Axel

You need to (manual or Google or Youtibe-tut): Log&Transfer to ProRes. Will work with everything but 1080 50/60 p. This would have to be >clip-wrapped (or the like) first or >transcoded by 5D2RGB or >Toast video conversion (or the like). As for the "All-I" codec, I can't tell if FCP 7, which could only use 2,5 GB ram and no cuda, will be able to play it back properly (it will be imported because it is mov). Try. If not, transcode to ProRes as well.

Right now everybody raves about the Mark 3. I sonetimes wonder how long they know the routines to be so easily and repeatedly impressed. Didn't they see them come and go often enough to realize a pattern? The 5D's raw is 8-bit only. Though I admit it's a big success and a decided improvement, this isn't IT! Not as good as the 2 5 k BMCC, imho.

Yes, keep in mind that these lenses are calculated to cooperate with the system camera's firmware, which will correct the distortion prior to compression. It also means a loss of resolution which again is fought by the MFT implemented artificial sharpening. There may be some benefit in having AF, if it works well with the Pocket, but other than that manual lenses are better. Shaky, yes, and again with some weird colors (Brawley style, absinth delir, instead of clean, natural looking colors). This way it's really hard to estimate the camera's resolution/sharpness, to tell how unsharp the image actually is. I bet, however, the dynamic range is very good.

        I wholeheartedly disagree.   You are not a professional, you are an amateur, and perhaps you consider yourself a skilled amateur?   Then the best way to prove it is to film and edit a wedding. Don't raise the expectations of your clients too much, but assure them they will be happy with the video.    Know, that filming a wedding confronts you with considerable challenges. You spend maaany hours with the family and friends, you can't be tooo much in the way, you can under no circumstances lose or botch important moments, you have to film them in clean images, beautifully, without shaking or trembling (but also very often without tripod), you have to get usable sound (in the beginning you will probably not wire the pair, but be aware you have to capture their voices really well!), you have to control the light for perfect exposure, in an environment where very often your only way to influence light is how you position yourself (and keep in mind, don't be in the way tooo much!). There may be no noise, there may be no clipping, but there may very well be creepy darkness. Or, almost worse, a parc in the harsh sunlight, with beautiful green treetops that cast green shadows on the faces of the lot, alternated by veeery bright stripes. You get blinded, hands sticky ...   Perhaps you have a talent to master all these problems or never experience the worst. You produce excellent images.   But having technically good images, perhaps even with glamour to them, is not enough. A good videographer is very rarely also a good narrator, let alone editor, and vice versa. Finding images is fundamentally different to arranging them. So if you are not a very good camera operator, but a good editor or the other way around, you have to find a way to become good enough.   You have to know where the moment you witness and record fits. You have to realize the moment. Often you have to make it fit. People react to you. They act to you. They know their expression and their remarks will be seen by their hosts, they absolutely have to come up smiling. You have to be charming. You have to direct them. You are not 'an eye', you are not a participant with a camera, you are the Ghost of the weddings past.   You really learn a lot about how people like to be, to be seen or to become. You are their magic mirror. An invaluable insight if you ever wish to do something dramatic.   This is so much more than an industrial image film. Who never made weddings doesn't know.   Next step is editing all that. The first time you will curse the day you said 'I do it', and you rue to have followed Zach and me and not Moongoat and /p/.   The second time you will try to follow a concept.   The third time you will talk with the pair in advance, find funny stories, write down a draft. You will get your clients to accept that you keep it short, you will have enough experience to face difficult situations calmly. You will edit in one day, in a relaxed mood, seeing that your preparation fruited.   The fourth time you will say, allright, I like you, that's why I charge only $1000.      And if you have improved your skills the first three times, you can actually enjoy it.

  It happens I have Children Of Men and Sleepy Hollow recorded on my receicer's harddrive. I just checked them: Children: Veery teal, classic BBL. It didn't bother me, I didn't notice at all, though I saw the film only two weeks ago. Sleepy: Most scenes are grey-beige (the always anaemic-looking people) with pastel-green backgrounds. Few scenes include candles, torches or fireplaces. Then the absence of green is a relief.   Malick: I can't remember The New World to be much sytlized (but I may err), Maybe some scenes in the fort (mud) were somewhat desaturated? The Tree Of Life had everything, if I remember correctly. Possible that some skyscraper-scenes with Sean Penn were conventionally blue/green. If so, the boring color-scheme had a similar function as Jake in Avatar awakening in the so-called 'reality'. The light was very often backlight, and it clipped.

You are right again, and your examples two posts above prove it.   Could you accept the view that in the wake of the Matrix success a lot of films exaggerated the BBL? It's not all about highest color contrasts, colors (not just two) do influence the mood, the emotional impact. And it's not a very original look anymore.    My fellow projectionist test-viewed Avatar. He studies film and happened to learn color correction then. He said we obviously projected the film in the wrong color space or whatever, because the faces had a green cast.   Cameron almost made a parody of the BBL in Avatar. The schema is only prominent when the stubborn military is associated. But even there, he broke the Maschwitz-rule (I call it that because I first heard of it in the Prolost-blog), that 'porange' (Maschwitz again) needs to be protected. Quaritch in the image above looks down to the Pandora forest, and the green forest reflects subtly on his face, giving the impression he was filmed with a GH2, before someone could apply Andrews WB-shift (The EOSHD-GH2-guide, page 79).   Of course, green and blue are not too rare in Avatar :mellow: .   And elsewhere humans are'nt protected either. Lights, computer screens and natural light are allowed to eat in their skin tones, obviously intentionally:   For my own taste, there should be another rule: If there is a color in the image, it has to be justified. There must be a source that may plausibly have emitted this color. I don't know how you feel about it, but I am getting used to realize the BBL as something very artificial and lumpen. Some make the look so extreme, it doesn't help the least, it's only distracting (Swordfish, CSI Miami).   The BBL is like the slice of tomato you have to put onto your beefsteak before you shut the hamburger, the better to counterbalance the dry saltyness. The necessity is confirmed scientifically by ecotrophologists. Add remoulade, and a Big Mac tastes the same all over the world. Films resemble each other visually more and more, they turn McMovies. I admit, the colors are merely a symptom, hardly the cause.

You are right. But then again, the look of Blade Runner is not typical insofar as the lights are cold and the shadows tend to be warm. Mixed color temperatures is not the principle of the BBL.

  Thank god I'm not alone. According to the industry everybody wants to see blockbusters, so we two must be the exceptions. We should found an anti-blockbuster-club. Who wants to join has to complete the following trailer lines:   Forget everything you have ever seen before ... (... or else you might find this very familiar.) This summer ... (Has it really been a year?) From the people who brought you Pearl Harbour ... ( Oops! They resurrected some japanese veterans?)   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDzuT0fXro&NR=1

On the apology of the blockbuster look: The old SW didn't have it, 2001 didn't have it, Blade Runner didn't have it, the Alien films didn't have it, The Silence Of The Lambs didn't. Had any of those film difficulties in directing the audience's attention to their actors? We've seen examples of how a banal scene in a banal shopping mall can be turned into something looking like from a summer blockbuster by simply applying some MBL. I suspect more than one blockbuster would indeed look depressingly uninteresting without that one-fits-all two-tone grading.

  A loanword like Zeitgeist? Interesting, because there are so many equally strong words for Wut in english.   Tony Wilson is right. And Andrew too. This is not about escapism or, as I wrote, Utopia. It's about filling the heads with false values. Easy to decipher in Armageddon, which indeed could easily be a nazi propaganda film (well, in a way), not so easy with Star Trek, almost the greek legends and heros of my childhood.   And Star Wars. What's wrong with Good fighting against Evil?    'What is thy name?' 'Legion. For we are many.' (Early example of someone who suffered from multiple personality disorder after watching too many stupid movies)

  Far-fetched, I'd say. The other day I tried to compare Black Magic with Apple, on similar thin basis: Some design aspects, the strife to always re-invent the wheel, public-relation-wise a very clever combination of understatement and almost religious ceremony.       He is very intelligent and very knowledgeable. He has an exquisite taste and loves cinema. His background provides him with craft and talent from various arts within the art of filmmaking. He is witty, charming and someone you would really enjoy sitting next to on a long distance flight. He states, that he finds TV shows often 'more daring' than Hollywood movies. But what does he mean?    Surely he is no enfant terrible. I can imagine him producing a TV series with a controversial subject. I guess he would hide the hot topic in some kind of troian horse. He can't be offensive, he can't be primitive. He is too smart by nature.     Andrew wrote:     Escapism, yes.    There are one million important things that need to be changed. Urgently.    Isn't that the job of 'investigative journalism'?    Cinema should indeed be 'more daring'. But essentially it's a Utopia. 

  I agree. Guys like Lucas have lost touch long ago. They are surrounded by dependents, and nobody dares to tell them.   Let me bring some aspects into the discussion, that we can perhaps both agree upon, for a change.   1. Mainstream means low intellectual standards. However, cinema is originally a non-literal, non-verbal, an emotional, subversive way of communication. We both accept that. Differences in quality can be seen when a movie not only entertains you.   2. Some serials shouldn't be continued forever, because their potential had been exploited long ago. This certainly is true for Star Trek. That's why Abrams startet over and remade the original. All stories are remakes, I mean every story that was ever written or told. Their origins go so far back in history, nobody can name them anymore. The crew of the Enterprise has characters of considerable complexity. When the going gets tough, how can Kirk and Spock work together? This was always more fascinating than some external villain's threat to the ship or some funny extraterrestrials threatened by extinction (yawn!). Aggressive extrovertism and cool rationalism have to excel themselves, join forces, become heroes, this ain't wear out fast.   3. Star Wars was original only in the sense that the plot of the first adventure was consciously tailored around ancient myths. The force, the dark side, the good magician, the black knight, the hero who has to realize his fate as a chosen one. LOTR made an epic drama of these same ingrediences, but Lucas didn't have the stamina to carry the ring to Mount Doom (Anakins end in the volcanic river was the return of the story line after a few silly episodes worth of the lowest tv soap scripts). Star Wars actually is over. The old films were too much worshipped as holy classics, you can't remake them for another century. The original characters have suffered their fate, that's all folks!

  Allright. You know, I sometimes miss the meaning in english phrases. Is 'tall muppet' an idiom? You certainly can't be talking about Jar Jar Binks, the most likeable figure in Episode I?    Yes, I heard that people didn't like him. That's the reason why his character was cut back in the following episodes. This eviction by the audience's vote is part of the syndrome you bemoan. I thought, Jar Jars sillyness made the overall toe-curling unbelievability of the events  endurable. He contrasted well with the Jedis, and he was important for the storytelling. But of course, rely on the mediocre taste of the majority, and you get panem et circenses.    EDIT: I continued to read about the project. In an earlier article, Abrams says:       Sounds good.

  Emotional soap opera? You are plain wrong. Episode iV (then known simply as Star Wars) was such an enormous success storywise, because it was a pure mythological tale, like Lord Of The Rings, or, as Joseph Campbell put it:     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F7Wwew8X4Y&list=PL352922ACB3A0D000   In terms of special effects, then real SFX (the 'S' stands for special, as opposed to common), Star Wars was a real revolution, hard to understand for young audiences today. Before this film, effects had just to be specific enough to make clear what were supposed to represent, the audience wanted to believe them, so they accepted the otherwise unconvincing tricks (see the 1933 King Kong as an example).   The third major reason for the success was the art work of production designer Ralph McQuarry:   His paintings did'nt respect practicability, and they really defined the look of the film. For a film, the look is part of the content. Lucas' main achievement was, that he saw the paintings and didn't say, okay, with today's technique and our modest budget, we have to break this down to something manageable. Instead he said, everybody on the set has to become an expert in overcoming physical limitations that stand in the way between contemporal state of our art and this vision.   That the Episodes one to three are lame has to do with being more inspired by profit than by a vision.          I don't know. I like Abrams. Two days ago I saw Star Trek - Into Darkness, in 3D (the action was so fast, I wished it would have been partially 48p, and 4k would have been appropriate too). I loved it, I didn't feel that WOW-effect in months. Abrams takes this old concept seriously. Much more than many of the original Star Trek - The Films did. He sets his marks with the lens flares and all that, but he is a great director. He knows how to tell a story.    @markm: Do you ever see films before you judge them?

Thoughts: Of the Pocket we know only two videos today, one the vimeo upload of an ungraded ProRes-edit, looking way too flat to an unexperienced eye like mine. The second the graded version, with some shots of seemingly very good dynamic range, others that still look somewhat washed out. I never liked the colors of Brawley, but others did really cool things with the 2,5k BMCC. I am sure of one thing: The Pocket is the camera for the best colors, but you need to have 'an eye', experience with grading and preferably the free Resolve Lite. I learned it just now, with the aide of Ripple, which I recommend by the way.    I believe that if someone not familiar with the niceties of grading can produce good colors with the Pocket, it is with this great software. But many will fail, because it really isn't painting by numbers.   In the video, we see another aspect of which I am unsure how to interpret it: Low resolution. Grant Petty of BM stated, the Pocket wasn't as sharp as the BMCC. On the other hand, we see handheld shots, which can cause the LFR-video to be smeared by motion blur. I really would like to see some expert footage.   Other than that, I instantly fell in love with that little device. I WANT it. But I don't know how or if it fits to the Lumix's.   Because with them, you have to expose more accurately, you have to watch out for banding artifacts and find a proper white balance, regardless of your intention to color correct and grade extensively. The G6 can obviously complement the GH2 or the other way around. It adds 1080 @ 50/60p, the image apparently has as many advantages as it has disadvantages. For the image alone there would imho be no need to change the camera. 

I'd make the screening room pitch black. I once worked in a very big cinema, it had black seats, black walls and a black velvet mask around the screen. It also had a steep, amphitheater-like audtitorium. When the lights went down, it was almost like 'I count to ten, you open your eyes and you are in ... '- wherever the film took you. I'd leave the main forum black on white. Why? I'm not sure why. I just think about it now. I had a DVX 100 once, but seldom visited the DVX user forum then.

  You only see the worst case, the time remaining with the maximum data rate. 24 Mb/s have an average data rate around 17 Mb/s, 28 Mb/s only ~20 Mb/s. So you get roughly 30 % longer recording time than what is predicted.     With the hood on, the codec's efficiency will let the data rate drop. You will have hours and hours left. Just for fun, check the actual data rate of that recording!

Why are the projects no longer on the surface? Did you move them? Moving (='hiding', as FCP X calls it in the manual) is a method to get them out of the way without deleting them. Move them back, restart FCP X, they will appear. Select them, delete files. I suppose you could always use the finder to get to the render files and put the whole folders into the trash. But I never tried this myself. Rather that than reading/writing anything over a USB connection. I suppose you didn't experience big problems with having the OS and program on the same volume as the clips? Note, that with AVCHD you always work with a copy, even if you checked 'original media'. The copying process is so fast, you don't realize it, but in the 'original media' folder live H.264 copies of your '.mts' - clips (EDIT: In case you chose 'optimized media' - the default for AVCHD -, the files will be big, but edit-friendly ProRes-files, check this). There are two advantages in that: 1. You can connect your card reader and a LaCie drive to the MacBook, open FCP X, hit 'import' and there 'create archive'. See here for details (This was obviously before the unified import of 10.0.6, the rest stays valid). In the opening dialogue, you choose the LaCie as volume where your SD-card should be archived. Now you wait, until the backup is complete. Then eject the card reader. 2. After that, you create a new event with your SDD as volume, hit import and choose the camera archive on the LaCie. 3. Here comes a very interesting feature only available with original SD-cards or camera archives: (here is your German ;) ) The blue icon selected here is the 'clip view' of the import window. It allows for you to skim through all your clips at once, qualifying them very quickly (granted, were the archive not connected only via USB, you could skim waay faster!). Moreover, you can select multiple regions of one clip before you hit import. 4. That way, you only copy the portions of the original clips you actually plan to use in your project, saving space on your system volume!

I somehow skipped the part where you wrote that you were travelling. Then of course your care is appropriate. With very old versions of the classic FC (and all older NLEs), when harddisc space was expensive and real time performance didn't deserve the name, you often judged an effect by how it looked on the current frame only (which was always rendered in full quality). You had to see things like an animation, and then you had to render, but you triggered it manually by selecting the clip(s) in the sequence and hitting ⌘+R. Render files can consume more space than footage, and none of them are actually used for final export, they are for preview purposes only. You can put off background rendering in FCP X's preferences (here), then you can render a selected clip by hitting CTRL+R. Assumed your project consists of a hundred animations with a dozen more filters on each. Then again, you wouldn't want to keep the render files. It would be wiser to export an entire self-contained movie as a reference and delete all render files. This will delete not only all rendered clips from the current state of your projects, but also those of all former states, because, as you know, FCP X works as it's own Timemachine, and since Lion, every tiny change on every file gets auto-saved. Imagine all the automatically rendered clips! Render files not only eat disc space (which is cheap nowadays), they eat RAM. This is because every file that's used to play back a sequence needs to be kept in short time memory together with all files it refers to. With this fact in mind, think of the size of your events and projects. Even on a 32 GB RAM machine, ONE giant event pool with thousands of clips will eventually slow down the system, if you use clips from this giant event in multiple projects. The same, if you had a hundred events, each only with 20 - 50 clips, but one giant project of two hours, using clips from all events and additionally cross-referential compound clips! Don't get me wrong: You can do this, and you should do it, but not all the time and not with, say, 4 GB RAM. Use Event Manager X ($4,99), until a future version of FCP X allows to uncheck unused events and projects (the main advantages of the program are, it makes you aware of your media organisation and it cleans up your GUI!). It also 'ejects' unused volumes ... Then there is GPU acceleration. If your graphic card allows it, you can see all effects in real time without rendering. You can - and should - always choose >preferences >playback >better performance over >high quality, when there is a problem with playing back unrendered clips. If you pause, the current frame will always be 'high quality'. First line: Backup for the work. Second line: Backup to reset the system, to format the HD. Third line: If, for some reason I have to relink to original media. I wipe and re-use the SD-cards.

With FCP X, there is almost no 'wrong' way. You seem to be quite conscious about what you do (because one can lose data!), so I just share a few thoughts: • How much redundancy do you need? How many instances of backups are sane, and when exactly begins paranoia? • Do you want the render files to be included in the Timemachine backup? A Timemachine backup implies that your system's harddrive, your SSD, may fail. Whereas this is possible, a whole different scenario is more likely to happen: Bug infection. Not death, but a condition where you beg for death. You have, for example, some version of FCP X. You are in the midst of editing some projects (which were sequences in older NLEs), and you install a plugin. All of a sudden, FCP X displays the beachball, renders random green or purple frames. You didn't make a Timemachine backup, because you felt secure with an expensive Raid :( . You trash preferences (old first aid remedy), no success, you uninstall the plugin, no success. Hell, the way to restore your project is full of pain. You can better go back to start. Timemachine is your rescue not only with third-party plugins (also, beware, Quicktime-plugins, like Perian), I also don't trust a new version of FCP X. Keep your old versions as backups! I make a Timemachine backup at the end of the day. Additionally, I have a freshly installed system-backup on another drive. And the camera archives on another (the media are on three drives that way!) Use the import-tools of FCPX to filter your usable clips, it helps a lot to save space!

Agreed. No ND, no rig, impressing.

Here it is: http://johnbrawley.wordpress.com/2013/04/24/footage-in-your-pocket/

Because they weren't deemed masterpieces at their time. There have to be things that get lost forever or else we couldn't understand the need to protect the rest. Today films have the best chances ever to survive, because ironically they are stolen and illegaly copied. Torrent archives. The grade of compression applied to these films doesn't matter.

Why should it be archived in the first place? To finally destroy the jobs of the archaeologists? Film/video is not made to last for eternity. If a work of art (I really think of films as art) is any good, it will survive somehow. If not, it will be forgotten in seconds. I am afraid this fate awaits a lot of videos. Interesting side note: It's not the technical quality that makes a work of art unforgettable.

I bet you have iDynamic "on". Then, in shots with great contrasts that would indeed require high dynamic range, the shadows get separately boosted with gain. They get noisy. This gets particularly annoying with brownish tones and with some film modes more than others. Apparently, it's like noisy colored banding, combining all major weaknesses of the GH2. The phenomenon is reproducible under similar conditions. Solution: Turn off iDyn in menu, have no fear to underexpose shadows slightly (watching the histogram) and to bring them back in post (3-way CC, midtones). Use an ND. Outdoors: 'standard' or 'dynamic', everything dialed down.