Axel

Even if you had a real steadicam, a full rig, the takes hadn't been any more stable. As I see it, there are other aspects that give hints - subliminally or directly - that these are actually very stable handheld shots.   You dodge the people, you scan for motifs. A dolly shot, a long travelling shot, a plan-séquence, gives you the impression that the camera is heading straight along an even path, as if on rails.   In the Steadicam Merlin manual the inventor Garrett Brown elaborates on a few principles that make an already steady shot look even more elegant:   > Keep the camera on the same level all the time (rule of thirds, one can use the grids for proportions). > Use tilts only as vertical pans without other movements. > An exception is, if you need to climb stairs. Then you have to find a way to smoothly keep the 'horizon' on the same level again. > Now there are steadicam shots that look like jib shots, combining tilts with forward or backward movements, but they usually don't work off the cuff, they need to be planned, tested asf.   That said, I find you are very good at what you do.

Dreamy music, low framerate, much flickering and dirty slomo, you must have some drug experience ;-) I like it.

Well done! I particularly loved the vertical pan with the slight stuttering, very cinematic.

Telling for the future of cinema. Why don't those story-wise timeless re-releases gross the big money they used to? It's because very many already own a pretty good copy to watch on a pretty good, pretty big display. There are, say, alternative ways to distribute a film than through cinema or DVD/BD-sales. Historically, the blockbuster-syndrom started with Star Wars IV, among all little stars on the movie canopy this was the Death Star. Now, if we don't re-discover the small, intelligent films, cinema will be dead, in the not so far, far future.

Your clients have no inkling of how persuasion works. People hesitating to undergo any of the advertised treatments need to feel the good vibrations, not fear to be led to the poison death penalty room (cause that was my first impression, and I bet I'm not too different from the rest, just look at the the beheaded skeleton between the beds: weight loss? Oh yeah!). The receipt for a good promotion is simple: Cut away the bad aspects, show only the positive results. Difficult without beautiful, happy people? Impossible.   But: I have done the exact same thing for a dentist. I showed him the clip, the rooms were more friendly, with a lot of modern art surrounding the instruments. I told him, I wouldn't recommend to put the video on his homepage, because it still was a torture chamber, and we needed really some relaxed faces to get this impression fixed, but he didn't give in. Next time, I promised myself, I wouldn't commit to anything of that kind.

I had the same thing with the GH2 once with a fast non-MFT-lens, a Nikon 50mm f1.4. Every light produced a glow, and the whole image was too soft (not seen on the Sony Monitor I had attached via HDMI). My mistake: I didn't make night-testshots in advance. I did later and found, that the lens was only usable @f2.0 and further. You should have closed the aperture one stop and increase the iso instead. Very fast lenses tend to produce softer images at wide open. The best sharpness for MFT seems to be 3.5 or 4. At f8, the DOF gets deeper, of course, but details may be lost. It depends, as you say, on the lens. Tests are needed to know for sure.

  I agree. There are more 'tests' on vimeo (and more on youtube) that are the peak of what the creator is capable of than experiments for future masterpieces. By labelling the videos tests the publisher anticipates harsh comments that could hurt his feelings. I also hesitate to upload anything of my amateurish stuff for the same reason.      What I like about them is, they are fun to watch, because they play with the tricks. They prove nothing, but they didn't claim to do.    We have three cats, and they like cameras, coming close and purring. But never would I expose them to the public, because I do respect their personal rights  ;)   What I do quite often is to capture small, personal events, like any other amateur, but more often I choose not to upload that, with very few exceptions: http://vimeo.com/29954680   I did an awful lot of wedding videos and continue to do so, but of course these are too private to publish. I often do second camera for music videos, most of which never see the light of day.

The quest for the filmlook of course renders the whole crusade against the insulting word 'filming' pointless. A digital intermediate, used for 99% of all feature films of the last ten years, after grading is absolutely indistinguishable from modern digital video with same post applied. There is of course the theoretically better DR, but look at the Zacuto shootout and what place the GH2 reached between Alexa and Epic. And what is more, stylish grading means reducing tonal values to a degree where, again, a higher DR seldom shows. Owner of both, I don't understand what you mean by saying the GH2 provided the better filmlook than the GH3. The filmlook is not generated by the camera, you said so yourself.

I agree. In my favorite film, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray gets the chance to 'redo' every action. Creativity founded on experience is the best. Routine mustn't be a contradiction to artistic freedom. One objection I have is that watching test shots of others doesn't help me as much as making them myself. This is, because the circumstances differ too much, and to learn something and know it by heart means having it done yourself. What I often think when viewing test shots is, 'he could have done better'. Or, 'how on earth did he do this?' Then I rise from my armchair.

To 4k sth would be least telling verb for what one actually tries to achieve. I am as much rooted in analog audio-visual communications as possible and used to think of digital video as the poor mans film. Now that celliloid/acetate/polyester are history, there will be new things to explore, and within ten or twenty years from now the 'films' ( completely irrelevant at which resolution) might no longer resemble those of today. Pioneers will use techniques that are digital-only and add new vocabulary to the language.

A new name should be found. I don't like the name 'video' personally, because it derives from an unfitting historical background. From when 'video' meant recordings of events, not creating and editing images. But the name 'film' will only cease to be generally used once the videomakers stop looking for cinematic travesty. And this will take a long time, unless you and the other 'pioneers' are just about to change this. On wednesday, a local TV-team made a report about my restaurant, with a C500 and a 5D. I didn't see the finished video yet, but I saw clearly that they tried hard to make it look like film. Everybody does, if I didn't miss the latest trend.

So noted. Maybe that 'filming' instead of 'recording video' (or what?) is a germanism. The sloppyness of my native language is notorious. I didn't mean to imply anything. Or did you make a joke? Sigh, I am lost with the niceties of english ...

Simply by >effects >stylize >film grain >realistic grain (as opposed to iMovie grain) >amount between 5 - 12%. BTW & OT: With Motion 5 as a developer tool for FCP X effects, much more could be rigged. So for example the complex filters of the 'Film Convert' plugin. It takes into account that analog color film stock is composed of three layers of colors (not channels) resp. layers of colored grain, magenta, cyan and yellow, with different characteristics, depending on the emulsions speed, and that the three layers have a slightly different focus. My opinion is, that mimicking a certain film stock is useless though, because we live in a digital world, and we only fine-tune a look with such filters. You make the project setting ProRes or ProResHQ, then you export as 'original'. Or specifically ProRes (Compressor preset, since 10.6 to be saved in the share menu). I think the best way is to install the free MpegStreamclip, download the free X264 QT-encoder-component (I use this one). You open the master with MpegStreamclip, then you export as mp4 and choose 'X264 encoder'. If you downscale 1080 to 720 for vimeo, check 'better downscaling' in MSC, avoids scaling artifacts (moire!

@Blanche View some tutorials on color grading with the on-board tools of FCP X (skip the ones that suggest you can do without the scopes or use automatic functions or match colors). I disagree with every single post that says you create one preset and paste it. Why? Because your already good images can be so much improved by thorough grading. Do it as the last step, after editing is finished. It should take a minute or two for every clip. NEVER 'share' your film directly 'for vimeo', because that means, that the inferior Quicktime H.264 encoder is used, and the film is simplified too much. The fade in at the beginning shows 'temporal banding'. You can avoid it completely, if you put a very subtle amount of grain on top of this clip, export as ProRes master and encode an x264 mp4 (for the vimeo upload) with the free x264 encoder from the high quality master.

  I had a Bolex 16mm with spring mechanism, very dark reflex viewfinder and an additional parallax viewfinder (being just what the term implies, a viewfinder). You could use film with different speeds. Quite impossible. There was no actual WYSIWYG. Yet, it was a 'run&gun' camera, a reporter's camera. I had the background and experience to judge the exposure (which only meant the aperture, because shutter angle and Iso were fixed). It's not as hard as it sounds.   Today, with our digital cameras, the preview we get during recording may not be perfect, but compared to the guessing of those analog-mechanic times, it is close to perfect. Does the doctor still use the stethoscope when the patient is monitored by the computer already?

She felt like a real woman finallly, after having the sex change to a man undone. The experience added organic credibility.

It was "Glockendichtung", but you won't find the correct item via Google. My advice is, go to a local hardware store, sanitary equipment department, look out for items that look appropriate. If it is sorted the same way, you may find three sizes, buy them all, they cost next to nothing and try to make them fit at home.

Yes, Glenn, people tell me I don't know the first thing about economics. 3D pushed digitalization and saved the cinema. I appreciate that much. Sales of bluray discs show a growing percentage of 3D. I guess plastic toys of Wolverine offered at McDonald's also statistically do better. I scanned the list of films about to be presented in 3D, and all I think is, why isn't there anything new? I don't say this is a hundred percent junk list, but I'm not looking forward to any one of them either. And if I would, I wished it was 2D. I was very anxious to see Prometheus, for example, but I was deeply disappointed. A good film doesn't need 3D, a bad film in 3D is like a foul fish covered with ketchup. Economically 3D may not yet be dead. What am I talking about? Nothing a stockholder could understand, so I give up.

3D is so ridiculously unrealistic, it always reminds me of the shaking seats in Matinee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4CaxFU56iI   Like Dracula, the count you can count on from time to time, 3D is going to take a rest. Will it be 30 years? 50 years? Who knows? People are not getting smarter. Before they do, they die, and the next generation falls for it again.   Clearly the days of two-dimensional images were over!

  Although I have the GH3 now, I keep the GH2, mainly for the reason that it has this better viewfinder. Right now I plan to make a new eyepiece. I bought a hotshoe-adapter, and my idea is to shove an eyepiece on the hotshoe with 1 cm distance to the EVF, covering it perfectly, and really soft.    Imho, the GH2s display is not sufficient for focussing, and the magnifiers shown above don't look ergonomic. But to 'judge exposure' there is great tool that never fails: The histogram.

Really GH2? I thought it was the RX-100. Lenses?

Beautiful.

Beautiful pans. Not sure what to think about the split screen. My first reaction was to find it distracting. With shorts on the internet first reactions are often last reactions, because people skip. 

You could stay with FCS3 and use FCP X for editing only. Both can live on the same system volume (you put FCP7 in a new folder in applications). With the 50 $ software 7toX (Appstore) you can translate your FCP X projects as FCP 7 sequences. No need for DaVinci, since you can send the FCP7 sequence directly to Color. I explained Color to a few beginners and it took an hour. It's extremely powerful. FCS3 runs on Mountain Lion, but you could ask yourself how long it will be supported. This is a question I can't answer. Without FCS, you'd need either at least Magic Bullet for FCP X or learn DaVinci, and it requires quite a fast Mac to run smoothly. As Xavier wrote, FCP 7 and Premiere are more similar than dissimilar. This didn't change with CS6. Everybody raves about Premiere's speed, it's real time performance with AVCHD and all that. But it has no chance against the editing tools of FCP X (more on the differences here) , the way it gives you access to your footage, the way it let's you build projects whose complexity you don't even feel or see (only if you transform them to the track-structure you are used to). Easily synchronizes your external audio. Very easy multicam editing. Easiest and high quality chroma keying. If FCP X alone is already enough? Not yet for me, but I am confident this will change. Some day. After Effects: The one argument for CS6. What offers AAE that Motion doesn't? • The Mocha tracker. You'd never go back to a stupid point-tracker if you tried it once. • The warp-stabilizer. Making less jello of your shaky clips than the Apple-stabilizers like Smoothcam. • The roto brush. Makes rotoscoping a lot easier (but still tricky) • The puppet tool. Automates parenting and combines it with • morphing Others will add more features. You should find out, if you can abstain from them. My friend uses CS5.5 on Windows. He detests FCP X. I know threads that turned into flamewars over the right system. It's not worth it. Hear others out, and make your decision, you can't be wrong after all.

If Premiere was the winner, you didn't need a Mac. A powerful new Mac and inexpensive FCP X will equal a self-configured Windows-PC with costly CS6.   Decide by the numbers. Make a list of the things you expect your new workstation to perform. Publish it here, and let the experienced users comment.