Axel

Adobe ... a.) ... can rely on their clients' loyality. They know, that a habit of working in a familiar environment can well be worth to remain faithful. As Adobe remains faithful. This software changes only marginally over the decades. It's like a an old horse rug, scrubbed and patched now and then. Nodes better for stacking comp layers than a timeline model (BM in their text explaining the virtues of Fusion)? Maybe, but our customers are used to that. b.) ... could be alarmed by this development, fearing that BM is cutting the ground from under their feet, slowly but surely luring their customers to their side. Becoming free obviously is no option for Adobe, so how can they react? They could become better than they already are, but how? Where? The answer: They have to become modern. They have to get rid of outworn concepts and find new ways. And hazard the near-term consequence to lose a substantial group of faithful veterans. Show a roadmap that leads somewhere. c.) ... may hope that BM will not survive their own policy. Who can say where the road goes? Where the day flows? Only time.

We had this fishing in troubled water some two years ago, when The Hobbit was released. I'd say it's not so much about sharpness or clearness as it is about how humans and other creatures move. At 24 fps, their motions have added gravity, as if a slight slow motion was applied. 48 fps, on the other hand, look the opposite: Everybody moves too fast, but paradoxically without momentum (the imperceptible motion blur misses). It looks hectic and lame at the same time. You probably get used to it. With borrowed films on my Apple TV, I get that. No big deal, I follow alright. But: If I really want to enjoy a particular movie, I either buy it in the store (obviously that makes it 24p) or borrow it on BD. That made me laugh. It's like telling people about the Emperor's new clothes, and they shrug, so what?

When I was a projectionist, one or two times a year there was an indian private screening. They delivered the film copy not in tin or plastic cans but in a bag that looked like an ancient potato sack. The dialog used to be as loud and as distorted as here. The images were as colorful, magic and, yes indeed: cinematic as these. As the years passed and cinema became digital, the indian contact person came with a shiny new harddrive within a shiny new pelican case. The DCPs were always perfectly state of the art, but the sound hadn't changed. So I guessed the Indians liked it that way. @rishabhsood Some colors are nice, but most of them look awful. A matter of taste? Perhaps. Imo you may oversaturate your images as you see fit. But leave out the shadows. Yes, shadows may be blue, but if this blue is too strong, everything looks like a reflection in a soap bubble. Or as if you just ate poisoned mushrooms.

Since the question implies aesthetic niceties, it'd be wrong to say the A7 was the low light king (can one say that? I know that in english, unlike in german, things have no sex, but camera clearly sounds female. Shouldn't it read low light queen?). Because, yeah, it's bright, but does any one of those night shots look pleasing?

G6 was stolen, together with 14-42 kit lens. Have to make stills for the homepage of my restaurant (it now contains photos from 450D, GH2, G6, iPhone 4, D3300 as well as a Lizard panorama shot with the 5D), so I had to buy a cheap substitute. I can't follow you. I didn't look into this too deep yet. I found the default colors (chose 'portrait' for no specific reason) to be very vivid. I filmed with 'S' fixed to 1/50, left aperture, WB and ISO to the program and thought it looked fine. Should I need to make a slomo, I will use it for video, otherwise the Pocket needs my attention more.

On the Rokinon(s): Actually I was very interested in the 14 mm. 11 mm (let alone 10 mm) will inevitably look like video, and 14 mm is still waaay wider than 18 mm. Unfortunately, the protruding front lens prevent the use of filters, and I'd never use the BMPCC without IR-cut, and most of the time I use an ND fader as well. I wasn't aware of the DX and DX II distinction. I do have a Nikon D3300 as a still camera now (it shoots quite decent video as well), and I like the Sigma very much on it. This camera has a fantastic AF for stills, and it could be worth the higher price. How bad are the potential problems of the BMPCC-MB-SB-Tokina combo, as reported by Andrew (in his initial SB review): > soft vignetting Others found > CA in the corners, or > couldn't focus on infinity or > not at all ???

Reminds me of a Kate Bush line (Hello Earth: watching storms start to form over America ...), also (I think very favorably for you) of Gregory Crewdson and of the last image of A Serious Man, Jobs omen. For me, this is in a nutshell what short film storytelling could be like: Portrait a fragment, with lots of possible implications. I am not sure if you did this on purpose, but that's how it worked, obviously for comurit as well. Saw your showreel 2013, and Storm is a major leap forward.

Like your pan shots. Few can pan. Took me a minute to remember where I'd heard the music before, old Hans. First thought it was Pirates o.t.C. If you don't want people to be distracted by such weird associations, choose a less familiar tune next time.

Really weird and extraordinary. Will explore this further.

I have a german book from, get this, *2000*, "Digital Film Production". When all the regions in my country, where steel and coal industry were dying had to be re-structured, the federation pumped millions into the development of CGI-studios. Many of the best VFX indeed came from Germany (started in the nineties, one example where you can see the outcome is Independence Day (1996), directed by Emmerich with his connections to southern german facilities), but it never paid off. Because, as the book foresaw 14 years ago already, VFX were not about higher quality, they were about reduced costs. As anybody can see now, the party that makes no profit at all from their work are the CGI houses. The book makes another point: Even though most SFX (analog special effects, 'tricks') are not particularly convincing, visually, they raise the perceived production value, and the audience enjoys them anyway, thereby willingly 'suspending disbelief'. Whereas, decades after Jurassic Parc, no limits remain as far as photorealistic simulations of impossible visions are concerned, people just know that anything goes and that it's just a cheap digital trick. Nothing 'special' anymore. And more: Any fantasy can be rendered to film, but plots became unbelievably dull. As Peter Biskind puts it in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, all new multimillion dollar blockbusters are B-pictures storywise, and after Titanic they actually degraded to C-pictures. As I see it, Jackson is really the master of CGI, if there ever was one, and he started with self-made analog effects (with his 16mm Bolex). Very often he tries to mimic stop-motion-juddering or adds some tilt-shift-look to artificial landscapes, and I appreciate that. I think he has made his masterpiece with the LOTR trilogy and delivered a respectable film with King Kong. Mortensen is a class A actor, and Jackson made him perform to greatest effect in LOTR, let's not forget that. I recently saw The Two Faces Of January (a somewhat old-fashioned film, taking place in the sixties, with an intelligent plot - Patricia Highsmith!), and I admired his performance, as that of his co-star Oscar Isaac.

It isn't. It's a psychological thriller. It's rather 'who am I?'. Fincher is one of a handful of serious directors of our time. Many prejudices around. Maybe a ful digital workflow lets people move to Premiere slowly but surely. Adobe did their homework, there are some really profound improvements since 5.5, the last version I knew better. Apple fucked FCP? They abandoned the old concept, and rightly so. Adobe tacidly adopted a few virtues of FCP X. That's why they are where they are now. For my personal taste, they should 'fuck' tracks, eventually. I presage that. And once they did, goodbye AMC!

Using LUT Utility in FCP X? You could try this LUT from slashCAM user "ruessel". It's for ProRes only. Say what you think. There is a special LUT for Resolve, I don't know why. This special LUT also counteracts the greenish cast produced by the IR cut filter, so if you're not using such a filter already (which you should), the image will probably have a magenta cast. My thoughts on LUTs: Nice to see a natural looking, colorful image. But I like to get there on my own. However, I always make a LUT version which I finetune underneath the LUT and then compare my own efforts to see if I missed anything. Imo it's easier to almost accidentally "find" the right look for a sequence if you didn't see it in almost perfect colors from the start.

You always have to be aware of differing frequencies. For example: With the GH2 I could shoot 23,98 fps with 1/50 shutter speed in my (50 Hz) country (same for 25 fps). For most LED lights I had to change to 1/40. Some camcorders allow to fine tune the shutter speed, until flicker and wandering bars disappear (> Clear Scan). With the BMPCC, it's still possible to shoot 30 fps in european countries, but you have to change the normal shutter angle from 180° to 216°.

Did you read my topic about the Mosaic anti-moire-filter? If it's any good, I will be one of the first buyers and will let you know. In the meantime: What are your thoughts on raw vs. ProRes? As far as moire is concerned as well as gradability ... FCP X does quite well with the ProRes footage and grading it, don't you think? Hard to say. Depends on your exposure. Generally, if you had avoided clipping of the lights in the background (zebra) and had enough light in the foreground, it should look better with the Pocket. On the other hand, it's not exactly a low light camera. There is a threshold beneath which noise really gets annoying. You'd see HDR effects rather with the sky. In bright environments the Pocket shows it's 13 stops (minus the lowest, a.k.a. noise floor).

No official prices announced. Estimated between 300 - 400 $.

Production design. Use the preview, also of this book, to get the picture.

Now you could, in theory, record a concert or sth. like that with the BMPCC in raw. I'm sure half a year ago I would have desperately wanted two of these cards, asap. In the meantime I have many hours of footage to compare, and even though my expectations rose, I feel not only ProResHQ (over 30 minutes on 64 GB) to be more appropriate than raw for most situations, I found ProRes standard (almost one hour) to be absolutely sufficient, that is: indistinguishable.

G6 is not exactly an insider tip, but almost. Forgotten silver. Everybody raves about 4k or raw now, but a simple little device like that, with decent colors and superb resolution - isn't that all we need?

Perhaps because Compressor (at least the current version) knows no NONE in the field order checkbox of the duplicated ProRes-preset. Didn't know. The legacy FCP had this third option above upper and lower field first. Also, because the short test clip I exported took an inappropriately long time, I suspect Compressor automatically made in-betweens. Don't like to carry it to the TV set though. Maybe a new project in FCP X is better? There it only says "25i". But I'm not sure. I did make some blurays from 1080 25p. As you know, it's not supported, so FCP X must have converted the stuff to PSF. There was no smoothed motion there. Tell us the solution, once you found out.

If you export a master in 25p as a self-contained film (this is an old term and also one translated from german, but I hope you know what I mean), there are only 25 phases left for Compressor to work with. On the other hand, if you fed FCP with 96 phases, the playback will skip about three of four frames to meet the "25p", but will never discard the original information. The moment you export this timeline with Compressor (and manually set a field domination as "top"!), Compressor will use roughly every second frame of the original, depending on the "frame conversion method" you chose (skip frame, frame blending, optical flow). Because 96 frames can't be divided by 25 in integer numbers, resulting in an irritating stuttering, you may very well have chosen optical flow. Optical flow does allow Compressor to re-invent missing motion information out of 25p to get 50 phases, and it additionally would smudge the 'cadence', smoothing the motion further.

I can only imagine what happened. You wrote your recording frame rate was 96 fps (probably for slomos?). You imported those into a 1080 25p project and exported directly to ProRes 1080 25i (=50i). What the NLE does is ignore the "p"-setting of the project and use every phase preserved in the original recording, therefore effectively ending with really interlaced video that has differing upper and lower fields, whereas what you were actually after was PSF (progressive segmented frames), which meets the broadcast standard whilst still showing the cinematic jerkyness. PSF means: No field domination/order. Premiere: > right click > change > interpret footage > framerate > set to 25p FCP 7: open 96 fps clips as batch in Cinema Tools > conform >framerate conversion >25p (does the same as Premiere, but before import) FCP X: Edit everything in a 25p project, export a 25p master, from that let Compressor make a 50i version (will then have PSF).

Beautiful.

We were all in the exact same situation once, I mean us 'prototype testers' who ordered the camera the minute (September '13) it 'arrived'. I was told by my dealer I was in a queue with 150 before me. A week before christmas he said I made it to number 40 in the meantime, but a substantial quantity of Pockets had been announced to arrive 'soon'. I couldn't stand the word soon anymore by then, but - surprise! - next morning the DHL guy was at the door with the Pocket. The features of the last firmware update also had been promised a long, long time ago. I never complained.

For the record. Search the BMD support site.

Some of us are one-man-bands. Though it is no problem to synch audio nowadays, you then better have an assistant who captures (and levels) external audio. But: If, for instance, the recorder is mounted on top of your rig (without additional mic it'd need it's own shock mount!), you can as well use the recorder as a fail-safe option and use it's headphone jack to record external audio via the Pocket's mic in (set to line in in menu). Anyway, to assure that you level right (the speaker volume that is, you leave the ch1, ch2 - settings at 65), until now you had to plug a real headphone to your Pocket's headphone jack, which made the set up clumsy again. Now, with this firmware update, you can watch the levels in the display. Don't know yet if they will show clipping fast enough. Otherwise, for the odd wedding and similar occasions, you may find the internally recorded sound indistinguishable from the recorder's audio and forget synching in post. The Pocket turned out to be an excellent camera for a wedding. Note, that there is a device called OMP (OhrwurmMonitorPro) that allows recording without levels, I tested it >here (it worked quite well, but it wasn't comfortable to wear over time). The Pocket now also features 18 (!) different Kelvin-settings between 2500°K and 8000°K. We get one thing, we miss the next: Now it would be nice, at least for ProRes, to know the actual color temperature of the scene. Arrrgh! Is there a smartphone app or something?