Category Archives: Video
Technicolor CineStyle and Your Canon DSLR
I’m going to assume here that most of you reading this already know what Technicolor is, whether you know it as the all-encompassing digital media company, or just the people who gave Looney Tunes color back in the 30’s. Well, Technicolor has now released a little software update for your Canon DSLR that allows you to take full advantage of your camera’s chipset. Essentially it optimizes the dynamic range that your camera can take in by pushing the capabilities of the chip. This is very important for those filmmakers concerned about getting the most flexibility out of their cameras. The way it works is it records video (and still images if you so desire) to a color log space, as opposed to Canon’s standard H.264 Rec709 colorspace. What this does is gives you footage that looks, in my opinion, really washed out and bland in camera, however in post, gives you an enormous amount of control in programs such as Apple Color. Technicolor even provides you with LUT’s for various programs, including Color, so you have a base to work your own adjustments off of. I’ve only been playing around with this on my 7D for a couple of days now, but from what I can see, I really like how it is looking. It gives the footage a lot more depth, and the ability to colorgrade footage is enhanced greatly. Here’s a little side-by-side preview of raw CineStyle footage versus colorgraded footage.
For those who want to see some more footage using CineStyle, I did a short video to test some different settings, that can be viewed here. If you’d like to read more about CineStyle, Technicolor has a page which explains it in detail as well as includes the download link, and that can be found here.
New Canon 7D firmware 1.2.5
– Fixed a rare phenomenon in which there were rare cases where movie files taken could not be opened when repeatedly shooting movies with specific CF cards.
– Fixed a rare phenomenon in which there were cases where “Err 02″ appeared when repeatedly shooting still images with specific CF cards.
– Fixed a phenomenon that occurred when using high-capacity (32 GB or greater) CF cards: If either a CF card with only a little available space remaining or the battery was removed and then reinserted into the camera, and then the user attempted to start shooting movies immediately, shooting would stop.
– Improved the writing/reading speeds when using UDMA 7-compatible CF cards.
– Fixed a phenomenon that occurred when custom function C.Fn 4-1 was set to assign IS start to the AF stop button on the lens: When used with lenses that do not have an AF stop button, the IS function would not work.
– Corrected some mistakes in the menu screens displayed in Arabic and Portuguese. (This applies to models in overseas markets. The models for the Japanese market do not display those languages.)
AOTC 5×5
A couple of the AOTC guys have come up with a cool new little video project. Basically, they consist of five 5 second clips from either our iphones, or maybe some leftover footage from one of our DLSR’s. Combine those clips with a 5 second intro, and you’ve got the 5×5. CB Coombs came up with the concept and films a lot of the random iPhone clips. Chris Zeppieri puts most of them together, and Adam Spitalny did the intro art, which in my opinion is pretty sweet. I think it’s a cool idea, since not all the clips are riding based. It’s really a short look into the “behind the scenes” of AOTC. Check them all out here.
2,130 photo time lapse
On my most recent solo excursion to New York, I decided to shoot a time lapse of the drive. I set the camera up on a tripod in the passengers seat, used a fisheye lens, set the intravelometer to shoot once every ten seconds. I was worried that the battery would run out, but alas it did not. Kudos to the LP-E4 battery for the 1DIII.
Push It A Stop 