MacVideo "Matt Davis' Blog"

The Light Fantastic

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:50:00 GMT

Just back from a manic week, shooting in Beirut, Cairo, then to Cambridge and finally to Edinburgh. We were shooting documentary style, interviews and GVs (General Views) or B-Roll, and Cutaways. The schedules were fluid, the locations unseen, and everything needed to be shot at NTSC frame rates. Immediately, my favourite camera for this sort of job (Sony’s FS100) was out. Secondly, we needed a flexible lighting kit, but all kit needed to be portable, flexible and light.Even in these days of extremely sensitive cameras, lighting is still an essential part of video work. Even if it’s a bit of addition with a reflector or subtraction with a black drape, you’re adapting the light to reveal shape and form and directing the viewer’s eye to what’s important to your story.

Canon EOS C300 first impressions

ricky_young@idg.co.uk (Matt Davis) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:12:00 GMT

A number of dealerships are hosting mini-events for video people to come and prod, poke, pet and stroke Canon's new Digital Cine Camera - the C300. I popped over to Visual Impact in Teddington to see this fabled camera 'on the hoof' so to speak.Quick run-down of the C300

Testing the MTF EOS adaptor for Sony NEX-FS100

ricky_young@idg.co.uk (Matt Davis) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 19:42:00 GMT

Many of us have moved from DSLR to the FS100, but we need to use our Canon glass. I've had a veryshort time to play withMike Tapa's MTF EOS adaptor, shown in prototype form at IBC 2011.My biggest discovery is that you don't need the control box attached all the time. Simply tellthe adaptor what iris setting you need, and detach. After that, every lens defaults to that irissetting. That's HUGE!

Blade and a J-Cut - two bits!

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:45:00 GMT

Final Cut Pro X doesn’t do J-cuts. It doesn’t do it at all, and whilst I am not an aggressive or violent person, I feel the need to sit on a naughty step for thinking what I’d like to do to this bit of software if it were something tangible.What am I talking about? Any editor will tell you that, in ‘How To Edit 102’, we learn about the J cut. Very simply, it’s when a simple cut between two shots has the audio of the second clip start at just a fraction before the picture starts. Or, put it another way, the second shot starts with new audio over the old shot, then the video cuts to the new shot.

Ha ha, I told me so... a cautionary tale

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:12:00 GMT

In a brief moment of stupidity, I purchased a couple of Tamron to Nikon adaptors to get going with a couple of legacy lenses I have for my FS100. I purchased them from 'one of those Chinese vendors on eBay', and I've ended up with rubbish.They don't allow the lenses to focus on infinity. They don't 'lock' either to the lens or the body, and focusing the lens makes the whole shebang try to detach from its self.

Down with DSLRs!

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:43:00 GMT

That’s it. Time out. I’ve had it with DSLRs.

Just can't shake the DSLR bug

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:38:00 GMT

I have a particular client who wants me to shoot interviews that must NOT look ‘corporate’ and slick. He wants natural, evocative ‘folk 16mm’ or ‘one man and his Bolex’ sort of stuff and is very keen on my DSLR work.

The 'Science' of 'Awesome'?

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:07:00 GMT

What is it about manflu and training DVDs? Once again, I am confined to duvet, lines of lemsip cut with vitamin C ready for snorting, and I am watching the latest instalment of Per Holmes’ Magnum Opus -“Hot Moves - the Science of Awesome”. And once again, it’s an amazing watch.This 115 minute long DVD/MP4 feature is an ‘addendum’ to the ‘Master Course In High-End Blocking & Staging’ course - a 6 DVD set of mindbending info, but rather than cover the mechanics of telling a story, or covering a scene so it will cut well, this DVD is about getting the trailer shots - as the narrator puts it, ‘awesome for the sake of being awesome’.

Be careful what you wish for... you might get it.

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 12:12:00 GMT

We’ve been wishing for ‘that elusive filmic look’ for a while now, making our videos look less like a security camera, more like a bit of cinema. We wanted progressive scan. We got it. We wanted wider latitude. We got it. We wanted 35mm sized film sensors for Depth of field, and now with theF3and theAF101, we’ve got it. But it comes at a cost.First off, big sensorsrequire longer focal lengths to cover them. That’s why a 50mm lens on a DSLR is ‘normal’ but on a compact it would be telephoto. But the longer the focal length, the narrower the depth of field (for a given setup). Lovely blurry backgrounds to your talking heads, rendering a messy background into ‘art’. But suddenly, you have to keep an eye on focus. Your pin sharp subject leans forward, and is out of focus. Twiddle, twiddle, lean back, twiddle, twiddle. And of course, you only have to breathe near a long lens to make the image wobble, so engage Optical Image Stabilisation, or upgrade your tripod to something made of cast iron.

Still Motion

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:50:00 GMT

The client saw me shooting with a DSLR, and naturally assumed I would have stills of the event. But shooting stills and shooting video are two very different disciplines.

Sweating the Petty Stuff

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:42:00 GMT

I’m putting the finishing touches on a simple set of ‘talking head’ videos destined for a corporate intranet to introduce a new section of content. Nothing particularly earth shaking or ground breaking. It certainly won’t win any awards, but it’s the kind of bread and butter work that pays bills.

x264 - never mind the speed, feel the quality!

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:06:00 GMT

Now that the MPEGLA has confirmed that H.264 is going to be safe from legal and licensing gotchas for the foreseeable future, I guess we’re all back to improving our H.264 game after kicking the tyres of Google’s VP8. Loads of choice to encode to H.264, but which one has the speed? Which one has the quality?The Elgato Turbo.264 is a great little USB dongle that accelerates your compression so a 5 minute video takes about 5 minutes to encode. That’s right. Try it! And quality is pretty good. Just open up your movie, Export the movie using the Elgato hardware, and - as Mr Jobs would say - ‘boom’.

Talk is cheap. Mics are not.

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:45:00 GMT

A little admission up front: I also do the occasional voiceover. As an editor, I’d often knock out a guide track for narration, and long story cut short, there you go. Needed a VO mic.To start off, I was using the trusty Coles lip-mic. This curiosity is the ‘living fossil’ of microphones, a ribbon mic held literally on the lip oft seen ringside at boxing matches. Its party trick, due to the inverse square law, is to provide an intelligable voice in noisy environments. You could record a half decent commentary in an office environment, or noisy edit suite (I needed to record lots of audio for phone systems at the time).

Accessorisation By Demand

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:18:00 GMT

However much I plan new equipment purchases, jobs come up that demand kit you can’t rent or borrow so the longed for toys have to wait again whilst you fork out for the basics.I have been nursing a little pot of cash that may have bought a brace of 32GB SxS1 cards, or some nice Canon L-Series glass, maybe even a BlackBird. Nice-to-haves that I needn’t worry too much about getting a quick return on investment.

Getting ready for 3d

Matt Davis — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:44:00 GMT

Getting ready for 3d

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 18:44:00 GMT

Have been filming in Banff, Canada for the last week. Helicopters over the Rockies, meeting bears whilst hiking, riding chairlifts over forests, filming cocktails being mixed and food being presented. Alright already, some jobs, you're the statue and some jobs you're the pigeon. This was a full-on pigeon job.But as I tried to capture the thrill of the chairlifts, the awe of the scale of the landscape and just the general depth of everything, blurry backgrounds and pull-focus shots weren't really cutting it. Watching the (high definition) rushes back were pretty awesome, but nothing like being there.

The Delights of Electric String

Matt Davis — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:59:00 GMT

The thing about shooting and editing video, there's just so much data created. Heaps of the stuff.

The Delights of Electric String

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 10:59:00 GMT

The thing about shooting and editing video, there's just so much data created. Heaps of the stuff.As I write, I'm sitting on a pot of about 48 Terabytes of data, and this is growing at about 1-2 Terabytes per month. Every project sits on a disk, each disk is mirrored, and when full, 'retired' and put off-site. Certain jobs are archived off to BluRay data disks, other jobs get copied to USB drives and handed over to the client.

Steady handheld shots on DSLR

Matt Davis — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:09:00 GMT

Steady handheld shots on DSLR

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:09:00 GMT

Here's the scenario: you'll be shooting talking head 'voxpop' interviews, you have to shoot hand-held, and you're shooting DSLR. The problem is that DSLRs are an absolute handful to hold steady. The longer the lens, the worse the jitter, and the jitter makes shots hard to watch.So there's two branches one can follow: Image Stabilisation and Camera Support. Please bear in mind we're talking about DSLRs that do video, not video cameras per se.

Take me where, Boris?

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:19:00 GMT

I hope you all enjoy the journey you can find here: Take Me There BorisYes, it's what is known as a viral campaign, and I will stop right there because it's got a job to do. Enjoy.

Take me where, Boris?

Matt Davis — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:19:00 GMT

I hope you all enjoy the journey you can find here: Take Me There Boris

Adventures in the land of the Grass Valley

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:50:00 GMT

Just back from a conference job in Rome - usual brief: a big conference has keynote presentations filmed, these need to be captured and edited down to their bare essence for viewing on the web.Conferences at this level go on for days. Picture the scenario: a conference may last four days, with 25% of the time in ‘keynote’ mode: four cameras record a presentation given to 2,500 people in an auditorium, whilst presenters do their stuff either solo or in groups. For the other 75% of the time, the 2,500 delegates split into, maybe, 25 groups. Every hour, there are 25 presentations happening, and this lasts for three days, eight hours a day.

Adventures in the land of the Grass Valley

Matt Davis — Sun, 23 May 2010 20:50:00 GMT

Just back from a conference job in Rome - usual brief: a big conference has keynote presentations filmed, these need to be captured and edited down to their bare essence for viewing on the web.

Gone in a flash

ricky_young@idg.co.uk () — Sun, 09 May 2010 21:29:00 GMT

So Steve Jobs doesn't like Flash.Flash has always had a chorus of catcalls and boos from off-stage, way before Mr Jobs started his campaign. It dates back fifteen years ago, in fact: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9512.html and http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001029.html