Jon Allen

Hard to compare digital sensors with actual pixels to photo-chemical emulsion. I read in Popular Mechanics/Science the other month that there was some guy using 10+ in film stock and an old spy plane camera and was taking pictures which he claimed were the equivalent of 4gigapixies. I was extremely sceptical, I mean, you can always scan a print at a higher res, it becomes a point of how much people will notice vs cost involved in producing material of such high magnification. But yes, it becomes a point of comparing apples to acorns after a while. This whole debate is rather old, obviously film is better as a standard, yet the cost of digital video provides an acceptable medium at a significantly lower cost.

That's not exactly what I meant. I meant use the PCMCIA slot as the interface between your camera and your computer, go directly to laptop instead of loading and unloading P2 cards.

Of which (prosumer or professional) camera we are unsure of from Michael's story. Thankyouverymuch

Granted, yes, we should hold ourselves to higher standards, but from your story about your viewfinder fogging up makes it sound like you were expecting to be forgiven - even though you can shirk and blame the backfocus (which is still your responsibility). Doctors make mistakes and it costs lives, still we insist that even they can be forgiven- why not a wayward DP too?

Way to go Haakon, gotta stick to your guns. I'm sure there's a lot more of us "closet engineers" out here than some like to admit. I'm pretty excited too about the HVX200, but there's still a fair amount of letdown after the original release date has come and gone and STILL no camera OR footage. The point I would like to make is that the lighting matters far more than the chip size on your camera. That's why producers can get away with using HDV on daytime shots and in the studio, yet you still need a big, clunky 2/3" SDX or Beta when you're doing ENG and reality TV, because the light isn't as controlled. Still, the nature of not even ALLOWING the option of interchangeable lenses is a bit bothersome. Even if getting more lenses in the future isn't an option due to price of those lenses, it should be an option. How many film shooters would have been happy with only one single lens permanently mounted to their wind-up bolex?

Any word on P2 slot-to-cable technology? Since the P2 is really just an upgraded PCMCIA slot, one could conceivably use the p2 slot as a plug to a cable, similar to laptop DAW hardware.

AFAIK, we're talking about HD...

Well we also need to qualify if we're talking SD "pro imaging" or HD "pro imaging"

Is the panasonic cam he's talking about the HVX200? In that case, only JVC and Sony are guilty of marketing hype. Any word on Canon joining the HDV race?

Other options are to use a cheaper camera to get the shot, so in case the CCD gets burned, your main camera doesn't. If you're needing a generic still of the sun, just buy a stock photo, easy enough. Lastly, if your photoshop skills are up to the challenge, you could just draw a yellow circle against a blue background and add a few blur filters. :P

....and Jim's seen a lot of real outer space battles, too!

Strangely enough, no Americans regret it. :D

Sorry about my post about Canada getting in the way. I honestly didn't mean anything by it. I meant it more as a reference to maybe a cross-town school rivalry. I was hoping my comment would be taken as a friendly jab. Either way, I was more meaning towards the "manifest destiny" of the US back during the [formal] expansion years. I didn't mean to offend, and I have quite a few Canadian friends. There's great fishing in Canada and I enjoy Kids in the Hall. jon

Most Americans would wonder if Canada has ever done anything noteworthy- besides getting in the USA's way. :P

Nevermind that XD is only SD and P2 can do both HD and SD applications.

I talked to a panasonic rep yesterday and he said that the only thing deterring the use of an external harddrive on the x200 was a harddrive that could write fast enough. I find this a little fishy, since even old dma harddrives can write at 66MB/s, while DVCproHD only uses ~12.5MB/s. I read an article in Millimeter that said that BlackMagic-Design had streamed HD from an iPod... did I not suggest this last fall??? External Disk Recording - Aug '04

I was watching "The Spy Who Loved Me" last night and I saw SO MANY zooms. Most of them seemed unmotivated. But hey, that's the 70's for ya.

...which is an important point to make. HDV is 4:2:0 and DVCproHD is 4:2:2 I believe. However, it's still on a 1/3 inch chip, which does make it inferior for "real" production use. I don't see most of us getting up in arms about that though, so we might be on to something with the HVX200. One thing about this camera that was the most disappointing about the HVX was the lack of interchangable optics. And JVC's other trump will be the use of square pixels as opposed to rectangular pixels on their new HDV cam.

But how far can we go the other way? I understand that proportionally, there aren't as many minorities represented in the media. How much of this can be "corrected" using programs like affirmative action and racial quotas. How do you enable everyone without disabling some? I would say it's near impossible to accurately represent all major & minor cultures/ethnicities. I mean, I haven't seen any Bosnians on TV lately, does that mean that there is covert discrimination against Bosnians by the powers that be? I doubt it. I also watched King of the Hill last night, and the only Native American I saw was a man who was having an affair with a main character's wife. Does this mean that Fox is out to cast a black cloud of paranoia over Native Americans? Again, I think not. I think it's a fact of the status quo. The frequent drivel handed to us by a white cast is good enough for getting the ratings (according to big biz), so why rock the boat?

From what I saw from the samples Apple has available there were just a few temporal artifacts once in a great while. But also understand, this was saved out for web transmission as opposed to actually going with a 10+Mbit stream (also, I had a render going). So it would seem the quality could be greatly improved if the data rate is boosted by a modest amount (circa 20Mbit/s). I was watching it on 1600x1200 on a 17 inch monitor, so I don't know how it would perform on a 40" LCD. Considering Apple just released the QT7 player today, I doubt we'll be seeing a lot of stuff that originated in digital for a while. Although Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, & Serenity trailers looked amazing! Batman Screenshots

The new H.264 from Apple/Quicktime seems to be an HD-lover's dream come true. This compression type can squeeze 1280x720p frames into streams less than 10Mbit/s. This seems like it could be the answer to only getting 1 HDD with your Firestore or an 8GB limit on a P2 drive. (1080p @ 8Mbit/s on 8GB card = 2+ hours) I imagine the only possible limit on this would be the horsepower it takes to compress on the fly. What does everyone else think?

Has anyone tried applying a vector blur to the edges of the matte in AE? I've heard that's a good trick for cleaning up green/bluescreen shots.

Like most pieces of art, you can retouch & tweak forever- never quite finished. There's normally a time to say that it's "good enough"

I remember watching the special features of "The One" starring Jet Li. They went to a lot of pains to do head replacements for the last fight sequence between the good and bad Li. I thought it turned out really well. Sometimes I caught myself thinking "Jet Li is fighting himself" it was pretty cool.

Apparently it's quite common for a director to battle depression after his "baby has left the nest" so to speak. I would think this is a normal feeling, you pour months (possibly years) into a film, and then you have to commit it to someone else's hands. "Movies are never finished, only abandoned" -George Lucas