First Work Week of 2010
01/08/10
This has been a great week. I got back to the gym, booked a job with a new production company, and started editing a new little film that I shot on my 5D MkII last week. I'm also finishing up my new reel edit and I'm going to change some stuff around on this site a little. It's like I finally got a little break of my own after the movie and the holidays. Oh and I got a 240v outlet installed in my garage so I can get a welder and finally teach myself to weld.
I love the Canon 5D MkII camera, you can do some really great stuff with it. Maybe it's just that it looks so nice that you put up with it's flaws. I see it as sort of like shooting on a Bolex. It's so portable and easy to use for simple things, but it gets really complicated if you want to do anything outside of "simple". Things like pulling focus, monitoring the image to more than one screen or even to one on-board monitor and getting good sound are all troublesome. You really have to nail the exposure too because there's not much info to change later. Oh, and transcoding the h.264 files to something Final Cut likes such as ProRes takes a long time and expands file sizes significantly. But if you use it like a very fluid, quickly moveable and sort of "unimportant" camera you get great results. If you treat it like a studio A Camera and try to do the things you'd want to do with a film camera, Red or even on an EX-3 you'll be disappointed and nervous. I end up answering a lot of questions about the camera for friends and I think I need to really point at a couple of resources that have set me on the right track in using it. Mainly the site cinema5D.com and the forums there have really helped me learn how to use it. Also the online training site lynda.com has countless movies about Final Cut Pro and even some pretty helpful tutorials about dealing with footage from the 5D MkII. There's another one too called blog.planet5D.com that has great links and is a nice place to pick up some knowledge. I like vimeo.com a lot now. It's pretty simple and I think the footage on there looks way better than YouTube. You upload it at a pretty large frame size and bit rate, they still down-res it, but it looks way better. Also I don't really want comments from anonymous internet trolls about my little home movies so I'm happy to avoid that on YouTube for now. Speaking of that, this new film is pretty funny to me, but I doubt anybody else will get it. I'll still put it up when I'm done.
There's a couple websites that I can't get enough of lately. I thought I'd share. The first is the blog at Advanced Armament Corp. They're an awesome company that makes silencers for rifles and pistols based in Georgia. I want my blog to be as cool as theirs. Of course I don't have a huge company to promote, and I often have to sign NDA forms so I can't talk about my work until it's out! How do you promote yourself if you can't talk about the work you're doing? I've been trying to keep it about the tech stuff and my own personal experience shooting, but I can't really say much about projects that are in production without getting some people mad at me. So I probably can't even talk about the next job and the new production company. Well, tangent over… The other website I'm totally addicted to is T.A.D. Gear. These guys make and stock so much cool tactical gear. I bought one of their jackets and I love it, but I have to admit I feel a little like I'm pretending I'm a mercenary when I wear it. I got the American flag patches that go on the fuzzy velcro which reinforces that image. Nonetheless, their gear is awesome! I totally want to wear that jacket all the time so I can have it on when the zombie apocalypse starts. I'd look cool fighting zombies with it on, or as a zombie wearing one. Whichever happens, I'm going to look all tactical and cool in my jacket.