albuswulfricbrian

I liked Gone Girl and Interstellar, but I didn't think that either one of them was spectacular.  Actually, Interstellar was spectacular in a lot of ways but the issues others have already pointed out (I found the sequence of events and dialogue a bit bizarre) kinda ruined it for me.

My favorite movie of the year was probably Grand Budapest.  I really loved Richard Ayoade's The Double, too.  Jesse Eisenberg was amazing and the mood and lighting were perfect.  Boyhood alslo stands out to me.

I did love the scores from Interstellar and Gone Girl though.  I haven't seen The Theory of Everything yet but I've been listening to the soundtrack and I love it, really looking forward to the movie.

i love this camera.  I'm always debating between taking this out or my BMPCC: small, manageable file sizes, good lens support, and tiny body versus raw and whatever BMPCC sensor magic is going on to get such an awesome image.

As Andrew has shown, the low-light on the GM1 is fantastic.

Anyway, I thought I'd share this short project.  It was shot on the GM1 and the Panasonic 25 1.4.

Caption: Another one of these things?  When are we going to get a rawhide with decent specs?

Full official specs: http://www.olympus-europa.com/site/en/c/cameras/om_d_system_cameras/om_d/e_m1/e_m1_specifications.html

 

At first I thought, fine, they just don't wanna add more programming cost to creating menu options with e.g a high bit rate mode.

But looking at video specs it seems to already be two modes for 1080p, one "high" bitrate  24 Mbps and one lower 16Mbps..

So it's just tweaking of numbers, this was a deliberate choice, what is going on here?!

I love that Olympus's "high bitrate" is the same bitrate an iPhone from several generations ago does.

This might be a silly question (but might as well start simple and go from there), but did you choose the 720p HD version when you played it?

After Blackmagic announced the BMPCC at NAB, I waited a while to start considering ordering one, and then waited a little longer because I wanted to get my financial ducks in a row in terms of paying for one (as this is really just a hobby for me).  

Anyway, now I'm thinking about pre-ordering, but I thought I would ask: is pre-ordering a BMPCC likely to make any difference at this point?  I can see that it can make a difference if you're one of the first ten, or the first hundred or whatever, but at this point will it make any difference?  How easy is it to cancel a pre-order?  I have no problem buying used on eBay or wherever else, and so I'm kind of wondering based on people's past experiences whether I should sit and wait and see how the release goes and wait for one to pop up there, or should I bother to place an order with somewhere like Adorama now.

Thanks for answering this admittedly trivial question.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

 

You are not a professional, you are an amateur, and perhaps you consider yourself a skilled amateur?

 

Then the best way to prove it is to film and edit a wedding. Don't raise the expectations of your clients too much, but assure them they will be happy with the video. 

 

Know, that filming a wedding confronts you with considerable challenges. You spend maaany hours with the family and friends, you can't be tooo much in the way, you can under no circumstances lose or botch important moments, you have to film them in clean images, beautifully, without shaking or trembling (but also very often without tripod), you have to get usable sound (in the beginning you will probably not wire the pair, but be aware you have to capture their voices really well!), you have to control the light for perfect exposure, in an environment where very often your only way to influence light is how you position yourself (and keep in mind, don't be in the way tooo much!). There may be no noise, there may be no clipping, but there may very well be creepy darkness. Or, almost worse, a parc in the harsh sunlight, with beautiful green treetops that cast green shadows on the faces of the lot, alternated by veeery bright stripes. You get blinded, hands sticky ...

 

Perhaps you have a talent to master all these problems or never experience the worst. You produce excellent images.

 

But having technically good images, perhaps even with glamour to them, is not enough. A good videographer is very rarely also a good narrator, let alone editor, and vice versa. Finding images is fundamentally different to arranging them. So if you are not a very good camera operator, but a good editor or the other way around, you have to find a way to become good enough.

 

You have to know where the moment you witness and record fits. You have to realize the moment. Often you have to make it fit. People react to you. They act to you. They know their expression and their remarks will be seen by their hosts, they absolutely have to come up smiling. You have to be charming. You have to direct them. You are not 'an eye', you are not a participant with a camera, you are the Ghost of the weddings past.

 

You really learn a lot about how people like to be, to be seen or to become. You are their magic mirror. An invaluable insight if you ever wish to do something dramatic.

 

This is so much more than an industrial image film. Who never made weddings doesn't know.

 

Next step is editing all that. The first time you will curse the day you said 'I do it', and you rue to have followed Zach and me and not Moongoat and /p/.

 

The second time you will try to follow a concept.

 

The third time you will talk with the pair in advance, find funny stories, write down a draft. You will get your clients to accept that you keep it short, you will have enough experience to face difficult situations calmly. You will edit in one day, in a relaxed mood, seeing that your preparation fruited.

 

The fourth time you will say, allright, I like you, that's why I charge only $1000. 

 

 

And if you have improved your skills the first three times, you can actually enjoy it.

That was strangely beautiful.  Thanks.

I'll give you a bump too as long as we're talking about eBay.  I've only ever sold one thing on eBay, a Nikon D3100 when they were having a promotion for free listing/no sales fee.  It sold, I got my money, and never really heard from the person so that was nice.  

I buy quite a bit of stuff on eBay though, and I've only ever had one problem.  Once I bought an old zoom AI Nikon lens.  It was a pretty decent price, had a few small issues listed that weren't a big deal to me, and so anyway I bid on it and won.  When it arrived though, the lens smelled awful.  It smelled like aging and death.  I didn't know it was possible for something that was basically metal and glass to smell so bad. I sealed it in a tupperware container with a cup of baking soda, and it ruined the tupperware.  I tried the same thing with lime juice (which is apparently supposed to kill smells) and it didn't improve at all.  I tried it with Febreeze and had the same outcome.  

I ended up just putting the lens in storage.  I've never used it because I don't want my cameras to begin to share its smell.

I've used the FCPX workflow you're using too, except now I import my photos into Lightroom, edit them there, export them as DNGs, and then import them into FCPX and assign a frame to each. I do it this way just because I like Lightroom a bit better than I like the coloring tools in FCPX.

Going through FCPX is the only workflow I've gotten to work for me, but I'd be curious to hear more about whether quality is lost somehow in this process. 

I've created a few small clips from the V2 30 fps burst mode by importing the .nef files directly into FCPX and then assigning a duration of 1 frame to each.  I then create a compound clip from the result which can be easily edited.  What I don't know is if I'm losing quality with this approach - comments?

 

Another approach I've tried is to create an .mov with an app called Time-Lapse.  It imports .nef files and exports an .mov file with a variety of frame rates and resolutions.  It also allows for non-interactive modifications to the files (exposure, etc).