M Carter

Scored a mint condition FL for $160 or so. Famous back in the day for low distortion; got it mounted on my NX1. It's a big sucker, but I found a focus ring to fit it. So on the NX sensor it's more like a 28mm or so; but yeah, it's pretty flat and sharp enough. A little bowing at the sides, but the left side was inches from the glass... Overall a very flat field... And pretty flares, too: I could see this being nice for interiors where you don't want the fisheye look. Can't wait to try it sometime...

Here's a nice alternative - Hasselblad made a set of 3 4x4 rigid resin soft filters, in light, medium and heavy. They show up on eBay often for $50 or less for the set. Here's the "light" filter (pardon my ugly mug with my slightly hungover saturday morning style - the bartender was verrrry friendly last night). It's really not a bad little filter, but it does look pretty "apparent" compared to modern alternatives: There's a pretty big highlight bloom going on, but in situations without big pinging lights (see the density on the right side of the frame) it looks like something handy to have. At 100% there's good detail smoothing but good sharpness for eye lights.

I have this AE plugin but haven't tested it extensively - it is DEEP, tons of features and settings. But I like the idea of tracking a filter and bringing it down a bit over eyes and teeth. I've got two extensive edits coming up that have lots of interviews so I'll likely put it through its paces - http://invisiblechainsaw.com/variablediffusion/

I may pick up a glimmerglass filter; pretty pricey at $250 for a 4x4 though… but the NX1 is grabbing every detail of skin, I'd like to run some tests. Last week it seemed all I did was interview ladies... Nikkor 85mm 1.8 at F2.8 or so...

Thank you - like I've said in other posts, I find I'm shooting more wide open than in the past. The jump in sharpness from 1.8 to F4 I used to look for, now I'm trying to really push away the sharpness. I think it's time to look into some diffusion, like a glimmerglass or something, been interviewing a lot of ladies lately! I have a set of 70's era hasselblad softs I might test soon, but I expect a modern filter may have a better mix of diffuse and sharpness.

Editready is really a great piece of software. Man, shot some interviews today. I keep thinking to myself "This body was a thousand bucks!!!"

Being happy in your personal life and your job is one of the keys to physical health; not downplaying chronic problems or genetic issues, but if you want to maximize your health, cut the stress, find people and work you enjoy, and take as good care of your body as you can. As for smokes - yeah, I have 3 or 4 a day (nights with a drink, you don't wanna know - I do like my scotch!) But for me, taking that 5 minutes, getting away from the desk... I've had the best ideas, the best sudden solutions to problems, the best insights. Some of that is the drug itself I'm sure, but most is just taking a minute to breathe (ahh, fresh air filtered through a camel!), taking a minute for myself away from the screen. I'm not getting younger and I'd like to be around for my kids for some time so thinking about those smokes - and I suspect that just taking a 5 minute walk around the block would be just as effective... working on that. But hey, we all have moments watching that render bar cross the screen - get AWAY, get OUT, even for 5 minutes, even if there's 5 million things to do that seem important. YOU'RE important. Set your phone to remind you and do it. Try it for a week, and no matter the weather, go OUTSIDE and WALK 100 steps or so. Try it for a week - do it 4 times a day and report back...

What he said. And you're still dealing with 8-bit footage, so trying to get some ultra-flat log-look curve will bite you in the butt at some point. Get close to what your vision for the final look is in the camera and you'll be a lot happier in the long run.

Usually just +3 or so. But if there are deep shadows and your ISO is high, and you have time to fiddle with it… try stuff like bringing up the black and kicking up the sat as well. Thing is, the master black isn't a crazy level of change - on my panasonic broadcast cams, you can gray the image right out. The NX1 doesn't really change as much as some cameras. But it's also not adding light, so it's not a big detail enhancer. But it can give you room to crush a little more, but I'd be wary of skin tones. I haven't tested Neat Video with the NX1 yet, but I'd like to try to force some macroblocking, shoot a noise profile that's pretty dark and see how it goes.

If you don't need full frame (I'm happier with super 35 for video, but I seem to like a more tele look often and I have good wides when needed), the D7200 may be worth a look. Same era-sensor, far as I know, should be a nice jump from the 7100 - just didn't get much attention since it wasn't the D7100 we all wanted (The NX1 was in many ways). But considering how often I shoot corporate as a one man band or just a sound guy, 4K has been a giant leap for me and the NX sensor is amazing for the money.

Everyone seems to say "don't shoot higher than 400 (or 800 or whatever), try to keep it at 100", but compared to every DSLR I've owned, this thing's a low light beast. One of yesterday's shots - I'm pretty sure I was around 1600-2000 iso for this; full frame on the left and a 100% crop on the right, (EOSHD and JPEG compression has added some stairstepping that's not there in the screen grab), but it's very very nice. The thing with this sensor I've found - bring up the master black a bit at high ISOs if the shot can handle it overall; if you're shooting at 400 or higher and, say, your subject has some deep black sweater or something that really just eats up the light, master black will mess with skin tones, so throw up a big sheet or something, crank in some fill and bring your key down a bit. Deep deep blacks have some blocking that H264 delivery seems to just latch onto terribly. Open the blacks where you can crush out the noise and it becomes much better. But it's freaky how punchy and bright a gloomy scene can get with higher ISOs, my experience has been that it's not just a cranked-ISO mush look - with a nice lens, you can get a really sort of "snappy" look. My grip was like "man, do we need to drag some lights in here?" And i was "Look in the VF, dude…"

I've just started playing with Canon FL glass - mid 1960's; they haven't taken off in price like other lenses because they can't mount on Canon with infinity focus; but the NX with its tiny flange focal distance has made glassless adapters available. These are solid metal little tanks and mechanically quite simple, easy to open up and clean but also very tough workhorses. Wondering how those older coatings will render. They have very few 1.8 and faster lenses, probably due to the technology at the time; there's a 58 1.2 and a 50 1.4 (pricey but not insane, cheaper than similar Nikkor primes), the 85 1.8 has a cultish following. I just scored a mint 19mm 3.5R which is "said to be" pretty amazing as far as distortion and optics go (been wanting a nice flat wide for some time and Canon claimed "less than 1%" back in the day, we'll see). Most reviews I've read of FL glass mention sharpness increases at F4 or so, but with the NX1, I'm shooting wide open much more than in the past with my Nikkors; you still get plenty of sharpness but there's a really nice contrast drop and high-key stuff gets a really lovely diffuse look to out of focus highlights (speaking of the Nikkors, not the FL - but my gut feeling is the NX sensor makes many lenses or f-stops that were considered so-so worth a 2nd look, especially for beauty, music vids, artsy editorial-style looks, or docs where you want to add some special sauce beyond straight reality). I need to get someone with nice skin when I have some testing time, but just walking around the studio and the yard, I've been intrigued. They seem to render greens and cooler colors with a very neat look. Only have a 50 and a 35 so far (waiting on the 19) that I've used for B&W film for some time now (still have a working darkroom and I print often) but hopefully I'll post some serious tests before long. Check this out - Nikkor 28-70 2.8, wide open, probably at 60mm or so and about 500 ISO (WHY NO META DATA SAMSUNG?????); gig was shooting some pickup shots at an inner city grocer, short doc about a food-desert program. One of the directors showed up and we grabbed an interview, just using the store's ceiling fluorescents, manually white balanced through an 82A to warm it a bit. Just added levels to the blacks in photoshop for this grab, but I'm still way impressed with the sensor).

Always feels a little odd when people compare a $1k camera (say the NX1) to $6k and up (the Ursa mini with viewfinder and power and media). All my experience tells me - unless you can afford something that does it all - If you're shooting something where extreme dynamic range is needed (resorts/golf courses, high-end real estate interiors with huge window views to hold, or narrative work with lots of outdoor shots), get something that can do raw or red when needed to hold as much highlight and shadow detail as possible. If you don't have lights, get something that shoots clean at high ISOs. If you have some control over your scenes, an NX1 or D750 or whatever should do it. I've done enough music videos and interviews outside where I would have needed big HMIs and generators to hold the sky detail; I'd have loved having something with a hope of hanging onto something up there. But those situations, the client didn't really care or we avoided the shots.

If I had to wager, I'd put my money on that. But even our service economy has businesses with tens of thousands of employees; look at Wal Mart's history of fighting unions, yet they seem to be a prime case where a union could be meaningful. Will it happen? Who knows. But we're talking unionizing pretty crappy, low-pay jobs, not middle-class-creating industries. My kids get it - work hard, avoid debt, live simply and portably. They know how tough it will be to have a good career. Well, my oldest is a paramedic and she may end up with a free education to become an RN… one of the last middle class career paths it seems. My son the animator? He's getting used to a suitcase and a laptop!

I grew up in Detroit, where the unions began as a good thing but eventually became huge and bloated and were cesspools of waste, mixed with valid employee representation; they also became another profit center for organized crime and eventually a parasite on society. I had friends who worked for the big three, and if you had no education, it was considered the holy grail - get unionized, get the benefits, and then learn the ropes of how to do as little work as possible. (Read "RivetHead", an entertaining but depressing memoir from an 80's era GM line worker). It was a big part of why Japan roared into the auto business like it did - Detroit's QC was abysmal and the market came to expect it as part of the deal. I'm sure for smaller businesses there is much more control, and we live in an age where jobs are more scarce and most people know they have to perform well. But the Northern US unions that reached their heyday just as the oil crises and economic decline hit (and made huge industrial and service businesses far more vulnerable to economic decline) gave a bad name to unions; I had a relative with about 20 employees in an industrial setting - he said "the day they unionize is the day I retire!" But he also knew that decent pay and benefits and a good working environment was a key to employee retention. In the US today, where corporate interests and near-oligarchy are where the power for making policy and laws is coming from, unions are a threat to the "winner take all" maximizing of profits and minimizing of pay and benefits to all but the top tier, so they get labeled "socialism" and the failures of unions in the past are constantly brought up. We're probably in an age where unions on a major level could so some serious good; but I can't see it happening with all the money that controls the process. I'm not really worried about terrorism, gay marriage, or the decline of religion in the US; I'm wondering what our country looks like at the natural end of those income-inequality charts. Nothing has stopped the direction those lines are going yet.

I can edit 4k Prores on a 2009 Mac Pro on FCP 6, quad Intel; but it can get a little choppy. But I deliver 1080 so I down convert to 1080 and also put a 4K layer on the timeline; when my cutting is done, I can turn on the 4k layer and do any punch-ins, send 4K to After Effects, etc. (Yeah, there's a new Mac Pro and FCPX in my near future…) I always do my final edit render to prores though and consider it a "master", and then output whatever is needed from that, be it MP4 or 720 H264, etc. Doesn't add much time, though my projects are usually under 10 minutes or so.

I found my loupe would make the camera think my face was up there and trigger the EVF; then I found that the EVF kicks the ass of my loupe… so that problem was solved anyway... (Though there are times I like the loupe for getting my eye to the back of the rig… need to get a rosette setup for my HDMI viewfinder, though if you punch the button a few times it will finally "stick" on the monitor setting… usually...)

Actually the US justice system is the worst one on earth… except for all the other ones.

In after effects, I would just loop something like that - don't know if FCPX has that feature though?

Wish i could save manual WB's on the NX1, too. My Nikons have always had that. I could even name them, have one for my old-yellowed softbox with speedotrons even (for product stills).

I'm sure we all remember the $500 pocket cam. Which set the internet aflame - "The pocket is discontinued! Here comes the pocket 2, I bet it will be a bigger sensor and have bla, bla, and bla!!!" Lasted about a week, right?

Another bonus for the swatch books - if your camera has a small detection area (like the Nikons with manual and the NX1) you just need to cover that area of the lens. Even with a deep matte box, I can hold a circular filter and just cover the sensing area and it's good. My bigger video cams seem to be the whole sensor though.

I once white balanced to an orange bottle of hand cleaner in an industrial shoot to get a really deep green-blue. It would have been way too far a push in post for an 8-bit file. I've always thought it would be handy to have a little book of painted cards in warm and cool tones; since WB is a combo of tint and temp, you could get some more variants beyond just color temp. (Though I like how the NX1 lets you adjust both matrixes independently and manually).

When manually balancing for daylight sources like LEDs or Kinos - I always keep an 82A filter and balance through that (and then I put it away). Gives a nice warmth that doesn't look tungsten-ish. Tried balancing through 1/4 CTB, but I'd always lose my little scrap of gel; but I found an old 77mm from the film days and keep it with my 4x4's, doubt I'll ever use it as I only shoot B&W film. Am I the only one who does this? I find that in post, I'm always pushing some warmth into my skin tones, I do this for interviews every time now.

Thanks - still, there were no boobies or 'splosions. Here's a poster I made, now someone write the damn script please?? Or I'll settle for a treatment for this one. And a cast list??