO NOT think this signals or should add fuel to the rumors that Apple will eliminate Final Cut. We have Steve telling us how "awesome" the next release is going to be.  But it is an indication that Apple is willing to give up on the server side of business and it will obviously impact post production companies down the road.  Oh, and it goes without saying, take this with a grain of salt. But since Apple's already cut Xserve it's not totally out of the realm of possibility.

Should I Work For Free?

Great chart by Jessica Hische on whether or not you should work for free.  Something all of us freelancers have had to decide at one time or another.

I The Pro Res Maker

I waited an entire day to watch this after seeing various links appearing on Twitter.  I don't know why because it's funny and worth your time since you're in to this whole video thing:

5" Sony Monitor

Sony's CLM-V55

Sony has introduced an affordable field monitor.  The CLM-V55 is a 5" monitor that plugs in to your camera via HDMI.  The price is expected to be around $399.  The resolution of the monitor hasn't been reported as of yet, but for the price I can't imagine it's anywhere close to 720p. One of the most affordable full 720p HDMi monitors out there is the SmallHD DP6 which sells for $899. However I imagine the pixel count will be high enough to aid in focusing.  We shall see.


For more information about Sony's CLM-V55, check out Pocket-lint's full write up here.

Undercity

I'm utterly fascinated with photos and videos about abandoned and underground places.  I love photos of ghost towns, abandoned hospitals and subterranean places like subways and tunnels.  There's a great video about the exploration of New York City's underworld over on Vimeo called Undercity.  If you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and watch it now (even at its length it's more than worth it):

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

Reopening for Business

I'm going to resume blogging again and have decided to return to my Blogspot site (which is the one you're reading now).  More traffic still comes this way than my Squarespace page, so I might as well resume posting here.  I have an upcoming post coming comparing Premiere CS5 and Final Cut Pro 7 with editing AVCHD material. And I'll try and provide some random links (most of which you'll probably have already come across) soon. There have been a few cameras released since I last updated, including Panasonic's AF100 which uses it's "AVCAM" variation of the AVCHD codec.  So this codec is definitely still alive and doing well for the time being.

Also, I'm having difficulties importing in my Squarespace posts. One of their mantras is that you can go in and out of Squarespace easily.  However they output to a "Movable Type" formatted TXT file that Blogger will not import for some reason.  So if you're just coming upon this site, there's additional content here.

More to come, I promise.

Moving

I want to redirect you to where this blog will now (rarely) get updated - please click here to continue reading the sporadic postings for me. I'm searching for a (working) way to auto redirect folks who come here. Thanks for stopping by and I hope to have more posts coming your way soon.

Lighting Tips

Lowel, a manufacturer of lights, has a nice lighting resource site called LowelEDU. Here they break down the various components of interview lighting and give you examples of lighting techniques and placement through their interactive players. Check out LowelEDU here.

MPEG-LA

Matthew Jeppson over at FreshDV has an interesting and potentially scary write-up on MPEG-LA, the organization which holds patents over MPEG and h.264. You know these two codecs which almost all of use in our cameras? Basically when you purchase a Canon, or Panasonic, Sony, etc., your camera only comes with a MPEG-LA license to use that camera in a non-professional way. Since most of us are buying these cameras for professional use, this is a real eye-opener. Read more about it here.