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Amro Othman

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Posts posted by Amro Othman

  1. I know, not the usual topic... but I can find tonnes of photograpers for weddings in Paris but not a good videographer! The ideal would be a two man team, one photo and one video!

     

    It's for my wedding. I would shoot the photos and videos myself but my woman obviously wasn't happy with that idea...

     

    Appreciate any suggestions :)

  2. I wonder what Sony will make of all of this? An FS700 is way out of my price range and it's image isn't even beating the 5d3 with ML. The only thing it has going for it is the high framerates at full HD.

     

    VG-900 was exciting on paper but not good in actuality for example. They were ahead of the game for price/ performance with the 5n, 7, and RX100 but now they are lagging behind with no budget video dslr in sight....

  3. Might be a good solution for portable powerful pc-laptop? Weights 11KGs, power of a standard pc at fraction price of a similar specs laptop.
    https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/computers/PowerGlide-Extreme-AIO-PC/


    No offense dude but that looks awful imo!

    If you want to have a big laptop i would rather go with something like this: http://powernotebooks.com/Sager-NP9370-gaming-laptops-notebooks-sys-5373.html
  4. Hey guys, thought I'd share my first solo video project :)

    http://vimeo.com/64094247

    Shot on Nex 5n. Edited in Premiere with a little contrast and sharpening added. Critique away!

    Known issues:

    - I struggled to get the skin tones right. The 5n isn't that awesome with skin tones and even after correction they are still off. I think it was made even worse while shooting because I used fluorescent lighting.

    - Messed up composition of the girl while interviewing in a couple of shots.

    - Used Sunset profile for most shots and Portrait for others. Not a great idea!

    Cheers
  5. And even with that nice hardware setup, you'll still be bottlenecked by your storage read speeds when trying to edit raw in real-time. You really need a RAID array for editing. 

     

    Well I have an SSD in my laptop for that, in case my external 7,200rpm USB3 drive can't keep up. Although I haven't tried editing raw just yet. I am going to shoot some footage on my friend's MarkIII and test it this week hopefully. I'll compare SSD versus classic 7,200rpm drive and see how each one fares :)

  6. On the technical side, yes if you work with 4K and/or raw then your macbook pro simply won't cut it anymore. I have an Alienware M17x which is a gaming laptop, with a powerful i7 CPU and soon to be 680m nvidia graphics card. It's great with Adobe Premiere because of the CUDA support.

     

    Soon enough people will start realising that if you want to efficiently edit this stuff you need either a PC desktop, hackintosh (like Andrew discussed before), or gaming/ workstation notebook running premiere or whatever program can utilise CUDA. Clevo/ Sager laptops are particularly nice if you want a professional looking and well-built laptop with beastly power. 

     

    If you absolutely can't go PC and don't want to set up a hackintosh, then the best option would be the new iMac with specifically the 680MX graphics card option. That's a good card and will have enough CUDA cores to handle the big files. And soon we will have the new generation of graphics cards from both Nvidia and ATI.

     

    The biggest mistake you could ever make is wasting money on a Mac Pro. Hugely overpriced and very dated now. There are much better 3rd party graphics options for the Mac Pro now... but if you go with the stock spec you will get an old piece of shit that is much weaker than the current iMac offerings.

  7. On another note, perfectionism can be a huge downside into actually getting creative and doing interesting stuff. I'm also someone who tends to fall onto the technical side of things but that's not why we are actually watching stuff. Now it's very interesting and fun messing with formats and spend days converting stuff and looking at pixels...but that's always the easy job. Some people say that it's extremely important. I disagree with that. People have a feeling that finally all the vulnerabilities are gone and now they can be in 100% control of the image. That feeling of vulnerability and feeling of "I'm not qualified enough" will disappear when they see RAW-images and are hooked.

     

    I agree that not having 100% control and being vulnerable does foster creativity, but we aren't just talking about raw here. The ML update greatly improves sharpness, dynamic range, colour depth etc. 

     

    I am myself guilty of spending a little too much time on technology instead of creative production, in video and in audio. But that is every person's challenge- to not waste time faffing about and get down to the hard work. Having this ML update in your arsenal isn't going to suddenly make you a time-wasting, procrastinating failure. Instead it will give you the option to make your non time-critical professional projects so much better. 

  8. But he's right. Get out of weddings before you even begin.

     

    Why? I was thinking of getting into this. Is it because it doesn't pay well and if you don't get it "right" according to the couple, they will lynch you for screwing up their perfect day?

     

    Just guessing here :D

  9. Amro Why did you write that? Seems like a waste of good internet space if you ask me. Everyone has an agenda of some kind. Andrew competes with Blooms site. So what We all have our favourites and vested interests. Where the conflict arises is when somebody is deceptive or when you get gurus who act like gods and trash the truth. There are websites who want you to praise the cameras their sponsors advertise and wont accept a bad word said about them and allow lies and deceptions from their members about them. That is annoying. But Phil Bloom doesn't do that. He does however give some very good reviews for FREE. So you can bypass the ads and get the facts. He is being called out over the 5D Hack but is that actually reality. What he has said so far has been fair. Those using this hack will have many problems that are just not there with the BMC. For the majority of stuff most will as things stand shoot prores. The only time you need raw is when you have no control over lighting. The 5D processes an incredible amount of data Maybe to much work for most.

     

    Why is it a waste of space? I don't mind Bloom's ads on the website, I never complained about them. And this has nothing to do with Andrew competing with Bloom either as when they have differing points of view I am sometimes on Bloom's side and sometimes on Andrew's side. For example the last argument they had I totally thought Andrew was being unreasonable and it sparked Bloom's reaction etc etc.

     

    HOWEVER, in this case I totally think that Bloom's reaction to the ML hack was absurd. It went against everything I thought the guy was about, and it felt spiteful and egotistical instead of positive and progressive.  Any videographer with half a brain knows that story/content is a priority and that raw workflow is slower and requires more processing power.

     

    Besides I'm not hating on the guy. I already said I respect him and his work and even tweeted that to him more than once. 

  10. Posted this on Bloom's blogpost. Part of me thinks he realised he dropped the ball on this one and wants the whole thing to go away. Like Andrew said with great power comes great responsibility.

     

     

    19 HOURS AGO
    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    Totally agree with Sam Tansey here. PB as much as I respect your work and like many of your articles, I think this one comes off as more of a convoluted ramble or rant, with too many obvious things like “focus on story and shooting more†. That’s fine though I know your website isn’t just for helping others but also for ranting too.

     

    Your response to Sam was a much nicer balanced view of everything, but your article and initial tweets were clearly negative and skeptical towards the ML hack, no matter how much you elaborate afterwards.

     

    I honestly think you responded awkwardly to the ML update because you feel left out. This amazing development is simply not relevant to you anymore. Several years ago you probably would have jumped up and down with joy. My only camera is a Nex-5n and I wouldn’t even consider shelling out my savings for a 5DMiii until I saw the videos of this new hack. In your blog post you talk about how much you love using your 1DC which is a $12k camera. Most of us can’t afford a $12 camera with all the toys around it.

     

    I appreciate that you try hard to relate to the newbies and the hobbyists as well as the pros and semi-pros, but maybe you should stop trying. You’re in the working pro league for a while now, with lots of experience and gear under your shoulders (due to hard work of course) and travelling the world giving seminars.

    Instead of constantly elaborating and glossing over everything, I think you just should man up and confess that you reacted to the ML raw hack that way because the whole DLSR community were crazy overjoyed and you simply didn’t feel like part of the party anymore.

     

    Not trying to provoke you with this post, just my honest opinion.

     

    Amro

     

  11. [quote name='aaronmc' timestamp='1351115696' post='20247']
    Kudos to you!

    I love the snarky additions to the transcript. I've lost almost all faith in Canon.

    This is what happens when a company is at the top of the heap. They stop trying.
    [/quote]

    My sentiments exactly. This has happened so many times. It's like Blizzard when WoW got popular- they got super rich and all they care about now is how to get even richer. The fans and power users get left behind as they enjoy the new demographic.

    Happy that Andrew is one of the only people man enough to ask the real questions, kudos indeed
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