Arri Alexa, RED Epic and Blackmagic Cinema Camera compared - video tests!

Arri Alexa, RED Epic and Blackmagic Cinema Camera compared - video tests! - motionVFX Blog:
"Some Like It RAW" is a mini-series of test videos, that tries to compare three great video cameras - the Arri Alexa, Blackmagic Cinema Camera, and the Red Epic. The goal of these tests was to explore how each camera handles real world shooting environments. All tests were performed by Ryan E. Walters, who is an award-winning cinematographer who did feature films, documentaries, commercials, and shooting for Comcast, TLC, Oxygen, and the Discovery Channel.His first video test was published a week ago and it focused on the IR filtration using Schneider ND's along with the Schneider IR Tuner Kit. The second video examines and compares how each of the three cameras performs in low light. Let's start with the newest test:

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Ingest Options in Adobe Prelude

Ingest Options in Adobe Prelude:
Learn how to ingest your video footage into Adobe Prelude. Prelude provides multiple encoding options to do instant backups and streamline your video editing workflow.

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Tip: How to Save Your Work When After Effects Freezes

Tip: How to Save Your Work When After Effects Freezes:
OK– so you’ve been working on your 99 layered After Effects project for an hour now and suddenly…that $%^& beachball pops up!  Your After Effects project has frozen in its tracks!  And you’ve forgotten to save all that hard work…
What to do?

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Avid DNxHD vs. Apple ProRes vs. GoPro Cineform: Recompression Generation Loss

Avid DNxHD vs. Apple ProRes vs. GoPro Cineform: Recompression Generation Loss:
If you have a properly tuned post production workflow then the amount of times you’ll recompress an intermediate video is zero or once; the most common case is recompressing assets like intros, bumpers, motion graphics, and others once they make their way into a final program.

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Learn everything about the H.264 encoder - parameters, best tools and more!

Learn everything about the H.264 encoder - parameters, best tools and more!:
The H.264 is now probably the most popular video compression standard for online video publishing and if you post your works to Vimeo, you probably encode them in H.264. After editing and grading your footage you want to publish your video with the best quality possible, but there's always an important enemy - compression. So, how to take profit of the great possibilities of H.264 if you don't want to wait for the H.265 standard?

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Make it Beautiful: The Workflow of a Professional Film and Video Colorist

Make it Beautiful: The Workflow of a Professional Film and Video Colorist - Power To Create TV:
Our recent guest Robbie Carman of Amigo Media shared a lot  of insight into the world of professional film and video.  He also wanted to give you an idea of what his work environment looks like.“Well I like gear!  In reality my gear is separated into several categories,” said Carman.  “A decade ago, the color correction systems that were in use were between half a million to a million dollars.”

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Archiving Video With HP's New LTO-6 Ultrium 6250 Tape Drive : Archiving and Back-Up

Archiving Video With HP's New LTO-6 Ultrium 6250 Tape Drive : Archiving and Back-Up:
I've been using LTO since 2009, when I started shooting on P2 cards and wanted a bullet-proof way to save client footage. At the time, the LTO format was in its 4th iteration (LTO-4), which was categorized by tapes that could store about 800GB of raw data, and read/write up to 120MB/s. Since '09, there's been an LTO-5 iteration (1.6 TB capacity with 140MB/s data rate), and now, just in the last couple of months, HP has released the industry's first desktop LTO-6 drive, the StoreEver Ultrium 6250. The 6250 can store 2.5 TB of raw data per tape, hit data rates of 160MB/s, with tape longevity up to 30 years.

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AE: Inverse Kinematic Character Animation : Adobe After Effects Tutorial

AE: Inverse Kinematic Character Animation : Adobe After Effects Tutorial:
Standard character animation in After Effects uses a process called 'Forward Kinematics' in that we animate down a linked chain - for example, upper arm linked to forearm linked to hand. To get animation we need to move the items down the chain one at a time. Inverse Kinematics creates a link back up the chain such that moving the hand would also move the forearm and the upper arm without breaking that link. This is a simpler and easier to control form of animation often used in 3D programs such as C4D and 3ds max etc. and allows us to control the animation for the complete chain through a single controller.

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Newton 2 Is An Incredible Physics Engine for After Effects

Newton 2 Is An Incredible Physics Engine for After Effects | Premiumbeat.com:
Motion Boutique has released Newton 2, a physics engine for creating realistic motion and animations in After Effects.

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מהפכני הפלאגאין הזה. Newton בשילוב עם Element3D יכול לחסוך הון בעבודה בתוכנת תלת מימד.

מדהים!

RED Epic versus Blackmagic Cinema Camera - workflow, footage quality and more!

RED Epic versus Blackmagic Cinema Camera - workflow, footage quality and more!: Andrew Reid posted a great comparison of the Blacmagic Cinema Camera and the RED Epic. A really interesting and informative material especially that many filmmakers wonder how the BMCC compares to a film industry standard. The RED Epic is obviously great, but isn't cheap, it also shoots 5K. Nevertheless the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is also pretty great. Andrew did many tests and he found out, that the BMCC can perform amazingly good - he found the low light performance astounding for such a small sensor.

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Super-Easy EDL Workflow in SpeedGrade

Super-Easy EDL Workflow in SpeedGrade:
We’ve written about how to get content into SpeedGrade, and have described the EDL Conform process in previous posts, but SpeedGrade has one more EDL trick up its sleeve that I think many of you will love. This one is about as easy as it gets.

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Make it Beautiful: The Workflow of a Professional Film and Video Colorist

Make it Beautiful: The Workflow of a Professional Film and Video Colorist - Power To Create TV:
Our recent guest Robbie Carman of Amigo Media shared a lot of insight into the world of professional film and video. He also wanted to give you an idea of what his work environment looks like.“Well I like gear! In reality my gear is separated into several categories,” said Carman. “A decade ago, the color correction systems that were in use were between half a million to a million dollars.”

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Media Composer 6.5.2 ‒ Consolidate QuickTime ProRes

Media Composer 6.5.2 ‒ Consolidate QuickTime ProRes - Media Composer Family:
QuickTime ProRes can now be consolidated like any other native codec, and has an increased playback performance of up to 4 streams in real-time at full quality. If your workflows involve AMA linking to ProRes media you can now consolidate them into an MXF wrapped file for quickly checking into Interplay or to become Avid native managed media. With the performance fixes, the consolidation process is very quick, as if you were copying the media. Also whether you are AMA linking or having native ProRes media, the playback performance has also been fixed to get up to 4 streams of playback depending on your storage performance.

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How To: Do ArriRAW Properly Part One

How To: Do ArriRAW Properly Part One: Skyfall used ArriRAW to set it’s look.After the release of Gambit last November, written by the Coen brothers and directed by Michael Hoffman, 4K London look at the ArriRAW workflow they used and how to gain the best results from this film-esque digital format.  In Part Two 4K London look more at the Post route of ArriRAW.

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CacheIO, Quantum, MTI Film Team to Demonstrate 4K Streaming at HPA Technology Retreat

CacheIO, Quantum, MTI Film Team to Demonstrate 4K Streaming at HPA Technology Retreat:
CacheIO, the Flash storage technology company, has teamed with Quantum, provider of StorNext shared file system software, and MTI Film, a Hollywood-based postproduction services provider and software developer. This alliance will demonstrate its joint system for uncompressed 4K streaming at the Hollywood Post Alliance Technology Retreat taking place Monday through Friday. The HPA demo will highlight the capabilities of MTI Film’s new dailies workflow, Cortex::Control Dailies.

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Diary of an Avid Switcher - Part 1 - Humble Beginnings

Diary of an Avid Switcher - Part 1 - Humble Beginnings | Jonny Elwyn - Film Editor:
I bought Avid over Christmas, making the most of Videoguys crossgrade deal, and finally installed Avid Media Composer 6.5.2 in the new year. The download and install process from the Avid site was very easy. I had scoured the net to see if anyone else had installed AMC 6.5 on Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and so far I’ve not had any problems, so that’s my first tip.

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Canon Cinema RAW Development Software

Canon Cinema RAW Development Software | CineTechnica:
Canon has released their very easy to use Cinema RAW Development software for Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion, which allows you to ingest, play, and export Canon RAW files. The user interface is very intuitive; just click on a clip and it immediately shows up in the Preview window. You can play it straight, scrub, go through it frame by frame, and set in and out points. The Preview window also includes some basic look controls, such as viewing gammas, sharpness, white balance, and brightness controls. There is also the ability to view frame and clip information. You can also use the software to play your footage out to an external monitor using an expansion card with SDI output.

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Pitch Perfect takes advantage of P3 Colorspace

Pitch Perfect takes advantage of P3 Colorspace:
Targeting the DCI-P3 color spec, which is the native colorspace for digital cinema projection, allows for a much wider contrast and color gamut than a traditional film-targeted workflow, and we took full advantage of that for this film.  The highlights of the film take place on a colorful stage with moving lights and flashy performances.  With all the saturated blues and reds, film prints can’t always handle that kind of rich color detail.

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An introduction to LTFS for digital media

An introduction to LTFS for digital media | Archive Management content from Broadcast Engineering:
LTO tape is already firmly established in the media production environment. For production, LTFS efficiently supports several important requirements such as camera media resuse, backup, transport, direct access to data and archiving.

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Digital Cinematography vs Film: Tides are Turning

Digital Cinematography vs Film: Tides are Turning:
As I embark on a long creative, exciting journey on Need for Speed with DreamWorks, I wanted to share some of my most recent findings from a five day camera test that pushed every camera to its breaking point. Our final choice was a three camera collaborative for the look and feel of this film.

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Log vs. Raw: The Simple Version by Art Adams

Log vs. Raw: The Simple Version by Art Adams:
Raw is all the rage, but should it be? Log gives us 99% of the benefit of a raw file in a grade but with much smaller files.

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Avid Whitepaper: Digital Cinema Camera Workflows

Videoguys Blog - Avid Whitepaper: Digital Cinema Camera Workflows:
With the ability to track multiple sources and timecodes, combined with AMA and open standards such as MXF, AAF, and DNxHD, Media Composer and Symphony give you the most flexibility in the post-production pipeline. Finishing and mastering can all be done directly within Avid products, or easily transported to third-party systems—or a hybrid between the two. The editorial process may seem complicated at first when dealing with high-resolution formats, but careful planning heads off any of the issues that may arise. Consult with all parties involved in both the production and post-production process for picture and sound to ensure that everyone is on the same page before the cameras roll or, in the file-based world, before the production capture process begins.

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Log Gamma Vs. Linear Gamma: A Primer

Log Gamma Vs. Linear Gamma: A Primer:
With the Sony F5 and F55 coming down the pipeline, cinematographer Art Adams, on behalf of Pro Video Coalition, decided to revisit the differences between log gamma and linear gamma in a simple and informative way.
While Sony’s cameras may use S-Log and S-Log2, you’ll run into log encoding in other formats like DPX/Cineon. It’s important to get a grip on why log encoding out of the camera is useful and why we need viewing LUTs for the footage to look normal on a Rec. 709 monitor.


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A Guide to Common Video Formats: Containers, Compression, and Codecs

A Guide to Common Video Formats: Containers, Compression, and Codecs:
MOV, H.264, AVCHD, MP4, AVI, the list goes on and on with so many letters of the alphabet. What video format should I use? What codec do I need? These questions come up all the time online and in conversation. This guide will demystify some of the most common formats and codecs used in the film industry while ignoring the formats that are uncommon, academic curiosities, or telecom based.

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Adobe SpeedGrade CS6 – Can Color Grading Go Mainstream?

Adobe SpeedGrade CS6 – Can Color Grading Go Mainstream? » NYC Production & Post News:
For years the Production Premium version of Creative Suite gave you what you needed to author a complete video production. While it didn’t offer a specialized tool that could craft color with as much finesse as Photoshop, many were happy with what Premiere Pro offered in terms of basic color correction. As Adobe pointed out in their tutorials, to finish your Premiere project you could get pretty respectable results simply using that app’s Fast Color Corrector and RGB Curves.

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Saving Autosaves Into Individually Compressed Archives

Saving Autosaves Into Individually Compressed Archives:
It's not too hard to just right click on the whole Autosave Vault folder and compress it into a .zip archive. On my drive here my Autosave Vault folder is about 4GBs, compressed though it's 291MBs. That's a huge amount of space saved. But it's also messy if you want to just get at one particular project's autosave (.fcp) folder.

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Over 6 Hours of Free Colour Grading & VFX Training

Over 6 Hours of Free Colour Grading & VFX Training:
If you want over 6 hours of free training on professional color grading and compositing techniques and generally how to make the most Assimilate Scratch’s finishing capabilities then these tutorials from Mike Burton and cmiVFX will do just the trick.

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How To Share Projects Between Multiple Smoke Systems

How To Share Projects Between Multiple Smoke Systems | Premiumbeat.com:
There is a concept in the 2013 releases of Smoke and the 2013 Extension 2 release of Flame Premium of WORKSPACES. Workspaces allows 2 or more different Smoke or Flame systems to access and work on the same project at the same time, using the same clips.  In the Project hierarchy, a Workspace will fall in-between the Project and the Media Library.  Each Smoke or Flame system connected to the same project at the same time, will create it’s own workspace.

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DaVinci Resolve Workflows

DaVinci Resolve Workflows:
Blackmagic Design’s purchase of DaVinci Systems put a world class color grading solution into the hands of every video professional. With Resolve 9, DaVinci sports a better user interface that makes it easy to run, regardless of whether you are an editor, colorist or DIT working on set. 

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How to create .tar files for all folders under a directory

How to create .tar files for all folders under a directory:
I have hundreds of project directories under one folder. Now I want to create .tar files for these projects. Is is fairly easy to tar multiple directories to one .tar file:

tar cvf /myStorage/allProjects.tar project1 project2 project3 project4

But I needed one .tar file per project. To keep .tar files seperate. So I needed to have:

/myStorage/project1.tar
/myStorage/project2.tar
/myStorage/project3.tar
/myStorage/project4.tar

To accomplish this, I needed to write a bash script:

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The New Low-Bandwidth HEVC/H.265 Video Coding Standard

The New Low-Bandwidth HEVC/H.265 Video Coding Standard:

New Technology Is Said to Require Half the Bit Rate of H.264 at Same Quality Levels

The ITU has approved the new High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) for high-quality, low-bandwidth video. The new standard, also known as H.265, will require about half the bit rate of its predecessor, H.264/AVC, the ITU said.

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Case Study: After Effects Rigging with a Segmented Puppet

Case Study: After Effects Rigging with a Segmented Puppet | Premiumbeat.com:
Interested in creating animations in After Effects?  This video tutorial shows you a real-world case study of a complex character rig in AE.  Learn how to modify elements and create realistic motion.

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