Image courtesy of Philip Bloom. Click through for his actual coverage of the show.

Canon Expo kicked off with a bang as the venerable imaging giant stunned crowds with its working prototype 4K camera! Is this the future of digital cinema?

Ug. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

There’s so much wrong with this prototype “concept camera” (as Philip kindly points out below, it’s important to understand that this is not a camera Canon plans on bringing to market) that I hardly know where to begin. It’s an atrocity of aesthetics and ergonomics. It has a fixed, not-very-special 20x zoom lens. The sensor is only 2/3”. It shoots 60fps. Nothing about this camera reflects any awareness of what digital cinematographers want. It’s as if Canon brass lifted the internet ban on the engineer’s dungeon just long enough for them to visit to RED’s web site, and then shut it down again after they’d read as far as “4K.”

Of course, this isn’t a camera, or even a plan for a camera. It’s a statement by Canon. They meant to say “We get it. We know what’s important.” What they actually said is “Ooh, bigger numbers!” I expect this kind of technology dick-swinging from Sony, but not from Canon.

What’s most troubling about this non-camera is that Canon made it at all. Anyone invested in Canon’s gear should be pissed at Canon for squandering their time and resources building this toy. I look at this thing and see my parents returning from Vegas with a sheepish expression on their faces, saying “Remember your college fund?”

Canon, please stop building fake “4K” video cameras when you can’t even make an SLR that shoots actual 1080p HD.

We’ve discussed the very real aliasing/moiré issue with Canon’s HDSLRs. It is both a real problem and a somewhat workable limitation that many happily accept. What is not in dispute is that these are symptoms of a poorly-sampled, low-resolution image. Readers of this site know that I am not a spatial resolution fetishist, but even I am painfully aware that my 5D and 7D footage is lacking detail.

Canon makes it incredibly easy to demonstrate this, since the 5D Mark II that makes such fuzzy pseudo-HD video also makes ridiculously high-fidelity stills. The frames below are a 1:1 frame grab from a 5D video, and the same scene shot as a still and then scaled down to 1920x1080. I did the scaling in Lightroom, using no Develop or Output Sharpening.

Click for full-sizeClick for full-sizeFeel free to download the full-res originals and compare yourself, or look at the 1:1 comparisons below:

Port of Oakland? Or #### ## #######?Chain-link fence? Or a dirt piece of glass?The difference is staggering. And remember, I don’t even care all that much about spatial resolution. What I do know is this: a sharp 1920x1080 camera can make an image with more detail in it than most female movie stars are comfortable with for close-ups. So for today we can dispense with a discussion about the merits of mastering at 4K. Canon is nowhere near that conversation with their HDSLRs. They’re still falling way short of HD.

To be clear: What you are seeing above is two different ways that the same camera made a 1920x1080 image. One image was hastily yanked off a sensor (skipping entire rows of pixels) and then compressed to H.264 in realtime; the other was captured as raw 5.6K bayer data, decoded slowly to RGB by an engine optimized for quality, then downsampled to HD using every 5.6K pixel to build a 1920x1080 image with as much detail as appropriate for a true HD image.

Does the latter sound unfeasible for “real” video work? Well it shouldn’t — it’s what we do with our RED One cameras now.

The RED One is more than just a “4K camera.” It’s a 4K sensor, some very clever software, an even more clever compressed raw codec, and then more clever software. Not to mention a decent form factor, decent colorimetry, smart proxy workflows for editorial, and viewfinders that actually help you expose and focus. It’s a full-fledged 4K ecosystem.

And look how painful it was for RED to get all that working.

Canon, you have none of that stuff, you have no idea how to make it, and you don’t even know that you don’t know this.

So stop dicking around with your fake 4K toys and start making cameras we can use. That we want to use.

Build a full-frame DSLR that shoots high-quality HD video at a variety of frame rates and the world is yours.

I’m terrified that you won’t though — because then you’d have to put it on a pedestal at a trade show and say “Look, we finally built a camera that actually does what we claim our current cameras do.”

So much more fun to say “Hey look, 4K!”

“We so get it.”

Which would you rather have for lunch — something a good friend ordered for you, or the most popular lunch among people who also enjoyed such hits as Turkey Sandwich and Fish Taco?

A few years back, Netflix made headlines by offering a prize of one million US dollars to anyone who could build a better recommendation engine for their online movie rental site. Crazy? Not according to Netflix. Their assertion was that if they could get just ten percent better at recommending movies based on users’ ratings (1 to 5 stars) of previously-viewed films, their revenues would increase by much more than a paltry $1M.

What has always boggled my mind about this challenge is that it’s a classic case of struggling to find a technological solution to a distinctly human problem. Google labors to perfect computer algorithms that convert recorded speech to text. For all their research and computational might, they do a pretty poor job. Meanwhile, a small, smart company called CastingWords* uses Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” service to assign transcription tasks to hundreds of eager, human laborers who work for pennies. The results are near-perfect.

Netflix is sitting on a nearly Wikipedia-sized repository of user-generated movie reviews. These reviews a not just free to Netflix — since only active members can contribute them, people are actually paying for the privilege of reviewing films on Netflix’s site.

Netflix not only ignores these reviews in recommending movies, it also ignores your reaction to the reviews. This is the 100% human answer to their “technological” problem that has been staring them right in the face for years.

When I give Face/Off five stars, am I doing it because I love John Travolta Movies? Or Nick Cage flicks? Or John Woo films? Or hyper-violent 90s action? Or any film that features a speedboat chase? Netflix has no idea why I like or dislike a movie, so how can they predict what I might like or dislike next?

When I read the Netflix reviews of Face/Off, two things are abundantly clear: First, many people like that movie for reasons I don’t agree with. Second, people who don’t like Face/Off, with a few notable exceptions, are people whose cinematic opinions I can live without.

In Real Life I have friends who love Face/Off and friends who hate it. And crazily enough, I respect all of their opinions. Any of these friends are welcome to recommend movies to me, and I will almost always take those recommendations.

That’s Netflix’s second mistake: Thinking that we always only want to watch movies that we’d rate highly. I don’t know about you, but I watch plenty of movies that I know won’t be five-star favorites. A friend’s strong endorsement is often the reason — even that guy who hates Face/Off.

But let’s get back to Netflix’s first mistake: Thinking that what everyone thinks matters. I’m sorry, but everyone is an idiot. Even with the challenge complete and the fancy new algorithm implemented, everyone seems to think that because I liked Mission Impossible III, that I’ll jump for anything starring Tom Cruize. Or that liking the first four Steven Seagal films has anything to do with one’s opinions of his subsequent works.

Read some Netflix reviews. While a few are insightful, most are utter garbage.

If a person’s review is garbage, then what good is their star rating? None whatsoever. So the majority of the data used by these million-dollar algorithms is worse than worthless. No wonder the results plateau despite endless efforts.

Of course, your garbage might be my delicacy. On Netflix, you can rate reviews Helpful or Unhelpful. But Netflix obstinately sticks to it’s “everyone’s opinion” philosophy and uses these ratings to bubble Helpful reviews to the top of the list.

The list. No matter how you rate the reviews, you see the same list as everyone else.

You can probably imagine what I’m going to say next. Unless, of course, you work for Netflix.**

If I read a compelling, insightful review on Netflix, and I mark that review Helpful, then factor that person’s ratings higher in determining what films I might like. Similarly, if I mark a review as Unhelpful, then don’t let that fool’s opinions influence my recommendations.

Let me build a personal network of friends whose opinions I respect, and let their recommendations populate my personalized Netflix experience. It will immediately become obvious that a few, cultivated opinions are worth much more that a watered down average of millions.

Oh, and speaking of millions, you can keep the check Netflix. Better recommendations will be reward enough. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m hooked on you like strawberry crack.

—

* I found out about CastingWords in Seth Godin’s amazing book Linchpin. If it doesn’t make you want to quit your job, then maybe this will.

** In which case you might sponsor a contest to develop a robot that can predict what I’m about to say based on what everyone else has said.

01 - Getting Started with Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

02 - Multishot Workflow With Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

03 - Working with The Keyer in Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

04 - Working with Power Masks in Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

05 - Cosmetics: Skin Retouching with Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

06 - Highlight Recovery With Magic Bullet Colorista from Red Giant Software on Vimeo.

Photo by Diana Stock using iPhone 4 and Plastic Bullet

You asked, we listened.

Plastic Bullet 1.1 (US$1.99, free update for current users) is available now, featuring some big new features pulled directly from your requests.

• Full-res photo developing on every iPhone
• Share your photos using Flickr and Facebook
• Faster photo developing
• Optimized for iOS4 and the iPhone 4

Read more about the new features in iTunes. You can see some full-res iPhone 4 examples on my Flickr feed — the quality is amazing.

Enjoy!

Kudos to Celtx for figuring out exactly what to include and what to leave out when designing a screenwriting app for mobile devices. Celtx Script (US$9.99) is the first iPad screenwriting app that “just works” in the way that Apple users expect. This is a welcome surprise given how clunky and homely the desktop Celtx application is on OS X.

Celtx Script on the iPad is as simple and elegant as one would hope. You can do most of what you need to just by typing. In portrait view you have a distraction-free view of your script. In landscape, there’s a handy scene list to the right for navigation.

Landscape view has a centering problem where the last character is cut off on the right. I trust that this is an easy bug to fix.

A feature I would love for both the iPad and the desktop version is folders in the scene list. Color-coding scenes would also be nice.

Notice how I praise the app for its minimalism and then request new features. See how difficult life is for developers?

Speaking of which, the developers were caught by surprise with Celtx Script hitting the App Store on a Saturday, so while the free Celtx Sync function would work between an iPhone and an iPad running Celtx Script, there was no way to sync between the free desktop Celtx and your mobile device. One of the developers managed to get the free syncing plug-in posted within a few hours though. Once you get the plug-in installed, you can import a screenplay from the free cloud backup using desktop Celtx’s Script > Import Script > From iPhone/iPad menu item. There’s a corresponding Export option as well. It’s not quite the same thing as a true Google Docs-style cloud sync, but it’s close, and it’s free.

I would love some assurance from the Celtx team about the security of the cloud storage.

I’m delighted that someone finally made a solid and elegant screenwriting solution for the iPad. That it works on the iPhone as well and syncs with free desktop software makes the $10 price a bargain.

Many folks asked why I ignored Celtx in my last screenwriting post. My answer was that it didn’t provide any features missing from my various other tools. That just changed in a big way.

Looking for screenwriting resources? You can follow my screenwriting list on Twitter, and check out my recommended screenwriting books at the ProLost Store.

Getting Started with Magic Bullet Colorista II from Red Giant Software.

Colorista II is available now from Red Giant Software for Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro (see update below), and Adobe After Effects. It’s what I used to grade these before and after examples. It’s my new favorite thing, and i really hope you enjoy it.

Technology and gear are not the first things I think about when I think about filmmaking, but they do tend to be the first things I blog about. If “none of the tech matters, just make a movie” was the end of the conversation then that would be the end of ProLost. Talking tech is great, and nobody does it better than Red Centre, so please subscribe if you haven’t already, and give a listen to episode 66.

If you’d like to play the home game while listening, here are full-size stills of the image of Mike from the post, before and after color correction. These stills are pulled from 5D Mark II footage I shot of Mike in the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, and you can decide for yourself if it’s compression, 8-bit-ness, or an insidious combination of the two that makes it tough to brighten Mike’s face.

Click for full-res camera original imageClick for full-res, graded image

Click for full-res, graded image with some preprocessing

On the show Mike also mentioned that he’s embarking on a new fxphd DSLR Video course as a follow-up to the popular-but-aging session that he and I shot in Japan. This time, Mike has nabbed someone who actually knows what he’s talking about, none other than Tyler Ginter of the 55th Combat Camera Company. I look at a helicopter and think, “how can I put this in my movie?” Tyler looks at one and says “I think I’ll jump out of that with 90 pounds of gear strapped to me (including a 5D Mark II). Check out Tyler’s videos on Vimeo and stay tuned to fxphd for more updates.

In my last post I made a barbed remark about the Sony NEX-VG10, based on early reports that it only shot 60i (NTSC) and 50i (PAL). Turns out it may actually have a progressive mode, which would make the PAL version an option for filmmakers in PAL countries, or those in the U.S. willing to jump through the 25/24 speed-change hoops like we old fogies once did with the first DV cameras. Personally, I’ll wait for real 24p, the importance of which Sony, unlike Canon, cannot pretend to be unaware. Now that so many camera manufacturers are fighting to give us DV Rebels exactly what we want, I won’t be expending any energy on cameras that don’t.

And last but not least, if you’re not on Twitter, this might be a good week to start.

I was having a bit of fun today combining the 3D Camera iPhone app (Alex Lindsay’s pick of the week on MacBreak Weekly yesterday) with Plastic Bullet (his pick a few weeks ago). After brunch at the amazing Brown Sugar Kitchen, I stopped by one of my favorite West Oakland sites: the concrete plant at Peralta and 24th.

No sooner had I started snapping my stereo pairs than I heard a loud “Hey!” In front of me, a dude in a hard-hat was pointing behind me. A guy in an orange vest was trying to get my attention.

Immediately I began subconsciously preparing my customary sanctimony. This is a public street. I’m just taking snapshots. It’s my right as an American. Today we celebrate our Independence Day. Etc.

(You may recall that I blogged a while back about a PDF you should print and keep with you called The Photographer’s Right, to help you with said sanctimoniousness.)

I turned to orange-vest man and he shouted over the truck noise “Hey, would you like to go inside? The angles are better! I’m the manager here, I can take you around!”

Say what?

Leave it to Oakland to continue to surprise even a guy who’s lived there for over ten years.

He led me around while I happily snapped, and I took his business card, expressing my sincere intention to use his location in a professional shoot if ever the right job came along.

There’s no conclusion here except that I thought I’d try to balance out all the whinging I do on this blog a bit. Not all is crap in the world.

Just the new Sony camera.

Mike Seymour: Bit Depth Fetishist

Mike Seymour of fxguide and fxphd loves his Canon 7D, but on the splendid Red Centre podcast he bemoans one shortcoming of its video mode more than all others combined: 8-bit files. Line-skipping, heavy compression, weird form factor? Mike’s not concerned about that nearly as much as he is the noise, banding, and crunchy chunky nastiness that he knows is lurking within those apparently lovely images, just waiting to pop out and bite him when he’s keying a sky or brightening a face.

Why Mike should relax: It’s just not that bad. It’s the compression more than the 8-bit recording that makes HDSLR video fall apart under stress. Get a good noise removal plug-in and watch your bit-depth magically appear to increase. And not every shot needs to be keyed. More professional photographers than will ever admit it shoot JPEG instead of raw. 8 bits is plenty if they’re the right eight bits.

Vincent Laforet: Gear Fetishist

Have you ever seen a photo of Vincent Laforet without something really, really expensive in the shot with him? Something black-anodized and wireless? Vincent loves the toys. He’s been using them to make awesome images before he fell in love with making moving pictures—he’d use film cranes to place SLRs in precarious positions on New York landmarks, for example. Now Vincent is reliably the guy who will strap a $4,000 camera body to about $300,000 worth of camera support gear.

Why Vincent should relax: More than anyone I know, Vincent could make a beautiful film with nothing more than a camera, a 50mm lens and a tripod.

Philip Bloom: Boke Fetishist

Sorry Philip, there are so many shallow-depth-of-field mavens out there to choose from, but your fanaticism for it combined with your keen eye and willingness to approach complete strangers on the street with a giant Zacuto rig sticking out of your chest like a spinal surgery patient have probably sold more Canons than their own marketing department has. Philip has made focus hunting into an artistic choice rather than a technical failing. And really, on a medium-close shot with one nice, sharp eye, who wants to be distracted by a crisp eyelash?

Why Philip should relax: Most movies are shot on 35mm film (roughly equivalent to the 7D’s sensor size) at about f/4. Some of my favorite shots of Philip’s have literally several things in focus.

Jim Jannard: Resolution Fetishist

Jim Jannard, founder of RED Digital Cinema, recently wrote “If 1080P is really ‘good enough’… then there is no reason for RED.” He’s bet everything that people care a lot about spatial resolution. Not satisfied to make a 4K camera, Jim announced a complete line of cameras for the pixel reductionist ranging up to a 28K monstrosity. To Jim, quality comes from sharpness and detail.

Why Jim should relax: The highest-grossing film of all time was shot in HD and then cropped for projection on screens the size of football fields. If you see a ‘scope movie that was shot in HD, you’re looking at an image only 800 pixels tall. Movies move. They have tons of motion blur, are rarely perfectly in focus, and they are watched by people who don’t have perfect eyesight in theaters that are manned by “projectionists” who focus biannually.

Roger Ebert: Frame-Rate Fetishist

Roger Ebert hates that wagon wheels go backwards. It drives him nuts. Years ago he saw a demo of Maxivision 48, a system that shoots and projects 35mm film at 48 frames per second, and he’s never forgotten how smooth it was. Like many, he decries 24 fps as a technological dinosaur, a holdover from a bygone era.

Why Roger should relax: With the advent of HD, it became easy to create digital moving images of high enough spatial resolution to pass for film (unless you’re Jim Jannard, see above), but at first we could only do so at 50 or 60Hz. HD video at 60 images-per-second inspired no filmmakers and no audiences—in fact, at the very Sundance I met Roger, a 60fps HD test shot by Allen Daviau was booed off the screen. It wasn’t until we hobbled our HD cameras to 24 that we could start making movies digitally. More frames-per-second is indeed smoother and more life-like. Just like video. Who would have imagined that audiences don’t want movies to feel more like daytime soap operas?

Jim Cameron: Depth Fetishist

I’m taking the hard road here by picking on a filmmaker I idolize, rather than the studio execs who see “3D” as just a longer way of typing the dollar sign. Jim uses the word I hate—immersive—to describe the effect 3D has on an audience. 3D is more “real” to him, more life-like.

Why Jim should relax: Jim has made some of the most immersive movies I’ve ever seen, and none of them needed an extra way to remind me that some stuff is in front of other stuff. 3D is an imperfect technology that has failed to win the love of moviegoers twice before. Movies work because they are larger than life. If you succeed at making them life-like, you run the risk of faithfully recreating the mundanity of the real world. Who would have imagined that audiences don’t want movies to feel more like plays?

Stu Maschwitz: Accessibility Fetishist

I flatter myself to be in the company of the above luminaries, but fairness demands that I turn the lens on myself. I am biased against expensive things. I’ll talk your ear off about how After Effects runs circles around Flame, and then instantly forget all your scathing rebuttals of all the things Flame can do that AE can’t. I get off on accessibility, even if I don’t actually access it. I bought a Canon HV20 the week it came out, calling it the no-more-excuses camera. Well I must have been wrong, because simply owning the camera didn’t cause a film to get made by me with it. Filmmaking is hard, and I sometimes get too preoccupied with finding ways to make it easier.

Why I should relax: Usually you do get what you pay for. A cheap, crappy follow-focus is just a non-refundable down payment on the good follow-focus you’ll eventually buy. And it’s the fact that filmmaking is difficult that makes it worth doing. Movies capture the efforts of a few and turn them into an experience for the many. Try hard, then try harder, then try harder still—and then look next to you at a filmmaker who’s trying even harder. Chances are you have a favorite director whose work has never been the same since they got famous enough to stop killing themselves making their films.

I kid because I love. In case it’s not abundantly clear: I admire every single one of these fetishists (well, except that last punk). But we can all use a little reminder now and then that movies work. They’ve transported us, fooled us, moved us, terrified us, and turned us on for a hundred years, all without any yet-to-be invented bells and whistles.

Movies aren’t broken, Stop trying to fix them and go make one.

So I’m always a bit surprised at how what seems to be such a simple task by comparison, putting words on a page, has perennially been handled in a way dissatisfying to so many writers.

Final Draft

Final Draft ($249 MSRP, $186.68 from Amazon) is the gold standard, if you take that analogy in the direction of gold being an outdated, unwieldy encumbrance, the continued practical significance of which is more imagined than real. Every “real” screenwriter uses Final Draft, and Final Draft’s .fdx file format is as close to a lingua franca as exists in Hollywood.

Final Draft is an essential tool for films in production because of its industry-standard revision management and compatibility with popular scheduling software, but over the years it has often been less than a joy to use for actual writing. If you used it on a Mac, Final Draft was always the app that made you most painfully aware of Apple’s willingness to start fresh with a new operating system. Final Draft sometimes felt like it was running in an invisible Macintosh Plus emulator ported to Linux and running in OS X’s X11 environment. Even as recently as version 7, Final Draft would only sporadically display screenplay text with an anti-aliasd font.

In fairness, the current version 8, which I was just forced to upgrade to thanks to Snow Leopard, is pretty good. It’s aesthetically minimal and feels like a good, native Mac app. But without wanting to discount the many complex features that Final Draft has under the hood, lets remember that its main task is to place the letters that you type on the screen, and format them like a script—which, by definition, excludes anything not possible using a 100-year-old typewriter. Even in version 8, some aspects of this simple task remain buggy. I find that I can wind up with lower-case letters in a character name depending on the mood of the (admittedly quite handy) auto-complete feature. Similarly, I don’t know if it’s a feature or a bug that I can occasionally type lower-case letter into a slug line, the formatting of which is set to all caps.

But the thing that absolutely flabbergasts me about Final Draft is that, after all these years, it still reflects not one ounce of understanding of how screenwriters think about organizing their work.

Almost every screenwriting application has a “notecards” feature, where scenes are displayed as virtual 3x5” notecards that can be color coded, annotated, and rearranged. This is mean to to emulate the age old screenwriter practice of avoiding actual work by dicking around with 3x5” notecards.

The problem is that Final Draft, like most screenwriting apps, assigns one notecard to each slugline, rendering the entire idea completely worthless. When writes use cards, they might break things down as far as one scene per card — but a scene usually contains multiple sluglines.

Here’s a scene from The Bourne Supermacy (Tony Gilroy, Brian Helgeland screenwriters). On this one page there are five sluglines. Every page in this tense action scene is like this—cross-cutting between Bourne and the Treadstone assassin, moving from setting to setting, punching in for crucial details. In Final Draft, each of these sluglines becomes an index card:

Which is not at all how a writer would use cards. This entire eight-page scene would probably be one card called “CAR CHASE - KIRIL TRIES TO KILL BOURNE.” Or, for another writer, maybe the chase would be broken up into a few cards. BOURNE SEARCHES THE BEACH TOWN FOR MARIE, CAR CHASE - KIRILL PURSUES BOURNE AND MARIE, KIRIL SETS UP HIS RIFLE, TRIES TO KILL BOURNE, etc.

The point is, sluglines and index cards have nothing to do with one another. In order for index cards to be of any use, they must be able to contain an arbitrary amount of screenplay.

Which brings us to…

Scrivener

I’m skipping over Movie Magic Screenwriter…  oh wait, let’s not skip them entirely—just take a gander at this screenshot, which I just today pulled from their website. Wow. Anyway, on to Scrivener—the best screenwriting application in existence, and without even trying to be.

Scrivener ($39.95) is a Mac-only app developed by a frustrated novelist who wanted a better writing tool for himself. He does all the coding himself and you can expect a prompt reply from him on his company’s forum if you have ideas for improvements or if you’ve found a bug.

I know, crazy.

The catch is that Scrivener is a general-purpose writing app, with a few screenwriting features thrown in. It offers the basic formatting features, but makes no attempt at street-legal pagination, or managing a character list, or tracking revisions.

Which is so great, because it lets you Just Write.

I could write a hundred love letters to Scrivener, but the one feature I’ll focus n today is the notecards. They are notecards done right. You can, get this, put as much or as little script in one notecard as you like. I never would have dreamed we even had such revolutionary technology.

Not only that, but you can have nested sets of cards. A card can contain more cards.

Whoa.

If that sounds like files and folders, then you’re getting it. In fact, the best feature of Scrivener’s notecards is that you don’t have to view them as notecards. You can always see them as a hierarchy of folders on the side of your screen.

What you see here is the method of screenplay organization described in Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat. While everyone agrees on Acts I, II and III (yes, they do), different writers have different ways of breaking up what happens in each act. Scrivener lets you nest as many folders deep as you like, creating your own template, which you can load in at the start of a new project. At every nesting level, the folders can also be viewed as cards.

What this buys you is the ability to organize by cards at a high level and at a macro level—where cards become scenes. Real scenes, not sluglines. Scenes the way a writer thinks about scenes.

It’s so awesome that it takes a little time to get used to, but it’s worth it.

The only problem is that at some point, if you’re writing a real screenplay that will be read by real people, you have to leave the Scrivener party, put on a tie and maybe even pants, and show up for work at Final Draft. You need pagination. You need revision tracking. You need MOREs and CONTINUEDs (I guess). I respect Scrivener’s stated goal to not allow their creative writing app to sprawl into a full-fledged movie production tool. Scrivener is for writing. And man, it works. It’s almost like the guy who created it is a writer or something.

So I write this in the hope that Final Draft takes a stab at a folder or notecard system that makes one lick of sense. If you don’t, someone else will. In the meantime, I’ll continue to work in Scrivener for as long as I can before sobering up and looking around for where I left my pants.

OK, another blog post to pimp a Red Giant product. To those who wish for a little more balance between these kinds of posts and my more philosophical rants, I hear you. But Red Giant’s been busy, and I think a lot of you are going to like this.

Grinder is an easy to use batch processor for footage from your Canon DSLR. It can convert to ProRes, add timecode, and even create low-res with window burn proxies for offline editing. You can also use it to conform (not convert, i.e. no frame blending or motion interpolation) a bunch of clips to one frame rate, so your 30p and 60p shots can become slow-mo clips at 23.976fps.

Grinder 1.0 is US$49 and available now.

Plastic Bullet is now live in the iTunes app store!

Red Giant’s first iPhone app, my first iPhone app. I’m kinda excited about this.

If you’ve ever shot with a Lomo, a Holga, a Diana, or any of the other plastic “toy” cameras out there, you know that part of the magic is the surprise factor. Did your photos turn out good? Or bad? Or so terrible they’re amazing? Just like a real plastic camera, Plastic Bullet never does the same thing twice. It develops your iPhone photos into literally infinite variations. They might look awful. They might look awesome. The good news is that you can keep tapping the refresh button until you get something you love. The look you love is yours and yours alone—not a canned preset than anyone can use.

Like it says in Holga: The World Through a Plastic Lens:

…as soon as you’ve pressed the button to take the shot the Holga does its own thing altogether and, depending on the camera’s mood, produces either the most enormous crap you’ve ever seen, or the most wonderful image ever to have caressed your oppressed creative soul.

I was in Seattle last weekend. I carried my Canon 5D Mark II with me wherever I went, with both my 24–70 f/2.8L and my 50mm f/1.2L. I pulled it out maybe once. I was having too much fun shooting with my crappy iPhone 3GS camera and Plastic Bullet.

Plastic Bullet is $1.99 and available now.

I can’t wait to see what you do with it! Please share your shots in the Plastic Bullet flickr pool!

The day-one upgrades are: 

• Magic Bullet Colorista 1.1
• Magic Bullet Mojo 1.2
• Trapcode 3D Stroke 2.6
• Trapcode EchoSpace 1.1
• Trapcode Form 1.1
• Trapcode Horizon 1.1
• Tracpdoe Lux 1.1
• Trapcode Particular 2.1
• Trapcode Shine 1.6
• Trapcode Soundkeys 1.2
• Trapcode Starglow 1.6
• Trapcode Suite 10

With more on the way soon. I want to personally thank the amazing team at Red Giant for their hard work in getting these updates out.

If you’re looking to upgrade your Production Premium to CS5, I’ve created a convenient store page here. Looking to upgrade your Master Collection? That’s here. If you have some other permutation of Adobe CS5 needs, including student/teacher editions, you can get started here.

If you stopped me on the street and asked me what I find compelling about Adobe Creative Suite 5, here’s what I’d say:

64-bit is a big deal for After Effects users. It may well be the end of those show-stopping “could not create image buffer” errors which have for years been the embarrassment of After Effects artists trying to do high-end work.

Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill. Finally we have actual witchcraft in an Adobe application.

Roto Brush. While the Photoshop kids are trying to content-aware remove bikinis from celebrity photos, the After Effects crowd gets to play with the Roto Brush. Does it work as well as we see in the demos? Occasionally, yes. But even when it needs a little more massaging—such as when the foreground object is complex, and the background has similar colors and textures—the experience of using Roto Brush is not only speedier than traditional rotoscoping, it’s also considerably less maddening. Think of Roto Brush as making the work of roto faster and easier, not eliminating the work, and you’ll be in love.

Premiere Pro. It’s easy to get excited by the performance features in Premiere Pro CS5. The Mercury playback engine, native editing of HDSLR footage, etc. But the real news with Premiere Pro CS5 is that the term “Pro” is, at long last, appropriate. Premiere is now good. Real good.

Amazon has CS5 Production Premium available for pre-order now, with a ship date of June 30—but the actual ship date is much sooner. I’ve created a page on the ProLost store for the various CS5 upgrade options. Every time you buy from the ProLost store, I plant a tree made of puppies in front of the Unicorn factory in your name.

First a small but important thing: Red Giant Software is having a big sale between now and April 18. 30% off everything. More details here.

Adobe announced Creative Suite 5, which includes new versions of After Effects and Premiere Pro. Both and standout releases, and I extend a hearty congratulations to the product teams. The After Effects feature that has everyone flipping out is Roto Brush, which uses, presumably, some sort of alien technology discovered beneath the Great Pyramids to semi-automate complex rotoscoping tasks. Like the Content-Aware Fill technology in Photoshop CS5, it has the potential to save you tons of time, which you can repurpose for more important things like staring at your computers screen muttering “How the hell do they do that?” Read more about what’s new in After Effects CS5 at the blog of After Effects Product Manager Michael Coleman.

The CS5 tools we care about are now 64-bit applications, which means many good things, but also means that all your third-party plug-ins need to be re-engineered for compatibility. Red Giant Software’s announcement about this is here.

Redrock Micro has teased some images of new products to be announced later today, including one that apparently eats your iPhone and turns it into Pure Awesome:

microTape Range FinderiPhone/iPod Touch advanced automation

Storm

The Foundry has released details on Storm, the end-to-end filmmaking tool tool they’ve been teasing us about. As expected, fxguide has thorough coverage.

Panasonic AG-AF100Panasonic has somehow found the stash of Obvious Pills that have eluded every other video camera manufacturer who also makes the still cameras masquerading as video cameras that have captured all the attention of digital filmmakers. Yesterday they announced the AF100, a “professional” video camera based on the 4/3” sensor from the GH1. Rumored price is to be in the $6,000 range, and although the internal codec is the much-maligned (and, by definition, non-professional) AVCHD, it’s maxed-out 24mbps AVCHD, so it should do better than the GH1. It also will have uncompressed HD out (which your could capture with, say, an AJA Ki-PRO), bypassing the ACVD codec entirely. I hope it also has some buttons.

UPDATE: Oh look, it does:

Jan Crittenden, Product Manager at Panasonic, had this to say about the camera on DVXuser: “There will not be aliasing as we actually have a clue about what causes that.” Nice.

I’ve had my iPad for six days now, as anyone following me on Twitter knows. I realize that some of my Twitter followers find the iPad chatter to be a divergence from my usual filmmaking tweets seasoned with occasional missives about coffee and photography (both of which are, for me, filmmaking tools)—but that’s not the way I see it. My iPad has been quite busy over the first near-week of its life as a filmmaking tool.

First and foremost, I hoped that I would enjoy reading screenplays on my iPad, and I am happy to report that I do, very much. I read a ton of screenplays, many in PDF format. I hate reading them on my computer screen, especially my laptop. Not because of the backlit screen, but because of the psychological association I have with my computers. They are devices for doing work. They are a constant and cacophonous source of distraction. Reading screenplays, even well-written ones, is weirdly not easy. If you’re susceptible to distraction, reading a screenplay on a laptop can be like trying to count ceiling tiles at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

Printed screenplays are much better, but I hate wasting the paper myself. If they come to me printed, great—but even when printed double-sided (which welcomely is now the industry standard), they add up in meatspace. My 17” MacBook Pro, an extra battery, power adapter, and three screenplays crammed in a bag is a recipe for a very sore shoulder.

The minute the iPad apps started flooding the iTunes store, I began a search for a good PDF reading app. I flirted briefly with converting the screenplays to the ePub format used by Apple’s iBooks app, but with disastrous results. Here’s a cool article by someone more persistent that I—but while I certainly gave up in part due to laziness, it was also because I realized that ePub is not ideal for screenplays. ePub books can be re-flowed and re-paginated on the fly by the device, and that’s not a good thing for scripts, where white space, formating, and page numbers matter.

I didn’t just want to be able to read screenplays, I wanted to be able to make notes on them. There is a full-blown PDF annotation app called iAnnotate PDF, but I skipped it due to its complexity, and to be honest, because it is about the ugliest app I’ve seen yet on the iPad app store. I don’t need a ton of functionality, I just need to make little margin notes, like one can easily do in Apple’s under-appreciated Preview app on the OS X desktop.

Which sadly ruled out the simple, elegant, and bargain-priced (for now) GoodReader, which has a number of fans, including writer/director John August.

I found my sweet spot with ReaddleDocs. It is fairly priced at $4.99, and while not a standout in UI design (the icon is unfortunate, and the mechanics of organizing files are convoluted), it somehow has nailed exactly the amount of information I want on my screen when reading a script.

Some iPad periodicals have been criticized for failing to provide a sense of place within the larger document. Readdle is doing two things to subtly combat that here. Obviously the current page number and total page count are at the top of the document, but what I really love is the black dot on the right. When holding a printed screenplay, you always have an intuitive sense of how far through the document you are. The dot provides that perfectly. Wonderful.

Tap that dot and you can rapidly move to any page. The refresh rate is standard-issue iPad-awesome.

ReaddleDocs allows you to set as many bookmarks as you like, and name them. This is the capability that I have bastardized into a basic margin notes feature. Brevity is warranted, lest you type right off the edge of the screen (a forgivable bug for a day-one app). Another reason not to go too crazy with the bookmark/notes is that there is no way to export them.

The last thing I’ll say about Readdle is that, like GoodReader, it knows that the default iPhone OS PDF reading service is unsatisfactory, and replaces its scrolling model with a page-turning one. Here I have another minor complaint (which echoes August’s about GoodReader)—the page turning gesture in ReaddleDocs is too stubborn, and the redraw is not as slick as the rest of the app. Again, I forgive this as a version-one issue that would be hard to test for without an actual device in hand. I don’t expect (or want) fancy iBooks-like page flipping animation, just something simple and smooth (and left-to-right) like what’s in the excellent Amazon Kindle app.

Readdle and GoodReader can both grab your PDFs from the web, Dropbox, email accounts, and computers on a shared Wi-Fi network. There is a seemingly never-ending flow of classic screenplays available at mypdfscripts.com.

So that’s reading screenplays—how about writing them? Final Draft is working on something for the iPad, as are the developers of iPhone screenwriting apps Screenplay and ScriptWrite. Until those options materialize though, the clever duo of Joke and Biagio have created a template for Apple’s Pages app that achieves screenplay formatting via Styles, which allow some automation (hitting Return after a character name will take you to a dialog element automatically), but not much (no Tab to advance through elements).

Adobe has a cloud-based, colaborative screenwriting web app called Adobe Story, currently categorized as a “free preview version” at Adobe Labs. Who would have thought that Adobe would provide the Google Docs of screenplays? There’s even a standalone AIR app. If ever there was a screenwriting app that wanted to be on the iPad, its Adobe Story. And with Adobe running AIR apps on iPads on day one, maybe there’s hope.

If you plan on writing anything long on the iPad, you may want to consider a physical keyboard. I like the Apple Bluetooth Keyboard because it allows flexibility in how you position and orient the device, and because Bluetooth was named after a Viking.

There are several movies that provide endless sources of inspiration to me, and since I own them all on DVD, I have no compunctions at all about ripping them with Handbrake and storing them on the iPad. Sex them up with cover art from this search engine (in iTunes, File > Get Info, Artwork tab, Add).

I used Apple Compressor to make iPad-friendly version of my demo reel, my short films, and various other inspirational videos found around the web.

I’m using the new Publish functionality in Lightroom 3 Public Beta 2 to fill my iPad with portfolio images, along with color reference stills, reference images for projects in development, and the usual family photos. Since I don’t use iPhoto, I just tell iTunes to sync my iPad with a specific folder I’ve created. Sub-folders become iPad “albums.”

So I have a dozen screenplays, a half-dozen feature films (with commentary tracks), my entire photography portfolio, and the ability to watch anything Netflix streams, all tucked neatly in my new murse. Not bad for less then a week into things. I bought the iPad with specific (and, so far, not very adventurous) ideas about how it could instantly become a useful filmmaking tool, and so far it has met and exceeded my expectations.

They’re square so they can work in both portrait and landscape modes—the iPad crops them on the fly. Some are definitely on the busy size, but you can set a different image as your lock screen, so maybe they have a place there.

All images were processed in the new Lightroom 3 Public Beta 2.

Since I don’t have an iPad yet, I don’t know which of these will work the best—please let me know in the comments which work out well for you this weekend!

These images are copyrighted, but free for you to use as wallpaper and lock screen images on your personal iPad. If you want to share them, please link to this page.

Yesterday Red Giant Software announced the release of Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. It’s the same Magic Bullet Looks you know and love, re-engineered for use on high resolution stills in Adobe Photoshop.

In case you don’t know, Looks, and now PhotoLooks, is a creative toolset for giving your images an overall cinematic look. It’s based on the model of an actual camera, with filters, lens characteristics, and film processing tricks. By accurately simulating the physics of light, glass, and celluloid, it creates a fun, creative environment for experimenting with your shots. Start with one of 100 presets, see how they’re put together, then modify them to taste—or design your own and share them with friends.

Longtime Magic Bullet Looks users will recognize the interface, presets, and tools—so much so that they might even wonder what’s new about this new version. A lot has changed under the hood, but all in ways designed not to be noticed. Here are some examples:

• That PhotoLooks is a native Photoshop plug-in means that not only can you use it directly from within Photoshop, but you can also use Photoshop’s Smart Layers to keep PhotoLooks as a non-destructive adjustment that you can tweak again and again, even after closing and re-opening the file. Aharon Rabinowitz shows you how to do this in the above tutorial.
• PhotoLooks contains the beginnings of a Color Management solution, so that your color-managed Photoshop workflow will match what you see in the PhotoLooks UI. Future versions will refine and enhance this feature to work with any popular color space you might care to use for your photography workflow.
• The last one is the biggest change and hopefully the most invisible: The Looks rendering engine has been re-written completely to work on high-resolution stills. While working on your look, you get the fluid, GPU-accelerated experience Looks has always provided, but when you press OK, your look is rendered by the new CPU render engine that can handle the gigantic image sizes common to current-generation cameras. If you’ve used the “secret” stills feature of Magic Bullet Looks, you may have run up against limitations in resolution. That won’t happen with PhotoLooks.

PhotoLooks is $199, or $99 if you already have Magic Bullet Looks or Quick Looks.

What’s fun for me, as the guy who designed it, is to see a whole new legion of creative professionals exposed to the power and creativity of Magic Bullet Looks. Here are some of their impressions:

I am not exaggerating when I say that Magic Bullet PhotoLooks will re-invent the way people think about filters in Photoshop—I have never seen anything like it.

-Deke McClelland, award-winning Photoshop author, and trainer

Another favorite feature of mine is the Look Theater. I get creatively stumped with my photography occasionally, and it is so cool to be able to just sit and watch my photographs take on a new persona without me having to lift a finger.

-Justin Seeley, Photoshop trainer and graphic designer

Magic Bullet PhotoLooks is a fantastic tool, with absolutely no adoption curve.

-Thorsten Meyer, Photographer

To make a perfect look for a photo [using Photoshop’s built-in tools] can be an arduous process of changing levels, curves, diffusion, glows, spot exposure, color correction, vignetting, edge softness, etc. However, the thumbnail for each of the 100+ presets in Magic Bullet PhotoLooks instantly updates to show its effect on your photo making it really easy to compare the effect of each one.

-Jack Tunnicliffe, Java Post Production

You can read more testimonials here.

The 24p firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark II is live on Canon’s site.

September 17, 2008, the day of the 5D Mark II’s announcement, when we first learned of its 30p movie mode:

Remember how I said how stunning it was that Nikon chose 24 fps for the D90’s D-Movies? How it could have so easily been anything else? How if Canon came out with a movie-shooting DSLR that shot 30p I’d be less than thrilled?

Well it’s worse than that. Because a 5D that shot 24p at full HD resolution would have been a very important camera. For Canon to have come so close and botched that one detail is almost unbearable.

Maybe we can get Canon to offer a 24 fps mode in a future firmware update.

Yep, maybe.

For as long as I’ve had my 5D Mark II, I’ve avoided using it for any projects that I could not shoot 30-for-24, i.e. slowing down the footage to 23.976 fps, using every frame. My 5D has been a gentle overcrank-only camera. There are plenty of occasions to shoot 30 frames for 24 frame playback—we do it all the time in commercials to give things a little “float,” or to “take the edge off” some motion. I still do this often with my 7D. Whatever frame rate I shoot—24, 30, 50 or 60, I play it back at 24. Just like film.

Folks ask me about 30p conversions often. Twixtor from RE:Vision Effects is a popular tool for this, as is Apple’s Compressor. Adobe After Effects has The Foundry’s well-regarded Kronos retiming technology built-in. All of these solutions are variations on optical flow algorithms, which track areas within the frame, try to identify segments of the image that are traveling discretely (you and I would call these “objects”), and interpolate new frames based on estimating the motion that happened between the existing ones.

This sounds impressive, and it is. Both The Foundry and RE:Vision Effects deservedly won Technical Achievement Academy Awards for their efforts in this area in 2007. And yet, as Mike and I discuss, this science is imperfect.

In August of 2009 I wrote:

I’m not saying that you won’t occasionally see results from 30-to-24p conversions that look good. The technology is amazing. But while it can work often, it will fail often. And that’s not a workflow. It’s finger-crossing.

On a more subtle note, I don’t think it’s acceptable that every frame of a film should be a computer’s best guess. The magic of filmmaking comes in part from capturing and revealing a narrow, selective slice of something resonant that happened in front of the lens. When you use these motion-interpolated frame rate conversions, you invite a clever computer algorithm to replace your artfully crafted sliver of reality with a best-guess. This artificiality accumulates to create a feeling of unphotographic plasticness.

Of course, it’s often much worse than a subtle sense that something’s not right. Quite often, stuff happens in between frames that no algorithm could ever guess. Here’s a sequence of consecutive 30p frames:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resNothing fancy, just a guy running up some stairs. But his hand is moving fast enough that it looks quite different from one frame to the next.

Here’s that same motion, converted to 24p using The Foundry’s Kronos:

Right-click and select View Image to see full-resBlech.

Again, don’t get me wrong—these technologies are great, and can be extremely useful (seriously, how amazing is it that the rest of the frame looks as good as it does?). But they work best with a lot of hand-holding and artistry, rather than as unattended conversion processes.

(And they can take their sweet time to render too.)

I’m so glad we’re getting the real thing.

This 50mm f/1.2 cappuccino cup is in response to the fabulous coffee mug that looks like a 70–200mm lens, which Canon was giving out at the Winter Olympics to people who had better watch their back when I’m around.

By the way, there’s a new version of the popular zoom lens that I want almost more than I want another cappuccino. Pre-order it now and I get a little closer. To the cappuccino.

Canon 70–200mm f/2.8L IS EF II USM lens available for pre-order at Amazon.

Readers of ProLost, pat yourself on the back.

In the 18 months since Canon announced the Canon 5D Mark II, you’ve written, you’ve called, you’ve left comments here and on Vincent Laforet’s blog. You politely but firmly harrassed Canon personel at trade shows. Perhaps most significantly, you put your money where your mouth is and bought 7Ds, showing Canon that 24p is even better than Bokake.

It delights me to no end to read these words in a Canon press release:

Developed following feedback from photographers and cinematographers, Firmware 2.0.3 further enhances the EOS 5D Mark II’s excellent video performance. The addition of new frame rates expands the camera’s video potential, providing filmmakers with the ability to shoot 1080p Full HD footage at 24fps (actual 23.976fps)—the optimum frame rate for cinematic video. 25fps support at both 1920x1080 and 640x480 resolutions will allow users to film at the frame rate required for the PAL broadcast standard, while the new firmware will also change the 30fps option to the NTSC video standard of 29.97fps.

I underlined a couple bits in there. Do they sound familiar? The wording is almost directly lifted from ProLost posts and my other communications with Canon.

Does it seem like I’m patting myself on the back? Well I am. But you should too. I know that, at best, I played maybe a tiny role in this. But this is a very cool thing that has happened here—we spoke, and Canon listened.

Read the full press release at dpreview.com.

Take a trip down memory lane and view all ProLost posts tagged Canon 5D Mark II.

And heck, buy a 5D Mark II from Amazon and support this site. I love mine, and I’m about to love it even more.

Magic Bullet Mojo is $99 on its own, or available as a part of the Magic Bullet Suite.

In many of my writings about color correction, both here on ProLost and in The Guide, I’ve talked about the balance between an aggressive “look” that helps tell your story through the use of a pervasive palette, tone, style, and feel; and the preservation of appealing skin tones. When grading a scene, you can push your look much further if you don’t lose track of appealing skin tones. Or, if you so desire, you can make a strong visual statement by choosing to allow your skin tones to get subsumed by your look.

The truth is, skin tones are just one of a small handful of what I call “memory colors.” Memory colors are colors that are, in the minds of your audience, inseparable from certain common objects or events. For example, the sky is so associated with blue that you might feel that you see those two words together as often as you see them individually. The same goes for green and grass.

The most basic idea of color correcting is that you are making colors correct, which is to say that you are making objects on the screen appear to be the colors that we know them to be.

The funny thing about this seemingly simple task is that it can be quite difficult. And it’s difficult for exactly the reason that it’s important.

The human brain is so tied in to our eyesight that we internally auto-correct for certain colors. This is the very definition of a memory color. For example, if you grew up in the United States, you know that a stop sign is red—so you tend to see an image of one as being red even if the color is way out of whack. In the shot below, we recognize the bald head as that of a Caucasian male, even though the white balance is incorrect.

We see his head as skin-colored, even though empirically it is actually almost perfectly gray! You might not believe me, so here’s a crop of the back of his neck to prove it:

This a variation of a common optical illusion called the Same Color Illusion. We “know” that square A and B are different shades of gray “in real life,” and that knowledge prevents us from seeing that they are in fact the exact same shade in the image (click the image to see proof).

UPDATE: Aaron points out below that the Color Constancy Illusion may be a better model of the problem.

Back to the head. Even though they “know” what color it is, your audience will respond more favorably to a memory color object if their knowledge of it matches their experience, rather than fights it. And so it falls to the colorist to correct the color of the head, to make it head-colored rather than gray.

In 2008 I pointed out an example of this from the trailer for The Incredible Hulk (Steve Bowen, colorist). Edward Norton’s face appears the same color whether in a cool scene or a warm scene.

Preserving skin tones is important, but so is preserving other memory colors. Here’s a shot from Jumper (Steven J. Scott, colorist). Sam Jackson is about to walk through a crowd of people. His and their skin tones are accurate, even though their world is a faded, monochrome olive drab.

But back up a few seconds in the same shot and notice that in this faded world, brake lights are perfect, vivid red, and New York taxis read as the correct yellow-orange. This is an establishing shot, and if the grade abused the hue of the taxis too harshly, we might not read “New York” as readily.

Here’s a very short list of memory colors I try to keep in mind when coloring:

• People are pink/orange (a color I like to call porange)
• Grass and summer trees are green
• Water and skies are blue
• Fire engines, stop signs, and blood are red

You could also add just about any food to that list. Unless you’re deliberately trying to make something look unappetizing, it’s probably good to render food as accurately as possible—as I’ll show you in a moment.

I welcome your suggestions of other memory colors. And bear in mind that memory colors might vary from film to film and even scene to scene. In Stomp the Yard, there’s a scene at the beginning where almost nothing is red. Later, there’s a red jacket color so important to the story that it leaps out of every scene in which it appears.

So what’s the big deal? Objects have colors, and the colorist makes sure those things stay those colors. Easy, right?

Not necessarily. To achieve the look of that Jumper shot—where key colors pop but unimportant ones blend into a complimentary shade of blue-green—requires practice, skill, and taste. It’s hard enough under the best of circumstances, but lighting, atmosphere, bounce light, flare, camera settings, and a hundred other factors can conspire to force objects to render on-screen in colors quite unlike their real-world hues.

The good colorist first picks the memory colors important to the scene, and then ensures that they stay consistent, often combating these factors to do so.

Here’s a very simple example. I bought some espresso beans today from my favorite local roaster, Blue Bottle coffee. As I was transferring them to an air-tight container, my 7D was right there, so I popped off a quick 720p60 shot of the process—because who doesn’t like seeing coffee beans tumble in slow motion?

When looking at the footage on my computer, I noticed a funny thing. The beans, which in life have a vivid, sumptuous brown tone, appeared gray-black on my screen. I almost didn’t notice, because I know they are brown, but on close inspection it was clear that I had been fooled by my brain into seeing what I knew rather than what was actually there. The cool color temperature of the indirect sun lighting the shot was reflecting off the beans and cooling their color down to near neutral.

There’s nothing unnatural or wrong about this, except that the audience for my espresso epic doesn’t know about the cool light source outside of the frame. They don’t even necessarily know what the falling objects are. I have to communicate that visually, so I need to preserve—or, in this case, recreate—the memory color of perfectly roasted coffee beans.

Here’s the shot with a Colorista Power Mask for just the beans:

And here’s that same shot with an overall look applied after the bean color fix.

To really see the importance of the local correction, look at the shot with the look, but without the bean fix:

Not only do the beans look more appetizing with the fix, they also survive the subsequent look adjustment better. In fact, since the look cools down the shot a bit, the warm color of the beans stands out all the more. Without the bean fix, the look utterly clobbers the brown beans. As a bonus, in the corrected version, the metal canister and the corner of the grinder on the right take on a steely blue color, better matching the viewer’s idea of what color metal should be.

If you pick your memory colors for a scene, and preserve and enhance them through your look, you’ll wind up with shots that pop without looking clobbered by a heavy-handed “preset” look.

Want to learn more? Check out some great books on color correction at the ProLost Store, or find more ProLost posts tagged with Color.

Canon today announced the Rebel T2i, AKA the 550D. It’s an 18 megapixel entry-level DSLR for $800. It features all of the video modes of the Canon 7D and 1D Mark IV: 29.97, 23.976, and 25 fps at 1080p, along with 50 and 60 fps at 720p.

I haven’t seen any samples of the video yet, although I’m sure we’ll soon be buried by them. [UPDATE: Did I say soon? Here you go (also embedded below)—thanks Jay]

I’m sure we’ll also be treated to many loving comparisons of how image quality, noise, compression, etc., stand up to Canon’s other offerings.

I would not expect the Rebel to represent any progress on the HDSLR shortcomings of rolling shutter and aliasing/moiré.

Two years ago I called the Canon HV20 the no-more-excuses DV Rebel camera. It was an HD camcorder the size of a soda can that recorded 24p with limited manual control, for under $1,000. Filmmaker Ayz Waraich made a beautiful short film with it called White Red Panic.

Folks can spend a lot of energy writing about cameras and filmmaking, about how this or that forthcoming tool will be a “game changer” or revolutionize the blah blah blah. Ayz’s film reminded us (and I include myself in that “us”) that filmmaking beats bellyaching every time.

Then along came the HDSLRs, and speaking only for myself, I thought there was some important stuff to bellyache about. Some potential that could be realized if only a few niggling details were addressed. The year that followed the introduction of the 5D Mark II was equal parts frustration and reward, as Canon and others took pot-shots at the target, always missing, but sometimes in ways that produced useable cameras.

I marked the Canon 7D as the real arrival of HDSLR cinema. The price, the frame rates, and sensor size all made great sense, and video finally earned it’s own button, more or less. There are still big problems with it of course, but they can be worked around. I’d hate to be working around them with a paying client over my shoulder, but for my personal work, I don’t mind. And if I get really stuck, I do have an actual video camera lying around here somewhere.

It seemed to me that no sooner had the HV20 come out that it was rendered obsolete by subsequent models, and its priced dropped from affordable to ridiculous. We went from “no more excuses” to “seriously, what more do you want” in a matter of months.

With the Rebel, HDSLRs just hit that point. If you have any interest in what they can do, there’s now a camera that you can buy for less than the cost of a decent tripod.

In fact, depending on how it performs, the Rebel may just be the new sweet spot. In the same way that the 1D Mark IV’s $5,000 price tag accounts for a bunch of pro stills features that don’t net much for the filmmaker, the shortcomings that put the Rebel at half the 7D’s price are most likely all in the stills department as well. If video is your primry interest in a DSLR, the Rebel could well represent the most bang for the buck.

Although the MSRP for the body is $799, Amazon seems to want to cash in on early enthusiasm for this rig—their pre-order price is currently listed at $899.

UPDATE: Less than six hours later, Amazon has amended the pre-order price to $799.

I’ve created a Rebel Starter Kit page on the ProLost store for those looking to take the plunge on the cheap.

Today Apple announced the iPad, and what I like most about what we’ve seen so far is that Apple clearly thinks it’s important that we be able to make things with it. The redesigned iWork apps are impressive experiments in creating stuff using a multitouch display. I liked my iPhone enough when it was just a phone, but I love it now that I have Storyboard Composer (formerly Hitchcock), Screenplay, and Photoshop Mobile, to name just a few.

I also use an app called Air Mouse to control the Mac Mini in my home theater. That, and the many other apps that allow your iPhone or iPod Touch to act as control device for your computer, made me ponder the possibility of using the iPhone’s multitouch screen as a control surface for Magic Bullet Looks. But I never took the idea very far because of the small size of the screen.

Folks doing color correction either know first-hand the value of a dedicated control surface, or avoid finding out for fear of the can’t-live-without-it sensation. An understandable fear, given the cost of these peripherals. Back in 2008 when I wrote about gestural interfaces and hardware devices, I expected to spend a couple grand at the very least for any kind of multitouch control device. Video pros routinely spend much, much more for large, cumbersome, single-purpose color control surfaces. Read any review of them and you’ll see one common thread: once you work a three-way color corrector with a set of trackballs that allow you to adjust multiple parameters at once, you never want to go back.

Imagine the dude above is looking at a stripped-down version of the Magic Bullet Looks interface on his main display. The Tool Chain, Preset and Tool Drawers, and touch-friendly Tool Controls appear on his iPad.

The iPad may seem expensive to people with a laptop, a smartphone, and little room in their life for something in between, but for video and film professionals looking for a general-purpose way to get more touchy-feely with their creations, it’s beyond a bargain.

As long as the software shows up.

So what do you think? Is the image above something that interests you? It’s just a hasty concept—nothing more. But it’s got me thinking about all kinds of ways that an iPad could become a part of the way we make films—not just with dedicated apps, but with companion apps that give us new ways of interacting with our favorite desktop tools.

A frequent concern about shooting to a heavily-compressed digital format—something the DV Rebel often finds herself doing—is the degree to which the footage will be “color correctable.” Will the shots fall apart when subjected to software color grading? Or will you be able to work with the footage as fluidly as you tweak your raw stills in Lightroom?

It’s a valid concern. The movies that the current crop of HDSLRs shoot are highly compressed. This compression is perceptual, meaning that it takes advantage of visually similar colors and shapes, and represents those regions with less accuracy than the detailed and varied parts of the image. This makes perfect sense, but often in color grading one seeks to enhance color contrasts—to make a face pop off a similarly-colored background for example—and so you may well create high contrasts between colors that were once nearly identical, and as such were given short shrift by the camera’s compression.

You might have noticed a similar phenomenon in audio. An low-bit-rate MP3 that sounds decent enough can suddently sound awful after even a tiny amount of EQ. Another case of perceptual compression limiting your options.

While you will never find as much data and detail in your HDSLR video as you do in that same camera’s raw stills, the H.264 movies created by the Canon 7D, 5D and 1D Mark IV will withstand some massaging in post. Here are some tips (similar to those found in greater detail in The DV Rebel’s Guide) to help you get the best results.

• Shoot flat. If you read Flatten your 5D, you know that I am a proponent of setting up a “flat” Picture Style using the camera’s built-in controls. The same settings I specced out for the 5D Mark II apply to the 7D and 1D Mark IV as well, although with the 7D I’m less likely to use Highlight Tone Priority, as this setting can increase shadow noise, and the 7D is not as noise-free as the other Canon HDSLRs.
• Chose WB wisely. Use a white balance preset that gives you as nuetral an image as possible. Shooting with an incorrect white balance reduces your dynamic range, because you wind up with an image that’s prematurely blown-out in one color channel, dark and noisy in others.
• Expose to the right. Make the brightest image you can without clipping something important. A rule-of-thumb considered gospel by many photographers, but our reasoning is a bit different. Yes, we, like the stills guys, wish to avoid excess noise in the shadows, but that’s not our main concern. Remember that term perceptual compression. Dark areas of an image get less bits. If you underexpose, you’ll have to brighten the image in color correction, and you’ll reveal all kinds of nastiness the camera thought you’d never see.
• Do denoise. It doesn’t really matter what denoising software you use, but use it. When you carefully and subtly denoise your footage, you rebuild your pixels anew, which is especially nice when you follow the next tip:
• Work at high bit-depths. If you start with an 8-bit image and do a gentle de-noise, you’re blending pixels values together to create new colors. Although there’s no such thing as something for nothing, doing this at a higher bit-depth means those new colors have massivly more gradations than the original image. Your subsequent color work will hold up much better.
• Sharpen last. Your flat Picture Style removed the camera’s built-in sharpening. Add your own at the very last step. The amount you use will vary depending on the output medium, so test test test.

By folllowing these guidelines you can make good-looking shots even better with color correction. But what about a shot that isn’t so great to start with? Turns out there’s hope. Below is a 7D shot that I grabbed in an uncontrolled situation. In my haste, I underexposed, and used the “cloudy” white balance when I probably should have used tungsten. But with a little denoising, careful analysis of the colors in the image, and a Colorista Power Mask, I was able to rescue this shot.

Yes, you can color correct your HDSLR footage, and you should. Color correction can make a good shot great, and in a pinch, put an unusable shot back in the game.

Nothing profound here, just some fun new gear mixing well with some trusty old gear into what for me is a “where have you been all my life” rig.

Pictured here is the Canon 7D with the venerable Canon 50mm f/1.4. It’s sitting on the skeleton of the Redrock Micro “Captain Stubling” rig, handles removed, and slipped into Redrock’s tripod platform plate. That’s sitting on a crusty old Bogen fluid head that I had lying around (the current equivalent in size would probably be the popular Manfrotto 701HDV).

That’s mounted to my new slider rig from Glidetrack. It’s the Glidetrack HD to be specific, and I chose the 1M length, which feels like the right balance of utility and portability for me. I’m more likely to use it for push-ins than for side-to-side motions, and when you’re using it for the “slow creep,” there’s only so long a slider can be before it shows up in your shot. There are a number of terrific options out there for slider rigs, but the Glidetrack was the right choice for me because of its minimal weight and mechanical simplicity.

Hovering above it all on the Noga arm is the Ikan V5600, which is a comparatively inexpensive, lightweight HDMI monitor. It doesn’t have quite the full 720p resolution the peaking features of the Marshall V-LCD70P, [CORRECTION, Mitch below pointed out that the Marshal is not 720p—in fact it has a lower resolution than the Ikan!], but it’s still quite usable for focus. The photo above lies in its streamlined simplicity—the power and HDMI cables for the monitor make it quite a bit messier in practice.

Speaking of focus, the Redrock Micro whip makes that a little easier when back-panning on the slider. The whips come in sets of three — shown below is the shortest of the bunch. The build quality on the Redrock whips is very good.

What’s missing obviously is a good set of sticks, or possibly two, to properly support the Glidetrack. I’m still shopping and open to suggestions.

Gear porn shots like these requires bokake, here courtesy of the Canon 50mm f/1.2L on my 5D Mark II, the price of which was recently lowered.

Disclaimer: I contributed to the design of the Redrock Micro Captain Stubling rig, which recently received a glowing review on episode 53 of the always awesome Red Centre podcast.

As always, I am grateful if you shop through any of the above links, or at the ProLost store 7D Cine page!

Canon has proudly placed Nocturne on their website, echoing the up-down-up pattern Reverie experienced last year.

Astute ProLost readers will have noted that Nocturne has always been viewable on my YouTube account, since Canon never asked me to take it down, just Vincent.

As you will recall, Nocturne is a short film shot entirely in available light using two pre-release Canon 1D Mark IV HDSLRs.

Vincent Laforet wrote about the film here and here, and has a fresh update here, along with a behind-the-scenes video edited by Joseph Linaschke.

My making-of post is here.

The 1D Mark IV is starting to show up in peoples’ hands and looks to be a rockin’ solid action SLR with the autofocus that Canon shooters have long wished for. As I wrote here, it is undoubtedly $5,000 worth of stills camera. It’s probably not $5,000 worth of HD video camera, unless you very specifically need the unmatched low-light performance.

Which you very well might. It’s obviously awesome.

Just remember that the Mark IV has no ergonomic concessions to video shooting—not even a dedicated video start-stop like the 7D has. And while it has greatly reduced rolling shutter skew (Nocturne is ample evidence of this), the video aliasing/moiré is no better than that of the 5D Mark II (something you can also see in Nocturne).

Man, it’s been quite a year. Let’s buy some stuff.

I know you have this friend: “Yeah, I just got this new (insert name of entry-level DSLR). I really like it. I haven’t really had much time to learn to use it though. I mostly leave it on auto.” When they say “I really like it,” they sound like a coffee shop employee describing the vegan chocolate cookie as “delicious,” i.e. lying. They hold up their camera and sure enough, it has the kit lens. Flimsy and slow, not even worth the $120 it added to the price of the camera, it is the reason your friend is not as excited by their DSLR purchase as they thought they’d be.

Rock their world with a fast fifty—a 50mm prime with a large maximum aperture. For Canon, there’s the no-excuses 50mm f/1.8 II ($100), and the best deal going 50mm f/1.4 ($360). Or show ‘em you really love ‘em with the crazy 50mm f/1.2 L ($1600). For Nikon, there’s the 50mm f/1.8D ($125), and if you want to go big I recommend the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX ($500).

All of these are available on the ProLost Store Fast 50s page.

You also have this friend, or more likely a family member: They have a Canon PowerShot that’s never done them wrong over the several years they’ve owned it. It has a tiny little LCD screen and uses its flash in anything less than searing sunlight. They have no idea how things have improved since they spent $400 on that little beast. A new Canon Powershot that beats this oldie-but-goodie in every way can be theirs for only $150 or so: the Canon PowerShot SD1200IS. It even comes in fun colors.

What’s nice is that Canon has not changed their menu interface much over the years, so there’s not much new to learn with a new PowerShot.

For the director in your life, here’s a weird but amazing gift idea: A green laser pointer. I use these on set for everything from placing background talent to describing the height of a light, or the cut of a shadow. The green ones are visible in broad daylight, and of course demand cautious handling, as they could damage human eyesight if abused. Once you spend a day on the set with one of these in your pocket, you’ll wonder how you ever got along without one.

(There are many cheap laser pointers out there, but they are most likely lower-power lasers being overdriven. Don’t skimp.)

Another great gift for anyone who spends time on a film set is a Gerber 22-41545 Multi-Plier ($52). You can schnick out the pliers with one hand, which was something I first saw on a shoot, and it was such a profound sight that I threw my Leatherman into the ocean.

Do you still know someone who doesn’t have The DV Rebel’s Guide? If so, buy one and bludgeon them about the head and shoulders with it.

Blu-ray is the best way for a movie fan to enjoy their favorite films, and the players are not only getting more affordable, they are also starting to be as good at Blu-ray playback as the Playstation 3. The Sony BDP-N460 ($200 or less) not only plays back Blu-ray disks with the speed and slick interface of the PS3, it also streams Netflix and Amazon on-demand movies via a wired internet connection. Want to use it wirelessly? Pick up the Linksys WET610N Wireless-N Ethernet Bridge ($80).

You’ll want some good Blu-rays to play of course. I recommend a few recent sci-fi classic remasterings: Close Encounters of the Third Kind ($32) (because Spielberg films are film school every time you watch them), The Terminator ($10) (because Jim Cameron was a DV Rebel before there was DV, making this movie for $6 million, roughly the bottled water budget of Avatar), and Galaxy Quest ($17) (because damn it’s funny, and my name’s in the credits).

Lastly, something from the jaw-dropping inspiration department: Stanley Kubrick: Drama & Shadows. From 1945 to 1950, Stanley Kubrick was a photojournalist for Look magazine. Will it shock you to learn that his photos are stunning? Even though he was a teenager at the time? I didn’t think so. This book is a reminder that every photo you make can be a step down the road to becoming a better filmmaker.

Happy holidays from ProLost!

Ever since I’ve had a computer, I’ve had long render times. Whether it was ray-traced checkerboard spheres on my Amiga 1000 or The Last Birthday Card on my blue G3 tower, I’ve always managed to find ways to keep my computer busy while I’m off pursuing other hobbies, such as sleeping, long walks on the beach, or (most likely) staring at the screen chanting “faster, faster!”

On those rare occasions that I decide to leave the computer alone with its thoughts, I sometimes wish I had a way to check in on the render progress from afar. Adobe After Effects ships with a handy script called “Render and Email” that can send you a simple email to announce the completion of a render. If you have push email on your phone, or know how to send emails that arrive as text messages (here’s how), this can be a suave way to leave your render cooking with the confidence that you’ll know precisely when to return from your three martini lunch.

But that’s not quite the same as an actual visual confirmation of a successful render. In a world of iPhones, augmented reality, and non-fat yogurt that actually tastes good, we deserve more.

I recently figured out a couple of nifty ways to get remote, visual updates on my epic After Effects renders, thanks to the insanely useful and free service known as Dropbox, AKA What Apple’s iDisk Should Have Been. Dropbox is a directory on your hard drive that is constantly syncing in the background to a remote server. You can share subfolders with specific people or groups of people (whether they be on Mac, Windows, or Linux), and these folders truly are shared in the sense that anyone to whom you grant access can add, remove, or edit files therein. I use it to collaborate with other writers, with my post-production crews, and even to remotely add photos to the screen saver loop on my parent’s iMac.

Did I mention that all of this is free, for up to 2GB of storage?

Dropbox also offers a free iPhone client [iTunes link] that allows browsing your Dropbox folders and limited file viewing. Two of the file types that can be viewed on the iPhone screen are JPEG and Quicktime.

You can set up After Effects to render to your Dropbox, and view the results on your iPhone.

Of course, it’s not exactly that simple. There’s a limit to the size of file that can be viewed on the iPhone, and you wouldn’t want to be pulling 2K DPX files across AT&T’s network even if you could do something with them once you got them. So there are a couple of things you can do to streamline the process. Unfortunately it’s a bit of work to set up.

The simplest thing to do is to configure your Render Queue item to have two Output Modules: the one you were planning on rendering anyway, and a second one set up as a JPEG sequence with the “Stretch” option enabled to scale the images down to an iPhone-friendly size. It’s this second Output Module that you’ll render to your Dropbox folder. Every time a frame completes, an iPhone-optimized JPEG of it will be automatically uploaded to your secure Dropbox storage.

The result is that every time you open the Dropbox app on your iPhone, you not only see how many frames have been rendered, but you can visually flip through the frames themselves. Sweet!

Of course, what you can’t do is view the animation at speed, so that’s where the second option comes into play. You can create a third Output Module that writes out a small (not more than 480 pixels wide or 360 pixels tall) H.264 Quicktime movie.

Now you can both check your frames as they finish, and watch the end result at speed.

If you configure that Render and Email script and use it to launch your render, you’ll also have a push notification that the render is complete.

It’s not quite the same thing as full administering your render from your phone, but it’s still pretty cool.

10 frames of a 7D resolution chart, shown here cropped 1:1, courtesy of Paul Lundahl of eMotion Studios (click the image to visit)

This article over at DVXuser caused quite a stir. Which is strange to me, because I’ve been telling you about this problem for a while now. Apparently a detailed, well-researched article with great visuals and clear explanations is more convincing than pithy quips and offhanded remarks. I’ll have to remember that.

The article by Barry Green is about the oft-reported “aliasing” artifacts in video from the Canon HDSLRs (5D Mark II, 7D, 1D Mark IV). Barry does a great job of backing up a few steps and defining the term aliasing.

Aliasing occurs when you observe, or sample, something infrequently enough that you create an impression of something that wasn’t there. Imagine a blinking light in a room with a door. You must open the door to check the status of the light. If you open the door often enough, you get a pretty good picture of the status of the light, maybe something like on, on on, off off off, on on on, etc. Your samples are frequent enough to accurately represent the light’s activity.

But imagine that you just happen to relax your light-checking to a frequency at which you see nothing but on. The light flashes once per second and you check on it once per second. As far as you know, the light is always on. Your infrequent samples give you a completely bogus picture of what the light is doing.

That’s temporal aliasing, because the insufficient sampling takes place over time. The classic cinematic example of this is the wagon wheel that seems to spin in reverse. Aliasing can also happen in spatial samples. For example, if you looked through venetian blinds at a zebra standing on his head, your partial sampling might reveal a white horse, or a black horse, depending on how the stripes lined up with the blinds.

So what does this have to do with Canon HDSLRs? The same thing it has to do with every digital camera. Every camera that uses photosites to create pixels has to deal with this venetian blind problem. There’s space between those photosites, and in that space you can miss out on important information about what was happening in front of the lens.

This is nothing new. We’ve long known that we shouldn’t wear detailed patterns or fine horizontal stripes when appearing on video. This despite the camera manufacturers’ inclusion of an Optical Low Pass Filter (OLPF), a very fancy term for a simple layer of diffusion atop the sensor designed to scatter the light a bit, so that the zebra stripe that might have slipped through the cracks will actually be spread to the pixels on either side of said crack. OLPFs work, but if they work too well the camera gets dinged by pixel-peepers as being too soft, so every camera company makes a judgment call about how much sharpness they’re willing to give up for less sizzling when a zebra does a headstand in a field of blowing grass.

The current crop of HDSLRs cheat in a big way to make video. Their sensors are not designed to blast an entire, full-resolution image out every 30th of a second. So Canon’s engineers (and Nikon’s and even Panasonics to some degree according to Barry) did what stills camera makers have always done with the “good enough” video modes on point-and-shoot cameras; they grab something less than every photosite. They look at the blinking light less often, and as a result they can pull off a whole picture at a rate speedy enough to make video.

But this picture is full of holes. And while the OLPF was designed to spread light between adjacent pixels, we’ve now dropped entire rows of pixels, so suddenly it’s insufficient by a huge margin.

What’s great about Barry’s article is that he shows you how this problem manifests itself on test charts (you know how I feel about those) and in practical use. But what’s even more shocking is that he reveals the actual resolution of these cameras. Thanks to the aliasing, it’s shockingly low. Yet the images appear crisp — and that’s Barry’s most artfully elucidated point: It’s precisely this infernal aliasing that makes the images seem sharp. If you fitted a 7D with an aggressive enough OLPF, the aliasing would disappear — along with any illusion that the 7D is a “full HD” video camera.

Some aliasing makes zebras appear stripeless. Some makes wagon wheels seem to spin in reverse. And some makes low-resolution images appear sharper than they really are.

So every HDSLR user needs to be aware of this and make a decision: Is that OK? Is the “fake detail,” as Barry repeatedly calls it, good enough for you?

For many, the answer is yes. As I have pointed out, the sex appeal of filmic DOF often wins out over technical shortcomings in shooters’ hearts, if not their minds.

Still, I have tried to warn you. I tweeted not long before Barry’s article that anyone pointing a 5D or 7D at a resolution chart is in for a nasty surprise. I also made mention of the Canon SLR’s low resolution in this post, which confused commenters, who responded that 1920x1080 was plenty. Of course it would be, but I was referring to the actual resolving power of the poorly-sampled images, which is much, much lower, as Barry empirically shows.

I even blogged this, over a year ago:

Let’s get something straight. The video from the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D MkII is not of good quality. It’s over compressed, over-processed, over-sharpened, and lacks professional control. It skews and shears and shuts off in the middle of a take. It sucks.

I was really trying to warn you guys about this.

But you didn’t listen. It took Barry’s awesome article to drive the point home. Maybe it was his facts and figures. Maybe it was his patient explanations. Or maybe it was because he did not end his article with anything like what I usually say after decrying the downsides of these cameras. Stuff like:

What the D90 and 5D2 have done is show us that it’s no longer OK for video camera manufacturers, whether they be Sony or Canon or RED, to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally. Buttons and features and resolution charts just had their ass handed to them by sex appeal.

That Barry didn’t wrap up with something gushy like that led many readers to accuse him of anti HDSLR-bias, but I think those people are wrong. Barry is a 7D owner, and challenged one aspiring HDSLR-hater with this comment:

I’ve shot some (what I consider) really, really good looking stuff on a 7D. It’s capable of great results. And I’ve shot some trash on it too, and found it very frustrating for anything wide/deep focus. But it’s $1700! You’ve got to cut it a lot of slack for that!

All I’m doing is pointing out exactly how these things work. It’s up to you to decide whether your scenarios would work within their limitations. If you’re shooting faces, they can excel. The more that you can keep out of focus, the better they’ll do. The more that’s in sharp focus, the more potential for negative complications from aliasing.

They are not a magic bullet. They are not Red-killers. They’re not sharper than conventional video cameras. Keep that all in perspective, and use them for what they’re good for, and they can do astonishingly good things at an unprecedented low price point.

Nicely said Barry. All around.

For my part, I’ve focused on the positive aspects of the 5D Mark II and the 7D because I like where they are pushing things. But I do owe it to you guys to show you that I take this aliasing problem seriously. You need to understand it well to evaluate whether an HDSLR is right for you. And I would hate to give Canon the impression that we’re content with looking at the world through venetian blinds.

A friend of mine shot this with his 7D. Right after a hundred other friends of mine shot the exact same thing with theirs.

A friend was starting in on a project that he thought he might shoot on the RED One. Understandably, he shot some tests. He was concerned about shooting in low levels of tungsten-balanced light, which is understood to be a situation that does not play to the RED One’s advantages. He was going to test against some other digital cinema cameras, and invited me to come play.

I think he was rather surprised when I told him that I would rather not. I explained myself thusly:

“I’m glad people test cameras, in the same way I’m glad people test condoms. But a condom-testing event doesn’t sound fun to me at all. At some point, you just want to pick a condom that you have reason to believe will do it’s job satisfactorily, and get busy.”

Cinematographer Geoff Boyle just posted this dutiful comparison of three 50mm cinema primes; Cooke S4, Zeiss Master Prime, and RED. I highly recommend that you download the full-res DPX files and compare them at the pixel level, because it will cure you of ever wanting to do such a test on your own. The differences are so infinitesimal that they could be accounted for by light bouncing into the scene off the operator’s cargo shorts.

Are camera tests useless? Not at all. I’m grateful that so many people want to do them. It frees me up to grab a camera that I think is going to be pretty much right for the job, and get busy.

Since then I’ve gotten many replies and comments from people shooting with the far less-expensive Extreme III and 133x cards without incident.

Here’s one such response, from Will Backer, reprinted here with his permission:

Hey Stu,

First off, thanks so much for your continued support of the indie rebel community — I’m a big fan.

I wanted to just drop you a quick recommendation regarding the flash cards you use and recommend for shooting video on the 5Dmkii and the 7D.

I haven’t shot on the 7D, which I realize has a slightly higher data rate, but I have shot 8 commercials (about 20 hours of raw footage) on the 5D with the Kingston Elite Pro 32 GB 133x cards (about $75 each), and I have not had any issues whatsoever with speed or data security.

I see that you’re still recommending the 8GB Extreme IV’s, which are 1/4 the size and more expensive than the Kingston 133x 32GBs.  I know you moved to these faster cards after losing data on the Extreme IIIs — which makes sense, but it seems the word around the net is the the Extreme III just didn’t play well with the 5Dmkii, and it isn’t necessarily a speed issue.

I bought 2 of the Kingston’s because I found people on cinema 5d successfully using them and I needed to shoot a lot in the field.  I’ve since noticed that Phillip Bloom and others use and recommend these cards as well.

Obviously it’s better safe than sorry when it comes to quality media, but the price difference is so huge that you may wanna give slower cards a try.  At least these Kingstons seem to work perfectly and offer a four-fold gain in storage capacity for your dollar.

Cheers,

-Will

Thanks Will. I’m cautiously changing my recommended cards on the 7D Cine store page and I’ll let you know if I have any issues with the Kingston card I just ordered!