Pronounced “PUG with a BACKPACK.”
On June 5, Clinton Torres and I will be guests at the first ever Bay Area Creative Pro User Group meeting, discussing Fountain and Slugline.
Wes Plate of Adobe will also be there, showing off Prelude. There are no plans for a Prelude-vs.-BulletProof showdown of Anchorman proportions, but be safe—bring your trident.
If you’re in the Bay Area, come and check it out!
BulletProof, which Red Giant revealed at NAB, is now availble for download as a free public beta.
You’ve got a great camera, you’ve got a great editor — how do you manage everything between them? BulletProof is a complete media prep solution that bridges the gap, with a workflow that simplifies how you handle footage every day. Offload, backup, organize, review, color, deliver: BulletProof has your back at every step. Whether you shoot with DSLR or a GoPro, BulletProof lets you focus on your story and get to the editor fast.
Get it now, and join us on the forum to report bugs, suggest features, and help us make it great!
The public beta is Mac only for now. The Windows version (which was also demoed at NAB) will be released later as a free update.
Ready for more detail on how BulletProof works? Check out this Getting Started video from Simon Walker:
From the App Store:
Veteran storyteller Neal Edelstein has reinvented filmmaking in a way that brings the power of hypnotic, episodic content to the iTunes Store. Viewed exclusively on the iPhone and iPad this frighteningly haunting story is released in sporadic and unexpected ways that will leave you constantly guessing, and constantly engaged.
A horror movie delivered directly to your iPad or iPhone, a little at a time. Push notifications alert you to new chapters. Pay a little for each one or buy a Season Pass.
And it gets even more interesting than that.
Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? Great work Neal!
Download the free app. Haunting Melissaon the web and on Twitter.
Update
on 2013-05-17 16:52 by Stu
Watch Neal discussing why this is such a big deal on Bloomberg TV: Is the App Store the New Cinema?
The team at Magic Lantern have managed to hack the Canon 5D Mark III to record 14-bit raw 1080p video at 24 frames per second. The results are stunning—the highest-quality video we’ve seen from a DSLR yet, comparing favorably to images from cameras costing much more.
This is a big deal. But maybe not as big a deal as some have made it out to be. Like Ham, the chimpanzee that was launched into space on a Mercury rocket, the Magic Lantern raw hack is less notable for its discrete accomplishment than for what it portends.
I was skeptical about the announcement of raw video at 1080p. This wasn’t a sensor crop, this was a full-frame image, somehow downsampled to 1920x1080—yet still being touted as “raw.”
The answer came back from Magic Lantern themselves:
Put this way, it makes sense—and matches what Magic Lantern said in their original post:
Key ingredients:
- canon has an internal buffer that contains the RAW data
Of course. Canon sparsely samples the sensor (the popular theory is that they skip lines and bin rows) to create their own 1080p bayer image, which they rapidly debayer to create 1080p video frames. It looks like Magic Lantern have found a way to grab this raw buffer and save it directly to the CF card.
Whatever magic Canon worked to eliminate the moiré in the 5D Mark III’s video now benefits Magic Lantern users as well. And whatever downsides there are to this sparse sampling will also affect the raw hack.
Right now, the hack requires quite a bit of work to get up and running, and even more work to derive useable results.
But those usable results are compelling. There are tremendous opportunities afforded by the raw video hack over the compressed H.264 recordings the camera natively makes.
But there’s a price to pay for recording 14-bit uncompressed raw. It requires crazy-fast CF cards, and you’ll only get 15 minutes of video on that 128 GB card, according to Cinema 5D, who graciously posted their workflow and samples, “after struggling for a day” to get it all working.
Even once the setup process is streamlined, and the raw-to-DNG conversion process is streamlined (or eliminated), uncompressed raw video is probably not the best option for most DSLR shooters. Better would be something like ProRes or DNxHD—but that would require high-quality debayering in the camera, which would seem to require more processing power than the 5D Mark III has to offer. More processing means more heat, which means a very different camera design than an SLR. It’s easy to see why digital cinema cameras start to get expensive.
The 5D Mark III raw hack is cool. It’s important. It’s something we’ll use, and like, and get good results from. But as exciting as it is today, it’s even more significant for what it means for the future of low-cost digital cinema cameras.
Mr. Ham risked his furry life to prove that a primate could flip switches in space. Three months later, a human being took the same trip. By proving that raw video is possible from the 5D Mark III, Magic Lantern have joined the forces pushing the industry in an important new direction.
Five years ago I wrote that large-sensor video had shown “that it’s no longer OK for manufacturers to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally.” Since the industry did such a good job of heeding that advice, my new mandate for the future is this:
What I love about the new generation of cameras, such as those from Blackmagic, Red, and even GoPro, is that they all give you everything they’ve got. They’ll give you the highest image quality they can, in the smallest package possible. They’ll compress images as much or as little as you want. They’ll max out their resolution at the expense of frame rate, or vise versa—whichever you like. And they’ll pack their best dynamic range into any format they can record.
Compared to this, Canon and Sony’s digital cinema product lines seem cruelly restricted at every tier. The result was palpable at NAB. As I said on stage at the SuperMeet, the show seemed to belong to camera upstarts. To cameras from small booths. From the Phantom Flex4K with its Super35 4K at 1,000 fps, to the Digital Bolex, the exciting cameras at every price point were the ones not charging by the button, feature, or codec, but simply giving you all they could do.
What Magic Lantern have done is show camera makers that if they won’t give us all they’ve got, we’ll just take it anyway. The smart manufacturers will try to beat us there out of the box.
Aharon Rabinowitz posted a wonderful breakdown of why you’re both right and wrong to be bent out of shape by Adobe’s announcement that most of their flagship software will go subscription-only.
Adobe is a company that makes tools we all love and rely on for our work in video post production. But with their latest announcement – that from here on in, all software will only be available through subscription – a lot of people are upset and feeling betrayed. I want to try to address it all in a balanced way. I’ll ask that you read all the way through because I am going to start with why, about certain things, you’re totally wrong. Then, I’ll move into why you’re also totally right – and have the right to feel angry and demand more.
Aharon’s words stick out like a sore thumb on the internet, because they’re rational, well-considered, researched, and nuanced. Creative Cloud is neither a money grubbing conspiracy designed to seize power, nor is it a deftly-handled modernization of a business model. The truth is somewhere in between, and Aharon has done us all a favor by taking the time to analyze the situation.
And the part about the ruler/stylus guy is priceless.
Adobe fans and haters alike, read it. Adobe employees, print it out and tape it to your wall.