Benjamin Hilton

Shane Hurlbut ASC is giving away his illumination experience for free right now, his stuff is like gold in the area of lighting, should answer a lot of your questions: https://www.hurlbutacademy.com/illumination-experience-workshop/?mc_cid=cc66b59990&mc_eid=d730f5a46a

I was with the founder of our organization one time and he wanted to grab a quick statement with a VIP he had with him. I swung up my camera and pushed record I thought and did the statement. When I pushed stop the record light came one...somehow I had missed it. It was quite embarrassing to ask him to do it again, had a technical difficulty;-)

I thought I would start this thread for anyone to share any crazy/embarrassing/funny stories they might have from film shoots, things we would all be interested in. Whatever it is, I'm sure we can all relate. I have quite a few, but I'll start with one. A couple of years ago, I was filming an interview with someone in a remote location. I had light stands holding diffusion and negative fill, and the light stands were weighted down with rocks. I was filming with a couple of GH5s and Leica lenses while another guy was conducting the interview. One of the stands started to sway a bit, so I quietly inched my way over to fix it before it fell over, trying not to distract from the interview. I moved one of the heavy rocks from one stand to another, and when I went to set it down, caught my finger between the rock and the stand. It crushed the fingernail, really badly. It was everything I could do to keep quiet and blood was dripping everywhere. I managed to kind of turn around to hide it, and make it back to the cameras, I then grabbed some leaves off of the tree behind me to hold on them as blood was dripping all over the ground. I didn't want to stop interrupt a good interview with, "excuse me, I just crushed my finger and blood is gushing everywhere." Somehow I managed to keep it from everyone else and the interview went flawlessly. The talent never knew...:-) It was so bad the fingernail ended up completely falling off a few days later, but the video turned out amazing! What are your stories?

This has happened to me quite a bit too, pretty annoying when you get in to edit and find out you have all the wrong shots

Here it is:

Leica photo primes and an nd filter for the interviews

From a promo I did recently with the GHA color on the interviews, you have to skip in a bit to see them: Funny thing, I was in a meeting a little while back with the Director of a really big TV station in the States and was showing him a video I did using the GHA color, while watching it he turning to me and asked under his breath, "you shoot on Red, right?" I took it as a really big compliment I must say

@Sage might have better info on this, but from my experience, the 1080 out of camera vs 4K downscaled to 1080 in post are nearly identical, something very rarely found. I shoot 4K for most projects still as I have the processing capabilities and want to future proof. But if you aren't concerned about it, 1080 is very wonderful out of the GH5. On the advantage side, 1080 out of the GH5 gives 60p in 10 bit, and a more bang for your buck bitrate. I've been using this GHAlex process for quite some time now, and couldn't be happier with it. I feel like it gave the GH5 the soul it was missing.

That's right, the bitrate will always determine your file size, no matter what codec you use. The codec just decides how efficient the bitrate you use is for the video, meaning 10mb/sec will look much better in h.265 as compared to h.264 as it is more efficient.

You should be able to set a maximum bit-rate and calculate the size based on the video length. Meaning a 500MB = 4000mb = 22mb/sec for a 3 minute video

This is really good to know

One feature I found really useful with Adobe Audition is the retime feature for music, where the software takes a look at the track and cuts it down to the desired length using AI I think. I've used it for years and had really good results with it. I'm in the process of switching our post over to Final Cut instead of Adobe and am wondering if anyone has found a feature like this in any other software that works usably? I don't think I can justify keeping a monthly subscription for Audition just for this one feature...

Thanks for the suggestions. I tried Handbrake and it is definitely slower than Media Encoder, but great final output! Might just work for me...

Hey all, I'm in the process of switching editing software for our company from Premiere Pro to FCPX. I really liked Premiere, it has the bases of our workflow for many years now. Our main issue was stability, just so many issues over and over again with no sign of improvement. I've cut two projects in FCPX over the last couple of weeks and really enjoyed it! I feel like my editing speed has gone up due to the flawless performance of the software and I really get this feeling like FCPX just gets out of the way of my editing...revolutionary I know. My main question is what conversion software do you guys use? I am used to the abundance of options available in Premiere Pro for rendering that are lacking in Final Cut. I could drop the $50 for compressor, but just wondering if that is the best option. Anything better/cheaper for encoding/conversion etc.?

Great work, this is such a fun idea. I wanted to enter so badly, just couldn't make it work time wise right now with my job. Hopefully if we do a round 2 at some point I can find the time to enter.