First video footage from the new Panasonic Lumix GH1 hits the web

Super-duper camera guy Phillip Bloom has gotten his hands on a Panasonic Lumix GH1 and has posted video from the not-quite-35mm cam for all the world to see. He has also written a piece on his blog of early thoughts about using the camera. Whoo hoo! It doesn’t shoot to H.264 and has some manual control!

Reflecting on the NAB 09 REDuser event

Another highlight of NAB 09 came in the same room that the Final Cut Pro User Group held the Tuesday night SuperMeet. It was the Wednesday REDUser event. Since RED didn’t have a presence on the NAB show floor this was their NAB by presenting current Scarlet and Epic prototypes and their new prime lenses at the REDUser party. Like the Tuesday night SuperMeet before it the REDUser party featured free food and a cash bar, vendors in the outer area of the Amazon ballroom and the presentations in an adjacent room where a raffle was also held.

Reflecting on the NAB 09 FCPUG SuperMeet

Two of the things I was looking most forward to at NAB 2009 were split between the Amazon ballroom at the Rio hotel and a corner of the south hall in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Those things were the Final Cut Pro User Groups SuperMeet, on Tuesday evening, and the Final Cut Pro User Groups SuperBooth that was on the show floor all week. The SuperBooth was particualrly unique among NAB booths in that it featured presentations from FCP users (incuding yours truely) at regular intervals throughout the week.

A whole mess of Apple Pro App technical documents updated

I awoke this morning to find a lot of RSS updates to a number of Apple articles regarding a number of different Pro Apps:

Final Cut Pro/Express: Some imported PSD files may only contain the background layer
Using FireWire 400 peripherals with multimedia applications and FireWire 800 ports
Motion: Motion quits unexpectedly when exporting to REDCODE  (The solution to this one, use another codec ... duhhhh!)
Final Cut Pro: Speed interferes with Smooth Cam
Compressor: Troubleshooting basics
Final Cut Pro: Troubleshooting Basics
Final Cut Pro: Quality issue with movies you export from the Viewer with filters applied
Final Cut Pro: Log and capture with DV50 sometimes does not work in French or Japanese
Changing system display settings causes Final Cut Pro/Express to quit unexpectedly

And a few others:

About “You need to restart your computer” (kernel panic) messages
Desktop computers: Troubleshooting wireless keyboard and mouse issues
iTunes Store: Error message 3001, -42110, or 5103 when downloading movie rental
MobileMe: Backing up files that are stored on your iDisk
Mac OS X 10.5: Disk Utility’s Repair Disk Permissions messages that you can safely ignore

5 Things I Learned in the Scene to Scene Color Correction Session

Monday at NAB I saw in on a session by colorist Robbie Carman called Match It: Scene to Scene Color Correction. He passed on a lot of great tips for Apple Color ... and a surprisingly large number of them were for dealing with bugs! Here’s 5 of my favorites:

1. Find your “establishing shot” in a scene, as in a shot that is representative of the overall shots in that scene, and grade that shot first. Use that as a reference and base for the rest of the grading on that scene.

2. Control + G toggles the grade on and off of a shot.

3. Double-clicking a still store brings up a split-screen of that still and the current frame you are parked on with the playhead. You can compare them side-by-side in the split screen and it is also reflected in the scopes. Control + u toggles that split-screen on and off.

4. Using Color’s groups functionality you can apply a grade to a group and that grade will appear in all the shots in the group. Make a change to that group and changes will ripple through all the shots in the group.

5. You can copy/paste grades in Color but there is a bug in the software that doesn’t show the pasted grade in the grade bar of the timeline. Click on the shot and they will then show up.

5 Things I Learned at the Video Compression on a Mac session

Jeff Greenberg of Future Media Concepts did a great job of presenting a lot of information in a short amount of time at his session titled Video Compression on a Mac. Here’s 5 tips I liked:

1. Job chaining in Apple Compressor is a key to better looking outputs. Under the Job menu > New Job With Target Output will allow you to scale video to a smaller resolution in its own step before doing the encode.

2. A shallow depth of field with a blurry background will compress better than deep depth of field. This made perfect sense when he said it since fast motion and busy frames always make for more blocky compression. I had never thought of that.

3. Always deinterlance in your compression software and not your editor. And never use the deinterlace filter in Apple Compressor. Always do deinterlacing in the Frame Controls tab of the inspector.

4. You can drag an old job from the History window of Compressor back into the Batch window to re-encode again.

5. MainConcept Reference is a new and promising encoding application available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

5 Things I Learned at the Text in After Effects session

Trish Meyer presented a great session on Sunday afternoon about working with text in Adobe After Effects. Since I consider myself an After Effects hack who wants to know more I sat in. Among a number of things here’s 5 tips that I picked up:

1. There is an Auto-open check box up in the After Effects tool bar that when checked, will automatically open the character and text panels when you add text to a composition.

2. When you want to add new text to a comp you can have the cursor always begin in the middle of the screen by using the Layer menu > New > Text. No more fumbling with clicking in or around the center of the screen with this technique.

3. Do your initial creation and stylizing of your text in its final, readable state before you being animating or working on transitions.

4. A square keyframe icon in an After Effects timeline means it it is a HOLD type of keyframe that will hold the parameter constant until it get to the next keyframe ... so no animation after a square, hold keyframe.

5. AE’s text engine is based on Photoshop which is not itself animatible. If you use the “Range Selector” parameter under the Animate property for text then this is they key to being able to animate text with ease in After Effects. Using the Range Selector means you don’t have to animate individual letters or words. This was the basis of the session and text animation in AE can go a million different places using the Range Selector and all its parameters.

6. (okay, one more that many people already know) Adobe After Effects is such an amazing, full-featured software application that it never ceases to amaze me when I watch an experienced artist work on it.

When your 16:9 tv isn’t enough there’s 21:9

Yesterday my PVC colleague Mark Christiansen posted this quick-link to to an utterly amazing promotional piece / short film from Philips touting their upcoming 21:9 television. It’s a fantastic piece of work with the camera drifting slowly through a crime scene in a bullet-time sort of way. Throughout the piece a number of the filmmakers step into the scene to explain various parts of their art and craft.

Go and watch the piece and check out this new television and then come back for discussion. I call marketing bullshit on this TV.

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