It’s Halloween again, am not in sunny LA this time but in currently pitch black but sunny and cold Calgary in Canada to do some DSLR workshops. Paul Reynolds reminding me that it’s a year since our big Venice Beach meet up. Which means it’s a year since I shot one of my favourite personal shorts and a perennial at my DSLR workshops as all the audio was recording with a simple Rode Video Mic plugged into the 7D with just AGC and no headphones and I got cracking sound.
You can read the original blog here….with loads of info on lenses etc. This was all shot handheld using the basic Zacuto rig and Z-Finder. This was one of my favourite shooting experiences and thanks to Sara Collaton for her help on that day.
The AGC is the only thing bothering me in this. You can hear it in between grabs when “New York” pauses the AGC brings the background noise up. But there is very little I would change in this piece. I am not someone to go back and tinker with old work. This is a snapshot in time of my skills with DSLRs and the work I was doing then. I would like to do another People series soon…bit tough in England as everyone is so miserable and my schedule in Canada is so tight! This was the last People film I made. I really need to do another one soon!! Maybe Amsterdam’s people in December if I go there or Stockholm’s people when I got there at the end of November.
New visitors to my site won’t know a lot of my earlier work so I will be doing the odd blog to highlight some of my favourites. I will add a commentary to this later.
I don’t use iMovie. I look at it and have no idea what to do, but it continues to innovate way beyond even stuff that Final Cut Pro is doing. It is a consumer editing software and much like consumer cameras have cool features we want in our pro cameras the same seems to be with iMovie 11.
The best of these is a built in rolling shutter fix. You know why you do those whip pans and the lines are all skewed? It’s horrible. Well after a very simple quick test with some extreme footage I have to say I am pretty damn impressed. It worked fast and made the skew way less pronounced. Yes, still visible as my example is pretty extreme but that is the point. I have a short demo video showing how it is done and the effect it has on the footage. Downside is does not work within FCP of course and the bit rate of the original pro res clip is substantially dropped, but not enough to ruin clip, it stills is pretty damn good and best of all it works FAST! I have only done this short test with skewed footage, not handheld jello vision yet.
Big thanks to Nino Leitner who pointed this out to me. Another cool feature is it can recognise and catalogue faces in your clips. Woudn’t that make logging nice and easy? Let’s hope some of these features will make their way to FCP 7. It’s possible. Aperture 3 has many features from iphoto…
Yes I know last minutes, sorry. But if anyone is interested in a low key Calgary meet up on Monday, food and drinks let me know here! I have no idea for venue. I am at the Ramada Downtown so anywhere near there would be great. I am in town to do two workshop for Vistek on the Tuesday and Wednesday before heading to Toronto, Ottawa and then home.
My dad had a moustache for most of my childhood. These days he has gone Euro-villain and has a goatee, but for me a ‘tache always reminds me of my dad. When I shaved my beard off last year I left a ‘tache to see what I looked like and found myself staring at my dad in the mirror. SCARY! I shaved it off 30 seconds later!
To cut a long story short, it’s Movember time again and if you don’t know what that is it’s when men (and oddly women) grow a moustache during the month of November to support The Prostate Cancer Charity. A very worthy cause as my beloved Grandfather Daniel died from it back in 2001.
So, despite the worry that I will end up looking like Ron Jeremy or Ron Burgandy for a whole month I am going to grow a ‘tache for charity and encourage as many of you as possible to do the same!! I have started a team on the official website, so please sign up and join this important cause! Let’s have the biggest and best team of the lot!! Even if you are a woman, join up…be creative! If you don’t want to or can’t grow one then please sponsor us!
To add some fun to this I will be taking photos and video of myself every day, to make a film of my ‘tache growing and you should all do something creative too! Let us completely overwhelm them with epic films of our moustaches!! No prize for best video, just the satisfaction of helping a good cause and having some fun at it. Despite the fact you could well look totally ridiculous for a whole month, which I certainly will! Any chance of a any female finding me slightly attractive over the next month is a big no no!
If someone wants to design a logo for our Team: Bloom ‘Tache then yes please!!
I am sure many of you are already on facebook and what not…but my web designer Piotr Godek from Odd Web Things and I decided to create a social network within PhilipBloom.net so people can easily message members within the site, talk to each other publicly, add friends, check what your friends are up to, participate in groups, promote events, show work..all the usual stuff but all directly within this site.
All you need to do is be a registered and please use real names. To use buddypress it’s really important that people use their real name as it’s friendlier and more open.
I will get a few moderators involved just to make sure everyone is polite and there is a always a danger of people being rude to others and I won’t tolerate it as there is no excuse. So if you are interested in being a moderator of a particular group let me know!
Hopefully interacting with each other will be useful and productive. Great discussions can be formed here and you can meet new people. If there are particular groups you want me to create let me know…
Obviously this is in it’s infancy so there will be a few kinks until we get it all running smoothly so bear with us!
Thanks and please join up!! Simply register as a user on my site by clicking members on the top right and then register! If you have already registered on my site use those log in details!
Well I just got back from Boston/ NY and am knackered. First thing I did was go to Panasonic HQ in Bracknell. Drop off the Gh2, the review of which is delayed as I have a faulty sample am afraid, and then picked up the AG-AF100 pre-production model (so image quality may not be same as retail version)
First off I need to point out this is a totally independent review/ analysis of the AF100. I am not being paid by Panasonic to do it. I am testing it as I want to test and I want to share my results with you lot. I am going to Japan next month to shoot with a production model but this is my own time and again I am not being paid to do it. Panasonic are being completely hands off and letting me have free reign here. Hats off to them for this.
I will be updating this blog as I play with it and get to grips with it. It’s a funny looking camera and certainly looks better proportioned with a nice PL lens on it rather than still lenses but I am not interested in how sexy it looks. I care how well it performs in the following areas.
Low light
Moire
Aliasing
Rolling Shutter
Resolution
I will do as much testing as I can, unfortunately the timing is not ideal as I have a shoot tomorrow so I won’t get a chance to do anything with it. But first impressions are good. I have shot a little footage at 3200 ISO and it looks pretty damn good! Great to have features on the camera that I miss SOOOOO much on my DSLRs.
Great to have a 4 setting ND filter wheel. Great to have a really good quality waveform, XLR inputs, zebras, headphone jack (!), the list goes on and on…stuff I struggle with not having on my DSLRs.
First thing I did, despite my hideous jet lag was a quick and dirty low light test. In the devastation that used to be my kitchen I set the camera to 3200 ISO, stuck a Leica M mount Voigtlander 50mm 1.1 with Fotodiox adaptor (costs around $900 for the lens, an amazing lens), used a box of matches and a fat cuban cigar (smoking is bad, only lit it for the piece…mostly!)
One thing I noticed straight off is if you are serious about your filmmaking you will need to invest in a Nanoflash, Ki-Pro type device. 24mbs AVCHD is fine for most things but you simply are not getting the best out of the camera. The HD-SDI of the camera may only be 8-bit but with a nice I-Frame codec you will get a much better image out of it…this camera with a higher bit rate using an external recorder will be much more powerful.
I have to say 3200 ISO really impressed me. I own a GH1 and have just tested an early GH2. I thought the AF100 was based on the GH1 chip but obviously it is not. I struggle to get anything usable from 800 ISO on that camera. 3200 ISO on the AF100 was so good. Pretty damn clean. It seems to have less digital noise than my 5dmk2, but this is early days of my tests… As sensitive as my 5Dmk2? No, just less noise. The blacks were surprisingly black. I just need to do a Nanoflash or KiPro test of it now…
A qucik and dirty test of the low light of the AF100.
Voigtlander 50mm F1.1
3200 ISO
http://philipbloom.net/?p=11250 Ungraded
Music by Aphex Twin
DAY 2:
Unfortunately i have been working all day today on a proper shoot on so the AF100 stayed at home. Tomorrow is when i will do as much shooting as I can, with only 1 battery!
I have prepped the gear for what I need.
Got my Philip Bloom Kessler Crane Slider
Miller Compass head with Solo sticks
Zacuto counterbalanced handheld rig
Nanoflash with powerbase 70
Adaptors for Leica M, Canon EOS and Nikon lenses
7-14mm F4 M4/3 lens
Kit lens from my GH1
Various vintage Nikon lenses
Zeiss ZF 50mm, 85mm and 100mm
Canon 70-200 F4
So am am all ready to shoot tomorrow. I am not planning on making a “film” as such. I feel it’s more important to test out the different options, see how well it performs etc…I just hope that battery lasts!
Isn’t a newsletter a thing of the past? Well it depends on how you use it. I use my blog, facebook and twitter to share my latest information but it’s easy to miss a tweet or a facebook post and often things are not important enough for a full blog post so this is a nice half way house.
This is certainly not going to be a daily newsletter, I will only write something in it to announce something very cool, to pass on information about events etc, to let you know about special offers on products that I hear about…to announce competitions. You get the idea. I have absolutely no intention of spamming you, I get enough spam as it is. So I will make sure that each newsletter is something that I myself would like to read! You might get a couple one week and none the next. If I have a crazy busy time one week then you could have three! I have no idea right now, I just want to make sure I only send when it is worth it. Of course you can unsubscribe at anytime!
There are a lot of interesting things coming up soon, both on my blog and on the newsletter. I currently have a GH2 to play with and I will be getting an Af-101 from Panasonic next week too…although only for a very short amount of time. So I will do my best to play with it as much as possible.
I have both the 6.5″ and 8″ Monitors from Marshall as well as their 17″. All great monitors and essential tools for me whilst filming. The 6.5″ is my go to monitor every time. BUT, it’s expensive. Over $1600. It has great features like peaking, false colour etc..
They are just coming out with the new 5″ version and I have got one to try out at the moment. It’s great. Really lightweight, perfect for mounting on my 5Dmk2 hotshoe.
It’s lower resolution than my 6.5″ which is 1024×768, the 5″ is 800×480 but it’s a REALLY high quality panel. I have used monitors with higher resolution panels and they, to put it bluntly, suck. Bad colour reproduction, reflective screens, terrible artefacts. The list goes on. Resolution is not the be all and end all. It costs just under $600
The Marshall has peaking for focus assist. It seems better than my 6.5″ for some reason at this, not sure why. It also has false colour to help with exposure. With the 5D/ T2i it detects the drop it resolution and aspect ratio and it corrects this. A big plus.
It runs off of 4 AA batteries. This is good and bad. They last just 2 hours. So invest in some rechargeable ones or power it using a different power system. AA batteries are good simply because you can get them anywhere…I have an AC adaptor for it which helps of course but I much prefer to keep my monitors battery only.
It’s a pretty simple monitor connection wise. HDMI only.
I am sure I will get a lot of questions asking me to compare with the 5.6″ Small HD monitor. I cannot compare it as I simply have not used it. I hope to get my hands on it to test it side by side. I saw it briefly at the Vimeo awards and it looked nice. I had issues with the previous panel on the larger Small HD but this one I believe is improved enormously. It also has a higher resolution panel than the Marshall at 1280 x 800. It also has HD-SDI as well as HDMI and very nicely you can buy a battery plate to power it from your Canon batteries. So a lot of plusses there, but until I can test side by side all I can do is recommend something I am using and I am loving the Marshall 5″.
I missed last year’s event as I was in the states probably but I am making this one, well the second day anyway. I will be speaking twice. Not sure times yet but I have two 1 hour slots. They haven’t told me what to talk about but I expect I will talk about shooting video with DSLRS…that or how to make the perfect Gin & Tonic…;)
Well let me first start with some disappointing news, this is not Philip Bloom… Just his assistant Cristina so I apologize for the false expectations
Now for some good news! Phil will be hosting two meetups on the East Coast! While he’s beginning his journey in New York for the Vimeo Awards he will also be in Philadelphia for some relaxation and in Boston for a BOSFCPUG DSLR Workshop (if you haven’t signed up yet hurry cause space is filling up). This is a beginners to intermediate workshop and is a full day.
Here are the details:
Canon Filmmakers Meetup in Philadelphia ~ Meet us for some drinks and, of course, bowling at NorthBowl Thursday, October 14th at 6:30pm. You can RSVP here.
BOSFCPUG Meetup in Boston ~ We’ll be getting together for some drinks at Clink on Friday, October 15th at 7pm. Check back or follow Phil on Twitter for location confirmation.
