Gave the first of my two talks last night at the Montreal Final Cut user group with Mathieu. It was a fun night and I learned a lot from others experiences. Some people raised very specific questions that I couldn’t answer right away so I will use the blog to answer them in the next few days.

The attendees were coming from a wide variety of backgrounds (about 50% photographers) and it was interesting to see how each domain had its own vision of the HDSLRs.

We might have only have been 60 people, but I think we were the conference with the biggest selection of camera and rigs! Attendees could try: 5DMrkII, 7D, 90D, D300s, E-P1 and GH1 bodies mounted on Shape, Zacuto or Red Rock Micro rigs! The Zacuto Z-Finder was the star of the night with a lot of people wanting to try it out to see if it lived to the hype. I think Zacuto is going to receive a few more orders in the next few days!

I would like to thank everyone who came, sorry if I did not have the time to talk to everyone. If you want to follow up on our conversations or start a new one, just email me. And if you have any pictures of the event, please send them to me! That is something we totally forgot to do.

Dont forget my golden rule: if the image does not look good, just convert it to black and white and boost contrast!

Also worthy of notification: Canon5DTips has reached the 500+ RSS subscribers and we have been averaging over 2000 visits per day for a while now!

I don’t know how I missed this one but Lynda is offering a course for 5DMrkII owners on how to edit their clips with Final Cut Pro. The video only covers the basics but it is nice for someone who never touched FCP and wants to get his feet wet. I even managed to learn something!

The problem is that the tutor does not show how to use proxies or convert clips to another format. 5DMrkII files are encoded in H.264 which makes it impossible to edit them in real time without dropping frames.

While editing in H.264 might work, if you only have to do a quick video from various clips, it falls apart as soon as you have to do anything more serious. The preferred method is to use lower resolution proxies in a non compressed format then export the final cut as a sequence of TIF using the original H.264 clips. You then import this sequence in Affect Effects to apply all the required transitions, grading and effects. Yes, it is a bit “more” complicated but it has the advantages of giving you real time editing plus no lost of image quality.

I wonder if the next Macs to come out will be able to use H.264 decoding chips on video card to do all of this work in real time, making the use of these proxies obsolete.

For a limited time, Blasterware fx is offering a free download of 68 high quality sound effects. There is a good variety of sounds in the back so you might want to check it out. Actually, since its free you should get it anyway, you can never have too many sounds effects!

Found out about this on the users group Final Cut Montreal (French).

Link: http://www.blastwavefx.com/i25/Blastwave-FX-Free-Sound-Effects-Download-Pack/information.html

In case you missed it, Vimeo Plus is now available for everyone, not just United Statians! Rejoice! Also, they changed the plan to be:

• 5GB of upload space per week (10x what you get with the free account)
• 5000 free HD embed plays with purchase (up from 1000)
• The ability to control which domains can embed in HD
• 25fps/PAL support for HD (up from 24fps)
• Make your videos private on Vimeo.com while still able to embed them on your site
• One-button upgrading of your existing videos to the latest high-quality format without using additional upload space

Of course some will complain that YouTube offers free HD hosting. True, but well, you know about YouTube…

If you havent seen it yet, go take a look at www.dslrflix.com. It is a blog/content site dedicated to cinephotography (I think they made up that word). Contrary to the Canon5DMrkII Vimeo group which is spammed by people showing their “test” footage, DSLRFlix only display high quality content. So no bandwidth is wasted!

Spread the news around so more people visit the site and contribute.