Axel

I find this touchiness to be disproportionate. Of the 2k defenders (among them more than just a few DoPs, but who needs so-called authorities to support his own point of view?) because they attack the 4k users in spite of their own statement that resolution is a quantitative parameter, correlated only to the size of the image, and that size is not that important. Lets me wonder sometimes if they actually envy those who already work with UHD. Like, caviar? - no thanks, my bread and butter taste much better! Hypocrites. Of the 4k users because why should they feel offended by any remark implying that they just fall for every marketing lie of the industry and were no 'real' artists? We're all post-modern, we're all artists by nature, we can't help it. Possibly shows they need more pixels to compensate for less, what? Talent?

In the 3D version of Avatar, horizontal pans on the military base did'nt look smooth. It's not always a bad idea to swallow poison. It depends on the circumstances, on the dose and on your expectations of the future.

Let me tell you another true story. Some ten years ago a friend of mine asked me if I would borrow her my VX2000. She wanted to shoot a video as a gift for her father's 50th birthday. She had Windows Movie Maker on her laptop. No experience with photo/video at all. Sport student. She interviewed her family, she dubbed her father's dog, live, during recording. She cut a wonderful 15-minute-video, she hand-made titles, in fact a sloppy but charming stop motion, a birthday cake gradually forming out of thin air. On a Friday I explained to her the basics of how to operate the camera. The following Monday she brought it back and showed me the film. I was gobsmacked. On the other hand, there is, as you put it, the market for enthusiast video. An invective? I linked this clip before:

I know my advice may sound far-fetched, but for many it might be basic. Watch, if available, the new cinematic release The Salt of The Earth: Here is why: The outside world is full of drama, of things so stirring, shocking and touching, nobody could have invented them. Why people don't notice? They deiberately allowed their senses to numb. A very strong motivation for 'aspiring fimmakers' may be to force people to share a vision. To impress them. More often than not, as everybody can see, these filmmakers have a grandiose attitude. They want to be the inventors, the creators. But that's futile. It makes all their efforts pretentious, embarrassing. The authentic attitude towards any subject is that of a good witness with sharp senses and a sensitive mind. No matter if the subject is fictional or, eh, real. What juries of film schools try to see in candidates' 5-minute-films is not technical perfectionism or an ability to mimick others. fuzzynormal: I wouldn't limit my possibilities too much, but the advice with the silent movie adresses one of the biggest problem of most amateurish films: Music. Don't let music express what you are trying to say. Don't use music!

Yes, I absolutely agree. But what lectures on the web can tell you is that everything has become affordable, that Coppola chose a tiny GH2 over Epic and Alexa, that formerly unattainable software is free (Resolve, Fusion), that you can shoot under almost every condition, that - more than a decade ago already - people made 'killer action movies on the cheap' (Maschwitz' book DV Rebel). Who really feels so inapt as he/she isn't up to a stupid >wedding ??? I think that was what Stab was trying to say. And he is right. But this is no new development. Betacam won a dumping war in broadcast, industrial films and other areas (against 16 mm film or Highband), and that started end of the eighties. In the sixties, the lightweight Arriflex made guerilla filmmaking possible. And so forth. From the internet, you can only learn very specific things. It can't offer you an entry to something as complicated and many-sided as filmmaking. And lighting is the most practical task there is. Besides the facts of physics, there is very little you can grasp in theory. What about sound? Sure, it has become cheaper too since the stone age ;)

I have two answers. One is, there are secrets that are safe out there in the open. How to make a good film, be it a short narrative film or just a clip fragment, has nothing to do with an easy advice, and be it the best advice. Two, sadly, state-of-the-art gadgetry enables state-of-the-art junk. The pioneers of filmmaking with their primitive equipment (compared to which a 7D comes close to Trumbulls dream-computer-interface from Project Brainstorm) made better clips than most of us. A professional photographer went on a safari tour for a travel agency. He asked me for advice because he wanted to shoot video with his 5D as well and try to sell it for the client's homepage. I told him, capture moving motifs, don't move the camera too much. Vary the framing of your shots, that's important for interesting editing. It's almost like preparing a slideshow. He nodded, got it. He came back, disappointed. He made everything wrong. He used the wrong shutter. He panned a lot, at the wrong speeds. He asked me to edit it and to insert some stills where he hadn't got the shots right. I declined the offer.

My now 1-year-old camera of choice is the BM Pocket. It is for a reason. But of course, it's not perfect. So let me, from my point of view, first add some features that would make it perfect. Later I will comment on features of other cameras I don't deem necessary. 1. Resolution. 1a -The Pocket should have the sensor of the BMCC (at least), which by now provides perfect fullHD in ProRes. 1b - What about 4k? Yesterday I accompanied a friend who looks for a new big TV. We visited several shops, most of which had a comparison between HD and UHD (one had an SD-signal also). It is absolutely no question that one should buy a UHD TV if it is to be bigger than 50". Because a 1080 signal (BD) is upscaled so well. However, I think though you don't really need 4k, you should have genuine 1080 at least. 2. Higher frame rates for slomo. Actually, this is something a firmware update could bring. I haven't been doing the maths exactly, but if the Pocket can write raw @ 30fps to the card without issues, it should be able to write ProResLT @ 80fps (or so). No? 3. Low Light? Yes, I want to be able to film in a subway. I am. I don't like and I don't want 'Night for Day'. It isn't aesthetically satisfying.

And it wasn't my intention to be "right". You know that once you start grading in earnest, it suddenly is about very subtle differences in HSL. If you never did that before, it probably never occurred to you that you were on a very low level of accuracy. As soon as it does, it's hell. I totally agree with you, but I don't see how this article can help me find a path towards reliable skintones for video.

But then something happened that the Ring did not intend. It was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable ...

For videographers, the whole article is quite confusing. To judge skintones in a video clip, you should of course not use Photoshop, let alone CMYK colors. Those 'typical' ranges of skintones can very easily be found on and around the so-called fleshline a.k.a. skintone line a.k.a. in-phase-indicator in the CC vectorscope, see it here on the site of Stu Maschwitz' blog. Maschwitz is one of the skintone dogmatists (older article: 'Memory Colors'), who always said: Preserve the skintones! In the text above he carefully backpedales, as it seems. In his Ripple training for Resolve 9 (that happens to be the one I know), the author Alexis Van Hurkman (also author of the Resolve manual!) never explains about skintones. The demo footage features heavy casts on the skintones, i.e. orange from a sunset in the desert. He does little to counteract this. At one point, he makes a light remark about that skintone line. If you want to know more, he says, follow me on my blog Thinking Aloud. I did. As a consequence, skintone accuracy in your headline suggests a completely wrong approach. Know where to quickly check it, keep in mind that conditions make deviations appropriate. Then forget it.

'Hokum' was a too strong word, I realize. English is not my native language. You wrote 'minimalism'. That's a proper name. What is color grading else but minimizing distracting tones? As we can see here, B&W can have way more nuances than the Matrix's O&T (orange-teal), which is an even more arbitrary style.

Different horizons. Despite all then-advanced special effects, Contact was a film made by down-to-earth americans, you could as well say bound to earth. And to 'slow moves' of the mainstream river, included some heartwarming human interest. It was spectacular only in the way fireworks are spectacular. It left little to the imagination, it was the equivalent to a diet coke and a cheeseburger, and nobody really felt the urge to talk about it, let alone think about it, any longer than ten minutes after leaving the cinema. In a way Gravity was the perfect film, not only the perfect science fiction film. It very convincingly altered the state (to quote an old movie). Of course it's filmic language was far more advanced than the point of view of the filmmaker: The end again was down-to-earth, literally. It is no-nonsense storytelling. The plot is straight. I agree about the psychopaths. The film is meant to be read this way. It's quite clear for everyone who has made up his conscience according to political correctness of his time that one shouldn't go this path. Yet there is a inherent mendaciousness (if that's the right word, I had to look it up in the dictionary, it should be stronger than hypocracy) in that. The film itself takes it's fascination from the very thing it claims to condemn. But all in all, a fine film, I agree.

Nolan made an embarrassingly pretentious movie with Interstellar, which imo renders all his not-below-IMAX attitude ridiculous. The old films mentioned above may look outmoded in hindsight. But that wasn't the case at their time. It is my habit to try to relate to the contemporary audience's horizon and expectations. I am old enough to remember some of the first reactions to masterpieces first hand. And I think none of the nice and intelligent films of 2014 can claim to be in the same class. Sorry.

Are you talking about the polish film? Then let me say, there is imo a lot of stylish hokum going on. There is no color grading, for sure, but there is an awful lot of grading. B&W today is the most style-oriented decision, it has more influence on look&feel of the film than any of the other parameters. The decision against scope is a stylistic one. There is very little sDoF-gimmickery. But then, on the other hand, absolute DoF was the style of the ancient. As you may have heard, Orson Welles used red filters to deepen the field for Citizen Kane. But the film is great, that's right. Since you don't seem to be abhorred by european films, have a look at La Grande Bellezza (watch with subtitles!). The opposite of IDA, it uses every trick ('truco') available so far, but nothing muddies it's message.

What needs no further evidence is the statement that Apple is indeed the evil corporation. We had it recently, they suck our wallets empty, and we cheer. To the longtime Apple users it's also undeniable that they get a benefit compared to a shabby, say, Lenovo, HP or the like with abysmal Windows 7 or 8. Someone (in conjunction with the hype about new iPhones) compared the fanboy behaviour with the Stockholm syndrome. Quote from Wikipedia: 'The victims (...) essentially mistake a lack of abuse from their captors for an act of kindness.' It was a PR fiasco. And it made practically all professionals abandon FCP. As the years passed, a few dared to take a fresh look, as here. Without prejudice (difficult for people who were let down like this, I admit), it becomes pretty clear that the concept behind FCP X was indeed revolutionary. And that this - or at least something very much like this - will be the future of editing. Or: Tracks as a visualisation for the correlations of clip selections aren't necessarily completely useless in every situation. For these rare occasions, FCP X still has a solution, scroll down this. I wonder how many years must pass until the first of the competitors swallow their pride and dispose tracks. And, let's face it, we all don't know if there still is some benevolent force behind that Empire. The iMac, OSX, the iPhone, FCP X, those were launched under the reign of Jobs, who had the balls to think differently, to indeed offer an alternative. So maybe my next desktop will also be a PC.

No need for a wallet anymore. You can pay with your iPhone. And manage all your bank accounts with an app. Or someone manages to hack Yosemite in this respect. I think rather Apple will add the support.

The point is exactly that 'normal viewing distance'. Christopher Nolan and David Fincher, two of the remaining directors who care for cinema, demand shorter VD, resp. bigger images, because that means better immersion. What they don't demand, mercifully, are HFR or 3D.

Hardly. 35mm 8-perf (film runs through gate horizontally, not vertically, the frame size equals full frame 36mm x 24 mm) could have had perhaps 5k, but never a theater print (4-perf, with considerable widescreen-crop), and definitely not when projected, because all those little analog tolerances added, and what was left was way under 1k. Digital projection in 2k meant an immediate improvement, though not a very spectacular one. And that 4k means four times the resolution of 2k doesn't mean that the images now look four times as good. It's rather that you recognize limitations of resolution caused by too big images later. 4k images can be projected bigger, that's all there is to it. Take 640p as an example: If you watch a Youtube clip in this original size - according to the pixels of your display - it looks the same as the HD-version. Only if you toggle it full screen you will see the shortcoming of the smaller resolution. But take the appropriate resolution as a given.

It was too much. However, all this seems* to be a matter of taste and of portioning. When Coppola said (in the doc on Apocalypse Now), that there was nothing more terrible than a pretentious film, he obviously wasn't talking about image films (as they are called in german, maybe one of the many german anglicisms, can you confirm this? In german Image always means personal appearance, Imagefilme are made to polish the reputation or prestige of companies, professions or political parties). A cinematographer - the name derives from the filmmaker, not just the photographer, the Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov) - must indeed tell himself, that he creates the world, that he is the master of light and shadow. To paraphrase Faithless: God Is A DoP! *No, it isn't just bad taste. Working in this business has a nimbus. Film (audiovisual communication) produces images, role models, opinions, conscience. It's despicable, it attracts pretenders (therefore the pretentious clip). You have to stay aware of how many impostors call themselves cinematographers, actors, editors, directors. You have to dissociate yourself from these assholes, you should never try to impress them!

Did you test how much slomo 1000fps mean, played back at, say, 24fps? There was an ad with a dog who shakes the head. This clip proves that this happens five time a second. With the 240 fps of the FS700, you'd have one shake lasting 2 seconds, which is probably enough. 1000fps you'd need to see the individual water drops fly off with no motion blur. It practically stops motion for creature movements.

The white orb issue affected the first few Pockets that were delivered. BM called them back for calibration of the sensor. That apparantly took about a month, but then the issue was gone. It wasn't reported since, so I'd say it's pretty unlikely that you buy a faulty one.

Beautiful, even touching. Keep up the good work.

You can use your SB with the Pocket. The MB BMPCC SB has some advantages though:

Eventually, it has to have fully operational nodes. It may have no more layer comps at some time in the future. The question is: When? Stu Maschwitz asked for working nodes, seven years (!) ago. The current Adobe help says on flowcharts: Get this: Adobe calls compositions, footage, blend modes and effects elements. Wow! Yet they deny to connect and modify these elements directly. It's back to the incomprehensible layer scheme with it's dreadful disclosure triangles, invented decades ago. You snooze, you lose.

The GUI-elements haven't necessarily anything to do with how a software works under the hood. So there is no reason why a rectangle representing a video clip should not also serve as a mini timeline, left side earlier, right side later. As I see it, this was the major misconception of everybody who was used to think in tracks (whereas there never was a model for tracks in the analog world, if not that of parallel partitions on an audio tape) when the trackless FCP X was released. Does there really need to be an independant ruler (the composition's timeline) where loose clip selections are shoven back and forth? Open and earnest question: What is that actually good for? Most Premiere users will state that the ease of the dynamic links is the most important advantage (besides the collection of effects and third party plugins that grows over the years). So what they want is indeed integration, not a bag full of independant, classic programs that need to be linked. There could be work spaces within one application, editing, compositing, color, sound. Now I'm just fabricating something. Maybe there are good reasons to keep things more separate. What I just say: There are no reasons to go on with old routines whose advantages nobody can explain. And from now on, there is yet another reason to wake up and make things better.