Dogsitting. Yard dug up for future lawn. Panasonic GH4 with Panasonic Vario 12–35 F2.8. Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 with new S-Curve tool. Ukulele.
So, obvously:
Vincent Laforet’s Directing Motion Tour
I’d been trying to figure out how best to pimp my friend Vincent Laforet’s new Directing Motion workshop tour, but luckily for me, Philip Bloom has done it perfectly.
31 cities all across the US, from May 6 to July 13th. If you can, go.
GH4 4K and Slow Motion Samples
My buddy Gordon Laing of Camerlabs came to town, with one of the few pre-production Panasonic GH4 bodies in hand.
Naturally, we drank some beers and ate some Chairman Bao.
We also grabbed a few test shots. Nothing too special, but I thought I’d share them here.
First things first: Having held and operated the GH4, I’m more enthusiastic about owning one than anyone should be based on this hastily-shot footage alone. The camera is capable of much better.
We played with 96fps (1080p) at the Ferry Building. The 96fps mode is a bit soft, with some color moiré. It seems (speculating here) that the camera sub-samples the sensor a bit to achieve this frame rate. Still, 96fps is fun as heck. If we’d had more time, I would have played with the synchro-scan menu to try to reduce the flicker.
At Off The Grid, we shot some ISO 800 4K. Or rather, we shot UHD (3840x2160), because it seems that 4K (4096 x 2160) is only avaiable at 24.0 fps mode, not at 23.976—which is a bummer of a (seemingly artificial) limitation. There are plenty of reasons to shoot true 4K at 23.976.
Other observations:
- Even after choosing CINE-LIKE D, I was still able to adjust custom picture settings. Of course I turned the contrast all the way down, and sharpness too. But I didn’t have time to test these settings.
- Off The Grid shut us down right away when they saw my Redrock Micro Eyespye Deluxe rig. So we packed it up and kept shooting video, using the GH4’s viewfinder. This worked surprsingly well. Holding the little GH4 with the tiny Panasonic 25mm f1.4 lens up to your eye provides great stability, and the viewfinder is plenty sharp for focusing, especially with the handy peaking feature. It’s a lot different than holding an SLR out from your body so you can see the rear LCD.
B&H charged my card this morning for my GH4 pre-order, so here’s hoping I’ll be able to shoot some better footage very soon.
You can order the GH4 from B&H or Amazon. Read the full Cameralabs review.
Magic Bullet Looks 2.5
Magic Bullet Looks 2.5 is a free update from Looks 2.0, with some big changes and some meaningful small ones.
20% (or 200%) Faster
We rebuilt Looks to run on the Universe GPU engine, which means it now previews and renders “over 20% faster.” But depending on your system, it can be a lot more than that.
LUT Tool
Use one of the pre-built LUTs, or import your own.
S-Curve Tool
Often the purpose of a LUT is to add contrast back to flat or log footage. But working with a LUT is a bit of a black box. What if you’d like to control that contrast curve—customize it a little bit? The S-Curve Tool gives you a graphical handle to intuitively modify the curve to taste. It ships with presets for S-Log, Log C, BMCC Log, and Cinestyle. The defaults are, of course, designed for Prolost Flat.
Strength Slider
Finally.
More to Come
Rebuilding the guts of Magic Bullet Looks to use the new Universe engine means big things for the future. We’re already hard at work on the next great update!
Magic Bullet Looks is a part of Red Giant’s Color Suite.
Slugline Birthday Sale
From the Slugline blog:
Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of Slugline’s launch. For Clinton and I, It’s been an amazing year of building and using the app.
By far the best part of the experience has been the amazing screenwriting community, more and more of whom embrace Fountain and Slugline with open arms every day. The feedback you’ve given us has helped make Slugline better than we ever could on our own. Your unanimously 5-star ratings and reviews have given us something to be proud of for sure, but we have so much more work to do.
But for now, it’s our birthday—so let’s celebrate! Today and tomorrow, Slugline is on sale for 50% off. That’s $19.99 USD instead of the usual $39.99.
Get it now on the App Store!