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The Sony PROduction Awards is a short film competition, and a chance to get your work noticed and win some pretty nifty Sony gear. Filmmakers from around the world will be pitted against each other and go up against a judging panel which includes myself, Andrew Reid of EOSHD, Shane Hurlbut ASC, Philip Bloom, BAFTA winning dramatist Tony Marchant and others! Enter your film now at the PROduction Awards competition website or read on for more details... Read the full article here

Then: Explain to him how he's wrong about the ugly noise texture in all MX footage, especially tungsten-balanced, making the image look cheap and chunky and digital. Explain to him why the shadows get so chunky and blue in any tungsten-balanced Red scene, whereas Alexas can be shot under any lighting condition. And then go on and add why the Alexa's superior low light ability is irrelevant. Explain to him why it's irrelevant that the Alexa has a smoother noise texture, much more like film. Explain to him why, despite the Red's 13.5 stops of DR being is a total lie (in fact the camera has no more DR than the C300, less than the F5, and a magenta-tinted highlight rolloff), it's still better than the 14.5+ stops smoothly handled in the Alexa. Explain why the Alexa's superior midrange tonality isn't significant. Explain why red code botching details in skin and foliage (again, some of the most emotionally resonant subject matter...) is irrelevant, whereas ArriRAW is fine and even prores handles these details well. Explain to him why the color science of the Alexa matches 5219 almost exactly and offers smooth creamy flesh tones and beautiful green foliage, whereas the red totally botches memory colors, but that's ok. Explain to him how he's wrong that the OLPF of the Red offers ugly internal reflections and color cast over highlights, whereas the Alexa rolls off smoothly like film. I'm curious. Explain how an ugly image with good specs looks better than a beautiful one with somewhat lesser specs. Personally I would shoot a C300 or F5 over an Epic; the Epic has a stranglehold on summer blockbusters for the resolution advantage, but the look is just so... ugly and the workflow so damn shitty. Yes there is beautiful content shot on red. But Prometheus, for instance, required a lot of CGI lipstick to dress up that pig. I do find the character of the Monochrome sensor to be superior.

Hello, Long time lurker, finally decided to register to learn and contribute. I've been doing a little testing with some of my Contax Zeiss glass as a taking lens to my Iscorama. Previously, I've only used a Helios 44-2. The Zeiss is noticeably sharper and seems to work well. Sorry, no lens flares here - just a quick test of overall sharpness and bokeh. I tried using a Contax Zeiss 45mm f2.8 pancake, which made a a nice, compact setup, but it unfortunately wasn't as sharp and I'd hoped for. Drew

Hey Guys, Just wanted to share a little anamorphic western I did a couple years ago. Finally finished put it online. Camera used was an unhacked GH1 (yea, I shot it a while ago) LA7200, used mostly a 24mm nikon Graded in davinchi Ran it through Dark Energy and cleaned it up most of the GH1 compression noise. It was a while ago, but I watch it on the big screen at a festival and I think it looked great.

This was a 1.5x oval aperture and the iscorama 36 in very low light:- not really a good indicator of sharpness but it illustrates the more pronounced 2x ovals being a m4/3 user you have the advantage of being able to use the speed booster to get away from the loss of lens speed.

Does look great - nice one - lovely textural shots. What's Dark Energy?

Cool! Congratulations, Andrew! I'd love to do a new piece for the contest but I don't know if I'll have the time. I'll do my best to get something new out of the door soon, though. Still I wonder, does this qualify as "no more than 25%" of CGI in the film?

You can be anyone, open to all.   For the compression I recommend 720p H.264 at 7Mbit, which is similar to what Vimeo streams at by default. You can easily get 5 minutes under the 250MB mark in that format.

Another couple of clips I put together over the weekend. All hand held ... of course :) I enjoy shooting stills on the E-M1 but I'm totally addicted to shooting video with it. Ergonomically, when set up to your liking, it's so easy to use and the controls, settings and dials just get out of your way. In the second clip, I resisted throwing all sorts of colour effects over the top and left it as is out of the cam on vivid setting with contrast at -2 as Andrew suggested in a post ... all else at default. No PP at all. Both shot with the Pana 25/1.4. In the scene at the 24sec mark of the 1st clip I used the inbuilt 2x convertor. There is a drop in resolution but the feature is handy. I hope it is OK posting videos here but I did not see another thread that has E-M1 videos.

I think the best 30p to 24-25p conversion you can do is to use Twixtor to increase the framerate by 2.5x to 75p. It computer generates an interpolated frame that's not there, and it does a remarkable job for the most part. If you look at a single frame digital videos shot at 24p, you see 2 trailing frames. The sound of computer generated frames might sound like something you might not want, but since you are blending it together with real frames, any artifacts are really not noticeable unless you are specifically pausing frames and trying to find them. I've done this for footage shot in good lighting with sharp edges around subjects and objects, and it looks very convincing. May not work as well in lower night or shallow DOF shots. It might, but I've never tried.

I want to share my experience with GH3 as a photography tool. Coming from a canon prosumer series, I was very disappointed with the GH3. The midtones are flat, so you end up with pasty saturated complexions on people's faces. At least in Adobe Camera Raw. So I bit the bullet and bought PS Kiss' GH3 lens profiles which lets me force different camera profiles that are calibrated for the GH3. And when I apply the 5D Mark 3 profile and bump the exposure by 1/3 stop, the image quality is superb. Whereas the standard Adobe Camera Raw profile that which is your only option in Adobe Camera Raw, for my standards, makes unusable pictures when it comes to pictures with people's faces being the subject. So the problem is that Panasonic is not working with Adobe to create calibrated lens profiles, not that the camera is not capable. But you can work around it for now. It's just one extra step in the workflow. Sure the raw files in MFT cameras are supposed to magically work in Adobe camera raw, but they only fix distortion. Colors, which may be fine for people looking for a different color profile than what you normally get from Nikon or Canon, but are not good when you are looking for accurate color. With that said, I feel good about shooting photos with the GH3 now that I know how to get the most out of it.

Also, I think the academy has a very limited scope on cinematography. The master says best: http://sea.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/874483/christopher-doyle-interview-part-2-life-of-pi-oscar-is-an

That's a ridiculous notion.

Robocop? Good??