Reviews

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While our wax printer was away for repair, I bought a cheap Canon MP610 ink printer. Turns out, it also prints on DVDs, and better than our outrageously expensive Bravo II dedicated DVD printer.

A friend told me I could save buckets by getting a so-called CISS system, continuous ink supply system.

Looking on eBay, there are many different offerings, all from cheap Asian to custom-built solutions for each printer. I chose an offering from down-under rihac. Installation is just a bit complicated, but if you manage to install memory in your computer, you´ll be fine. Rihac provides an extensive installation manual, which is adapted to your specific printer model.

The result: cheap printing (did you know that drugs - the illegal type - are cheaper than printer ink?), never having to worry about which colour might run out just as an important printing job is up, and saving the environment.

Rihac uses very good ink, and I did some printouts just before installation, and afterwards, and could not see a difference. Some reviewers wrote that the Rihac ink is more light resistant than the original one.

Bottom line

If you rather spend money on film gear than ink, get yourself a quality CISS system. Search on eBay, there are many different providers. I for one can recommend the one I chose, but find out for yourself.

Happy printing.

ASC member and DP for the long-running 24 series, Rodney Charters, gave a 20+ minute interview, showing off his RED One rig that he used to travel around the world.  Equipped with the Birger Canon mount (about 1.200$), he uses the Canon 16-35mm 2.8 (1.450$), the Canon 24-70mm 2.8 (1.190$) and the Canon 70-200mm 2.8 (1.190$; $1.700 with image stabilisation) lenses. From Sim Video he has a special handle (1.200$) that doubles as EVF and battery holder.

He also had some custom made handle bar system, that does not need any rods - thus shedding off a pound or two, and saving further space (sorry, no link).

The whole set fits into one smart looking bag (the Think Tank Airport Acceleration, about 200$) that can be taken onboard a plane.

The whole interview can be found on the excellent Reel Show.

Looks like it is now possible to record 5.1 location sound even when there is no budget for a sound recordist. The Holophone H4 SuperMINI is a $2,500 (ca. NOK 13 500) microphone that records surround sound onto a stereo track, all in a size that makes it possible to mount the little wonder on a small sized camera. Do I hear anyone mention the Red camera? Nature documentary?

Imagine the richness this will give in editing. Rather than having to do with pre-recorded sound, or the one-channel camera mike, having 5.1 will surely add production value to those 1-man crew shoots.

The magic of the SuperMINI is that it uses Dolby Pro Logic II encoding to create two stereo tracks from six discrete audio channels. These can output to cameras and stereo recorders with XLR, RCA or miniplug inputs via separate adapter cables. The twin tracks can then be connected to the stereo audio inputs on any professional video camera, audio recorder, mixer, or other gear.

Read the full review (4.5 out of 5) over at DV.com — free registration required, and very much worth it.

Sometimes you have to produce photographs from films, so-called frame grabs. In Final Cut Pro this entails several clicks for each frame, something that becomes tiresome after a while. Also, if your material is anamorphic, you have to resize it in a separate programme, adding yet more clicks.Enter Movie Frame Grabber, a simple programme for the Mac.You drag a QT into the blue window, then you chose the frame you want, hit “Save Frame” and you are done.Much easier than using QT or FCP.One thing I noticed - and I am torn between calling it a feature or a bug - is that each frame gets exported in the same size as your windows is sized. I.E. When you have a 600×400 QT file, but your window is, say 605×605, you get a square picture. The good thing is that Movie Frame Grabber does a decent job of uprezzing. So if you need some quick framegrabs, this is a big time saver.

Wishes

What I would love are the following future features:

• De-interlacing
• Automatic naming and numbering of exported frames.
• Option to export in native QT size (with option of having 16:9). Option of having 25%, 50%, 200%, 400% sizes. Throw in some advanced resizing calculations, and this could become a powerful tool that people would spend money on. This reviewer included.
• Display of current window size.
• A Text saying “Drop QT file here” instead of the blue screen — this threw me off at first; blue screen to me suggested that I would have to plug in a DV source.
• Support for keyboard control. Space = start/stop. Arrow left/right = one frame advance/back.

That said, great little – and free – program.(Review at Macupdate.)

I’ve been using Final Cut Pro since it had version number 1.25. It came on a CD in a small package. The years have passed, machines have gotten more advanced, Final Cut Pro is now a studio suite and comes in a big suitcase-like package. The installation takes a good hour.

Final Cut Pro

Has the same good look. Now with a smooth cam filter, that allows de-shaking of footage. This could be done earlier, but now you can do it from within FCP. Nice touch.

Color

This was the main reason I was excited about the update. A powerful (and previously prohibitively expensive) tool for colour correction, and selective colour correction.When you first open Color you understand that it has been only a short half year since Apple bought the company behind Color. The interface feels very un-Apple. Most values cannot be changed by mouse, but have to be entered. When you want to try out a couple of different values, you have to re-type them each and every time. (You can connect third-party dedicated colour correction hardware to your mac; and I am looking forward to the hardware producers coming up with more affordable designs.)Another downer was finding out that Color does not support viewing your material on an external monitor in DV. This makes Color as it is useless for a big part of the FCP user base, as you cannot use a tool for colour correction that disallows the proper display of colours in the first place.When roundtripping from FCP, you will also get annoyed by Colors inability to take layers into account. If you do multi-layered video, Color will only display the highest one.I haven’t used Color a lot, but it already crashed on me three times.Obviously, still some work to be done. But Final Cut 1.0 was also unrefined, and look what it has become. And thanks, Apple, for including this powerful tool without an extra price-tag!

DVD Studio Pro

In none of the presentations I’ve seen, has anyone mentioned DVD Studio Pro with more than a side-sentence. Well, I haven’t noticed any changes from the previous version.

Compressor

This lovely compression tool has received a great overhaul of its UI. Very smooth now. Easier to do repetitive tasks. Presets are arranged in a more logical, easier to find order. Clusters are easier to set up. When you shell out an extra 179 bucks, you can buy Flip4mac and transcode to wma and flash (or you might need Episode for $495; neither Apple nor Telestream are very clear about this).One, for me very annoying, bug I’ve noticed is that Compressor no longer supports all of QuickTime’s flags. In my case I use a lot of telecined 8mm films that need to be turned into the right direction. In Quicktime you can change the properties of a movie, without having to re-render. Which worked fine in the previous version of Compressor, but now the output will be upside down again.Am looking forward to Apple fixing this one soon. Please!

Soundtrack

As a cameraman, I have so far concentrated on the visual sides of FCS. But in the presentation I saw I was blown by the simplicity of adding surround sound. You can create space feeling in real-time, just by moving the mouse. Also, Soundtrack comes with tons of sound effects, which alone would cost a small fortune.Soundtrack is now more integrated into FCP. Before, you couldn’t change a cut after you had committed a project to Soundtrack, but now the smart people from Apple have come up with a Conform tool, that will save many hours, and make sound editors much more friendly to picture editors coming in with that one last change.

Motion

Before I start that new version of Motion, I have to be sure to have a couple of uninterrupted hours. This has not happened in the past two weeks, so there will be a while before I can give it a try. But from the demo I learned that Motion is now 3D, and once you’ve mastered the steep learning curve around this, it looks like a powerful, yet easy to use tool for advanced animation. I am looking forward to animating stills in 3D space.

The last two weeks have been nothing short of crazy. A documentary we had started working on in 2003 finally draws to a close. Today we showed it to our main supporter, who stated that it was an important historic film. That felt good.

GPS

Anyway, I have no problems confessing that I am a gadget freak. That is gadgets that promise to make life easier. I also have no problems admitting that I am excellent at losing my way, when driving to the unknown (hey, I even managed to get lost inside a lighthouse). Combine these two with my seeing an offer for a GPS wayfinder, an you won’t be too surpized to hear that I am now a happy owner of a Garmin c550.

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