The Canon 550D - The 7D's little brother!

So it was that Canon announced to a mostly suspecting public that coming soon to store near them would be the latest addition to the Rebel Line, the Canon 550D or Rebel Ti2. This little beauty certainly does look the goods on paper and with it’s free and easy attitude towards video it’s sure to be a hit with all the boys and girls! What’s it’s deal, I hear you ask, well it’s basically a mini 7D. It’s a Digic IV processor, 18MP APS-C Sensor with pretty much the same video modes and frame rates (1080P @ 30, 25 & 24P, 720 @ 50 & 60P, 480 @ 50 & 60P). Am I excited, you betcha!

Let me tell you why. . .

Check out the Press release here for all the information, I’m not going to bother to regurgitate it all for you, but rather add some thoughts to ponder.

If the 500D had of been this camera, I don’t think I would ever have brought a 7D. . .end of story. . .Now I love my 7D, heaps and heaps and heaps, but I only brought it for the manual video controls, useable 1080P mode and $1000 price difference to the 5D MKII. At the time I was shooting mostly video and considering I really only needed those things, the 5DMKII, despite the luscious full frame sensor, seemed overkill for my purposes. So I jumped at the 7D as soon as it popped it’s head up, but now the 550D is on the horizon I’m looking at my neglected 500D on the shelf and wondering if I could maybe finally get my 7D auto focus looked at by Canon using the 550D as a backup. That my friends is a very alluring thought!

Now having said that, I’m sure there are a couple of things that the 550D will have that will really irk me. Going back to having only pre-set white balances will be agony. I shoot almost exclusively with a manual Kelvin white balance, adjusting it for nearly every shot. This is just me, it’s the way I like to do things. Having this ability for the first time on the D90 was a godsend. Losing it when I moved to the 500D killed me. Getting it back when I got a 7D was like slipping into your favourite old shoes. The prospect of going back to that with a 550D as a back up camera is almost a deal breaker for me. Once you get used to it to Manual Kelvin, it’s nigh impossible to go back.

I’m also left wondering if the noise apparent in the 500D image will be any different with the 550D. The 7D eats the 500D alive in this respect and to be honest, I’m not sure why. I see people making reference to the 2 processors, but I’m not sure how this makes a difference. I thought the two processors were there so you could crunch through 18mp stills at 8FPS. I’m not an expert on that though so I should stop pretending to be!

So am I going to get one? At this stage I’m not sure. . .but to give you an idea my 500D is now sitting on eBay, with I might add, a spectacular marketing video that I shot special for it! All I know is that no matter what happens, it will be missed and remembered dearly. . .the first HDSLR that I ever owned! *sigh*

More soon. . .

A sense of lurking malice hid in the atmosphere, unseen forces swept through the air and the ocean, elements whipping each other into a frenzy. The usually idyllic Sunshine Coast had turned feral and it surely was a sight to behold!

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With the weather putting all my shoots on an indefinite hiatus until it clears, I had the perfect opportunity to get out with the camera and shoot a little bit of what’s going on at the moment. We are getting pummeled by heavy rainfall, strong winds and king tides – It’s not the best, but it sure is interesting! The surf is big and supposed to be increasing right up until Wednesday and it should make for some great footage if this onshore wind will let up.

This was a bit of an experiment today, with different settings, white balances, filters, time lapse, slow motion. . .and of course some playing with the Glidetrack Shooter for the first time in a shoot of this kind. Got to admit, I had a ball! It’s been ages since I got to go out and just shoot for fun and I really enjoyed it, even though it felt like shooting in a Coriolis storm!

As usual, I shot it all on the 7D with the usual crop of glass. Nothing too different there – Sigma 30mm f1.4, Tokina 11-16 f2.8, Canon 100-400 IS 4.5-5.6 and 70-200 f2.8 IS USM.

I didn’t have too long to shoot, knew that I wanted to attempt a very harsh color profile in camera and had some ideas of what I wanted to capture. The wild sea, some time lapses of the clouds as the wind was howling and they were moving super fast, and hopefully some people watching. I got lucky on all counts, with the bonus being some Kiteboarders who were the only ones to brave the conditions. Funnily enough, the kiteboarder in the red is the same Kiteboarder from the 7D test video I uploaded ages ago! I found out his name is Mick and he is the Stickerman here on the Sunshine Coast. So good on ya Mick! Thanks again for the footage!

There were quite a few people watching and despite a few curious glances at the strange looking guy with the Glidetrack, on the ground behind the spectators, everything went pretty smoothly.

Got to say I do love this Glidetrack Shooter so far, but I am still a bit of a novice with it and still yet to learn how and when to employ it to the greatest benefit. It is a lot of fun though and quite smooth along the slide. I ended up getting a little Manfrotto 701HDV head for it. That was a good move, it uses the same base plate as my 503HDV and means I can quickly pull the Glidetrack on and off my main tripod legs without any hassle and also switch the camera in between both of them without having to change base plates. It’s very useful and I’d say almost essential for shooting on the move. It has taken a bit of getting used to in terms of setting up and balancing and what not since it’s a tripod mounted on a tripod, and as you can see in the wide shot with the people watching I noticed it develops a gradual lean when moving from one side to the other. It’s not very noticeable when viewed in real time and you can really only see it because of the speed ramp applied to the shot, but it’s something I need to investigate so I can stop it from happening. Something about the drawing board and a trip back to it. . .who knows?!

There is some funny business going on with some frame blending artifacts on the sped up clip of the tree and the clouds. I have found a slight hiccup with MPEG Streamclip and the fact that the transcoding process actually creates interlaced footage. Yes I’m aware it’s Progressive interlaced footage, where both fields contain information from the exact same moment in time and hence when displayed together create one entire progressive frame. But I don’t want that, I’ve found that speed changes with frame blending enabled and also Smoothcam can make this footage show it’s true ugly interlaced colours in the form interlaced banding. Something I was glad to see the back of when I got my HVX! And now it’s BACK!!! Ugghhh. . .So MPEG Streamclip only allows you to select the options “Upper field first” or “Lower field first”. It doesn’t let you choose ‘none’, or ‘progressive’, like After Effects or Final Cut. If anybody knows a way, please share, this is annoying me and so far I’ve only been able to achieve true progressive output in ProRes LT with Compressor. But as you may or may not know, Compressor takes much longer than MPEG Streamclip to do the same thing, so it’s not really a path I want to embrace at this stage. I’m putting it out there! Any ideas?

So for the last time lapse I used my little chinese intervalometer, which, by the way, has a bung screen but is still usable. It was just a 1.6 second exposure fired off every 2 seconds. Finally I got some decent wave motion. I decided to play it back at a slower frame rate just so the motion wasn’t so fast you couldn’t appreciate what was going on. I think that works well with waves, so you can actually see whats happening.

The music in this video is by The Last Atlant and the song is called ‘Everything is Illuminated’. A great track off an even greater album, ‘Cloudburst of Colours’. Get on it, no doubt you’ll enjoy the whole album if you liked this track!

Anyway, it’s definitely not a masterpiece, but I had heaps of fun shooting it which is all that matters at the end of the day. . .and I didn’t get rained on too much, which is a huge bonus.

Hopefully the swell picks up even more over the next few days and we get some real carnage going on! Fingers crossed!

More soon!

And for you Vimeo Lovers!

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 1280×720P 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!

Now let’s be realistic, this was a totally self-indulgent w#nk! Hahaha! In fact that’s what this video should be called!

Got an iPhone? Check the Video out here!

SmumMug in 1080P? Check it out here!

I was bored, ok? This was shot when I was stuck in the hotel room in Sao Paulo after we had been delayed and missed our flight out of Brazil to Texas, all those months ago during the Brazil and Mexico Shoot. I cut and uploaded the second travel video this day and after that, pretty much had nothing to do except shoot myself doing what I had been doing for ages, sitting in the window watching the rain fall down from the sky and cascade down the glass. Riveting stuff, why not shoot it?

Funnily enough, it did prove to be quite a challenge, and there was much trial and error, particularly with the shallow focus and having to get the shot right, before running over and getting in place. To be honest, my acting wasn’t as good as I thought it would be either, way too contrived. . .lucky I didn’t have a speaking part.

I used the Sigma 30mm f1.4, the Canon 50mm f1.8 II, Canon 70-200 f2.8 IS USM and the Tokina 11-16 f2.8. The 70-200 was probably my favourite of the four, positioned right up against the far wall of the hotel room, wide open and loving the dim light at a low ISO. I can’t help but start wondering what a 5D MKIII might have looked like and how soon it will be tempting me.

The music here is by a group called Way Out West. They are absolutely phenomenal artists, just two lads in fact, Jody Wisternoff and Nick Warren. The song is called “The doors are where the windows should be” and it just sounded exactly like I felt at that time; Mellow with a dash of skitter.

It’s short and rightly so, the subject matter didn’t really lend itself to lengthy epic, rain, me and a window. . .even 30 seconds is too much. Sadly that’s all the Sunshine Coast has been offering up the last week also! Just rain, rain and more rain! There hasn’t been much shooting going on that’s for sure. When there has, I’ll be back on the case and pumping out content on here like there’s no tomorrow.

More to come soon! Oh and Happy New Year guys and gals!

It was about a four hour drive to Tenterfield. The gorgeous Katie was a little trojan, driving all the way there, while I pointed the camera out the window under the pretense of making a video for ‘the blog’. Well, it wasn’t a complete waste of time and the video above, I’m actually really pleased with. Not because it’s my best work ever, but because it’s the little things that you forget and this will be nice to look back on. I hope you enjoy it!

There’s  full 1080P version on SmugMug, Check it out here! You’ll find the full story and a Vimeo embed after the jump too.

At last I managed to get around to hacking out the rest of this cut last night, it’s been sitting here on the computer, half finished, for quite some time now!

I didn’t get to spend as long in the edit as I would have liked due to time constraints still making themselves known even this close to Christmas! The trouble is, given that it is coming into Christmas, I’d like to go into it with a clean slate and all the home movies edited as I’m sure there’s going to be a bunch of stuff shot over the next couple of weeks. Hell, I still have to edit the video I shot of Christmas last year! Hahaha!

Anyway, it was great seeing the kids and the old man and woman again, they moved away from the Sunny Coast about 6 months ago and it’s been a bit lonely without them. Kendra, the eldest little girl, is a riot and you’ve probably seen her in other vids of mine about the place. She is so much fun to shoot with, loves the camera and loves watching it back even more. She seems capivated by the way she does things, as if thinking “Wow, do I really look like that when I get around?!” I’m sure it feels a lot more graceful to her!

I took the whole camera kit with all the lenses and the tripod. I was hoping to stop and get more footage on the way down, but considering it was close to 40ºC and the air conditioner in the car is broken, poor old Katie didn’t fare to well when we stopped to get the time lapse over the mountains. In the interest of a level status quo for the rest of the trip, I decided car footage would be best!

I made considerable use of the Sigma 30mm when I was down there, this is just a great lens for ‘home movie’ style footage. If the distance between you and the subject isn’t too great, you can usually achieve a really nice depth of field and that really helped with the Bubble blowing footage. That area was really busy, the background was a mess and with a really deep depth of field, taking it all in would have made that footage unwatchable. Sigma 30mm f1.4 for th win!!!

I used the Sigma a little more than the Canon 50mm f1.8 as I don’t have a 52mm Polariser for the 50mm. I am not going to get one either, as I want a Canon 50mm 1.2 or the Sigma 50mm 1.4 eventually and I don’t want to be buying interim crap if I don’t really need it. Regardless, I did use the little 50mm on some of the close up shots of little Olivia’s (the Baby!) face. You’ll notice the really horrible out of focus shot of her getting scared when I sneeze, I know it’s a bad shot, but I couldn’t help but include it, she got such a fright, cried and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Nice brother hey!

I have to say, and it’s pretty obvious I think, the best shot in there is the one of Kendra in the swing. My colleague Brett often questions a shot’s merit by asking me “If you died to tomorrow and this was what was left, this one shot was going to be shown to everbody as an example of your work, would you hang your hat on it?”. Rather melodramatic, I know, but it really does make you think! In most cases, I answer in the negative, thinking, as if I would ever hang my hat on a single shot! But I think I know what it’s all about now. This shot was just a case of right place, right time and I feel probably one of the best, if not the best, I have ever captured. I don’t know if I’m biased becuase I love the subject matter dearly, but there’s something about it that really makes me happy, and that’s what it’s all about I guess.

The music in this piece holds a special significance for me. It was written by my best mate, Marlon Platt, a couple of years back. He laid it down into an iMac, just him and a guitar, using the stock mic, very budget and completely fitting for the project at the time. I asked him for a track that was all about travelling and had that road trip feeling of discovery, fun and the realisation of something great. This is what he came up with and I think it’s pretty darn good! So when it came time to find a track for this video, this one immediately sprang to mind and I think it works here nicely. Marlon is based in Melbourne, still writing music in his spare time and occasionally puts some stuff up on his MySpace Music site, Marlonism. Check it out to see where he’s at these days.

Well, that’s about it for now. I’m not so sure what’ll be popping up on here over the break (All I know is I won’t be getting one!), but keep an eye on the Facebook page for some mobile picture uploads from the new iPhone and whatever else comes about!

Merry Christmas!

Oh and despite the fact that the Poll shows more people prefer Vimeo over SmugMug. I’ve loaded this onto SmugMug first. Sadly for all you pro-Vimeo people out there, the stats don’t agree with the polls! Video’s are getting around twice as many hits on SmugMug as they are on Vimeo. So either the people out there watching videos’ aren’t voting on the Poll’s or somebody else is driving the Traffic to SmugMug. I’ve posted both here for now and will continue to do so for a while yet! Enjoy!

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. . .

Should be able to get a release for the Brazil and Mexico footage soon and can’t wait to finish the Tenterfield clip, I just need a little while to get all this other stuff out the way!

I’ll be getting back into it before the dust has settled though, mark my words.

Stay tuned!

Cotton Tree Jetty on a perfect Sunshine Coast day! Times like this it sucks being behind the camera!

Crazy times abound here on the Sunshine Coast at the moment. I have been shooting flat out and working pretty much non-stop. It seems that this time of the year is not only the hottest, but also the busiest and most lovely to shoot. That makes for long days behind the 7D and long nights in front of the computer.

Sadly, that is the reason for this short post without a video. Icurrently have 2 minutes of the Tenterfield Road trip cut complete, it’s nearly 11pm on a Sunday night and I have to call it quits. I’m driving to the Gold Coast in the morning for a meeting and still have a bunch of stuff to get done before I leave at 5am.

It may be a couple of days before I get a chance to finish it off, so here are some stills from the trip and the last couple of days.

Stay tuned over the next week for the Tenterfield Road Trip video and also another announcement that should make for some great footage.

More soon. . .

Not quite as sexy as Scarlett Johansson. . .but almost! Pic: Jared Land - Reduser.net

Red, the folks behind the wonderful 4K Digital Cinema phenomenon the ‘Red One’, are at it again! Making bold claims while people wait, frustrated and anxious, for actual hardware to become available.

It seems like only yesterday that some of the boffins over on the DVXUser Forums were claiming Red was a myth, a dream doomed to never see the light of day. It was, what did they call it? Vaporware! That’s it! To think that Red stuffed about so much with the release of the Red One that somebody actually dubbed it Vaporware should explain why this latest announcement about their upcoming 3K, 2/3″ Sensor camera called ‘Scarlet’, while very exciting, is something many people won’t be holding their breath for. But to say that the spec list kindled that ever present pilot light of desire into a small inferno would be hitting the nail on the head. On paper, this thing looks good! Real good!

Aside from being a 3K camera, shooting in RedCode RAW (a proprietary compressed RAW format, with all the associated benefits that brings – think real grading in a codec with some real latitude and 4:4:4 colour space), it also shoots high frame rates and heaps of other cool stuff. I won’t regurgitate it all here with some spin, you can read it for yourself over on the Red Forums.

What really got me though, was when I read that you will be able to, via a special mount, electronically control Canon and Nikon Glass. Double take! “Electronically control Canon and Nikon Glass!” You have got to be kidding me. . .I nearly wet myself. I mean on the 2/3″ sensor version, meh. . .What will it be like in low light? Will it be noisy? What will the crop factor be? I don’t know the answers to these questions. But on the S35 Sensor, which is similar in size to the APS-C, I’d be very keen to shoot video in RAW, with Canon Glass, wave goodbye to poor h.264 compression, aliasing and all the other not so great things on the 7D.

The question is, is it worth the money for the end result? What else will I need to manage all this RAW Footage? What kind of beast will I need to edit it? Grade it? How many thousands of dollars would the RAID array cost to store it all?

As much as the possibilities of these glorious camera’s tend to make us technophiles drool, I for one will be holding off for a bit, seeing how the chips fall and maybe dipping a toe in the water once Scarlet’s been in there for a while, relaxed and ready to go!

This is awesome for a couple of reasons. I have been looking around me lately, feeling a little creatively burnt out, racking my brain for something cool to shoot a video on for the site. Something hopefully that will renew some faith in my ability behind the camera, after the lacklustre travel videos from the Brazil and Mexico shoot, which even my Dad thought were pretty ‘meh!’ Hahaha!

So I’m taking the camera on the road trip, looking for something fresh, something interesting and also some shots of my gorgeous little sister who is no doubt responsible for probably half the views on Vimeo of the last video I cut of her. She’s only 3 and already knows how to get on the computer, go through the history, find her video on Vimeo and watch it. . .full screen. So I intend to make her another that she can be equally excited about.

I think it’s going to be just what I need. . .some time off the beaten track. . .no deadlines. . .some time with the family and hopefully a fresh head on my shoulders when I return!

Wish me luck!