Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Why I will hire a professional stuntman next time. Or, all the places my body hurts.

P132

Yesterday I did a few stunts for The Red Rider. Basically I repeatedly crashed a motorcycle. The following diagram represents a plethora of muscle strains, abrasions and other nasty injuries I sustained.

Posted via email from Joshua Brown

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Panasonic GH2 8bit 4:2:2

I will preface this post with a caveat: this could be hearsay.

I was given a hack for my GH2 that I was told would generate 8bit 4:2:2 files. It's a very indepth hack created by a a friend of a friend. Obviously the files are still .mts wrapped, so I've been re-wrapping/transcoding them with Adobe Media Encoder.

I've chosen settings that I believe will not modify the original source and output them to ProRes. 1080p, 23.976, ProRes 4:2:2. The process takes about 2x longer than the files length so a 5 second clip takes about 10 seconds to transcode on my 2009 17" Mac Book Pro.

On average, the file size gets a bit smaller (my 356MB file became 199MB), so I decided to compare them. 

From my unscientific observations, it appears there is a VERY minor noise shift in the new ProRes. Not objectionable, just different from the original. And a VERY slight gamma shift favoring the mid-tones and smooshing the blacks. These could be the result of not knowing what settings in Media Edcoder I am using, but all in all it appears to retain everything very well. I will be using this workflow.

Posted via email from Joshua Brown

Thursday, March 15, 2012

The ultimate baseplate for future camera systems

http://www.abelcine.com/store/OConnor-Universal-Baseplate-Set/

Oconnor_universal_baseplate
Oconnor has created a very unique baseplate system that intrigues me very much. with the overly simplistic design, one can adjust the rod height to fit almost any small to medium sized camera on the market.

This could be the perfect transitional baseplate system for anyone who wants to test the waters with a DSLR then graduate to a more capable system in the future without constantly buying accessories specific to the camera system.

Posted via email from Josh Brown