The guys at stillmotion have put together this excellent tutorial video on lens selection for the Canon DSLR cameras.
Thanks guys! Excellent information!
The guys at stillmotion have put together this excellent tutorial video on lens selection for the Canon DSLR cameras.
Thanks guys! Excellent information!
Here’s a great article by Seth Godin about chasing your dreams while hoping for that magic lottery ticket.
Entrepreneurial hope is essential. It gets us over the hump and through the dip. There’s a variety of this hope, though, that’s far more damaging than helpful.
This is the hope of the magic lottery ticket.
A fledgling entrepreneur ambushes a venture capitalist who just appeared on a panel. “Excuse me,” she says, then launches into a two, then six and eventually twenty minute pitch that will never (sorry, never) lead to the VC saying, “Great, here’s a check for $2 million on your terms.”
Or the fledgling author, the one who has been turned down by ten agents and then copies his manuscript and fedexes it to twenty large publishing houses–what is he hoping for, exactly? Perhaps he’s hoping to win the magic lottery, to be the one piece of slush chosen out of a million (literally a million!) that goes on to be published and revered.
You deserve better than the dashed hopes of a magic lottery.
There’s a hard work alternative to the magic lottery, one in which you can incrementally lay the groundwork and integrate into the system you say you want to work with. And yet instead of doing that work, our instinct is to demonize the person that wants to take away our ticket, to confuse the math of the situation (there are very few glass slippers available) with someone trying to slam the door in your faith/face.
You can either work yourself to point where you don’t need the transom, or you can play a different game altogether, but throwing your stuff over the transom isn’t worthy of the work you’ve done so far.
Starbucks didn’t become Starbucks by getting discovered by Oprah Winfrey or being blessed by Warren Buffet when they only had a few stores. No, they plugged along. They raised bits of money here and there, flirted with disaster, added one store and then another, tweaked and measured and improved and repeated. Day by day, they dripped their way to success. No magic lottery.
What chance is there that Mark Cuban or Carlos Slim is going to agree to be your mentor, to open all doors and give you a shortcut to the top? Better, I think, to avoid wasting a moment of your time hoping for a fairy godmother. You’re in a hurry and this is a dead end.
When someone encourages you to avoid the magic lottery, they’re not criticizing your idea nor are they trying to shatter your faith or take away your hope. Instead, they’re pointing out that shortcuts are rarely dependable (or particularly short) and that instead, perhaps, you should follow the longer, more deliberate, less magical path if you truly want to succeed.
If your business or your music or your art or your project is truly worth your energy and your passion, then don’t sell it short by putting its future into a lottery ticket.
Here’s another way to think about it: delight the audience you already have, amaze the customers you can already reach, dazzle the small investors who already trust you enough to listen to you. Take the permission you have and work your way up. Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, success is mostly about finding a path and walking it one step at a time.
I meet too many young filmmakers with this same “magic lottery ticket” mentality to filmmaking.
Excellence in anything requires hard work, diligence, perseverance, risk and some sweat equity. Notice that excellence doesn’t require any luck or chance.
Last Sunday marked an interesting time in television, especially when compared to television 20 years ago. Last Sunday night was the series finale for Lost. The 2.5 hour event was prefaced with incredible amounts of direct and indirect marketing hype. It was to be a pivotal event with massive viewership expected.
Total viewers for the epic finale event: 13.5 million viewers.
Sounds pretty impressive, until you compare it to the finale of M*A*S*H. 20 years ago: 106 million viewers.
I find the comparison absolutely amazing! Surely Lost with it’s pervasive reach, rabid fan base and marketing hype could reach most of America. After all, weren’t all your friends talking about the upcoming Lost finale? But, the Lost viewership was only 12% of the size of those who tuned it for the finale of M*A*S*H.
And yet, the season finale of Lost was declared a complete success with its numbers and exposure. If the February 29, 1983 airing of M*A*S*H would have landed 13.5 million viewers, would it have been declared a success? I doubt it.
Today’s viewing marketing is broad, vast and diverse. Back in 1983, there were far fewer viewing options and platforms–no Internet, Netflix, iTunes nor DVRs.
While it may sound discouraging for producers, I believe this is great news for indie producers. Today’s options are amazing. You can now produce content directly to your audience and reach your audience through a myriad of channels. The key is know your audience and market to your audience. Be specific. Target your message. And, be really good at what you do.
It starts with a phone call or email: “We’re interested in producing a video.” Sometimes, the project details are very clear with little room for changes. Other times, the media need is more vague, with the client only knowing what they want to accomplish with the video production. Most of the time, however, it’s somewhere in between–the clients knows generally what they want and how they want to accomplish it, but needs help getting there.
Helping the client understand their audience and how a video production can help communicate their message will build a very strong foundation for the project at hand.
To best understand what my client wants to accomplish with this video, I have a list of questions I ask them:
I use these questions with every new client when putting together a corporate video project. After these questions have been answered clearly, we have a much better understanding of the client’s needs. And, with this information, we can now begin budgeting the project much more accurately.
We then take this information and begin putting together the client proposal. We find that our proposals are simply their information provided back to them in our own format.
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Russ Pond is the owner of Top Pup Media — a corporate video production company based in Dallas / Fort Worth, Texas providing production services for commercials, tradeshow videos, promotional spots, training media and a variety of other services.
When the HDSLR cameras hit the market just shy of two years ago, all of a sudden, you had huge sensors capturing stunning high-definition video. Things were about to change. Huge sensors in affordable bodies were going to up the quality of HD video capture.
The HDSLR cameras, like the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 7D, started shaking up the video landscape. RED cameras up that point were the only affordable HD cameras with the larger sensors, but the HDSLRs changed all that. With camera body prices of $1800 to $2500, now it was possible to capture high-quality, shallow depth-of-field video. And, with frame rates at 24p, the filmic quality is quite amazing.
The challenge with HDLSR video cameras is that they are not video cameras–they’re still cameras. The HD video capture was an after thought, a bonus feature. While it had all the controls for still photography, it didn’t really support videography. The Canon 7D was a step in the right direction, adding dedicate controls and additional video features, but when it comes down to it, it’s a still camera that shoot video.
The mumblings started. I remember being on set with a friend, Blake Calhoun, talking about this shift in video technology. A couple months ago, we both predicted that the next step would be to take the inner workings of the HDSLRs and stick it into a video camera body. With the large sensor, now you’d have an affordable video camera that shot amazing high definition video. We thought it would be a couple years.
It was a couple months.
Panasonic announces today the AG-AF100, a new High Definition camera that does just that. It’s a 4/3″ chip, interchangeable lenses, all wrapped up in a video camera body.
Dang! That was fast!
Here’s what Panasonic had to say about the new camera:
Panasonic Solutions Company today announced a game-changingAVCCAM HD camcorder, the AG-AF100, the first professional micro 4/3-inch video camcorder optimized for high-definition video recording. Scheduled to ship by the end of 2010, the AG-AF100 will set a new benchmark for digital cinematography.
Targeted at the video and film production communities, the AF100 delivers the shallow depth of field and wider field of view of a large imager, with the flexibility and cost advantages of use with a growing line of professional quality, industry standard micro 4/3-inch lenses, filters, and adapters. The full 1080 and 720 production camera offers superior video handling, native 1080/24p recording, variable frame rates, professional audio capabilities, and compatibility with SDHC and SDXC media.
The design of the AF100’s micro 4/3-inch sensor affords depth of field and field of view similar to that of 35mm movie cameras in a less expensive camera body. Equipped with an interchangeable lens mount, the AF100 can utilize an array of low-cost, widely-available still camera lenses as well as film-style lenses with fixed focal lengths and primes.
“Designed in consultation with the filmmaking community, the AF100 eclipses the video performance of other cameras in this price range,” said Joe Facchini, Vice President of Sales & Product Management, Media & Production Services, Panasonic Solutions Company. “Ideal for film schools and independent filmmakers, this affordable, digital cinematography camera employs an advanced professional AVC/ H.264 Hi Profile AVCHD codec compatible with a wide range of editing tools and affordable players.”
The AF100 incorporates a 4/3-inch, 16:9 MOS imager. The camcorder records 1080/60i, 50i, 30p, 25p and 24p (native) and 720/60p, 50p, 30p, 25p and 24p (native) in AVCHD’s highest-quality PH mode (maximum 24Mbps). Ready for global production standards, the camcorder is 60Hz and 50Hz switchable.
The AF100 maximizes the potential of its high-resolution imager with built-in ND filtering and dramatically reduced video aliasing. Standard professional interfaces include HD-SDI out, HDMI, time code recording, built-in stereo microphone and USB 2.0. The AF100 features two XLR inputs with +48V Phantom Power capability, 48-kHz/16-bit two-channel digital audio recording and supports LPCM/Dolby-AC3.
This newest Panasonic AVCCAM camcorder is the first to enjoy the benefits of advanced SDXC media card compatibility in addition to existing SDHC card support. (SDXC is the newest SD memory card specification that supports memory capacities above 32GB up to 2TB). With two SD slots, the AF100 can record up to 12 hours on two 64GB SDXC cards in PH mode
The AG-AF100 will be available by the end of 2010. Panasonic will support the AF100 with a three-year limited warranty (one year plus two extra years upon registration).
Also found this video about the new Panasonic camera:
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