Adam, Doug, and Lance take on the big, bad DSLR this week, talking about the pros and cons of DSLR for DiY Filmmakers. It’s being touted as an equalizing technology, but what is really involved in a DSLR production?
Panel is:
Adam (@adamfairholm)
Doug (@thedougmovement)
Lance (@omegabane)
Picks
Lance SF Film Commission
Doug So what does an HDSLR Hybrid Shoot Look Like?
Adam Pixelcorps
File: http://www.diy-filmmaking.com/podcast_files/ep6_get_off_my_lawn_dslr.m4a
Apr 28
It’s been a little quiet around here due to our prep for this week’s podcast – all about DSLR filmmaking for DiY Filmmakers. It’s a really exciting topic, and one that takes a lot of research and pizzas. The pizzas aren’t necessary, but they help.
In the mean time, here are some cool things around the web that caught our eye that may be useful or just fun:
DSLR Film Blog
I came across this blog in my research on DSLR filmmaking for this week’s podcast. (I had hoped that there was a blog dedicated to this, and I found one! I love it when the internet works like that.)
Anyways, the DSLR filmmaker blog is really great – its in-depth, technical, and gets you excited about DSLR filmmaking while at the same time bringing you the latest news on the technological advances in the DSLR world. They also highlight some DSLR short films and other DSLR-created media.
Apr 23
One of the books I turn to in my library often is Chris Holland’s “Film Festival Secrets“. It’s a great resource for filmmakers looking to do the festival thing – for a few reasons. There is the hardcore film festival advice, and then there is some great general “reality check” advice for filmmakers sprinkled throughout.
My favorite is a listing of things that that film festival programmers complain about seeing over and over again. You can go grab the free PDF version of the book and check it out (page 5), but I’ll list some of my favorites here:
(from Film Festival Secrets)
What’s wrong with these? There is nothing inherently wrong with them, but you can recognize the pattern. They are all the cliches of independent films, whether imagined or not (and I suspect, since these came from film festival programmers, they aren’t imagined).
Apr 22
Adam, Doug, and Lance are back from a week off! This one is a doozy. Facebook changes, fatheads, how much iDVD sucks. It’s wall to wall usefulness!
Panel is:
Adam (@adamfairholm)
Doug (@thedougmovement)
Lance (@omegabane)
Picks
Lance PartyStandups.com
Doug NEIL YOUNG PLAYING “LONG MAY YOU RUN” IN INAPPROPRIATE SITUATIONS
Adam Hootsuite
File: http://www.diy-filmmaking.com/podcast_files/ep5_pick_of_the-weak.m4a
The pages feature has become a central way that DiY filmmakers promote their films. You can gather a lot of information and interactive media and material all together in one place, and bring everyone to it on a platform they are familiar with.
Yesterday, Facebook changed the way people traditionally interact with these pages by dropping the “Become a Fan” button and adding the “Like” terminology. Users should already be familiar with this, since you can “like” anything you find in your news feed.
The number one change as I see it though, is the connections feature that Facebook is rolling out. Essentially, what you “like” shows up in your profile, categorized by the type of thing you like. As Facebook puts it:
connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile
(from the Facebook FAQ)
We want to involve people more in the podcast, so we set up a Google Voice voicemail box where you can call and leave anything you’d like – questions, comments, or verbal abuse! We’ll play it on the podcast and discuss, as long as we can play it (meaning keep swearing to a minimum).
The number is 954-324-7349, or 954-324-7DIY.
Google Voice has a problem with custom greetings, so if you want the cool custom greeting featuring yours truly, you just have to use this handy little Google Voice call widget.
Hope you give us a buzz soon!
Apr 19
Let’s be honest with each other – timecode is cool. All those behind the scenes videos show some timecode in the corner, ticking away, as if it holds the secret key to the whole process behind the picture.
Well, in a way it does. Timecode is a very simple way of cataloging every single frame that you shoot. Any frame – any one at all – can be referred to by a string of 8 digits.
00:00:00:00
HOURS : MINUTES : SECONDS : FRAMES
It was developed by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and is the standard referred to as SMPTE timecode. For DiY filmmaking purposes, knowing your SMPTE timecode is a good idea, so let’s get started!
A big part of people interested in DiY Filmmaking is people interested in documentaries, so I’ll be posting documentary-specific things on the site occasionally.
Reccently I came across this video from TED of a talk by Marc Pachter, who did a series of interviews for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The interviews were of people who had led extraordinary lives.
In this talk,Pachter talks about something you don’t hear a lot about – getting a good interview. A lot of people assume it’s easy – you sit down with someone and ask them questions – how hard can it be? However, Pachter gets much deeper into it – into the art of it – and comes up with some really fantastic advice.
Some of it is not applicable to documentarians, such as waiting until subjects are 50 and older, or battling for the audience’s attention on stage (the interviews were conducted in front of an audience), but give it a look, and you’ll find some fantastic bits of advice on how to approach your next interview.
Two of the underdogs of editing (compared to Final Cut Pro and Avid) wasted no time in unveiling new versions of their video offerings Monday at NAB. First of all, let’s just take a basic overhead view two of the announcements:
Sony Vegas Pro 9
Sony Vegas announced Vegas Pro 9.0d at NAB with a few new features. Multi-layer PSD support (with support for manipulating individual layers within Vegas, which is pretty cool), closed captioning support, more device support, and a burn to DVD from timeline feature.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
I have to admit that I am not a Premiere fan. It was my first serious NLE that I used, but I floated over to FCP and never looked back. However, Monday Adobe showed off the CS5 versions of its video lineup (which includes Premiere, After Effects, and all the little tagalong Adobe apps like Media Encoder, blah blah) and turned some heads, including mine.
First of all, Premiere Pro uses Adobe’s much-touted Mercury technology, which boasts “amazingly fluid” realtime editing of clips snagged right off of your Canon 5D or 7D (to name a few). It’s also only 64 bit – no 32 bit machines allowed. And if you have the right graphics processor, you can gain some significant speed advantages in rendering and playback by using your GPU over your CPU. This, when FCP is still dancing around Open-CL is a little distressing to FCP users. At least, of course, until Apple decides to let us know the next steps for Final Cut Pro (fingers crossed).
Apr 12
We aren’t at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas, but we are hooked in and seeing what sweet new technology will be coming out of the expo for DiY Filmmakers to use and adopt.
Make sure to follow us on Twitter where we’ll be tweeting some awesome NAB stuff, and following NAB’s official twitter account might not be a bad idea either.
As is to be expected the NAB official list of talks and things like that reads very much like the things we write about here on the site, so we’ll see how things go down. It feels like filmmakers of all budgets as well as broadcasters are on the same page here. Very excited to see what goes down!
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The internet is chock full of how to guides for doing pretty much anything you can think of to make films on a budget. DiY Filmmaking is a blog that brings you the best and the worst of all that, plus great tips, tutorials, and guides of our own.
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