MOX Open Source Movie Format Crowdfunding Campaign

If you've ever longed for an open source alternative to Quicktime, now you can hep make it happen. From the MOX Indiegogo page:

There are already movie formats aimed at professional users, but they each fall short in one way or another. Some are not cross-platform, making them difficult to hand off to colleagues. Others do not support key features like higher bit depths and lossless compression. Few have well-designed APIs so that applications can take full advantage of them. Most require developers to pay licensing fees.

The source of these failings is that the formats are not open. Controlled by video software companies, their inner workings are shrouded in mystery. If users need the format to add a new feature or support a different operating system, it is entirely at the company's discretion to do so.

Compare this to an open format like JPEG, which can be read by any program on any device. Or see how OpenEXR has evolved to add features for today's visual effects artists. There's no reason we can't have the same freedom with a movie format.

Imagine of ProRes wasn't controlled by Apple. Imagine a movie file that played back with the correct gamma on every computer. Imagine multi-channel, high-bit-depth movie files for VFX collaboration. Imagine a camera that shoots both a lightly-compressed, ungraded log digital negative and a compressed edit proxy with the on-set LUT baked in—both in the same file.

The film industry needs this.

MOX is the brainchild of Brendan Bolles, who co-created eLin with me at The Orphanage, and wrote the OpenEXR code that now ships with Adobe After Effects.

I love that the campaign is simple and clean, with no superfluous perks like t-shirts to distract Brendan from his coding tasks.

Please contribute. If you have questions or skepticisms, please let Brendan know, either on the campaign page or on Twitter. He's making this for you, so tell him what you need.

Introducing Offload

When Red Giant introduced BulletProof, we sought to solve a great number of problems with gathering, organizing, and managing the huge quantity of media we create with our cameras. Some people swear by it, but it's a lot of app.

Everyone needs a trusted system for copying footage from their camera cards to their computer. For most shooters I know (video and stills), that's still a manual, drag-and-drop process. It's fussy and error-prone, and there's no way to be sure your files are free from corruptions or errors. Want a backup? Manually initiate another copy.

Today, Red Giant launches Offload. It's a simple, powerful app for getting your shots off your camera and onto your computer.

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Speed

Offload is fast, at both copying and verification.

Safety

Offload uses the field-proven checksum-verified copy technology from BulletProof. Each file is tested to be identical to the camera original, and Offload shows you this process in an intuitive, graphical way.

Configurable

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We realize you've been doing this without our help for a while now, so Offload allows you to easily set up folder naming templates using dates, camera info, and custom text. Keep your same workflow—but let Offload automate it for you.

Director-Proof

Offload is easy. There's nothing to learn. It has one screen, no options, and no catalog file to manage. You already know how to use it.

Visible From Space

You're on a shoot with a hundred things on your mind. You return to your laptop and try to remember if the card sticking out of it has been copied and backed up, or just copied, or hasn't been copied yet. Just me?

Offload's interface is big, colorful, and communicative. Gold means something's happening. Blue means done and safe. Red means bad. You'll know your copy progress at a glance, even from across a busy set.

Backup

Offload makes it easy to add a second, backup copy destination. The copy finishes first, and you can remove your media card right away. The backup will continue in the background, using the same checksum-verified technology.

Works Your Way

Offload plays nice with your exitsting workflow, instead of trying to replace it. It's just a better way to copy files. For example, if you double-click a thumbnail, Offload takes you right to the media file.

Offload is simple, powerful, and affordable. It doesn't ask you to change how you work. It makes the process of transferring media visual, easy, and fast. Its checksummed copy technology could save your butt. It's available today from Red Giant for only $49, or as a part of the Shooter Suite, which also includes PluralEyes and BulletProof.

Adobe MAX 2014

I told you I took a lot of pictures with my telephone.

Last week, Adobe held their MAX event to announce some cool new creative tools. At the keynote, they put me up on the big screen as an example of how Lightroom's cloud syncing legitimizes mobile photography. Wanna see? It's right at the head of the section on mobile apps.

The example they highlighted—where I snap a few iPhone shots of the Small Gunns team working on some new products, was 100% real—you can see the results here.

My Photos Truly Belong Among the Clouds

Lightroom mobile is great, but it can do your head in a bit. On one hand, it makes perfect sense to sync your traditional photos—the ones made with "cameras"—to your mobile device, for a hand-held way of sorting and lightly pre-editing them.

On the other hand, with the ever-increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, you're just as likely to push photos from the phone up to the cloud. As I've mentioned, the race is on to dominate this blatantly obvious workflow.

But if you upload photos from Lightroom mobile to Creative Cloud, you're limited in resolution. If you push photos from Lightroom desktop to mobile, you're limited in features. The workflow is powerful, but incomplete. I've tasted enough of it to be impatient for Adobe to fill in the gaps—which I hope means going "cloud canonical" with my Lightroom library—i.e. all of my full-res photos live on the cloud, and I can access them from any device. The originals on my Drobo become a local backup instead of the "master" copies, as far as Lightroom is concerned.

Lightroom Mobile 1.2

Adobe is clearly working hard on this stuff. They even fixed my "Achilles heel" bug with Lightroom mobile. Version 1.2, released last Monday, gives you the option (that it's still an option shows that Adobe is not fully conversant in mobile just yet) to include location metadata on export.

You can now more easily switch between flagging and rating photos, or even opt to do both at once, with a long press on the buttons at the bottom left. Why do I feel compelled to explain how this feature works? Because it requires explanation. That's not a compliment.

Lightroom mobile 1.2 also introduces some, and this is going to start sounding familiar, powerful-but-incomplete features for sharing and getting feedback on your photos. You can sync a Collection to Creative Cloud from desktop or mobile, then share it from Lightroom web. This generates a public-but-private web gallery, where visitors can now "Like" and comment on your photos. You can then get notifications on your mobile device—but nowhere else just yet—when new comments and Likes come in. Adobe's Julieanne Kost blogged that "this feedback will flow back into Lightroom desktop in an upcoming release".

If you want to try it out, here's a Collection I've shared. It's nice to be able to share a gallery of images without the encumbrance or misaligned incentives of a social network. By sharing that link here I've effectively made that gallery "public," but it's just as easy to make a gallery as private as you like, by sharing it with only your client, or your friends, or your family. It's a cool feature that could become a powerful tool—again, once the gaps in the workflow are filled in.

Creative Cloud Finally Earns its Name

In the MAX video, you'll hear me say that when I sync an iPhone shot to Creative Cloud, "it allows that photo to transcend mobile photography, and become true photography." I do believe that.

But... I'm a little crazy. I don't want mobile photography to mean a compromise in quality. Or, to put it another way, I want the convenience of mobile access and sharing, but for all my photography. Often when I show people photos on my iPhone screen, they ask, incredulously, "you took these with your phone?" The answer is usually no, but that cultural assumption that a photo on your phone was made with your phone is a bias that is unfortunately shared by many developers.

This is why it took me a moment to understand the importance of this announcement from Storehouse, the lovely photo/story sharing service. It allows you to easily create media-rich stories from your iOS device, which is great, but limits you to photos and video on that device.

But not anymore. Storehouse now integrates with Creative Cloud. Just connect your Adobe account in the Storehouse app, and you have instant access to your synced Lightroom Collections. Here's a quick example I whipped up to try this out.

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As John Montgomery observed, "Adobe has made a Photo Stream that actually works". This is a big deal, and I can't wait for more developers to offer this connectivity.

How You Pay

After the launch of Creative Cloud, a valid concern expressed by many users was that Adobe adopted a software-as-a-service pay structure for what was still very much software-as-a-product software. By my measure, Adobe is now well on the other side of their aggressive efforts to correct that situation. The name Creative Cloud finally makes sense.

Most, if not all, the mobile apps that Adobe showed off at MAX are free. The obvious catch is that they're useless without a Creative Cloud subscription. That's $49.99 per month, or $9.99 per month for just Lightroom and Photoshop. For more on what this means to users and to Adobe, check out this Forbes article.

What interests me far more than their bottom line is Adobe making good on their promise that an exclusive subscription model frees them to focus on incremental, useful updates, rather than needing to pack annual releases with exciting, but maybe not as utility-oriented "wow" features designed to incentivize paid upgrades. The CC 2014 release of Premiere Pro is a great example of this.

I'm also finding it easier to share projects with other artists, as the chances are now far greater that they're using the latest version.

Adobe's subscription model is priced fairly, and makes life better for people who rely on their tools for their creative work. I'm a fan.

Unrelated to Photography, But Super Cool

In an awkward, jargon-soaked, Microsoft-heavy segment of the MAX keynote called, terrifyingly, The Future, Adobe snuck in a quick demo of an in-development app, code-named Animal, that performs realtime face capture, using nothing more than your computer's built-in camera, to automatically animate an on-screen character.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force will never be the same.

MAX Out

"The Future" notwithstanding, what I saw this year from MAX (far from all of it) was an Adobe getting better and better at making tools for artists instead of "solutions" for "ideators." I still find the ubiquitous on-stage heckler approach uncomfortable to watch, and Adobe management still vomits up Onion-article-grade jargon without a second thought to how its customers might see themselves more as "people" than a "market segment"—but overall, I felt much more of a connection to what Adobe is up to this year than ever before.

It's also worth noting that, in these shockingly troubled times for women in tech, Adobe effortlessly put numerous smart, creative, strong women on stage to show off both their tools and the work than can be done with them. Hell yeah.

Keep up the good work Adobe.

GoPro HERO4

GoPro has announced their latest action camera, the HERO4, in both Black and Silver editions, along with the Hero, an entry-level GoPro. The kind folks at GoPro invited me to try out these cameras last week, in an activity-filled day in San Francisco.

A Camera and a Culture

At the HERO3 launch event two years ago, I was struck by how different my reaction was from other camera announcements:

This @GoPro Hero 3 demo reel is making me feel like I’ve wasted my life by not wasting my life.

— Stu Maschwitz (@5tu) October 17, 2012

Or, to put it another way, while other cameras make me want to go out and shoot something interesting, a new GoPro makes me want to go out and do something interesting.

GoPro CEO and founder Nick Woodman is passionate about sharing the moments in life that matter most. With the eloquence of Ferris Bueller, he'll tell you that life is short, that moments flit by, gone before you know it. A camera that you don't need to fuss with, strapped to your head or clamped to your toddler's tricycle, can certainly capture and preserve that moment—but, more importantly, it allows you to share it. And that's what makes these moments more meaningful to us.

When he talks about this stuff, you believe it, because he does.

Other camera makers may compete viciously on specs and features, but they can't touch GoPro's culture. The world is full of camera companies trying to build something useful for an adventure. Spend a day with the GoPro team and you'll have no doubt that they are truly an adventure company that also makes cameras.

Small Big Changes

The HERO4 looks a lot like the HERO3+ (with its flat lens covering on the waterproof enclosure), but there are some changes. The battery is new, and inserts much more easily now into the bottom of the camera body rather than the back. The WiFi button on the side is now also a Settings button, making basic menu operations easier. The menus have been reorganized, for the better, as have the indicator lights on the body.

The HERO4 uses the same 12-megapixel sensor as the HERO3+. All the increased resolution and frame rate performance is due to a 2x increase in processor power.

Again With the 4K

The HERO4 Black alone shoots 4K (UHD) video at up to 29.97 fps. Do you need this? Probably not, but it's nice to have. I shot some 4K 23.976 video of my son riding his scooter (using the awesome Jaws Flex Clamp Mount). Play it full-screen and you'll notice that the background is quite sharp. But the subject—my kid—with his face a foot or so from the lens, is slightly out of focus. The GoPro lens has a fixed focus distance of infinity (from what I can tell), and generally-speaking this works fine. Throw lots of light at it and keep things at arm's length, and GoPro footage can look amazingly sharp. But at 4K, you'll see what's truly sharp and what's not.

Still, for situations with tons of light, and where the vertical reframing that comes with 4:3 (4K is 16:9 only) isn't necessary, I might use this mode, because why not? 4K's real advantage at capture time is in helping to provide a clean HD master, and so far that seems to be true of the HERO4 as well.

More likely, however, is that I'd opt for the 2.7K 4:3 option, which would seem to be an ideal setting—except, for some reason, it is only available at 29.97 fps, not 23.976.

Slow Motion For Me

The HERO4 can shoot 1080p HD up to 120 fps. So that's cool.

Across the board, those familiar with the HERO3+ series will see that the HERO4 is basically the same camera with more of everything in the resolution vs. frame rate matrix. This is a great example of a camera obeying Maschwitz's Law, i.e. giving us everything it's got.

Silverback

The 4K UHD option is unique to the HERO4 Black. The Silver, which retails for $100 less, eliminates this feature (and some of the higher frame rates), but ads a touch LCD screen to the back.

There's already been much angst over this bifurcation of the two models, but it makes sense to me. If you're a "serious" GoPro shooter, you don't want an LCD screen burning up your battery and adding heat. You're more likely to use the built-in WiFi (hear that Canon? This tiny camera has built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and shoots 4K, for $500.), or maybe the LCD BacPac, to check your frame before sealing up your dozen GoPros in their waterproof enclosures and bombing a muddy track on your customized mountain bike.

The HERO4 Silver is a great GoPro, especially for stills. For many people, it will be the perfect choice.

Don't Forget Stills

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A whale shark, like a chicken-fried steak, is the second thing in its name, not the first.

It's insanely fun to shoot stills with a GoPro. Or rather, the only time it's worth taking stills with your GoPro is when you're having insane fun. Bring it with you in the pool, or in the ocean, or on a roller coaster. And by all means, if you go snorkeling with a whale shark in Baja, bring your GoPro—as I was lucky enough to do within weeks of getting my HERO3 in 2012.

Night Swimming

One of the cool new features of the HERO4 is "Night Lapse," a time-lapse mode optimized for night shooting. This is super fun, super easy, and a great fit for a camera that's weatherproofed out of the box and so easily and mountable anywhere. I clamped it to the railing in my backyard almost as an afterthought, and captured a swirling lesson on the Bay Area's microclimates.

Capture Overkill

Another thing I like about GoPro's culture is that they encourage a capture-a-lot, edit-a-lot mentality. This necessitates post-production, which they encourage with their free GoPro Studio software.

What do I mean by capture-a-lot, edit-a-lot? More than just the obvious. Sure, if you clamp a GoPro to your surfboard and record all morning, you'll have a ton of footage to comb through (something the HERO4 makes much easier by allowing you to tag "HiLite" moments in your footage by pressing the Settings button while recording—a very smart feature), but it also means capturing in a generous, lenient format, and then using post production to extract the best results.

The folks at GoPro who shoot and edit these amazing launch videos usually shoot at a higher resolution and frame rate than they deliver. Often the resolution of choice is 1440 x 1080, a full-sensor readout from which you can extract a clean 1080p crop. The ability to vertically reframe within the native 4:3 image routinely saves their butts on those unattended helmet cams, where framing up a shot (even with an LCD or iPhone app preview) requires experience, guesswork, and a bit of luck. It certainly saved me on Run Like Hell—where I added numerous vertical reframing animations to keep the composition feeling right.

They also often shoot at high frame rates, freely using footage at both 100% speed and also slowed down to 1:1 or beyond. To facilitate this for all GoPro users, not just those with access to Kronos and Twixter, Studio now has optical flow slow motion built right in.

Lastly, they use ProTune, which is their flat picture profile. I recommend this mode of course, with the additional tweaks of setting Color Space to Flat (instead of the default of "GoPro"), and Sharpness to Low (the lowest setting) instead of the default of High.

That's Prolost Flat for GoPro. And note that, in the HERO4, these settings can also be applied to stills. This requires a separate trip into the settings menu, as each shooting mode now remembers its own settings.

Road Rash, But no Faceplants

What's not to like about the HERO4? Not being a “journalist,” it’s hard to complain about a camera I’ve been given for free. So here's me trying:

• The menus, while greatly improved over previous versions, are still clunky to navigate.
• If you're only an occasional GoPro user, it's easy to get bit by getting a setting just slightly wrong. On that tiny screen, you may well miss a small detail that can render your footage significantly less awesome. For example, I took some advice and set my minimum ISO to 400 for one of our activities. But there wasn't enough light for ISO 400 and 60 fps, so my HERO4 Black had no option but to slow its shutter to 1/30, meaning I didn't get 60 fps at all, I got 30 smeary frames per second in a 60 fps stream. I won't make that mistake again, I hope, but there is a learning curve here.
• The choices of aspect ratio, resolution, and frame rate, and how they all interact, can be confusing. And the default setting is a new mode that I don't like at all, yet still managed to accidentally use a few times. It's called "Superview," and it uses a full-sensor capture which is then stretched to fill a 16:9 frame. The stretch is biased more toward the edges, like a terrible setting on a terrible HD TV (or a crappy HD upconverted movie on cable). GoPro sees this mode as a way to get maximum coverage and fill modern TVs with no fuss in post, but if there was a button to wipe this setting from my GoPros, I'd press it. Instead, it's the default, which means we'll see a lot of it. The Aspect Ratio Police are going to be busy.
• As I mentioned, the the 2.7K 4:3 option is inexplicably limited to 29.97 fps. Maybe a firmware update could fix this.
• The image quality is about what you'd expect. There's compression artifacting, and noise, and everything you're accustomed to from GoPros past. These are the kinds of problems that drive me crazy in my own GoPro footage, yet never seem to bother me in other people's. That’s because, to get back to my initial observation, the GoPro is the ultimate content-is-king camera. If what you’re shooting isn’t interesting enough to power through some macroblocking, you’re using the wrong camera.

That’s it. That’s the worst I can say about the GoPro HERO4. In the past, one might have been able to find an angle from which to balk at the price of a GoPro, but the entry-level Hero, at $129.99 USD, eliminates that complaint.

GoPro Cinema

A GoPro has its own look. It’s a difficult camera to evaluate in the context of “cameras,” because it speaks it’s own language so strongly. If you try to intercut it with other footage, you can expect many non-camera people in your audience to recognize “a GoPro shot” when they see it. In a historical epic, this would be a risky move. In a Jeep commercial, it could be as natural as lens flares and sky gradients.

The GoPro look is not mandatory though. At some resolutions, you can opt for a cropped field of view, for a less crazy-wide image. And the fisheye distortion is actually quite easy to dial back in post, using either the Lens Distortion effect in Premiere Pro, the Optics Compensation effect in After Effects, or the Lens Distortion tool in Magic Bullet Looks.

The last time I used a GoPro for filmmaking, I embraced the signature look. When an audience sees that telltale barrel distortion and poppy palette, they know they’re about to see something really cool, that really happened. I used this to my advantage as I gradually escalated the mayhem in Run Like Hell well past reality and into pure science fiction.

I love having the GoPro in my arsenal, even if I don’t use it as often as my other cameras.

Go Amateur

The GoPro Studio software comes with template projects, pre-populated with professional footage, over which you can drop your own shots for a shortcut to a ready-made video. One of the samples stands out, because instead of Olympic snowboarders or bikini-clad surfers, it’s nothing more than GoPro CEO Nick Woodman playing in a pool with his kids. There’s one shot in that template—just a simple moment of his boy jumping into the water—that is so infectiously ebullient that I literally gasped when I saw it. I realized in that moment that maybe I shouldn’t evaluate the GoPro as a filmmaker, or a camera nut—but as a dad, with a kid who seems to grow at light speed. I’m so grateful that Nick captured this simple, joyful moment, and that he shared it with us all. If you never see another GoPro shot in one of my films again, don’t think for second that I’m not using these delightful little cameras. If I’m doing things right, I might just be using them more for life than for work.

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Baja pool family selfie with GoPro HERO3

The GoPro HERO4 Black ($499.99 USD), HERO4 Silver ($399.99), and Hero ($129.99) start selling on October 5. My favorite GoPro accessories are the Jaws Flex Clamp Mount and the hilariously named 3-Way. Don't forget a MicroSDXC card too.

Cameras Cameras Cameras

Between IBC and Photokina, the past couple of weeks have seen numerous interesting camera announcements.

Panasonic LX100

Panasonic announced the LUMIX LX100. The name makes as much sense as camera names ever can, as it's bigger and badder than the single-digit LX models that were my point-and-shoots of choice for years. Some of my most-loved photos were made with my LX1, LX2, and LX3. I have an eight-foot-wide print from my LX2 hanging in my home. The LX100 is a MFT camera with a 10.9–34mm ƒ/1.7–2.8 lens (24–75mm AOV equivalent), that you can operate one-handed, even if you can't fit it in a pocket. For stills only, this is a tempting street-shooter at $899 (Amazon pre-order).

Oh, but it does shoot 4K video. Which means everything shoot 4K video these days.

Except the Canon EOS 7D Mark II

Here it is. Don't buy it.

Samsung NX1

Samsung announced the NX1 Mirrorless Digital Camera. It features a Super-35 sensor and shoots 24p 4K to HVEC H.265, which is a next-generation codec that promises higher quality and smaller file sizes than current popular codecs such as H.264. The price for all that is insanely low at $1,499 (Amazon pre-order), but it's a Samsung lens mount, so get ready to do the adapter dance.

Canon, time to wake up and smell the Samsung.

AJA CION

AJA announced the CION at NAB 2014, and they perplexed me with their statements that the camera, while capturing an alleged 12 stops of dynamic range and recording to 4:4:4 ProRes, would not have a log recording option. Well, the demo footage they brought to IBC seems to corroborate my suspicion that, while AJA might have designed a great form factor for their first camera, they might not have figured out how to make it produce competitive imagery. Check out this deep dive on the footage by Art Adams.

Question: What is in this reel that shows me what an amazing camera the Cion is? Answer: nothing.

AJA proudly labels the footage "ungraded," but it's contrasty and color skewed. Adams spends a lot of time on the color problems he observed, but my biggest issue is the luminance response. This camera should shoot log, period.

Apertus AXIOM Beta

The Apertus AXIOM beta crowdfunding campaign has 13 days left to raise $100,000. Once again, I find myself skeptimistic.

Sony PXW-FS7

Super 35, 4K up to 60 fps, HD up to 180 fps. Configurable viewfinder and super cool handgrip included. All for $7,999 (B&H preorder).

When the CION and Blackmagic URSA were unveiled, I joked that the companies had announced "camera-shaped cameras." But the FS7 is a camera truly designed to be operated by a human being, right out of the box. I want one.

Alexa 65

Meanwhile, in the big kids department, ARRI announced the Alexa 65. From newshooter.com:

The sensor is slightly larger than a 65mm 5-perf film frame and is comprised of three Alexa sensors that are arranged vertically and seamlessly stitched together.

The camera uses rehoused Hasselblad medium format lenses that cover the sensor and are of the highest quality. The lens mount is a larger PL type.

Damn.