The great thing about the NAB is that we will see a lot of new products targeted at the HDSLR market. The bad thing is that most of these wont be available for my trip to Iceland…

The first of these product is the HDSLR PowerBase 70. First, the picture:

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Things are moving fast here: I talked about the book two weeks ago, received my copy last week and just finished my first reading. Verdict: I am loving it! To put it simply: it covers almost everything! From shoot preparation, gear selection, editing, etc.. It gives a solid foundation to any photographers who wants to move to video.

It is all about the content…

First, the book assumes only one thing: you are a photographer shooting stills and you want to learn how to shoot video. That is it. It goes over all the lingo, gear and processes used in cinematography and give you a working knowledge of what is required and involved in a shoot. The content goes wider and deeper than any DVD training material I have seen so far. Read the rest of this entry »

PeachPit has a new book targeted at photographers who want to move into the video business. It is called, From Still to Motion. You can get the free chapter “Playing with the Light” here.

Judging by the content of the sample chapter, it seems to be targeted more toward the pro / serious videographer but the lighting concepts hold true what ever the gear you use, from Kino Flo lights to DIY setups.

Take a moment to download the sample chapter and read it. If you like it, you can pre-order the book here. I will have a full review once I receive my copy.

You can get it here.

List of changes (as we already talked about):

• Adds or changes the following movie frame rates.
  • NTSC:
    * 1920×1080 : 30 fps (changed – actual 29.97 fps)
    * 1920×1080 : 24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
    * 640×480 : 30 fps (changed – actual 29.97 fps)
  • PAL:
    * 1920×1080 : 25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)
    * 1920×1080 : 24 fps (added – actual 23.976 fps)
    * 640×480 : 25 fps (added – actual 25.0 fps)
• Adds a function for manually adjusting the sound recording level (64 levels).
• Adds a histogram display (brightness or RGB) for shooting movies in manual exposure
• Adds shutter-priority AE mode (Tv) and aperture-priority AE (Av) mode to the exposure modes for shooting movies
• Changes the audio sampling frequency from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz.
• Fixes a phenomenon where communication between the camera and the attached lens is sometimes interrupted after manual sensor cleaning.

So no last minute surprises except for the 30fps which is now 29.97 fps. Small change but I know a few people who will be happy about it. On the other hand I guess they will quickly forget about the 29,97 and shoot at 23,976…

Installing the update right now! Expect a review of the new features very soon. You can also read M Bloom early review right now.

Ok, I know my track record with rumors is not that great, but…

Last week, I attended  a talk about Color at the Montreal Final Cut usergroup and, at the end, a rep from a third party reseller told us that he had been ask by Apple to schedule meetings after the NAB with his clients who have attended the conference.

Anyone in the business knows what it means: new product!

The question is: what is this product going to be? It is probably not a piece of hardware since it wouldn’t make sense to meet clients to talk about a new Mac (book)Pro. So it has to be a new software or a major change to an existing one.

Some people talked about a new version of Final Cut Studio, I doubt it. The people behind Apple are brilliant and usually follow a well crafted roadmap. 2010 is the year of the iPad in Apple strategic plan. This is why I think the announcement will be related to the iPad. More precisely, it will be some authoring tool targeted at iPad content supplier.

I have no idea of the format of the tool: plugin to FCP, pro version of Pages, totally new app, etc… Yet, I am pretty sure that it is coming. I hope this tool will be accessible to business of every size, like what they did with the App Store instead of the Music Store which is only available to major players.

I know this is all speculations right now but, from a big picture point of view, it makes sense to have such a tool to standardize content development across suppliers.

After reading Dan post (a while ago) about wide angle lenses  with wide aperture, it got me thinking. While I have been happy with my 17-40L4, as it is wide enough for pretty much everything I do, going wider would open the door for more creative shots. Ex: having an even better separation of foreground and background objects. Also, Dan reviewed lenses from a 1DMrkIV perspective so I wanted to see what was out there for full frame owners.

Before going into the list of available options, I think it is worth looking at the effect of wide aperture on wide lenses. After all, the goal of this exercise is to find a wide angle lens that will give us some control over DoF. As we all know, a wide aperture allows more light into the camera which allow us to shoot in lower light which is always good. The other result of aperture is too control the depth of field (DoF), which is another familiar concept. The thing you might not be aware of is how hard it is to get a shallow DoF when shooting ultra wide.

For most of us, this is a good thing because it allows us to shoot in low light without having to worry about keeping the subject in focus. But what happen when you need to shoot wide and want a shallow DoF? Lets look at some numbers.

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If there is one thing no one was expecting this week, it has to be the release of a new HDSLR camera. Yet, that is exactly what Canon did. The new Rebel T2i is, on paper, an incredible package priced ridiculously low.

For the photographer

18mp on a 1.6x crop factor, I will have to see some real life sample shots to judge image quality but it is interesting to see the ISO going to 6400 (extendable to 12k) for an entry level toy. That is quite good if image quality is at the rendez-vous.

It also benefits from a lot of features that used to be restricted to the double prosumer bodies like improved auto focus and light metering. From a photographer perspective, it should be considered a decent upgrade for any 50D or older camera owner (if you dont need the burst rate). At least, from a specs sheet perspective.

For the videographer

Remember how 5DMrkII owners felt when the 7D was released? Well, 7D owners are now feeling the same! The new rebel can shoot video full manual and has variable frame rate (24p, 25p, 30, 50p and 60p), something to make 5DMrkII owners jealous. I know because I am!

Of course, the camera will probably not have the same low light image quality as the 5DMrkII (and maybe the 7D) and it is not full frame so it does have its limitations. Yet, it is a fraction of the cost of its ‘better’ alternatives. Read the rest of this entry »

We talked about it earlier and now it is official. You can read the press release here. The interesting part is Canon talking about a 2x gain in speed for Prores 422 HQ transcoding compared to Compressor. Then again, if you are using MPEG Streamclip, the speed gain should be about the same.

This last sentence sound a bit weird to me:

Additionally, users will also be able to add timecode, reel names and metadata to footage quickly and easily – further enhancing the experience of EOS MOVIE users when editing their footage.

This could mean that we will not have access to the camera metadata, something that was part of the original product developed by Gluetool.

Release date, for the free beta, will be in March so new features might pop in until then.

Note: Thanks to Peter Wiggins for the link on this one, almost missed the announcement!

A while ago, we announced that the BeachTek DXA-5D was discontinued and confirmed that a new version of the product would be out ’soon’. Soon in this case sounds like the end of February /March. Just got an email from BeachTek announcing these:

I know a lot of people prefer to use en external recording device such as the Zoom H4n but being able to record (and monitor) directly on the 5D means no sync in post which can be a real time saver and less clutter in your bag.

The conference was not over this afternoon and I had already received a few emails and SMS from friends telling me how great of an external screen the iPad could be. And now even Philip Bloom  talks about it.

I am currently downloading the iPhone SDK3.2 to investigate the possibility but if it is doable,  I am not the one who will do it! Way too complicated!

M. Jobs might call the iPad a magic item, transforming the iPad as an external monitor would require massive coding skills. Why? You would have to port the Canon desktop SDK to the iPad which is near impossible unless you are Canon and have access to the source code. OnOneSoftware did it for the iPhone with their DSLR Remote app by using a little trick: they use a computer as a proxy so they could piggyback on the existing Canon API. The next part would be to resize the feed in real time so it fits on the iPad screen, something I doubt the iPad has the CPU power to do. So you see, it is not really possible in the current context.

It is too early to tell, but one thing is for sure: if it is possible, it will be done! The market for such a product is too big for a developer to ignore! And who knows, maybe the solution will come directly from Canon! (wishful thinking!)

By the way, I am looking for a cocoa/Objectif-C dev for a totally unrelated top secret project…