As an example, he says that the Canon 5D Mk II which has a bit rate of 48 Mbps actually has a broadcast effective bit rate of 110 Mbps when compared to similar MPEG2 material. What do you think?

http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=10018

Edit: I looked in the FAQ but couldn't find anything directly on this topic.

Then I can just hit the select button to save a particular frame. That is the easiest way to make sure that I don't miss a single reaction. Shooting images here is very difficult because of the low light and extremely close proximity to the subject which yields very shallow depth of the field sometimes.

I firmly believe that the cameras 5-8 years down the road will all be 2.7K-4K video cameras that simply record video and allow you to extract a single frame if you want a still image. The GoPro 3 Black already shoots 2.7K and 4K but the frame rates are not very high at 4K.

As we get bigger and faster SD cards shooting RAW 2.7K video might become feasible. You really don't need that high of a frame rate for this to work either. Anything in the 12 to 15 FPS range works for everything but fast movement.

To save space the camera could record a set amount of video(ie: 1 minute). Then overwrite that video if you didn't press record to save the video or press a button to capture an image from the video. It would constantly recycle the memory and the videos it stores unless you indicate to it that you want to save it.

Here are some saved images from the videos. These were all created in camera. I know the quality of these images is not anywhere near regular still quality. However, as we get better memory and faster processors saving good images from video will be more practical.

It is so hard to capture a child's reaction with stills when their expression changes so rapidly.

I have accidently deleted some clips I shot with a GoPro from the microSD card, and I am able to recover the files, but the files will not play. I have tried a couple different recovery programs, and I end up with the same result. Is there any other software that would be better for the job?

Thanks for your help

This time I'll be taking the same lens, on the GH2, with the tele crop I reckon the sun should just about fill the frame. Is the 7402/7401 up to the job? The midspreader version would be my preferred, but is possibly less stable than the other?

Any other tips for super long lens shooting?

I've been frustrated for a while about how much of the internet discussion on filmmaking revolves around gear and is often in a consumeristic way (what to buy). I decided to do something productive about it and have started writing a series of articles with what I hope is helpful points on producing a micro-budget short. I titled them:

"From a Vimeo clip to a narrative short"

because I imagined them for somone who is experimenting with their dslr and making some test videos but wants to try to do a scripted, narrative short. Here are the first three posts:

INTRO

A lot of people are making camera tests and small experimentation with the gear they bought and uploading that to the internet. There is nothing wrong with that, but the kind of approach is very different from the one needed to produce something scripted. In these cases you need a more conscious, prepared approach, and work in a more organized and linear fashion. You also need to work with other people, and if you don't have the budget, use a lot of creativity to achieve what you need.

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=187

WORKING WITH OTHER PEOPLE

I don't believe any advancement in technology will make a significant change in the process of making narrative content. I'm very skeptical about all this rhetoric about a new camera coming out and "evening out the playing field" between the low budget and high budget guy. Films are for the most part a sum of the amount of human talent you put into them, where technology used is a secondary concern. The big focus then, of the aspiring filmmaker, should be to form relationship with people and find ways to mobilize them. But it's a big challenge to get talented and disciplined people to work with you, from a professional to a family member, and this proposes different concerns and also ethical questions. When should you work for free or low pay, and when should you ask others to do the same?

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=189

LOCATIONS

It's really important to get the locations early on, because in the linear process that pre-production is, a lot of things depend on the locations to be finalized. Art department, camera, lights, etc need to know what they are working with before they can proceed with a lot of things. The relationship you have with the locations owner is also crucial because of how important the location is and the stakes it would create if you lost it last minute. I actually advise in some situations to push for paying for a location, even if you could get it for free, just to establish some sort of moral right on using it. It's also very sad, that most filmmakers would not want to lend their apartments up for shooting, because accidents do happen. So there are also a lot of moral concerns about not ruining the reputation of the rest of the film community and being really careful with other people's property.

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=196

SCRIPT BREAKDOWN

In it’s simplest form, it’s about making a list out of each scene about the stuff that needs to be taken care of. If you’ve ever tried shooting something longer tha 5 pages – you’ll know this has to be organized. With experience, you will learn to translate a written scene into a list of problems. These lists will then form the basis of your budget and your scheduling. You can use standard methods or even some software, but the basics are all the same: Look at a script and break it down into small little problems to solve.

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=244

BUDGETTING

The budget is a necessary tool to prioritize where you put your limited resources to make them count the most. To be useful, the budget must be a blueprint of the making of the film, where there is a real relationship between the plan and the execution. I also discuss how you assess and understand your budget when most of the costs are covered with favors and deals.

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=269

PRODUCTION CHECKLIST

Working on a micro-budget project with an understaffed crew and often a lot of first-timers in the mix, the producer has to stay on top of a lot of small and big things, making sure they are being dealt with. To facilitate that mental task, I'm collecting a checklist of items that you can go over in the pre-production phase to make sure your not forgetting anything.

Read the rest at http://www.otraluna.com/?p=304

I have a few years of experience in filmaking, but as I say in the intro, I'm not claiming to be the most experienced producer out there. I do think that I have some experience to offer on the micro-budget level (unfortunately!).

If I think this is helping someone, I'll cover more topics.

Harold House

http://rodrigoconstanzo.com/camera/error.mov

(it's a small 8.6mb file. didn't want to upload it to youtube/vimeo in case that flattens the distortion)

This is using the stock 14-42mm lens and Aquamotion v2.

In the first half of the video it looks like the flashing christmas lights are causing it, but that's not the case. The second half of the video you can see it in a static lighting situation.

This doesn't happen all the time, though it seems that certain types of images cause it to happen consistently. It's rare enough (in my footage) that I haven't bothered to track it down or fix the problem, but these shots are really bad (the first one is pretty much unusable, which is a shame as it's nice footage).

"keep your planes frontal and not longitudinal", "Avoid 1, 2, or 3 point perspective"

My brain is having trouble envisaging a shot that doesn't make any use of 1, 2 or 3 point perspective. Can someone enlighten me?

What I mean is like MediaInfo, but what I need is full information of GH1/2 video file: Shutter, WB, ISO, etc.

This is the first time this happened to me. I have tried Disk Utility to fix it without success. Has someone had a similar experience or have a recommended application to fix the disk image?

Thanks in advance!

http://www.amazon.com/Moviemakers-Master-Class-Foremost-Directors/dp/057121102X

Years ago, while flipping through 25fps video trying to find just the frame in a piece of video where somebody had smiled just right. (It was for a VHS tape-box slick). I discovered, to my amazement, that

People's true smile can last less than 1/25th of a second.

However, we do perceive that smile, register it and imprint it on our memory as that person's true smile.

I used movie cameras and video cameras for portraits for years before I bought my first still camera in 2009. French news crews used analogue video cameras as their main tool for stills, sound and video, rushing on motorcycles to beat deadlines.

There are lots and lots of advantages, all of them somehow tied to a better selection of still image; (i.e. one you couldn't have got using a still camera) to make up for the higher quality you'd get from a still shot - or even a series of stills. That holds true today, unless we have 60fps DSLR [burst mode, for minutes, or hours at a stretch]!

A few weeks ago, I spotted my favourite waitress nearby on her day off. Armed only with my GH2/Sigma 30mm/Driftwood Sedna 5/ HBR25fps, I had to set it to ETC mode to get in close enough and shoot about a minute or so while sliding the camera around on my café table.

Only today did I get around to asking her if I could use the shots and she agreed. So here's one random still and an animated series of just a few key shots of VLC frame-grabs.

Quite facinating

Only for Windows.

http://gizmodo.com/5953601/

Vitaly, put it in the right category. I would not kn ow where to put it.

Superb stuff. Everyone should at least check out the Breaking Bad podcast from Michael Slovis on Cinematography.

Living in Albuquerque, as I do, it's insane to here an outsider think about how the landscape speaks to the camera work. Really made my day.

Lots of people here undestands, dont undestand, and soso undestand what dynamic range is. Some people compare it to latitude, which in a simple way is much the same thing but on an analog sustrate.

COLOR HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DYNAMIC RANGE.

Both sensors (bayer or foveon) and films stocks (diferent emulsions) captures light, in a time and a speed. Both use this to gather all the information available to them in that specific time.

""Dynamic Range of a Sensor: is defined by the largest possible signal divided by the smallest possible signal it can generate. The largest possible signal is directly proportional to the full well capacity of the pixel. The lowest signal is the noise level when the sensor is not exposed to any light, also called the "noise floor" This is interpreted by bits in a digital level.""

In the photosites of the sensor. When the photosites are well lit, they full themselfs with light particles. Then we can know how much light has enter each photosite and have a comparison between the low lit ( not so fully loaded ) and high lit scene ( fully loaded photosite). have the average and get results. So as bee told before Dynamic range is defined by the largest possible signal divided by the smallest possible signal it can generate.

""Even if one's digital camera could capture a vast dynamic range, the precision at which light measurements are translated into digital values may limit usable dynamic range. The workhorse which translates these continuous measurements into discrete numerical values is called the analog to digital (A/D) converter. The accuracy of an A/D converter can be described in terms of bits of precision, similar to bit depth in digital images, although care should be taken that these concepts are not used interchangeably. The A/D converter is what creates values for the digital camera's RAW file format""

"sensor has millions of pixels collecting photons during the exposure of the sensor. You could compare this process to millions of tiny buckets collecting rain water. The brighter the captured area, the more photons are collected. After the exposure, the level of each bucket is assigned a discrete value as is explained in the analog to digital conversion topic. Empty and full buckets are assigned values of "0" and "255" respectively, and represent pure black and pure white, as perceived by the sensor. The conceptual sensor below has only 16 pixels. Those pixels which capture the bright parts of the scene get filled up very quickly"

we can easily understand this, but inside the sensor there are more dificult parameters that must be calculated.

This differs alot from what actual film is made of, and the prosess that has to be done to make the film capture light. foveon sensor is more like Film, it has diferent levels of colors, chemicaly aligned in layers using diferent sutrates and quemicals for each color. So film does not "hold light inside" it uses it for a quemical reaction, so color can be generated using this method. Foveon sensors are quiet the same, the are made from layers of silicon with diferen materials, so the wavelenght of the light can traspass easily each layer. Also foveon sensors use pixel by pixel information, thats why foveon sensors with less pixels have better image quality than good old bayern pattern sensors (GHx, Canon, RED, Nikon Pentax)

But here is the question ive been hunting me some hours ago. I didnt knew that Dynamic range is limited by the bits the sensor can output. As @berniez put at the GH3 rumors topic. Vitaliy answer was quiet good but i didnt manage to undestand it at its full.

IF THIS IS TRUE CAN SOME ONE EXPLAIN MORE DETAIL ABOUT IT, COS I DONT HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE.

Here the eplanation but .... can someone explain it in more detail please.

""As an example, 10-bits of tonal precision translates into a possible brightness range of 0-1023 (since 210 = 1024 levels). Assuming that each A/D converter number is proportional to actual image brightness (meaning twice the pixel value represents twice the brightness), 10-bits of precision can only encode a contrast ratio of 1024:1.

Most digital cameras use a 10 to 14-bit A/D converter, and so their theoretical maximum dynamic range is 10-14 stops. However, this high bit depth only helps minimize image posterization since total dynamic range is usually limited by noise levels. Similar to how a high bit depth image does not necessarily mean that image contains more colors, if a digital camera has a high precision A/D converter it does not necessarily mean it can record a greater dynamic range. In practice, the dynamic range of a digital camera does not even approach the A/D converter's theoretical maximum; 5-9 stops is generally all one can expect from the camera.""

Info:

http://learn.hamamatsu.com/articles/dynamicrange.html

http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/dynamic-range.htm

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/dynamic-range.htm

http://www.dpreview.com/learn/?/Glossary/Digital_Imaging/dynamic_range_01.htm

Please feel free to post any info concerning this topic. Thank you very much for reading, and please correct me if im wrong since im still in learning stage.

Cheers.

I was just wondering which methods some of you may have to make markings on your display (or even external monitor) for guidance for framing cinema aspect ratio?

The Guide lines sadly can not have two horizontal bars as far as i know of.. I was hoping the hack would introduce some type of marking somewhere down the line- but since that does not seem to be possible, lets hear your method :)

Thanks guys

Just today I got offered my first ever broadcast gig which consists of a 28 minute infomercial. It's pretty involved with graphics, multiple locations, lots of b-roll, cut in segments, etc. Never done a broadcast gig before, so what tips would you guys give as far as everything. Would you guys shoot in 24p and use a process to get it to 29.97 or shoot straight up 60i or 30p? Feeling kinda like a noob with this stuff, done plenty of fairly big gigs, just never anything to be distributed on TV. Let me know if you guys have any tips or tricks.

Thanks

I've got a local band interested in shooting a music video or two with me after I showed them some footage I got of a small gig of there's shot handheld live with a single camera.

I need to flesh it out with them some more, just exactly what sort of things they're looking for but thought it'd be a nice thing to ask if anyone here had any tips about attempting my first one?

I think we'll be shooting multiple takes with the band miming over the top of a sync track which will be used for the actual audio in the final video. I guess I'm wondering first about the best way to tackle the syncing issue. I'll record with the camera the sound in the room so should be able to here this sync track and sync all the clips to the actual music properly before I start editing... Wondering the best way to go about that tho, obviously can't rely on a clapperboard as such, and when the artists start miming to the track I'll likely hear they're instruments over the sync track so I wonder if having a small bit of un-mimed to music at the front of every take may be the best idea for having something clear to sync with.

I'll try to edit with FCPX, I guess it's multicam work of sorts, not sure if that update dropped.

Who knows how it'll go, I look forward to trying, and would greatly appreciate any suggestions from anyone else on here who's more experienced in these matters.

Cheers

Jim

Anyone who has any advice, previous work (slowmo using gh2) or comments, please post them in this thread.

I'm tearing my hair out with this one which usually means it's just something silly but for the life of me I can't figure out what. I just shot some really simple Q&A stuff yesterday on a JVC HM-150e and the GH2 using HBR. Don't ask about the JVC, I have no idea why the work decided to completely ignore the advice of it's A/V department (me) and bought that thing but it's what I had to work with.

Anyway, the JVC was at 25p and was recording the sound from a mic placed on the table, 48khz obviously. I used it to get a wide shot and used the GH2 to get close ups. However now that I'm trying to Sync them together I simply cannot get them to fit. The GH2 footage which is also 25p and with audio at 48khz is seeming to run slower than the 25p out of the JVC.. this is extremely confusing.

Anyone got any ideas?

Cheers, R.

Cheers!