Canon just finished its announcement of the first camera in a new line of digital cinema cameras, the C300.  Along with the rest of the film-making world, I was pretty excited to see what Canon was announcing today.  It was clear that they were woken up a bit by the sleeper success of the 5DmkII, and decided to build a camera with the same small form factor benefits but with the pro-video features the 5D was lacking.  Namely, uncompressed video, XLR ins, HDSDI out, reduced rolling shutter, etc.  I had hoped to see these sort of features with perhaps 2K resolution and 60fps at something around the $6-7K price range… a natural extension for the democratized DSLR video market.  But alas, the MSRP is a whopping $20K, and it records no higher than 1080P 30fps.  At that price I would’ve expected at least 4K at 30fps and 2K at 60fps. (more…)

I spent a couple of days at the PDN/WPPI show in NYC this week. As any good convention should be, I learned lots of great stuff, and had some good meetings with some of my vendors. Also got to meet in person several other photographers and industry ‘big wigs’ that I’ve gotten to know online.  These include Canon’s Chuck Westfall, Rick Sammons, Mark Wallace, Susan Roderick & Kenna Klosterman of Creative Live, Dennis of Cinevate, Shane Hurlbut, and Vincent Laforet. (more…)

shoot first, focus later.

I was just checking out an interesting new technology rumored to be on its way to consumers later this summer. It’s called a light field camera, and it’s a fundamentally different way of taking photographs. It lets you shoot first and focus later. It also lets you shoot in 3-D!

Traditional photography records all the light coming from a specific direction at a specific point (more…)

I just spent two very quick, very busy days at the 2011 NAB show in Las Vegas.  As usual, there was tons to see and lots to learn.  Highlights for me were, in no particular order:

• Trying out the Angeneux Optimo lenses. Sadly, $50K for a lens is outside my budget for the time being.
• Seeing the Kessler Crane Revolution head and Orion controller in action.
• Getting hands-on with the Cinevate stuff.  Most of my current rig is made by Cinevate, so it’s great to see the rest of the product line first-hand.
• Getting an up-close look of the new Red Scarlet in action as it wandered around the show floor.

• Checking out a promising-looking new powered cage by ECC Tools at the Oconner booth.
• Trying out the Phantom Gold super high speed camera. Again, sadly $150K for a camera is outside my budget for the time being.
• Meeting Vincent Laforet, Dennis Wood of Cinevate, and Mitch Aunger of Planet5d.
• Lots of 4K eye candy by Christie, Panasonic, and others.

River Design began offering video services late last year, with significant investments in a professional rig. We’ve seen some early success with several projects already completed (I’ll be posting those soon), but I was most impressed with my recent experience with the iPhone.  While on vacation in France & Switzerland, I decided to whip out my iPhone and film a bit of the beautiful mountains while I was skiing.  I then did a quick edit in about 10 minutes and uploaded the resulting video to youtube.  All of it was done right on my phone.  It’s not a terribly professional result, but considering that the camera, editing and encoding package, and uploader all fit in about 1/5th of my pocket, I was pretty amazed.

Check it out for yourself:

And as a little bonus, here’s one I shot with my iPhone and the GoPro Hero, mounted to a chest strap.  I edited this one using iMovie on my laptop, so the result, while still far from professional, is a step up from what the iPhone can produce by itself: