So desperate I'm taking shots with my iPhone. Come on SUN!!!!

I am hanging. . .

Like, flat out hanging for a hit maaaan! It’s been that bloody long since I was out in the sunshine having a great time shooting, I almost forget what it’s like. It’s a sad feeling.

I know I could go out and shoot some really morose, rainy, boring footage and peddle it off as ‘arty’ but there’s enough bloggers doing that kind of crap around the place. It’s depressing!

It’s a waiting game though and it seems we’ll be waiting a while. There have been rather decent storms complete rain and floods, gale force winds (with rain in them) and a hell of a lot of clouds. It’s uninspiring weather at the best of times and even though the surf has been big it’s so windy and rainy, there’s not much going on out there to shoot.

But what’s been going on? Well, the Glidetrack is going well. It’s alot of fun but I do get over having it on the tripod all the time. It adds weight and makes the whole thing pretty unwieldy. I am getting much more used to it and it’s already paid for itself. I love the shoulder mount function and use it quite a bit, takes out that horrible minute shake that seems to introduce some terrible jello. It’s also been great for using for Aerials, I straight up would not have been able to get some of the shots I got last time I went up without it.

I sold the 500D! It went to a chap in New South Wales. I hope he has as much fun with it as I did. He got a bargain! I would have been stoked with that deal! So the money is sitting in the bank and was supposed to go straight towards a 550D, but i am just not sure if that’s what I want to do. I’m seriously considering kicking the HVX and getting a 5D MKII when the new firmware comes out. Being able to record audio properly on that sucker is going to be killer! So considering that’s the only thing I keep the HVX around for these days, it’s possible she might be going to a new home. It’s done it’s time and really, somebody somewhere will give it a hell of a better life than it has now, sitting in the corner in it’s Pelican case. Probably going to sell it all as a kit.

Well, that’s about it for now. I’ll be doing a bit more around here in the coming weeks. It’s time to get back into the swing of things. Next up I’ll be bringing you some information on a group of unlikely lads who have got their hands on Firmware dumps of the 500D and 550D and will be doing their best to bend the 500D to their will, cracking it wide open and making it do all those cool things we want it to. We’ll be following their progress closely because if and when they succeed, there’s going to be a hell of a lot of happy campers out there!

More soon. . .

It was a scorching hot October day, a merciless sun beat down on mine and thousands of other shoulders as my lovely lady and I carried the camera gear kilometers up the beach. Up ahead in the distance (*Sings* I saw a shimmering light!) hundreds of kites hung in a stiff breeze coming straight off the pacific, pulling tightly against their strings. Children looked up in awe, adults stood rooted to the spot, astounded. It truly was a sight to behold and I think the Coolum Kite Festival surprised us all that day. It was fantastic!

I’d heard about this event a while back and thought it might be interesting to shoot. Let’s be straight though, I thought it would be a couple of locals flying their little kites down on the beach, nothing too crazy, but worth a look. I was stunned! It was huge, apparently one of the best kite festivals in the world with international fliers and everything. People had come from all over, there was even international media at the event. I really couldn’t believe it!

I went there with the 500D kit and sadly (Well, not really, but almost) it will probably be the last 500D video I shoot, as the 7D arrives in about an hour (not that I’m counting ). The HVX with a Rode shotgun and Dead Cat came along too, as I figured this time I would like to get at least a little bit of interview footage as well.

My lovely girlfriend accompanied me to give me a hand and was put in charge of holding the HVX and reflector. She was a huge help and only dropped the HVX in the sand once! Could have been disastrous, but it actually wasn’t as bad as it sounds, a lot of blowing and less freaking out than I would have thought, and it was back to normal with no grit in the zoom or anything. Happy Days! Anyway. . .

I ended up shooting a similar kind of style to the golf clip, as I was really pleased with how the handheld shots brought a more organic and lively feel to the action when cut with the locked off shots.

All the handheld footage was shot with the Sigma 30mm f1.4. The lens works really nicely for this, but because the whole rig is so light, you have got to be very steady with it or the rolling shutter issues of the CMOS sensor totally destroy the footage. I am thinking that getting some rods will add to the weight of the camera and help those shots as well as be the first step towards adding a matte box to the kit, which I desperately want to do. A full rig with a follow focus, matte box and all would be perfect, but at this stage, could be a little while off. I’ll put that one on the wishlist!

There’s a couple of wides in there from the Tokina 11-16 and the telephoto’s are from the trusty Canon 75-300.

This was really fun to shoot, the kites were mesmerising to watch. In hindsight, I should have probably shot some slow motion of the bigger ones as the tails and what not would have looked almost hypnotic at 50 frames a second, but there’s always next year.

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. . .

Our friend Rob Galbraith has gone to the trouble of including a couple of test video clips on his site in full res.

Needless to say I am pumped, have already arranged to pre-order and am going to buy this one sight unseen. Fingers crossed it’s the right decision.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-10042-10239-10240

Couple of things I am super excited about. Max flash sync speed is up 1/50 of a second from what the 500D is capable of to 1/250. Obviously all the frame rate and resolution options. 1080P! NICE! 24P, meh! Yeah, it’s the speed of real film, blah blah blah. . .It’s old. . .I can see why some people who might need a film out would have use for it, but I’m not looking to do a film out. 25P is great plays nice with TV and the footage from my HVX and pretty much every other camera around Australia, so happy days there. In fact I hazard a guess most everybody would actually have trouble telling the difference between 24P and 25P anyway, they are so close it’s not funny.

What I really can’t wait for though is manual colour temperature selection. I loved that capability on the D90, so fantastic for shooting video. Being able to dial in a Kelvin temp to achieve a certain effect is something I’ve really missed, so can’t wait to get that back.

One of the main reasons I keep the HVX around these days is because it shoots slow motion, and records audio well. To be honest, I also prefer the feel of shooting video on the HVX, even though the look of a DSLR is much nicer, you can’t beat a dedicated video camera for handheld shooting. They were designed with that in mind, of course they are going to suit the job better. But now the 7D is going to be able to shoot 50 and 60 frames a second in the 720P mode and have a external stereo in audio jack, there looks to be less and less reasons to keep the old P2 around. I’m not sure what will happen there yet, but if our friend Hudson (the guy who successfully hacked the 5D MKII Firmware to provide audio gain control, Zebra stripe like function and audio level meters) works some magic on the 7D’s auto audio gain control, then I’ll have a serious dilemna on my hands. Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. . .*shudders*

Well, that’s about it for now. Off to Fiji tomorrow for a 8 day shoot. More on that in the coming days, it should be good!