Category: technology

HD of the future offers 16 times as many pixels.

I have seen the future, and it is freaking huge!

A new standard has emerged for Ultra High Definition Television, and it is completely useless for today’s living rooms or movie theaters.  At approximately 16x the resolution of high definition, and approximately 4x the resolution of the RED Epic, it seems like this new standard is a solution in search of a problem.

However, once you have that many pixels to play with, you can start to think about new and interesting ways to utilize video.

Take this scenario: Imagine that you’re a business person on an extended stay away from your family.  Today, you might utilize FaceTime or Skype to have a video chat.  Now imagine that back home you had a TV the size of your entire living room wall, and the resolution was so high that you could literally press your nose to the screen, and the image would look like a window – no pixels visible at all.   Instead of turing on the computer and talking to a little box on a little screen on a little computer, you could appear as though you were actually in the room with your family – separated by a window rather than by thousands of miles.  You could sit down and have dinner together, read stories together, watch TV together – you could do everything except give the little ones a hug goodnight.

While many people are going to cheer (or criticize) this new standard based on existing entertainment technology, I think Ultra High Definition will drive all sorts of creative possibilities that we haven’t even begun to imagine.

Alex Gollner has a really interesting post over on Alex4D that compares the progress of FCPX to the progress of iOS (and to a lesser extent OSX), and draws some pretty interesting conclusions.

Final Cut Pro X features: catching up and superseding « alex4d: Editing organazized.

As many of you know, I’ve now been using FCPX as my primary editor for quite awhile, and I think Alex has hit it on the head here.  By taking a look at the development cycles of the other technology within Apple, it certainly implies where the future may be headed.

Be sure to pop over to Alex4D and take a read!

The worst thing about shooting video with a DSLR is the physical form factor of the camera. So I’m not quite sure why THIS is a good idea.

I’m sure it’ll make pretty images, but I think it’s time to move away from the DSLR shape and think about the ergonomics of video when creating a new video camera.

On the plus side, this should work with many of the existing DSLR accessories. On the negative side, most of those accessories exist because shooting video with a stills camera, quite frankly, sucks.

We shall see when the camera is released in October!

We don’t do a to of still photography at Groovy, but I have been a hobbyist since I shot for the yearbook in high school (Go Centurions!) with my father’s borrowd Canon DSLR.  For as long as I’ve had autofocus, I’ve often used the trick of focusing on the subject using the center AF then recomposing the shot.

Turns out, in the modern parlance of the Interwebs, I’m doing it wrong.

In most modern SLR cameras, the autofocus sensor located at the center of the frame is generally designed to be more sensitive and more accurate than most or all of the camera’s other AF sensors. In low-light situations, it is possible for the center AF sensor to be the only one that will reliably lock on to the subject and achieve focus lock. This has given rise to the technique of center point focus-recompose, which involves placing the center AF sensor on the portion of the subject that needs to be the most clearly focused, and activating autofocus. Once focus has been achieved, then the camera is reoriented until the desired framing is achieved, and then the shutter is released. There’s just one problem with this idea: it is 100% guaranteed to cause focus to be behind the intended center of focus.

Wha? How? Huh?

Read the entire article to understand the nuances, but in short – simple geometry means that when you focus and then rotate the camera even a few degrees, you’ve now changed the distance from your lens plane to the focal point.  When shooting with extremely shallow depth of field, this can mean the difference between a beautiful shot and a useless pile of pixels.

Not much more to say except

1. It makes so much sense that my brain hurts for not thinking of it before.
2. Full frame sensors are awesome, but awfully tricky to use right.

ᔥ Reddit user csbphoto in response to this question.

FedEx was our friend today.

If I’m not mistaken, this completes our Stage 2 order!

When Apple released FCPx in June last year, the response from FCP users was universally (very) bad - well, almost universally bad.  While I wasn’t thrilled with the new release, I thought the biggest problem was not with the software, but with how Apple presented it.  This was, after all, something completely new and people have trouble with change even when the change is for the good – and whichever side of the fence you fell on FCPx, almost everyone knew that FCP7 was getting long in the tooth and needed a change.

What I said then was that if Apple had released FCPx as a free “time limited beta” – where they would gather user feedback and address problems in the final release, the response from the community would have been significantly different.  Today, Apple released FCPx 10.0.3, and from what I’ve seen, this is the release that should have followed the free beta period.  Many of the features that people have rightfully bemoaned losing in the 7 to X transition are back – most notably multi-cam editing – with mixed formats and mixed frame rates, media relink (thank whichever deity you wish to thank), broadcast monitoring (huzzah!), and perhaps most importantly (but far less sexy) XML support – which has allowed the big brains at Assisted Editing to release their FCP 7 to X conversion tool, allowing you to bring your FCP7 projects in to FCPX – I honestly think I heard a choir of angels sing when I read that.

Time will tell if Apple has also squashed the most persistant bugs, but 10.0.3 is, so far, is the first version that I think FCP users should have had to pay for.  Better late than never, and I think FCPX now is a true contender for professionals.

If you haven’t tried FCPX yet because of all the negative press, I highly recommend it.  Once you wrap your head around this new way of working (and you do have to forget almost everything you think you know), FCPX really is a powerful, professional editing tool – at least, NOW it is.

Our EPIC is on the way, and I’ve been playing around with some footage shot at this September’s REDucation in preparation of delivery.  Here is a little sample:

Our EPIC is on the way, and I’ve been playing around with some footage shot at this September’s REDucation in preparation of delivery.  Here is a little sample:

Our EPIC is on the way, and I’ve been playing around with some footage shot at this September’s REDucation in preparation of delivery.  Here is a little sample:

Our EPIC is on the way, and I’ve been playing around with some footage shot at this September’s REDucation in preparation of delivery.  Here is a little sample: