GH4 Officially Pre-ordered

GH4 Invoice

As I  mentioned in my last post, I’ve officailly  pre-ordered the GH4. I was a little worried at first because it wasn’t available on Amazon last night. But at about 9AM PST, it came online. Now for the long wait!

Hopefully, it’ll actually arrive close to the promised date. The date happens to be very close to my birthday, so I’ll consider this my gift to myself this year!

Panasonic GH4 Available for Pre-Order tonight at Midnight!

GH4 Release

Exciting news today in the Panasonic GH-world! According to rumor sites, tonight marks the opening of pre-orders for the GH4.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 Camera Body, Black with DMW-YAGH Pro Audio Video Interface Unit $3298

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH4 Mirrorless Digital Camera Body Only, Black – with 4K Video Recording $1698

Panasonic LUMIX DMW-YAGH Interface Unit, Pro Audio Video Interface for LUMIX GH4 $1998

I’ve been going back and forth on what camera I should get to upgrade from my GH3 – Blackmagic 4k, GH4, Digital Bolex, etc…? The GH4 is, for me, the obvious choice.

For starters, it fits perfectly in my existing ecosystem of equipment. If the batteries and body are the exact same, then it will fit inside my cage. I won’t have to purchase new batteries. And if shooting in 4K is overkill, then I can use my current batch of SD cards to shoot in HD.

I am also very happy that Panny is using it’s own CMOS chip instead of the Sony chip in the GH3. I always felt the GH3 suffered from poor image quality. On a recent shoot, I was plagued by moire issues and skin tone issues. In order to get proper skin tones, I’ve found that you absolutely have to white balance to a gray or white card.

Last, I’m impressed that they are also offering the DCP 4k standard of 4096 x 2160. This will be nice for getting just a little more resolution on the edges.

Of course, it’s easy to get excited about new cameras based on specs alone. Time will tell how good the camera will be. But I have decided that this is the camera I’ll be getting and most likely I’ll be pre-ordering it tonight.

For deals on products from Adorama, check out this site:  verified.codes/Adorama

Webinar complete: purchase when ready.

That subject title was for you ST: TNG nyerds out there. Thanks to everyone who checked out my color correction in FCP X webinar for Moviola! From the looks of it, the responses have been very good.

If you didn’t get a chance to see it, you can purchase and stream it from Moviola’s site. It’s $9.99 to rent and if you have a subscription then you can view as many as you like, including my News Cutting in FCP X webinar.

Here’s the link to color correction webinar:

http://moviola.com/webinars/color-correcting-in-final-cut-pro-x/?completion=1

and to the News Cutting webinar:

http://moviola.com/webinars/news-editing-in-final-cut-pro-x/

I make a pittance on these, but any purchase helps out!

Screen Shot 2014-03-04 at 1.46.20 PM

 

Color Correcting in FCP X Webinar

It’s been a busy couple of weeks over here at the Garbershop. I finished my video about Mt. Zion Cemetery, which I shot last year. I’ve been working again at Discovery Agency using FCP X. And I have also been cutting two jobs over at my office, a promotional video that I shot for a friend who is a patent attorney and VAM for Showtime.

On top of that, I’ve been scripting and rehearsing my next webinar for Moviola, which will focus on color correction in FCP X. It will be done in four parts. I will explain the color correction capabilities from an editor’s perspective, starting with the basics and working up to some more complicated shots. It’s all very practical, real world stuff. I use footage from actual jobs that I’ve cut over the past few months. No demo trickery here!

I highly recommend checking it out if you have the time. You’ll need to sign up in advance to watch it live on March 3rd. Or you can catch it after the fact, but they charge a small amount for it (which I do get a small percentage of, so please purchase or rent it if you can!).

You can register here:

http://moviola.com/webinars/color-correcting-in-final-cut-pro-x/Hero-Master-1

My mini-doc, “A Cemetery Remembered” is now online!

I’m pleased to present my latest short-form documentary, “A Cemetery Remembered.” As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this was a passion project of mine that I started last summer in 2013. I read an article in the L.A. Times which recounted the story of Mt. Zion Cemetery. It is located in East Los Angeles and had fallen into disrepair. Because of the story in the Times, a grassroots campaign was started by a local rabbi to restore it.

I pitched the story around to a couple of people, but realized that this was a project that I needed to pursue on my own. Well, sort of on my own. I enlisted the help of my amazing fiancé/producer (prodancé? fian-ducer?), Tina Nguyen, to help me out on the shoot and the edit.

We shot over the course of one day with the following equipment:

  • Panasonic GH2
  • Sanken COS-11D
  • Rode VideoMic Pro
  • Roland R-26 Field Recorder
  • LED 900 light
  • Kessler Pocket Jib Traveler
  • GoPro (footage was not used in the final piece)
  • Gripper 3025 suction cup car mount. Used with the GH2.
  • My home-made shoulder rig (AKA, The Spider)

I edited the piece in FCP X so that I could use it as a test bed for a larger documentary or other non-narrative piece. I’m happy to say that FCP passed the test.

X is great for this kind of project. And this project had it all: synced dailies from non-jam synced second source audio, multiclips, footage from different codecs, DSLR video, proxies, extreme color correction with lots of power windows and tracking, camera stabilization. I was even working off of a portable bus-powered $120 Buffalo Thunderbolt HD and moved between two systems.

I started the project late last year in 10.0.8 and then upgraded to 10.1 in December. The new Library-based system works extremely well. I finally feel that my hard drives, and consequently my own brain cells, are organized.

Backing up is simple and effective. I employed the use of Timeline Snapshots as daily backups of my sequences in addition to FCP’s built-in system of backing up (which, thankfully, I never had to use). The camera footage was backed up on a larger RAID.

Because of working on projects like this over the past year, I now feel 110% comfortable in the magnetic timeline. I can work as fast, if not faster, than 7. The key here is to create the dialogue audio bed first (the radio cut), then add music and b-roll. The radio cut generally drives the story and the music and b-roll support it.

Once everything is generally worked out in the timeline, the fine detail work begins. It’s then very easy to move sections and soundbites around without causing music which resides later in the timeline to go out of sync.

On this project, I would change the clip connection point of music generally to the second shot, since the first shot would have been an outgoing shot of the previous scene. When you get used to the magnetic timeline you start to think about relationships between clips. In doing so, you begin to think about story as opposed to what clip goes on what track.

Cemetery Remembered Timeline

X still has its issues and there are most certainly some major areas waiting for improvement. My two biggest request are as follows. I hope that Apple comes up with a way to organize audio clips based on roles. I’d also like to see a way to move the active clip indicator (that little white dot on top of clips) up and down so that you can edit with the keyboard more effectively in secondary storylines. There are also general responsiveness and playback issues that need to be fixed.

The good news is that, with the 10.1 update, I can clearly see Apple’s direction here and it’s all good. There is very little I cannot do with the app. Where there are problem areas in the software, I now have solid workarounds. We have clearly moved well beyond the days where I couldn’t work due to bugs. I’m now experiencing the opposite. I have so much control over the footage that I didn’t know where to stop!

All-in-all this was a great experience and I look forward to using the knowledge I gained on this short-form piece on longer projects.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Uncommon Library, who donated all the music tracks heard in this video. Their music can be licensed at uncommonlibrary.com. Please check them out and license some music from them!

More info on the restoration can be found at restoremtzion.com.

Snapshots in my mind.

On my current project, I’m exploring the new snapshots feature in FCP 10.1.1. It’s one of those features that, at first, seems like a small addition. But in practical usage, I’m finding that it’s a huge shift in how I think about versioning.

In FCP 7 and prior, I would duplicate timelines to create versions. When too many timelines were in my project, I would duplicate the project if it had grown too large. Then I’d trash old versions to decrease the file size and move forward.

In previous versions of FCP X, I would duplicate the timeline and append a v2, v3, v4, and so on at the end of each day or notes pass. On the next day I’d continue on with the duped and updated version. Dupes represented both archives AND new versions.

But with 10.1, things are a flipped around. Here’s a graphical explanation of the switch.

Versioning Method (past versions of FCP):

Versioning method

Continue reading

I’ve been grilled!

I had the immense pleasure of chatting with Chris Fenwick last night on his FCPX Grill podcast. We talk about lots of FCP tips and tricks. But most importantly, we discuss my humble roots with the Videonics DirectED Plus!

You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fcpx-grill/id757640927?mt=2

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