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I finally got around testing the various adapters I bought to adapt my Carl Zeiss Contax Yashica primes to our RED. The RED has the Wicked Circuit dumb mount. All adapters work fine up to about 20 meters, but after that there is a definite difference.

All tests were done on the Zeiss 50/1.4 lens, with the aperture set to 4 and 16. No filters were used, instead faster shutter speeds were employed.

Here is the frame I took in 4k, scaled down to 25% (Click on picture for full size), further down the test you will see 100% cropped images of just the chimney (compressed to jpg in Photoshop with high quality setting) .

El Cheapo

First in line is the £5 adapter off eBay from seller big_is. Very quick and efficient delivery from Hong Kong. Fits nicely. Fairly soft on infinity.

Holds fairly well at f16.

Bad at 4.

Conclusion: if you are on a budget, and either only shoot closer subjects or have plenty of light, this is an acceptable adapter.

DVD Technik

Next in line is the adapter from DVD Technik in the Ukraine at about $35. Has a very nice quality feel to it, and sist very tight on the lens. Best to be fitted once onto the lens, and left in place. Also quite tight once connected to the camera; downside is that it takes a bit longer to change lenses, but they do sit more tightly.

Disappointing at f16.

Appaling at f4.

Conclusion: Not really an option.

Confirm Adapter

Fianally the most expensive option at $85 from Happypage in Hongkong, an adapter with built-in autofocus confirm chip. Happypage offers the option of getting that chip programmed to your specific lens, which is a nice option when you want to use your lenses on a Canon EOS stills camera. Since the RED is thankfully a fully manual camera, I could not test this extra functionality.

At first the adapter would not fit. After an e-mail to happypage they immedeatly sent off a second adapter without any cost to me. The adapter arrived, but would not fit either. This suggests that the Wicked Circuit adapter might be slightly off, since happypage has only happy curstomers. Anyway, using my Dremel drill, I managed to get the adapter to fit into the RED – again, very tight, but not as tight as the DVD Technik one, and run the tests.

Happypage advertizes the fact that their adapters are a fraction of a millimitre thinner than their competitors, and claims that this helps with the focus on infinity. Let’s see how this holds up to reality.

Me likes at f16.

A Bit disappointing at f4.

Conclusion: Clearly the winner.

Conclusion

As so often, if you want quality, you have to pay for it. Interesting though that the by far cheapest option was not the by far worst one.

Also it seems that I still have problems with the back-focus on the Wicked Circuit adapter. My guess is that if that should ever get sorted out (or I might – gasp – order again a Birger Canon mount) the results will improve.

While our wax printer was away for repair, I bought a cheap Canon MP610 ink printer. Turns out, it also prints on DVDs, and better than our outrageously expensive Bravo II dedicated DVD printer.

A friend told me I could save buckets by getting a so-called CISS system, continuous ink supply system.

Looking on eBay, there are many different offerings, all from cheap Asian to custom-built solutions for each printer. I chose an offering from down-under rihac. Installation is just a bit complicated, but if you manage to install memory in your computer, you´ll be fine. Rihac provides an extensive installation manual, which is adapted to your specific printer model.

The result: cheap printing (did you know that drugs – the illegal type – are cheaper than printer ink?), never having to worry about which colour might run out just as an important printing job is up, and saving the environment.

Rihac uses very good ink, and I did some printouts just before installation, and afterwards, and could not see a difference. Some reviewers wrote that the Rihac ink is more light resistant than the original one.

Bottom line

If you rather spend money on film gear than ink, get yourself a quality CISS system. Search on eBay, there are many different providers. I for one can recommend the one I chose, but find out for yourself.

Happy printing.

ASC member and DP for the long-running 24 series, Rodney Charters, gave a 20+ minute interview, showing off his RED One rig that he used to travel around the world.  Equipped with the Birger Canon mount (about 1.200$), he uses the Canon 16-35mm 2.8 (1.450$), the Canon 24-70mm 2.8 (1.190$) and the Canon 70-200mm 2.8 (1.190$; $1.700 with image stabilisation) lenses. From Sim Video he has a special handle (1.200$) that doubles as EVF and battery holder.

He also had some custom made handle bar system, that does not need any rods – thus shedding off a pound or two, and saving further space (sorry, no link).

The whole set fits into one smart looking bag (the Think Tank Airport Acceleration, about 200$) that can be taken onboard a plane.

The whole interview can be found on the excellent Reel Show.

Looks like it is now possible to record 5.1 location sound even when there is no budget for a sound recordist. The Holophone H4 SuperMINI is a $2,500 (ca. NOK 13 500) microphone that records surround sound onto a stereo track, all in a size that makes it possible to mount the little wonder on a small sized camera. Do I hear anyone mention the Red camera? Nature documentary?

Imagine the richness this will give in editing. Rather than having to do with pre-recorded sound, or the one-channel camera mike, having 5.1 will surely add production value to those 1-man crew shoots.

The magic of the SuperMINI is that it uses Dolby Pro Logic II encoding to create two stereo tracks from six discrete audio channels. These can output to cameras and stereo recorders with XLR, RCA or miniplug inputs via separate adapter cables. The twin tracks can then be connected to the stereo audio inputs on any professional video camera, audio recorder, mixer, or other gear.

Read the full review (4.5 out of 5) over at DV.com — free registration required, and very much worth it.

Sometimes you have to produce photographs from films, so-called frame grabs. In Final Cut Pro this entails several clicks for each frame, something that becomes tiresome after a while. Also, if your material is anamorphic, you have to resize it in a separate programme, adding yet more clicks.Enter Movie Frame Grabber, a simple programme for the Mac.You drag a QT into the blue window, then you chose the frame you want, hit “Save Frame” and you are done.Much easier than using QT or FCP.One thing I noticed – and I am torn between calling it a feature or a bug – is that each frame gets exported in the same size as your windows is sized. I.E. When you have a 600×400 QT file, but your window is, say 605×605, you get a square picture. The good thing is that Movie Frame Grabber does a decent job of uprezzing. So if you need some quick framegrabs, this is a big time saver.

Wishes

What I would love are the following future features:

• De-interlacing
• Automatic naming and numbering of exported frames.
• Option to export in native QT size (with option of having 16:9). Option of having 25%, 50%, 200%, 400% sizes. Throw in some advanced resizing calculations, and this could become a powerful tool that people would spend money on. This reviewer included.
• Display of current window size.
• A Text saying “Drop QT file here” instead of the blue screen — this threw me off at first; blue screen to me suggested that I would have to plug in a DV source.
• Support for keyboard control. Space = start/stop. Arrow left/right = one frame advance/back.

That said, great little – and free – program.(Review at Macupdate.)

I’ve been using Final Cut Pro since it had version number 1.25. It came on a CD in a small package. The years have passed, machines have gotten more advanced, Final Cut Pro is now a studio suite and comes in a big suitcase-like package. The installation takes a good hour.

Final Cut Pro

Has the same good look. Now with a smooth cam filter, that allows de-shaking of footage. This could be done earlier, but now you can do it from within FCP. Nice touch.

Color

This was the main reason I was excited about the update. A powerful (and previously prohibitively expensive) tool for colour correction, and selective colour correction.When you first open Color you understand that it has been only a short half year since Apple bought the company behind Color. The interface feels very un-Apple. Most values cannot be changed by mouse, but have to be entered. When you want to try out a couple of different values, you have to re-type them each and every time. (You can connect third-party dedicated colour correction hardware to your mac; and I am looking forward to the hardware producers coming up with more affordable designs.)Another downer was finding out that Color does not support viewing your material on an external monitor in DV. This makes Color as it is useless for a big part of the FCP user base, as you cannot use a tool for colour correction that disallows the proper display of colours in the first place.When roundtripping from FCP, you will also get annoyed by Colors inability to take layers into account. If you do multi-layered video, Color will only display the highest one.I haven’t used Color a lot, but it already crashed on me three times.Obviously, still some work to be done. But Final Cut 1.0 was also unrefined, and look what it has become. And thanks, Apple, for including this powerful tool without an extra price-tag!

DVD Studio Pro

In none of the presentations I’ve seen, has anyone mentioned DVD Studio Pro with more than a side-sentence. Well, I haven’t noticed any changes from the previous version.

Compressor

This lovely compression tool has received a great overhaul of its UI. Very smooth now. Easier to do repetitive tasks. Presets are arranged in a more logical, easier to find order. Clusters are easier to set up. When you shell out an extra 179 bucks, you can buy Flip4mac and transcode to wma and flash (or you might need Episode for $495; neither Apple nor Telestream are very clear about this).One, for me very annoying, bug I’ve noticed is that Compressor no longer supports all of QuickTime’s flags. In my case I use a lot of telecined 8mm films that need to be turned into the right direction. In Quicktime you can change the properties of a movie, without having to re-render. Which worked fine in the previous version of Compressor, but now the output will be upside down again.Am looking forward to Apple fixing this one soon. Please!

Soundtrack

As a cameraman, I have so far concentrated on the visual sides of FCS. But in the presentation I saw I was blown by the simplicity of adding surround sound. You can create space feeling in real-time, just by moving the mouse. Also, Soundtrack comes with tons of sound effects, which alone would cost a small fortune.Soundtrack is now more integrated into FCP. Before, you couldn’t change a cut after you had committed a project to Soundtrack, but now the smart people from Apple have come up with a Conform tool, that will save many hours, and make sound editors much more friendly to picture editors coming in with that one last change.

Motion

Before I start that new version of Motion, I have to be sure to have a couple of uninterrupted hours. This has not happened in the past two weeks, so there will be a while before I can give it a try. But from the demo I learned that Motion is now 3D, and once you’ve mastered the steep learning curve around this, it looks like a powerful, yet easy to use tool for advanced animation. I am looking forward to animating stills in 3D space.

The last two weeks have been nothing short of crazy. A documentary we had started working on in 2003 finally draws to a close. Today we showed it to our main supporter, who stated that it was an important historic film. That felt good.

GPS

Anyway, I have no problems confessing that I am a gadget freak. That is gadgets that promise to make life easier. I also have no problems admitting that I am excellent at losing my way, when driving to the unknown (hey, I even managed to get lost inside a lighthouse). Combine these two with my seeing an offer for a GPS wayfinder, an you won’t be too surpized to hear that I am now a happy owner of a Garmin c550.

more…

About a week ago I received my replacement p910i. I have read rave reviews about it and was mildly excited what I finally held it in my hands. It weighs a bit nicer in the hands, with a more round feeling that the privious 810. the keyboard has undergone a very sucessful re-design, the buttons are easier to push. The jog-wheels no longer works on 3 axises, but 2 – something which one gets used to ever so quickly.

The phone has a whole lot of switches and buttons, some of them are a bit too easy to push accidentally. With the flip closed, you get of course the normal 12 number keys, plus 5 cursor keys, 4 option keys, and 6 keys spread around the edges of the phone. This is not a simple just-use-it phone.

Switching on the p910i, the first downturn comes. It feels like it takes a full minute for the phone to boot. The menu has been re-designed, and at first I did not understand the logic behind the structure. Why, for example is the calendar on the main menu, but for the to-do-list I first have to go to the Office folder?

The phone crashes frequently, especially when using slightly more demanding applications, such as taking photos, or playing back video. In normal use (like making some calls, and checking e-mail once per day), I need to do a sorft re-boot at least once a day. Last week the phone was used on a film, where it was supposed to play back a small video file. On about every second take we had to wait an extra two minutes for the crashed phone to re-boot. I find this unacceptable.

Ringing SonyEricson, I get the tip that I should update the phone’s hardware…

Why, oh why do I need to update a phone that I received only days ago?

Why, oh why does SonyEricson think that every p910i user has a PC?

That’s right, you cannot update your phone on a Mac. Actually, you cant do anything on a Mac, they jsut do not talk together (except for simple Bluetooth file transfer that sort-of works, ocasionally and slow).

Sometimes I cannot make outgoing calls. First after a re-boot does the phone work as a phone again.

For a phone that has been delayed for many months, I find it amazing how unstable it is. Considering the price-tag I think that SonyEricsson should feel ashamed. Not recommended.

For my recent job in Germany, I knew that a better case for carrying the tripod was necessary. Normally, one would use a rigid plastic housing, but they weigh in at about 6kg, are difficult to transport – and are butt ugly. So I did some research, which lead to the Israeli company Kata, which has a background in supplying bags for military applications. About 5 years ago they started making bags for film- and TV professionals, and I decided to give their Triporigid 2 a try, and ordered it from B&H in New York. As always, the package arrived a few days later – thanks, UPS.

The bag is made of Condura, an extremely durable synthetic cloth material. The inside of the bag is in a british yellow, making it easy to find in dim light. It features a few extra pockets, which acommodate the tripod plate, and – in my case – some small tools. I also bought a dividing set, so that in one compartment I can carry some extra cables.

What I really came to like is the ability to convert the bag into a backpack, making it just so much easier to carry a tripod over a longer period of time – or over difficult terrain. This is so good, that I in fact find myself using the bag even in cases where I could have done easily with an unpackaged tripod.
The quality of build seems immaculate, and promises to give years of service. Recommended.

Just got my shiny p990i, and was very disappointed to find out that it does not sync with OSX. Surfing the web, I found some workarounds. These are:

Address book
Go into OSX address book, open the preferences and the vCard pane. Here change the format to 2.1. Highlight the addresses you want to copy to your phone. Now you can use File > Export vCard. Now open the Bluetooth programme > Send File. After the file is transferred to the phone, open that file and you can import all addresses.
Unfortunately, no synching here.

iCal
You have to first download a script, which enables you to export a chosen date range in a format that can be read by the p990. Cumbersome. Download and instructions are here.

We can only hope that Apple will come up with a solution at some point. In the meantime, suggest that Apple do something about it.