Tenolian Bell

Are they less 1080P cameras than previous HD cams that shot 1440P with 2/3 inch sensors?

PBS’s Frontline, one of the most beautifully shot and edited documentary programs on television, produced segments for it latest show Obama’s War with the Canon 5DmkII. One of the DP’s, Danfung Dennis , shot the opening sequence with a custom rig that allowed it to be attached to a steadicam rig. Frontline Shoots Doc with Canon 5DmkII

I'm just saying still photography frames are not the best justification for how large motion photography frames should be. Plus temporal resolution is multiplied because we are watching 24 fps.

They don't have to rack focus during the shot and they expose one frame for longer than 1/24th of a second.

I have a friend who has retired but was working in commercial photography for over 30 years. He heard about RED and their ambitions of competing directly with Canon and Nikon. He went over to RED forums and began asking questions about how RED planned to get over some of the hurdles of competing with companies who are well established. He admitted he was asking some tough questions, but was very soon flamed by people who had no idea what they were talking about. Eventually Jim himself joined in with some rather choice comments about the inquiry. At the end of it my friend said no one gave any good answers to his questions, he was only met with venom for doubting RED.

I'm sure Kodak sees the beginning of the end for television being shot on film. This television season appears to be the tipping point. The rumors I've heard place 65mm as the center of Kodak's future plans. Kodak is actively working on finding an alternative to the most expensive element in film, the silver. This should allow them to lower the price considerably. Since most big tenet pole summer/Christmas Hollywood films are looking to go large format and IMAX. Kodak would provide 65mm as an affordable option for these movies to be shot in a larger format.

Ah OK. I'm sure that 1.4 million users number are the number of people who paid. I know a lot of people with bootleg copies of Final Cut Pro. I bet the actual number of FCP users is two or three times the official number.

How is that associated with FCP?

"With 1.4 million users and 50 percent of the market, Final Cut Pro is the number one professional video editing application," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The new Final Cut Studio includes more than 100 new features and dramatically expands Apple's ProRes family of codecs so editors can work in the studio with the highest quality video or on location at low bandwidths." The New Final Cut Studio is $999. Final Cut Pro 7 Expands Apple's ProRes codec family to support virtually any workflow. ProRes Proxy allows offline and mobile editing at low bandwidth; ProRes LT allows general purpose editing; and ProRes 4444 is for editing and visual effects at the highest quality possible. Easy Export allows users to continue working on projects while encoding is done in the background and the sequence is exported to YouTube, MobileMe, iPhone, iPod, Apple TV, DVD or Blu-ray. iChat Theater support allows real time collaboration by sharing Final Cut® timelines or individual source clips with iChat users anywhere in the world, even if they don't have a copy of Final Cut Pro. iChat New speed tools to change clip speed with ease. Alpha transitions to create dramatic effects using moving mattes. Native AVC-Intra support for the latest high quality Panasonic cameras. http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/

I mostly use Wooden Nickel in LA. You are right Matt in LA they have far more toys and equipment choice than in NYC. I've tried to talk some NYC rental houses into getting similar G/E equipment.

Yeah, I'm just pointing out that on high density computer screens you have to play standard def video at its native resolution to get a true sense of its look. In DVD Player there is a normal size setting. Most of the time at full screen it will look like crap.

Without looking at your systems settings, other than the zoom, its difficult to say what may be causing the cropping. What version of OS X are you using? DVD Player in Tiger did not de-interlace video as well as other software players. That was improved in Leopard. The LCD screen on the iMac has a much higher pixel density and better color reproduction than a standard television. At full screen the iMac shows the warts of standard definition video. At the very least you need to watch 720P full screen on an iMac. If you have the 24" screen preferably you want 1080.

Electronics companies don't necessarily purposefully release half baked products. Software has gotten to the point of being so complex to certain degrees its impossible to find all of the potential problems or even know what problems to look for. Most all major software companies have a developer community whom they give early software builds to help them find bugs and problems, even then its difficult to find everything. At some point you have to release it to the public. Out in the wild the software is run through situations and circumstances that could not be tested for, then you debug and patch as you go.

Yep Premiere Pro for the Mac OS X was released with Creative Suite 3 in 2007. I think most people don't really care. The way the situation has worked out is Adobe's fault. In the late 90's Premiere 6 was a simple video editor and had nothing near the sophistication of Avid. The lead developers of Premiere wanted to add advanced functions to rival Avid. Adobe was not interested. Apple asked Adobe to develop a simple video editing application for the Mac (iMovie), Adobe turned down the offer. Adobe stopped developing Premiere for the Mac because they thought Apple was a dead company. The lead development team of Premiere left Adobe and went to Macromedia where they were free to develop Final Cut Pro. Apple bought Final Cut Pro from Macromedia to own its own video editing suite. Premiere was left behind in the NLE development race.

I've never seen anyone pooh pooh music videos or commercials. Especially if its a music video for a top music artist or a national commercial for a top brand. I suppose its true few are thrilled about doing low budget music videos for unknown musicians or informercials selling some wacky gizmo.

This is true. Apple's refresh cycles can be unpredictable and frustrating. The Mac Pro is over a year old, the iMac is nearly a year old, and the mini is going on two years old. The primary reason for Apple's long refresh cycles are the fact that it designs very expensive machines and does not have nearly the volume sales of Dell or HP. Apple cannot compete with the volume business so it has to operate in a different way. Generally when Apple launches a new computer it is using rather expensive components. The case of the latest MacBook is machined from a solid block of aluminum. The advantage of this process is to give the body durability and strength, this process is more expensive than snapping together plastic parts. Apple was the first to use 15" and 17" LED backlit LCD panels in laptops, which are more expensive than CCFL panels. Apple has been able to secure Intel's newest Xeons for the Mac Pro before the general PC market. Apple has been able to get Intel to design special mobile chips that have been used in its MacBook and iMac. Apple got Nvidia to design a special GPU chipset that is currently used in the MacBook line. This is all very expensive. Because Apple does not have the volume of sales of the larger PC makers, Apple has to amortize these costs over a longer period of time. Eventually other PC makers begin to use the same components and bring the prices down below what Apple charges. This cycle generally lasts 6 to 8 months and Apple then updates the machines again with new components. The desktop line has currently gone longer than it normally ever does. Part of the reason is that Intel's newest Xeons are not yet available. Part of the reason could be no rush to launch expensive machines in this economy. My wild guess is that Apple will launch a new version of Final Cut Studio and the new desktop line at NAB.

How much internal storage would be ideal for HD editing? Western Digital recently introduced 2TB drives, that would be 8TB of Mac Pro internal storage. Is more really required? Not being snarky, I'm genuinely asking your opinion. As far as Apple's reputation for over charging for similar functionality. Since Apple switched to Intel people have been hard pressed to find cheaper machines for the same functionality from other PC manufacturers. You could build your own for cheaper, but most of us would prefer to have a warranty and guaranteed customer support. Apple does not actually make much profit from its software. The purpose of OS X, Final Cut Pro, Logic and all the rest are to differentiate Apple as a separate platform from Windows and sell the more profitable hardware. You are right. Growth in the computer market is slowing and actually stalling with the bad economy. The Windows PC makers are competing on price and racing to the bottom of profitability and solvency. Apple actually misses a lot of this by not being dependent on Windows. The other PC OEM's see this and have been exploring alternative OS to Windows, but their is nothing currently viable. You are correct that the future growth is in mobile internet devices. Apple recognizes this future growth and why it has heavily invested in iPods and the iPhone. I guess you would look at them as toys if you are a heavy iron snob. But the reality is that the future is in portability. Laptops outsell desktops, mobile internet devices outsell laptops.

Psystar is arguing that Apple holds an unfair monopoly by not licensing OS X to the general market. Their is no legal precedent for monopolizing your own product when their are options and fair competition. Apple tried licensing Mac OS in the 90's and it nearly drove the company out of business. What Psystar is doing is clearly not legal. The only reason they have made it this far is on some technicalities. I think the full trial is set for November. Its expected by that Psystar will loose. I wouldn't buy one of these machines based on the fact that Psystar is using a hack to boot OS X and their is no guarantee that OS X will continue to support Psystar's hardware.

The primary advantages of the Mac Pro are the 8 processors, 32GB of RAM, and expansions bays. Unless you plan to run software that can take advantage of multiple processors, regularly perform a lot of rendering, or 3D compositing. 8 processors is far more than you will really need. If most of your work is going to be with miniDV, HDV, or some highly compressed HD format you don't need a Mac Pro. I would recommend you look at the top end iMac. It comes with a high quality 1920x1080 monitor, 3.06Ghz Core Duo processor, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS graphics, 4GB of RAM, and 1TB hard drive. That makes for a really good editing machine. Apple is expected to update its desktops any time now. Unless you need something right away, I would wait a little while.

The Genesis outputs 1920x1080, it was never sold as a 4K camera. His point is that the Genesis has full 1920 lines for Red, Green, and Blue. While the REDCAM or Dalsa Origin claim to be 4K cameras but don't have full 4096 for every color.

Yes Phil, I knew you especially would appreciate that article.

Well 4K in the world of the professionals who do this, and you say “4K,” it means you have 4096 red, 4096 green and 4096 blue photo sites. In other words. You'll have 12 million green photo-sites, 12 million blue photo-sites, 12 million red photo-sites. That's 36 million photo-sites. A 36 mega-pixel image is what you get from a 4K scan." "Now you know very well that you cannot take a 8.3 million pixel sensor and create 36 million out of that without interpolation. You are up-converting, and there's really no value to the up-conversion. There's no new information." "So 4K is not these 8 mega pixel or 9 mega pixel or 10 mega pixel CMOS images for the Bayer pattern where they add up all the pixels in a row and say hey, we got 4K. The great perpetrators of that mythology have been RED and Dalsa. That's why I call these “marketing pixels." It's intentional obfuscation. But somehow the world has accepted that that's 4K. It's purely semantic." "Now if you use the same arithmetic that these people are claiming they're 4K cameras are using, then Genesis would be 6K. Because it has 5760 pixels on one line: 1920 red, 1920 green and 1920 blue. But isn't that a little bit nonsensical?" "I think that people will start to understand this and realize that it creates a terrible problem with post, because you have so much more empty data to process." John Galt, Panavision Creative Cow Magazine

The EX3 can also accept an adaptor for B4 video lens mounts. You could use lenses made specifically for HD such as Zeiss Digiprimes or Fujinon lenses. I would highly recommend looking into that option.

Yes I got this email also. I was wondering what was taking so long. That's an interesting and unexpected development. Being a 4.5x2.4" 4.7 ounce mobile phone. The iPhone has extremely limited resources. The iPhone only has 128MB of memory, the average computer has around 1 - 2 GB of memory. Some of the built in applications such as the phone, SMS, email, and iPod all stay active in the background. Which means they always take away a bit of the crucial 128MB from the main application that's running at the time. These apps need to stay active so that when you receive a phone call, the phone switches to the phone app and you can answer the call, or when you receive a text message the message is displayed, and when the phone receives an email its able to notify you. David said he's had problems with memory leaks from these applications which means they are not efficiently using their memory allocation. So his application has to be extremely memory efficient cleaning up old and unused processes and freeing space so that the app can continue without using up all of the available memory and crashing. I'm glad David is extending the effort. Looks like it will be a really good app.

The star of Slumdog Millionaire is the director Danny Boyle. I agree and said earlier in the thread that in certain circumstances well known directors and producers who have a following or well known for making quality films are able to get movies made and distributed without star actors.