Mike on the scene at NAB

Hey all - just a quick note to let you know I’ll be at the NAB show - today is Saturday, and I’m just sitting down at the Digital Cinema Summit to take notes on…whatever they are going to talk about next.

I’ll be bouncing between this and the Digital Tech Guru panels today/tomorrow, with maybe some DP panels as well - gotsta get me 5 minutes to see the schedules, work has been INSANELY busy this week (another post entirely).

Monday morning first thing I have an interview with Ted Schilowitz in the Red booth, and with anticipation of Scarlett (“professional, handheld camera”), 4K displays, 4K projectors, 4K distribution system, and a new Red reel I’ve been seeing pieces of for a few months, should be a helluva show.

I’ll be abusing my access priviledges to get in bright and early…for your benefit.

I’m also, through work, going to be spending some time with the Codex and S.two booths, they should both have some very interesting announcements, and other stuff as well of course.

It’ll be an interesting show with both Apple and Avid off the floor. I noticed Apple shipped Final Cut Server quietly last week, and Avid had some good announcements too.

: )

-mike

UPDATE - aaaaaaand then work intervened. I took some demo footage over to the Band Pro booth, and Randy Wedick and Michael Bravin gave me a quickie look-see at the new Sony F35 camera. It is the Genesis sensor (striped CCD) 35mm sized, with a PL mount, on what is otherwise an F23 body. Better brains behind it, so some image enhancements in the circuitry. More later.

I also got a quickie looksee at the Angineux Rouge lens, I will HAFTA check me out that! Aimed at the Red camera crowd.

-mike, yet again

Red “Mythbusting” Video

RED / RED Mythbusters

Ted Schilowitz sat down with Michael from Plaster City and did some mythbusting, to show that:

1.) You can play back on a Mac straight from the footage from camera
2.) You can drop that footage straight into Final Cut Pro
3.) You can play it back in Final Cut Pro without transcoding, and
4.) You can edit that footage, straight from camera

They shot it with two cameras, and walk you through the whole thing in real time. A good demo to see how it really does.

Caveats - you need a FAST machine - 8 core Mac Pro strongly recommended. You don’t get much in the way of realtime performance - you can play and you can cut.

BUT…it works! It is quick and easy if you need to cut stuff in a hurry AND have a fast box.

Link at top of article takes you to page on Red’s site that has small and large versions.

-mike

Crimson - third party Red application to help with workflow

Just so’s I’m first to call it - what we’ve been waiting for - Crimson - a helper app to help get conformed clips from Final Cut to Redcine and back, with just the parts we want and need in order. I’m doodlin’ with it, will have a report.

Huh? Whazzat? Whachoo talkin’ bout, Willis? Here’s how he describes it:

Crimson Workflow™ is a tool for transforming sequences created in popular Non-Linear Editing Software, such as Final Cut Pro, Avid and Premiere. It allows proxies, and offline material to be replaced by higher quality material, by efficiently managing the use of two software products distributed by the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, namely Redline and Redcine.

Crimson Workflow™ leverages many tools for troubleshooting less than perfect metadata and file structures giving the user tools to properly reconnect to original material. It also facilitates the use of Redcine after, rather than before editing a project.
Crimson Workflow™ is targeted at smaller productions and individuals. But you might find it useful, no matter how large your production.

What the software will EVENTUALLY do for you (under development, not feature complete yet, this from Ian Bloom’s site):

If you buy this software today, you can expect the following features to be enabled in the near future:

Loading and Saving Workflow Templates
Undo and Redo enabled
Support for AVID XML sequences
Support for Premiere XML sequences
Support for CMX 3600 EDLs
Blind Color Correction Tools Completed
Blind Framing Tools Completed
Support for GlueTools™
Support for the application formerly known as RedTools
Proper handling of speed changes and reverse in XML sequences.
Trimmed R3D Intermediates (as soon as a tool is available)
Timecode and R3D Metadata awareness.
Python Scripting Enabled

Verr Verr Promising.

I first saw it at the Los Angeles Red User Group, as demo’d by Mark and Aldey from OffHollywood, my friends from the East Coast that you may recall I went with when they got the very first Reds ever shipped. They worked with Ian quite a bit to get this software developed, giving feedback and spending a lot of time to get this done.

-mike

-mike

Quick update - Red One now shoots 2K at 120 fps - sample included

Just a quick note - Red released firmware build 15 last Thursday, which included a BUNCH of new features like multiple simultaneous video outputs (finally!), Look import and export (camera settings can be moved camera to camera and backed up on computer), and OH YEAH BABY - an increase of the maximum frame rate at 2K resolution from 75 to a whopping 120 frames per second!

The above is just a quickie timeline export from proxies on the timeline - I shot it “plain,” not tweaking the on camera settings, nor adjusting them in Red Alert - consider this a flat transfer - so no kvetching about the contrast and saturation, mmmkay?

: )

OK - SO HOW ABOUT 480 FRAMES PER SECOND?

Well, Red can’t do that - we’ve already achieved maximum framerate possible at this resolution. So how do we push further?

I then doodled with retiming it, to slow it down even further - here’s a shot (ignore the clipped highlights, result of some LUT doodling I was doing):

Note that this shot is used in the above cut as well - gives you an idea how far things can be pushed for saturation and look. The LUT I was messing with clipped highlights, I didn’t bother to go back in and try to retrieve them.

...and here’s the same shot, using After Effects’ pixel motion vector juju, to make it 4 times longer, effectively 480fps.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!

: D

I also attended the first Los Angeles Red User Group meeting, I’ll write up all the cool 3rd party hardware and software I saw in another post.

UPDATE - here’s a different bigger better longer one, 1000 pixels wide

Personal update - I’m moving to Los Angeles

Hey all - this isn’t industry news, just personal. I’m moving to Los Angeles to be more of a part of what I’ve been writing about for the past four years - digital moviemaking. I talk about it here, if you’re interested.

Red One Unboxing - Part 1

Fedex delivered my Red, #417, on Monday to my friend’s house since I was out of town (as pre-arranged with Red). The plan had been for me to drive over, set it up, and shoot some 4K footage of his kids (twin boys). Didn’t quite work out that way, but read on.

I got over there and started unpacking everything - and there’s lots to it! I had three boxes of stuff from Red.

Blu-ray Won - What’s Next For…

As I guessed (once it was getting pretty obvious), Blu-ray has won the high definition optical disc format war. After Warners announced they were going exclusively Blu-ray, then Netflix, Best Buy, Blockbuster and Walmart said they were too, and Toshiba finally acquiesced and took HD DVD out in the back yard and shot it. Poor Old Yeller, but he had to be put down.

OK, so what will this mean? Lets run through repercussions for us as consumers, and more interestingly, as content creators.

AppleTV Take 2: New Software, Same Hardware

I very carefully and duly noted when Steve Jobs, during an interview, said that Apple had 3 businesses (Macs, iPods/iTunes, and iPhones) and a hobby (AppleTV).

If that wasn’t a tacit, explicit admission that a product hadn’t done as well as they’d hoped, I don’t know what is. To launch a product and then call it a hobby, you might as well say “Dude - it tewdally tanked.”

And with good reason - more expensive than a DVD player, with less content available, AppleTV didn’t add up to the sum of its parts in consumers eyes.

For high end users, it made for a nice way to have a good interface to their iTunes library that was constantly available, and also display pictures in high def on an HDTV. As bonus round, it could play movies in a pricey, low quality format, and Oh Cool! - it also could play back purchased TV episodes if you missed them. This was how I perceived it when I bought mine, and quickly realized I wanted a MUCH bigger hard drive than the 40GB unit it came with. * I was enamored and excited about it enough I even started a blog about it called AppleTV Hacker (which I haven’t updated since last August).

So I was pleasantly surprised to Steve Jobs spend some time talking about AppleTV again at this year’s MacWorld, as he described it as AppleTV Take 2.

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