29 Ways to Stay Creative

Stuck in a funk, creatively speaking? Here’s some ideas to break out of the old. Watch below…

Gear In 60: Travel Lighting & Grip Kit

I travel a lot for simple sit-down interview shoots, and commonly need to fly with a lightweight lighting and support kit for DSLR or small HD cameras. Here are two videos from our new FreshDV Gear In 60 Seconds series that talk about the two Pelican gear cases I often fly with, and the affordable tools inside. Watch below.

Shutter Speed vs FPS

Here’s a short video tutorial on the topic of Shutter Speed, which is at times confused with Frames Per Second. The tutorial is from a DSLR shooting series by the University of Waterloo, and it’s a good primer on the topic. You can watch it below.

Which ProRes quality level is Good Enough when editing DSLR footage?

So I wanted to share some personal findings after working heavily with DSLRs for about a year and a half now. I’ve been converting most of my DSLR footage to ProRes LT for post-production, and have found it to be a good size-to-quality happy medium. In most cases, my projects will end up on DVD, web, or some kind of Standard Definition delivery, so LT allows me to strike a quality compromise that tends to be invisible after output. Even for HD applications, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find visible quality issues when editing with ProRes LT, assuming that you aren’t pushing the image too much in color-correction and grading. And let’s be honest, you probably shouldn’t be heavily grading DSLR footage anyway…for as much as I love DSLRs, the footage doesn’t like to be pushed hard. Read on…

Constructing a helmet cam

Stillmotion has a blog post up with info on how they pulled together a makeshift DSLR helmet camera for POV shots. They built it around a standard skateboard helmet and a Canon T2i, with the addition of one of those el-cheapo wireless video monitors (I snagged one a while back, and it works great for the money). Head on over to their blog for more info and pictures.

10 Screenwriting Tips from Joss Whedon

Yeah, that title got your attention didn’t it! Over at Scriptwriting in the UK there’s a nice post with ten detailed tips on screenwriting, by none other than geek-filmmaker darling Joss Whedon. And a damn fine collection of tips indeed. My personal favorite is #5…quoted below:

Canon 7D DSLR Operation 101

Everyone’s favorite video DSLR advocate, Tyler Ginter, has produced another video tutorial similar to his last (that one concentrated on the 5D MKII). This new tutorial focuses on the basics of how to set up and how to shoot video on the Canon 7D. In this tutorial, Tyler takes all the pain and suffering out of the menu and settings configuration process. If you want to get the fast track on how to shoot with the 7D, watch the video below…

DSLR Video and Aliasing Artifacts

If you are shooting video with one of the hot new DSLRs, you are probably aware of the aliasing issues found in some of your footage. If not yet, you will at some point. Just keep shooting, it will show up. Fine detail aliasing has always been an issue for any camera system, but it’s particularly prevalent in DSLRs as they lack an Optical Low Pass Filter (OLPF) that is specifically tuned for video. In the case of the 5D & 7D, engineers at Canon have also chosen to sample a limited number of lines from the image sensor to downsample to 1080p. This is quick solution, but not the highest quality way of doing things; it creates aliasing image artifacts, and reportedly limits the resolution of the cameras at around 720p. It’s almost as if these tools were primarily designed as still cameras! How strange. At any rate, I’ve learned to warn my clients before interview shoots not to wear shirts with fine detail patterns, as they will moiré faster than you can say “how the hell do you pronounce that word?”

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