Jonny Petts was not successful in his attempts to hack the 500D and he has put the project to an end. There will be no 500D firmware hack. At least not from Jonny Petts anyway, but to my knowledge there is nobody else still working on it.

For those of us who were hoping and praying for this to come to fruition, it is a tough blow and to the 500D owners out there still hanging for Manual Controls, I’m sure it is gutting to hear but I hope this will at least will give you some kind of closure.

I think it’s all got a bit difficult, with the advent of the 550D, now the 60D and the inexorable march of technology it seems it’s inevitable that the 500D will remain as it always was, a great but somewhat limited camera that is still capable of some fantastic images in the right hands.

I have extracted the following from Jonny’s most recent message to me and will share it with you here. Don’t hate on the guy though, he did give it his best shot and tried to lead the charge in a task that was immensely challenging, even for the most knowledgable hackers.

Well, from the start I had alot of issues. I had no real experience with these programs, I made small amounts of progress and began to understand what I was doing and so on. I mean, this is why i did not want any payment for it. This was meant to be a little project I could work on and learn from. I mean I am still working it, rarely, but I doubt i will get anywhere. I appreciate all your support and interest, it means a lot to me, you took a big risk in doing so, I have tried my best to produce it, but as you know I am no Trammel Hudson who has this database of knowledgea and has all the resources. I know I’ll get a wave of hate comments for this but i didn’t wish to get peoples hopes up, I just think that the 500D really is for point and shoot with some creativity, but I really think that if you want these manual controls we will need to get the 550d. Which is what I am currently saving up for (that or a 7D). My message to 500d users is to use what you have! I got drawn into hating on Canon for not giving us manual controls, but a photographer recently told me, that it’s the vision you have that makes the shot not the gear, and with the 500d i have found work around for these issues.

I really feel the 500d is a great camera, and I do love it, it produces some great shots but this camera is not for pro’s. It’s for the small time beginners like me, but as i have learnt so much I feel i want these features so I am ready to upgrade.

Sorry mate,

Jonny

So there it is, straight from the man himself with some wise words that ring true no matter what the profession. It’s not so much the tools as the vision of the creative behind it. . .

I’m sorry to all of those that feel they have been misled, it was neither Jonny’s nor my intention to mislead anybody at all. It’s a real shame it hasn’t come off, but don’t let it dishearten you. Go out, shoot great pictures, enjoy what you have and keep smiling!

Jonny's life is full of text based awesomeness!

Is it happening? Isn’t it happening? Has something happened? When will we know what happened? Can we donate to make it happen quicker? Will we know after it’s happened or will they tell us while it’s happening?

All tough questions, with one easy answer. Yes! It is happening, work on the Canon 500D Firmware hack is still in progress. . .but sadly, there hasn’t been much progress. . . *Queue sad face*

It was never going to be an easy road for Jonny Petts to crack the 500D open like a ripe walnut, exposing the oh so crunchy inner centre to his machinations. In fact I knew it was a rather ambitious project to be undertaking given Canon’s tightening of all things related to firmware. Considering that Trammell Hudson got his dirty little mits on the Canon 5DMKII and taught an already sexy piece of kit how to pole dance it’s no wonder. Surely Canon want to drip feed us easy to implement features in order to keep the profit centre close to home? Hey, if you were a multinational corporation with a plan, wouldn’t you do the same?! I know I would!

But it’s not all bad news, there are some really positive things that have happened in the last couple of months that may give you cause for hope.

Firstly here’s what Jonny had to say in our last communication. . .

I don’t want any donations for this yet, but the news is that I’m currently a bit stuck with some of the code. But luckily for me my uncle is a programmer for Store counting systems and he uses IDA extensively so he offered to provide assistance with the bits I don’t have a total grasp of. I am not on the level of Magic Lantern and I’m still learning as I’m doing all of this. I am also close to purchasing a Canon 550D so I can compare a lot of the things between them and find out what everything does!!

So as you can see, it’s not full steam ahead without any hiccups, but it was never going to be and the project is still very much alive and kicking. That Jonny is not willing to accept whatever cash people want to throw his way I think is quite decent also. So while there is still determination driving this thing, I think you’d be silly to count it as down and out.

Another very positive fact worth noting, is that the previously unknown to me, Tester 13, who is working on the project too, has well and truly earned his stripes. You may or may not have read about the firmware hack that gave the Panasonic GH1 it’s wings (Greatly increased bitrate amongst other things) and got many a shooter very excited, well, even if you haven’t the work was pretty bloody awesome! Rambo has been raving about it, he’ll pop up around here somewhere singing it’s praises (won’t ya?! ). Well that was the fine work of Tester 13. So there is some very good help on the case with Jonny.

So considering how long it too to see progress with the GH1, perhaps it will just take a little while to see this come to fruition. Don’t lose heart, friends. . .Stay the course. . .We will see in time!

More soon!

More good news for 5DMKII Owners. . .

Those lovely folks over at Canon are at it again with a new firmware upgrade for the Canon 5DMKII.

I got to admit, that whilst it’s not so cool that things like this need to be addressed, it’s almost a given that any product anybody releases these days is going to have at least some problems. Even the most intense testing is bound to overlook issues that consumers will experience due to their sheer volume and impossible to replicate real world usage. Having said that, I’m very glad that these days things can be fixed by something as simple as a firmware update. Features can even be added! I mean put it this way, can you imagine if the Canon 5DMKII was still shackled to 30P and had no manual audio control? That would suck! Massively!

In this release we’re not seeing anything so exciting as the 24/25P additions or manual audio control, but more a couple of fixes for some funny little things the camera does some times. Here’s a direct quote from Canon’s Download page. . .

This firmware update (Version 2.0.7) incorporates the following improvements and fixes.

1. Fixes a phenomenon in which the aperture exhibits abnormal movement when shooting movies in manual exposure mode and Aperture Priority AE (Av mode) using some Canon lenses (such as macro lenses).
2. Fixes a phenomenon in which the exposure level shown in the LCD panel differs from what is shown in the viewfinder when shooting still images in manual exposure mode.
3. Fixes a phenomenon in which the Wireless File Transmitter (WFT-E4 or WFT-E4 II) may not automatically power off when used for FTP transfers.

These phenomenon only occur with the Version 2.0.4 and Version 2.0.3 firmware.

The Version 2.0.7 firmware being released this time is for cameras with firmware up to Version 2.0.4. If the camera’s firmware is already Version 2.0.7, it is not necessary to update the firmware.

So is it anything to sing and dance about? I don’t know. I guess it will be if you have been suffering from the above issues. I have seen the Aperture issue mentioned in point 1 on my own camera, with nearly all of my lenses, so I will be interested in seeing that fixed. If you’ve seen any of the issues above, let us know how the new firmware treats you!

Download it here.

I’ve always regarded tilt shift lenses with a sense of awe. The things they are capable of are quite astounding really and to actually get your head around it is quite difficult at first. But once you’ve got the basics sorted, it quickly becomes apparent just how much you’ve been missing out on by using conventional lenses. The Canon TS-E 17mm F/4L is one of the newest additions to the Canon Tilt Shift line up and this, my friends, is a seriously cool lens!

There are focal planes flying all over the place, perspective correction techniques galore and enough dials, nobs, twists and turns to make you queasy. So when I’d decided that the Canon TS-E 17mm F/4L was for me, I did a lot of reading about the net, trying to prepare myself for what I knew was most likely to be a confusing exerience in the beginning.

To be completely honest, a lot of what I read made zero sense. The perspective correction I understood, but the whole focal plane thing was so confusing to me, it took a good couple of reads for it to sink in. I’d seen all the miniaturised stuff that people had shot around the place, it looked cool but seemed a limited application. I had no idea what the actual uses of the effect could be and when I found out I was quite surprised. I’m not going to regurgitate everything I learnt here, but if you’re keen to take a look at some interesting reading on the effect, check this article out.

But I digress, this isn’t supposed to be a post about the basics of tilt shift photography. . .it’s about the lens. . .so without further adieu. . .

Pulling it out of the included little Canon Duffel bag, the first thing I notice, is that this thing is large and pretty heavy. Taking the lens cap off, the huge exposed convex elements on the front make me think of two things – Uncomfortably large repair bills if I ever ding the front of that lovely L series glass and the disappointing realisation that I won’t be able to put a filter on the front. I love my polarisers for landscape shooting, so this is a bit of a sad moment. Holding it though, it’s evident the build quality is as you would expect for an L lens and when it’s mounted on the front of the Canon 5DMKII it looks like a serious piece of kit, kinda tough. . .I like that!

Now at F4 it’s definitely not the fastest lens on the shelf, as a result of that you’d expect that you’d have to sacrifice that lovely depth of field we’ve come to expect from fast lenses on these large sensors. This is somewhat true, but not entirely true at the same time. The tilting ability does allow you to do some pretty crazy things with depth and where and how it’s displayed. being able to adjust the focal plane, selectively focus on or apply blur wherever you like in the frame is a very cool function. You’ll get more apparent depth of field or boken with this wide angle than with any other, this much is certain. This more than makes up for the slower speed of the lens. The minimum focus distance is also dramatically reduced when utilising the tilt effectively. How close, I’m not exactly sure, I’m not a numbers guy, what I can say is that I was able to achieve focus on something so close that when I actually looked to see how close I was, I was too close for comfort and concerned about damaging the front element. Got to watch that one.

Man this thing is sharp! Like seriously, deliciously sharp. Now I was always a fan of my Tokina 11-16 f2.8 on the Canon 7D, and it also did a passable job on the Canon 5DMKII at 15-16mm despite not having been designed for it, but the Canon TS-E 17mm F/4L eats it alive. Fantastic stuff! I’m not much of a pixel peeper, but even at full 21MP on the Canon 5DMKII viewing images at 100% it’s tack sharp. You do see a little softening and vignetting at full shift towards the edge of the frame, but this is to be expected at such an extreme viewing angle. Even wide open at f4, it’s sharp, but by the time you’re down around 8, it’s really impressive. So for the sharps it’s a massive win!

One thing I found really fantastic was the almost imperceptible barrell distortion. I read a review somewhere before I bought it that said there was slight barrel distortion. If it’s there, I can’t see it. . .Lines seem perfectly straight, it all looks great to me. For a lens largely suited to architectural photography, it would have to keep distortion of any kind to an absolute minimum.

Worth mentioning, is that this lens is manual focus lens. There is no auto focus at all. Now for some people I can see this is going to be a pain in the butt. However, ever since having a dodgy 7D that couldn’t focus to save itself, I manage quite well using the Live View and zooming in to check focus. It’s not difficult and for super sharp shots and video, it’s not a bad practise to get into. The focus ring is nice, smooth and has hard stops.

Now at this stage, I begin to look back over what I’ve written and it sounds like this is a shameless plug for Canon. It’s not. This is my honest opinion of this lens. To me, it really is this good, and for the price it had bloody well better be!

What I found to be a huge creative positive to using this lens was that I was no longer restricted to certain framing conventions and tripod heights in order to avoid any perspective distortion. Now I know this can all be done in post, but I’m an in camera guy. Stretch it in post, or do it optically through L series glass on location with no loss of detail – for me it’s a no brainer. Also, perspective correction with DSLR video and it’s limited resolution is not even an option. So now it’s just a matter of setting up your shot at whatever tripod height you want, get your perspective true and then shift away till your hearts content to re frame your shot without introducing any awkward converging lines.

For a lens to give you so much more creative control and freedom is rare. It has given me so many more options when I shoot, so many creative choices, that it’s really exciting. It gets me really motivated to shoot and go out and see what this lens can do. It can create really nice text book shots but the possibilities for throwing out the rule book completely and creating some really abstract effects make this a really versatile lens.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely! The Canon TS-E 17mm F/4L is a great wide angle lens before you touch any of the cool tilt shift functions. When you take into account the possibilities they add, it’s a clear winner in it’s class.

The video below and the images here are just a collection of test shots, all have been shifted, some tilted. I’ll post some more examples sometime soon with more detailed explanations.

Until then. . .:)

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Jonny's idea of fun!

Jonny Petts. It’s a name violently ricocheting around the inside of quite a few Canon 500D owners heads out there and it’s no wonder either. Jonny, after all, is the man trying to bring manual controls (amongst other things) to the 500D!

In case you didn’t know, Jonny, has taken up the cause of trying to bring some of the functionality from not only the Canon 550D, but also from the Magic Lantern Canon 5DMKII Firmware, to the Canon 500D. The original post can be found here, but if you caught that, read on for the update.

Here’s what Jonny had to say about the progress thus far. . .If you understand all of it, you’re doing much better than me!

So, as you know this isn’t going to be an easy or quick task. It took Trammel Hudson 100′s of hours to make the Magic Lantern 5DMKII Firmware.

Since we last spoke, two other people have joined the team, and having quite a lot of knowledge in this area, taken a lead position.

One of them, Tester 13, said “The Canon 500D dump is easy, as dissectfw decrypts flasher properly for 500d firmware. But the Canon 550D is different here as we either need a dump or clean flasher to figure out encryption tables. Maybe the encryption has totally changed. So it must be statistically checked if we still have XOR. It is hard to improve anything in Canon 500D as it is restricted by used sensor. And disassembling won’t help you here, as you need documentation for many Digic, ADC and other registers. In reality any real progress that we have in ML is related wither to PTP commands (easy to find and understand), screen video memory (same thing), or audio codec (functions could be spotted and used model is known). It is not surprising that the other fields are much harder. ” (Dont know how many of you will understand this, but hay ho!)

So we now have dumps of the Canon 500D and now need the Canon 550D dump. It is proving hard to get, but this is not my field. Tester 13 has tried using Trammel’s firmware unpacker but apparently it “doesn’t work due to different XOR tables. Even with a working unpacker Trammel couldn’t dump the 7D firmware for months.”

So Tester13 is currently the driving force in this operation, whilst I am just looking through the dump of the Canon 500D and gaining knowledge via. forums. I would like to stress I AM NO TRAMMEL HUDSON, I am just someone who is trying to orchestrate the creation of this firmware for the benefit of others.

Thank you,

Jonny

One thing that Jonny did ask me to make known, is that if you think you can contribute to this project and have anything that may be of assistance to him and Tester 13, please make yourself known in the comments so I can pass along your details. A combined effort is much more likely to see this effort succeed, you know, ‘many hands make light work’ and all that stuff.

Stay tuned for more news on Jonny’s progress. . .

More soon. . .

This kind of stuff is great for Queensland Tourism!

All signs pointed to Noosa coming alive this weekend! “Cyclone Ului is generating monster swells that will punish the Southeast Queensland Coastline this weekend!” “A Century Swell!” “8-12 Foot Waves on Saturday!” “Dangerous conditions this weekend! Storm Surges, Localised Flooding and Beach Erosion forecast!”

Friday Afternoon was exciting, the swell was sizeable and the atmosphere was electric. Everybody had heard what was heading our way, there was talk of things to come everywhere I turned. Everything was coming together nicely. I got some setup shots, popped around and shot some stuff with the Glidetrack and finished off with some time lapse when it got too dark for video. This was all just a reconnaissance mission, the next day was what counted. . .Saturday was game day! Sadly it didn’t quite turn out the way everybody thought.

Despite the media doing their usual stuff, I thought the Coastalwatch Swell Forecast would be at least somewhat accurate. After a week of excitement that built to feverish pitch at 5:30am this morning while I was driving to Noosa, arriving at the car park out at first point was a little bit of an anti-climax. It looked smaller than the evening before and despite picking up a little bit, it soon got pretty messy. It became apparent that the fabled “8-12 foot waves” were just that, and unlikely to be seen. I’ve got to say it was a little depressing having been looking forward to it all week.

Now don’t get me wrong, there were some good waves to be had, but they just weren’t the kind of bone-crunching waves that I had been hoping for. Something really crazy with more serious consequences for a misplaced foot or an overly ambitious turn. Something that would make for good vision!

By lunchtime I’d called it quits and headed home via. Mooloolaba, just to see if any madmen were chasing closeouts on the beach. There wasn’t a lot going on and so it was wrapped.

Sadly I didn’t really capture anything that is, what I would call, outstanding. If anything, the footage from the Cyclone Hamish Swell in November of ’08 was much crazier and made for better watching. Anyway, better not neg on it too much, we’ll see how it comes up when it’s all done and dusted. Hopefully it won’t take too long to get it up.

On another note, I finally heard from Canon with regard to the Autofocus issues I had been having. After this tweet “May have to give up the hope of @CanonAustralia helping with my Canon 7D #autofocus issue. No progress in three weeks. Blog post Friday.” I received an e-mail from the Service Department, there was no mention of there being a known (read: admitted) issue with 7D’s, but it did seem like they were taking the issue seriously and that they gave a damn. Which I might say is very nice, as I was beginning to think that they didn’t and wasn’t looking forward to having a sour taste in my mouth. I’m yet to make contact back to them as it came through on Friday afternoon but I’ll let you all know how it progresses.

More soon!

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What it looks like at Jonny's end! Where is the "Add Manual Controls & Extra Frame rates button"?

When I first got wind of this, I was very, very interested! I’d always thought that surely as soon as the Canon 5D MKII Firmware Update that gave the user manual control over ISO, Aperture and Shutter speed came out, somebody would take up the reins and find a way to port that over to it’s baby brother the Canon 500D. It never happened. I guess by the time the Canon 7D came around, most people had seemed to forget about the fantastic little 500D.

Canon seemed to have forgotten about it, no firmware update with manual controls ever came and now with the release of the 550D, which has all that we wanted in the 500D and more, it seems it’s slipped totally from the program.

Enter Jonny Petts. A likeable lad from Kent in the UK. He’s a friend on Facebook and when I saw his status update that he was beginning work on a 500D Firmware Hack, naturally I thought I should suss it out and see just what was going on. I built this site around videos I shot on the 500D and there’s still alot of people out there who would jump at the opportunity to have manual control of their settings and shoot at different frame rates with this little gem, so good on Jonny eh? Three cheers!

So after having a bit of chat with Mr. Petts, here’s the deal, I’ve included the whole thing here because, quite frankly I understand about 16% of what he’s saying!

Ok, well i have a firmware from the 500d and the 550d. I am also comparing what Magic Lantern has done with the new 5D MK II firmware update to the new 5D MKII to see if I can see what they have done.

But what I am ultimately trying to do is use dissect_fw3_2 to expand the firmware into flasher/firmware then to reverse the flasher (after loading it into IDA to find out how to decrypt the firmware image). After I have done all of this, I will be able to attempt porting the desired functionality into the 500D firmware from the 550D’s firmware.

This is going to be a long and painful process and could mess up the 500d, but I am willing to do it for the sake of others, as it will benefit all of the 500D users out there and could save some people $200 instead of buying a 550D.

Did you get that?! You’d be forgiven if you didn’t get it all! So here’s the scooop. . .

Jonny’s first objective is the revered 24P. Many 500D users (myself included) have found dinky workarounds for the manual controls, but are still horribly crippled by that awful 30P and the useless 20P in 1080 mode! I believe he is also looking to implement the 60P and 25P functionality as well. No word on 50P, but we’ll see how that develops, I’m sure if it’s possible we’ll hear about it.

Next up is the manual controls, obviously the new 550D has full manual control over the Shutter, ISO and Aperture. It was such a pain shooting video with the 500D, this would really be a godsend!

Since the 500D doesn’t have a microphone input, the disabling of the AGC is not such a huge issue, but I think that Jonny plans to contact Trammel Hudson (Author of the 5DMKII Magic Lantern firmware) to get his take on things. I’d be interested to know whether people see this as an important thing considering they can’t connect external mics.

I’ll be following Jonny’s progress very closely here, so if you’re interested, stay tuned. If you have anything to add or know a thing or two about hacking the firmware on Canon camera’s and would like to get in contact with Jonny, leave a comment here and I’ll make sure he gets it! Wish him luck guys! I would have loved this to happen when I had one of these camera’s and I can’t wait to see how it goes!

Jonny would like to give a big shoutout to the Cinema5D Forum users. Apparently they’ve been instrumental in getting this project up and running. Smiles all round!

More soon. . .

**UPDATE** Want to catch the first update on Jonny’s progress? Here it is!

It’s a happy day today! An e-mail just arrived in my inbox this morning from SmugMug HQ with the wonderful news that their embedded flash player is now capable of displaying a HD video feed in Full Screen mode! This is great news and welcome addition to the already fantastic service these guys provide.

So basically, there are a couple of new buttons that are only visible when you are in Full screen mode – HD and Stretch. Both are toggled on or off and give you what seems to be a 1280x720P HD stream and the option to stretch it so it fills the screen or display it pixel for pixel in a 1280×720 frame in the centre of the screen.

Give it a go with the video above! I don’t think I will update the old embed’s for the other video’s on the site as they all have links to the HD versions and Vimeo versions too.

Sorry for the lack of updates over the last few weeks. A ridiculously stacked schedule has left me without much time for sleeping, let alone getting out and shooting content for the site. An easing of workloads over the next week should allow for some all out shooting fun while the weather is blinging here on the Sunny Coast! Can’t wait for that!

More soon!

Not unlike the Canon 5DMKII was sometime ago, this is a game changer!

Confused? You needn’t be, it’s actually very simple. Facebook has come to the Xbox 360 and it is going to redefine the way we view and interact with Social media!

Now why on earth would I be posting about the XBox 360? Aside from the fact that it has HD capabilities and also plays movies, what does it have to do with camera’s and the usual content on this blog? Well it does have something to do with photo’s and this is how it all started. Allow me to explain. . .

Until now, Facebook, a site based upon Social interaction, has increasingly and somewhat ironically become an anti-social pursuit. It’s habit-forming for many and anybody who has experienced it would agree that despite being a social platform, it all too often removes the user from actual social situations to inform their other ‘friends’ of their doings and current ‘status’.

I see friends posting photo’s of what’s going on, updating their pages, writing messages, all while it’s actually happening. While that’s going on, sure I can see it on my computer or my phone, but that person is completely detached from the actual situation that moments ago, they were actually experiencing. We are seeing average everyday people turning in to voyeuristic documentarians for the benefit of their Facebook following.

When I view this content, like many others, I am alone on my computer logging in to see what’s going on. Katie also reads and sees most of the same content, as we have many mutual friends and we often discuss what we see on there. I never watch her ‘maintain’ her Facebook, nor does she watch me, nor does anybody else I know watch other people on Facebook. It has seemed to me for all intents and purposes to be an individual and anti-social pursuit. . .until now. . .

Recently Katie and I had some friends around and we were all sitting in the living room, chatting away and having a few drinks. I have an XBox 360 connected to the TV that streams my iTunes music from my editing machine over the house wireless connection.

I remembered seeing that Facebook had come to the XBox 360 and after picking some beats and seeing it on the menu, rudely decided I would check it out (It was new and shiny, I just had to have a quick peek!). What ensued was something I have never experienced before and I couldn’t believe it.

There was 8 of us in the room and when they saw their beloved Facebook on the TV, many were quite surprised! All being quite avid Facebooker’s, this was a new and interesting (albeit a little klunky) implementation of the site.

What was intended to be a quick look to see what it was like turned into a full on group session. We went through old photo albums, laughing, telling stories and reminiscing. This quickly led to more searches for ‘that photo’ and in turn, more laughter, discussion and reminiscing. It all happened so fast, before you knew it everybody in that room had had their own photo’s up on the screen, we had all had a great time and 2 hours had flown by.

I looked around me. There had been a radical shift in the dynamic. In that moment the XBox had suddenly and irrevocably changed the way we interact, share and evaluate a Social Media experience. It had taken it out of the office and bedroom and into the living room! A room oft-times designed to comfortably accommodate multiple people for extended periods while they talk, watch TV or a movie. I mean of course you could have always plugged a laptop in and done exactly the same thing, but what I’m really talking about here is accessibility. Heaps of people have laptops and Plasma’s, how man people would actually bothered to hook it up and do that?

The XBox might not be the first to do this, it definitely won’t be the last, but with it’s wireless controls and ability to display on the TV, it sure is a perfectly suited system for that kind of viewing.

So now what? What’s next and where do we go from here? Will Facebook actually begin to promote real life social interaction in the form it did in our lounge room that night? I sure hope so. . .then I won’t have to live with the haunting Social/Anti-Social paradox that is Social media.

More soon. . .

The exorbitantly expensive Panasonic P2 Card and it's little friend, a Sandisk Extreme 3 SD Card.

Now we’ve already covered the point of acquisition, the camera, but once it’s shot and sitting on those memory cards, where does it go? Here in Part 2 of Tools of the Trade we’re going to find out.

The Canon 500D shoots to High speed SD cards. High speed because the video aspect has a rather high sustained data rate, it’s not like stills where you can fill up the buffer and when it’s full, it just slows down your maximum shooting speed. Video has to be able to dump continuously to the card. For that reason I use a Sandisk Extreme III Card rated to Class 6. Which I think is around 30mb/s. Don’t quote me on that one .

I just plug the USB cable into the computer and then into the computer and dump the card to my dump directory, aptly named ‘Dump’. From there I use Cinema Tools to conform the footage to 25P so it plays nice with my HVX stuff, and then MPEG Streamclip to convert it to ProRes. My trusty Quad G5 2.5, although up to most things I throw at it, does not like to edit native h.264. To be honest I can’t blame it, whilst it’s a beautiful codec to behold, it’s an unwieldy monster beneath the hood.

The Panasonic HVX-202 Stuff is a little convoluted. It shoots to a proprietary Panasonic memory card dubbed P2. It was specially designed by Panasonic and is basically a PCMCIA Card with an array of high speed SD cards inside, a little controller and enough confusing stuff to ensure that nobody could reverse engineer it and make the damn things cheaper for the average Joe. Unfortunate for us, great for Panasonic! The exorbitant amount they charge for these things must make them a mint! but I digress.

The old P2 card is slotted straight into the side of my 17″ Powerbook G4, which hasn’t been retired yet because of it’s useful PCMCIA port, despite it’s now defunct processor. The P2 Card appears like a drive, and I just copy the contents of the P2 card to a new folder on an external drive. Once it’s safely on the drive, it’s plugged back into the G5, and the required files are converted to Quicktime files using the Log and Transfer utility within Final Cut. That creates DVCPRO HD Quicktime files which can be edited nice and easily in the timeline with almost any other codec footage I have lying around.

Once the ProRes conversion is all done on the 500D stuff, it’s straight into Final Cut Pro, where it’s chopped, cut and spat out the other end, either in it’s native quicktime format, or through compressor into H.264 for web viewing.

I rarely go to much trouble grading my footage, preferring to achieve most colours in camera. I have used Apple Color and Magic Bullet Looks (MBL) extensively and to be honest whilst I understand they have a place, I have come to appreciate the purity of an image straight out of the camera. Not only that, but often you watch a clip and see some poorly executed MBL absolutely destroy what was probably some really nice footage to start with. I know this is probably the user, not the software, but still, it’s become kind of cliché. Grading is good, but you don’t need it all the time. Simple is good, simple is fast! I’d prefer to walk away from a shoot, knowing that it already looks the way I want, rather than knowing I’ll be grading for an hour or two in the edit. I’d rather be out shooting!

I do make use of Adobe After Effects on occasion, for TVC’s and things like that where the basic motion effects in Final Cut are insufficient, but not so much.

For the photography side of things, Adobe Lightroom is my program of choice. It is fantastic! Not only for it’s fantastic asset management system, but also it’s editing features. On an average day I am normally dealing with around 100 images, and that can reach anywhere up to 300, depending on the job. Dealing with that amount of images, it’s easy to lose track of what you have and have not got and where what you have or haven’t got is. Advanced search tools, albums, a star-based rating system and the ability to flag photo’s make dealing with bulk images a breeze.

The processing module in Lightroom is sufficient for most edits. You’ve got your normal raw editing tools as well as some really useful custom masking tools. If there’s some very specific masking or layering required, then Photoshop CS4 mops that up nicely. You can also export straight from Lightroom to a web gallery, or even upload that gallery straight to your website via. FTP. I don’t know if I said it already, but Lightroom is fantastic! If you’re into digital photography, get onto it! Check Lightroom out here.

I use all Apple computers. I’m not a fanboy or anything. I used PC’s for close to 15 years, got sick of them crashing whilst editing, got a mac, no more crashes. Great computers, great OS, but most importantly, they suite the way I work really well.

So that’s the Post-Processing side of things covered. . . .I could probably keep going on for ages, but hey, it’s Saturday night, almost 9:30pm and I can hear the couch, popcorn and a movie calling. . .What a party animal!!!

More coming in Part 3. . .