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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Quick Links


For the past few years Lightworks has been an intriguing dark horse in the editing world. "The King's Speech" was edited on it! And they went and released a -practically - free version of it a few years ago. And promised a Macintosh version (over three years ago.)
Nowadays the "free" version costs a little money if you want to be able to output in certain compression formats, and the Mac version is still not released, though they just released an update for Windows and Linux:
Major new Lightworks release (Windows and Linux) - and now you can just "buy" it | Red Shark
There are some big new features, including background importing, rendering and even exporting. Speaking of which, export to YouTube is now built-in.
There's more hardware support with AJA's ioXT now recognised by the software. Subtle changes to the UI make navigation more direct and intuitive, and the screen elements adjust more easily to different screen resolutions including Retina - in readiness for the Mac release.
And they say the Mac version is actually coming...soon:
No dates yet but we've heard that it's close to a closed Alpha release, although we understand that the Mac code is already running very well. It will then move as soon as possible to a public Beta release, which will be the first time that everyone will be able to get their hands on this long-awaited final piece to the cross-platform NLE puzzle.
It will be cool if they do it, but I'm not holding my breath.



A quick look at some different styles of lenses, including: tilt-shift lenses, macro, Ultra-wide, Fisheye, soft-focus and "Specialize Bokeh Lenses."
A Quick Start Guide to 6 Specialty Lenses | Photography Tuts
Often, lenses in the photography community are similar in design. Each brand has similar focal length ranges and speeds for their popular lenses (all major brands make a 24-70mm and 70-200mm for example). However, many lenses are also specialized, with features such as macro and tilt shift. Here is a breakdown of seven of these lenses and their practical purposes.


Malaysian-born filmmaker debuts short film at Sundance | Pro Video Coalition
Norman: We shot the film on a RED camera and edited it using Adobe Premiere Pro. I’d used Premiere Pro on Wanita Cosmos, which was drawn in Photoshop and animated in After Effects. I hadn’t edited anything in a few years, but I wanted to use Premiere Pro for the film because of the intuitive RED workflow.


Paul Cameron Says 4K and Beyond Changes Our Perceptions | ASC
“The natural long lens anamorphic look, with extreme out-of-focus backgrounds, feels and looks different in 4K, even though the optics are the same,” Paul reiterates. “With all that resolution and no grain, to me, it’s different. And we have to learn to use it, to develop a slightly new sensibility about it.


Magic Lantern hacks the Canon 5D Mark III and the output is amazing. Stu argues that every camera should give you a RAW output option. Sounds good, at least for professional cameras.
Space Monkeys, Raw Video, and Giving Us All You've Got | prolost
The team at Magic Lantern have managed to hack the Canon 5D Mark III to record 14-bit raw 1080p video at 24 frames per second. The results are stunning—the highest-quality video we’ve seen from a DSLR yet, comparing favorably to images from cameras costing much more.


Fountain is a simple markup syntax for writing, editing and sharing screenplays in plain, human-readable text. I actually copied that description from here. This article is a discussion on changing the syntax:
Fountain 1.1 — “Use The Force” | John August
Most times in Fountain, you don’t need to force anything. It just understands what you want. But when you need to, you can force a Scene Heading with a leading period. You can force a Transition using a leading greater-than symbol.


The prices for ARRI's upcoming 'lower-priced' documentary camera, the AMIRA, are leaked/released, and more than I can afford;
Prices Revealed for AMIRA, ARRI's Cheaper ENG-Style ALEXA-Sensor 2K/HD/200FPS Camera | No Film School
25,980, 28,980, and 32,980 Euros is obviously the price for Europe, but if that’s translated directly to American dollars, what would it look like?$35,444, $39,537, $44,994 for the three different packages.


Canon is doing okay..I think. At least they aren't at junk bond status like Sony...
Canon’s Fiscal Year 2013 Financial Results Released | CanonRumors
In particular, the EOS 5D Mark III and 70D advanced-amateur-model digital SLR cameras continued to realize healthy growth.


The VFX industry is seriously messed up; companies going out of business, employees and contractors being treated poorly, and tax credits are working to further distort the industry. Last year there was a VFX protest at the Oscars, and it looks like they are trying to do it again.
Visual Effects Protest Planned for the Oscars | AWN
Visual effects workers are planning a demonstration in Los Angeles next month to protest foreign tax subsidies they argue are destroying their industry, according to a report by The Wrap.



This has nothing to do with video, but it does explain how someone's identity was stolen and how you might consider protecting yourself from some identity theft attacks:
How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username | Medium
Later in the day, I checked my email which uses my personal domain name (registered with GoDaddy) through Google Apps. I found the last message I had received was from GoDaddy with the subject “Account Settings Change Confirmation.” There was a good reason why that was the last one.


The Art of Close-Ups with Edgar Wright


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