I just received my shipping notification from Zeiss lenses! They are sending me a set of prime lens to shoot some test footage with my Redrock M2 adapter! I’ll be doing a ton of testing next week before shooting an upcoming short, with the Zeiss primes, Redrock M2 adapter and an HVX200. I’m hoping to eventually do a huge breakdown similar to Adam Wilt’s breakdown of the DVX100. If anyone has any requests please let me know soon!

Mike at HD For indies has posted Red One’s latest ISO test charts. Pretty promising stuff. I’ve reposted the images below. Noise definitely becomes highly evident in the faster ISOs, but come on - a range of 500 to 4000 thats incredible!

So I’ve still been slacking off lately as I’m swamped with unpacking and putting together a couple of proposals for upcoming potential projects. I’ve got a bunch of good stuff cooked up to post about, as well as some plans for incredibly detailed articles in the works. The jewel which will be a full work up on Zeiss F mount primes lenses in use for video. I have a full set on loan from Zeiss at the end of this month. I’ll do some comparissons with some standard manual Nikons as well as tests with various settings for optomizing your camera with your M2.

Mike at HD For Indies has reported some issues of his own after the recent software update. I touched on some users reporting compressor issues after the quicktime update in a post last night. I myself did not experience an issues. The QT 7.2 update is intended to fix some bugs that emerged after updating FCS 2, among other things. Mike’s problem seems to be much more serious, but other’s have reported a few other bugs. I’m not saying update or dont update but look at what some people are going for and make a decision for yourself. I would say though, that if you’re currently not having any problems then waiting to update isn’t going to hurt anyone or slow you down a bit. UPDATESo Mike’s crash was narrowed down to a failed hard drive. I had an issue where FCP 6 would not open on my G5 PPC and had to uninstall and reinstall the entire studio - meh. Good bye half a day.

Is available now. I was just about that say go and get it, as it provides an H254 update and also seems to fix some bugs in Final Cut Studio, though I just also got an email from the list-serve suggesting that it causes an issues with compressor. Unfortunately I just performed teh upgrade on 2 machines. I’ll check some stuff out and post soon.

Update info
About QuickTime 7.2 for Mac
QuickTime 7.2 addresses critical security issues and delivers:
- Support for full screen viewing in QuickTime Player
- Updates to the H.264 codec
- Numerous bug fixes

Get the full release notes here.

UPDATE
Just ran a clip through compressor with every preset with the excpetion of the format conversions and it worked flawlessly - so update away!

Haven’t Been in front of a computer for a couple days for the first time in a long time. Spent the weekend moving both my house and my office. Being that they were in two completely different dirrections it was quite time consuming. Been working on a shoot for Burton Snowboards and Hewlet Packard for the past couple days which has really been too conductive to unpacking or being on the computer at all. I plan on posting a bunch of stuff this week so keep checking back.

There’s a nice post by cinematographer David Mullen on reduset.net. I came across the post a couple weeks ago - it’s simple but insightful and somewhat motivating. I just noticed that the post is making another round around the tech web circuit. Take a quick look.

While I’m talking about Mullen, I should mention that he is in a recent documentary by John Fauer, ASC entitled Cinematographer Style. If you’re into shooting at all this is a great and inspiring documentary. Imagine having the stories of 110 of the greatest cinematographers at your finger tips.
Brief Description -

A feature documentary, this film explores the nuances of the universal art of visual story-telling. Director Jon Fauer, ASC, visited with 110 cinematographers from 15 countries who have worked in all sectors of the industry, including feature films, television, documentaries, commercials and music videos.

A post up on reduser.net lists a whole bunch of great meta data that can be ingested via USB.

Edge Timecode
Time of Day Timecode
Project Frame Rate
Instanaeous Frame Rate
Frame Size
Optical Format
Color Temperature
Shutter Speed / Angle
R, G, B Gain
Saturation
Exposure Compensation
Contrast
Tonal Response Curve
Gamma
Compression type
Audio sample rate / bit depth
Zoom, Focus, Aperture values
Clip Name -
Camera I.D
Magazine I.D
Clip Number
Date of Recording
Credits (optional) - Project, Director, Camerman, Editor etc

A whole ton of useful stuff here. I found this interesting because, for the past couple of days I’ve been obsessed with finding a way to export the meta data that is carried in a DVCPROHD signal(actually all DVCPRO codecs). The HVX200 logs changes in camera settings within the codec and these are preserved as long as you continue to work within the codec. It would be great if this data could be exported to a data file that would be compatibile with After Effects. Most of the data that it logs would be somewhat useless in that situation but things like exposure and focul length changes would help with compositing. Hmm - oh the possibilities.

HD DVD is launching several major titles that will include features not available on Blu-Ray releases of the same films. Most of these features are based around using the built in ethernet ports on HD DVD players to access and share additional web based content.
From Yahoo News

The HD DVD version of “300″ will allow users to re-edit the movie, selecting and ordering the scenes as they see fit, and upload their edit to a server hosted by the studio, Warner Bros. The edit will be accessible to other users, who can download it to their players and see the movie in its new form.

“300″ will be available on the competing Blu-ray high-definition disc as well, but will lack the re-editing feature and a few other extras like a strategy game, Collins said, because not all Blu-ray players can connect to the Internet.

Pretty cool feature but nothing groundbreaking or even new. There was a criterion release of Beastie Boys music videos that allowed you to do something similar on a SD DVD and it’s probably about 5 years old. The sharing it online is newish. Most DVD players have a custom chapter playback which you can enable to watch scenes from any film in your own order. Some people share these online, but its simply instructions telling you which chapters to play when - though I doubt that it is a very wide-spread phenomea. An old favorite is watching Pulp Fiction in order.

The news report sites that Toshiba had a 70 percent market share of high-definition players as of April, though the 30 percent share of Blu-Ray players does not relect the additional 3 million Playstation 3 units Sony has sold.

Blockbuster has recently announced that it will only carry Blu-Ray movies. This should probably beef up Sony’s market share more, though with Toshiba’s price drops I think its safe to say that there is still a long wasy to go in the new format war.

I’ve just learned that as of the end of the day on Tuesday - Springfield, VT was tied at the lead of the Simpson’s movie premiere contest! Pretty exciting stuff for such a small town. If they win I might even be inclined to take a trip there myself. Check out this news coverage from the Oregon paper, The Register-Guard, and from Illinois The State Journal Register.

I posted about this a couple of days ago. Everyone should definitely go vote for Springfield, Vermont. It only takes 10 seconds and you don’t even have to give them your name or email.