Videocracy Blog

A few months back I heard about a camera that was going to revolutionize digital cameras and digital filmmaking.  This camera is known as RED, and I finally got around to doing research about this camera.  I read an article that appeared on the Videography.com website…it was a product review of the RED camera.  This camera is similar to the new Panasonic in which it has solid state memory cards instead of tapes.  From what I understand this camera doesn’t have any form of power supply, or monitoring (i.e. viewfinder) the article called this camera an “erector set camera” in which the monitoring and the power and all other things are added onto the camera as the user needs it.  Basically this camera is nothing more then a lens with places to plug things in.

What I found most interesting is that they are calling this camera a replacement to film, not an addition to the digital cameras that already exist.  By saying that they are saying that this camera has the ability to create images as aesthetically pleasing as film is, while still being a digital camera.  They said it is Not an HD camera, and should not be treated as such.

The camera captures on it’s proprietary RAW format, so just like shooting RAW on a Digital SLR all the elements of exposure and white balance can be tweaked and adjusted in post.  At least that’s what I understand they are saying about it.

I would love to learn more about this camera, and possibly have a chance to use it, and see what it is capable of…it seems like a very impressive piece of equipment.  It should be, since it costs 17,000 bucks…Maybe this will change filmmaking?  Maybe not….we’ll see if this is the direction things are headed…

I have a pretty good understanding now of how Blender works, I have been modeling, and experimenting any chance I get. Yesterday I started designing a 3-Dimensional logo for OnYourMark that will go into a new commercial. I knew I wanted to do another one, and use what I’ve learned in both Blender and Motion to good use. I’ve created the first 10 seconds or so, thus far…and I’m really excited and impressed with the results…it will be neat, and I’m looking forward to showing it off…

I played around a bit today with Apple’s Compression program, compressor.  This program wasn’t previously installed on my Mac, and in order to get a small enough compression to put on the web, I was rendering out a video in almost full quality in Final Cut Pro, then I was using Quicktime to cut the framerate down to 15 fps, and also the video size down to 320 x 240.  From there I put it into Visual Hub…now VH is a great program I think, but with compressor I have the ability to do all of this in one step.

I first render a fully uncompressed video in Final Cut Pro, this step is unavoidable…you can go straight to compressor with it, but why not have that uncompressed version to work from.  Anyway…in Compressor I have a ton of options to choose from, I can render it with all sorts of different codecs for all sorts of different purposes.  So I found the one I have been using and that is compressing for Web, and I use the H.264 codec.  And then I adjust the frame rate and the size as usual.

Two things I really like about Compressor is, first of all once you select the compression you want to put on the video, it gives you a split screen preview of the original, and what it’s going to look like after.  Pretty cool…

The other thing I see, now I haven’t played with it to know for sure…but it looks like you can have multiple videos rendering at the same time…so I can be compressing one video with one codec, and a whole different one with a different codec.

Here’s a great video on the power of Apple’s Compressor:

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/compressor/

Now I’ve only barely scratched the surface of this program, but it’s pretty cool none the less…

Am I an Apple guy or what?

I am adding another program to my ever increasing arsenal of software….Motion, which is another one of the programs that comes with the Final Cut Pro suite.  I’m rather enjoying what I’m learning, I used After Affects for awhile now, and I used Mirage for some time in college, but I am liking the things that I am doing in Motion, it will be a great tool for creating motion graphics, and more interesting backgrounds to title sequences…can’t wait to learn more.

I read an article that AT&T will be cutting their payphone service by the end of 2008….we all knew this was coming, with the increase in Mobile Cellular Telephones, we aren’t using payphones anymore.  I recently thought about this, and I thought about how I don’t even know how much a payphone costs anymore….

Oh well…we are a cell phone nation now.