The news is finally in and RED has changed the game. With the new announcement of both RED Scarlet and RED Epic, RED has made many a geek filmmaker giddy with joy.
The hottest thing about all these, is that they’re swappable. What that means is if you have a Scarlet S35 package, but need some high speed shooting, you can rent an Epic S35 and drop it into the rest of your kit, saving you tons of money.
Needless to say, I want a Scarlet S35.
Oh, and all these cameras can double as DSLRs too. One solution for all your image capture needs.
The ShuttleXpress and its big brother, the Shuttle Pro, are USB peripherals designed for media applications.
The ShuttleXpress comes with a spring-loaded shuttle, a jog wheel, and 5 buttons. It’s also conveniently configured for many popular applications such as, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut, Adobe After Effects, and others. It’s also easily configurable for any application such as, Winamp and VLC.
The construction is pretty solid. The buttons have a satisfying click to them. The shuttle has nice resistance in the spring for fine controls. And the jog wheel has subtle clicks for precise tuning. The base is wide with 5 rubber feet to give it nice stability. Not that you’d be thrashing the thing around.
Using the ShuttleXpress is a breeze. It’s not meant to replace the mouse, rather, compliment it. I placed mine to the left of the keyboard. Scrubbing through long footage and navigating the timeline is fast and easy.
My one regret is not going for the Pro model. The Xpress only comes with 5 buttons while the Pro has 15. But for the price is fair.
If you do a lot of video or audio work, I would definitely recommend one.
There’s been a lot of buzz about the Nikon D90. Mainly because it can shoot 720/24p. This is amazing on a DSLR and a boon to all filmmakers.
Why? Because you get access to all of Nikon and their third party lenses which are much cheaper than film lenses. Thus, you get that beautiful depth of field all DV filmmakers strive for.
But one of the big problems was it had auto exposure when in movie mode. Until now.
D90 movie exposure lock: Menu / Custom Settings/ Controls / AE-L/AF-L for MB-D80/ Set to “hold” – press when recording to set exposure lock
There’s a small microphone on the camera, but no audio in. So if you want to record good audio, you’ll need a separate recorder. But that’s not that big of a deal.
If you have a great tripod with a great head, then you have the potential for great pans and tilts. But sometimes the equipment is great, but your hand is not that steady. Rubber band to the rescue!
Strap a think rubber band to the handle and pull it in the direction you wan it to move. The rubber band acts like a shock absorber, dispensing energy as necessary.
If you’re a tad on the impatient side, the song starts at about 1:10 into the video.
Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there. It doesn’t sound great, as it’s not supposed to.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum—Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-86 Dot Matrix Printer—Drums
HP Scanjet 4c—Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array (act as a collection of bad speakers)—Vocals & FX
If you haven’t seen Johnny Lee’s hacks to the Wii remote, this is a great summary of what he’s accomplished. Johnny Lee is a PhD grad student at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s also the one who came up with the poorman’s steady cam. He’s around 30 and he’s already presented at TED. How cool is that?
Drobo is a “RAID” external storage solution. I put RAID in quotes because it really isn’t. It functions similarly to a RAID 1 setup, but the cool feature is that you don’t need to format the drives or even run identical capacity drives!
Ever since I started working with video, storage and archiving has been a huge concern/fear of mine. Love Angle took up a whopping 88 GB and 20 DVDs.
DVD is still probably the best longer term (5-10 years) solution, I still need an immediate solution for all my HD footage, especially as I work on multiple projects simultaneously.
The Drobo is a bit of an investment at $500 USD, and that’s without any drives. But it’s expandable with 4 bays, hot-swappable, and tells you when drives fail.
LTO3 (Tape)
$0.08/GB
Pros: Cheap, long life-span
Cons: High setup ($2000), sequential read/write
HDD
$0.20/GB
Pros: Fast, no setup costs
Cons: Unreliable
DVD
$0.19/GB
Pros: No setup costs, easily expandable, versatile
Cons: Slow, takes up space, medium life-span (5-10 yrs)
Blu-Ray
$0.90/GB
Pros: High capacity, Can produce HD content, reliable, long life-span (50+ yrs)
Cons: $600 setup for drive, takes up space, slow
As it stands, for pure backup purposes, DVD is probably the most practical. As Blu-Ray comes down in price, and especially if you are doing a lot of HD, it may make sense to move to the new format, especially since HD-DVD is dead, there’s no more uncertainty in the format war.
