Tiny Tiny movie

MICRO MOVIE:
Something I worked on  has popped back up in a finished form. Does anyone remember this picture from 1989 in the newspaper?

 (Am I dating myself?)  That was when they figured out how to nudge individual atoms around on a plate of copper in a very cold vacuum.  Since then, they're still using the same type of equipment, the scanning tunneling electron microscope, but they've set their sights a lot higher- making a stop-action animation movie using individual atoms as the pixels. The atoms are actually carbon monoxide molecules, but those are smaller than most atoms, so I figure we should let this one pass.
Here's the 2 minute movie:

 Why is IBM doing this?  It's all about smaller data storage size. The quote from Andreas, the lead scientist, is that if this works out, you'll be able to store all the movies ever made on your iPhone.

So IBM booked the prestigious Ogilvy agency out of new York to come and make a behind the scenes doc about this microflick, and they came out from New York, but they needed another local guy to shoot some more stuff for them. And then some stuff was missing, and out I went to Almaden again.  And hmm how about some more nice shots of the microscope? Worked out pretty well in the end for me. The scientists in the Atom Lab were all really cool.  Each of them was from a different country, and you get the sense that each was one of the best in their field in that area, to land this apparently cool job at the IBM research facility. Who even knew that IBM was still around! I'm exaggerating, but they're out of the limelight.  Nevertheless, they have this massive high tech campus in southeast San Jose.  The Science-per-square-inch readings were off the charts.  Their chemical laboratories would have made Breaking Bad jealous.

Anyway, here's the flick.  I shot a lot of the B-roll, everything of the microscope, and some of the interviews.  Can you tell the 5D footage from the hacked GH2 footage?

Airbox Inflatable softboxes on: Noteworthy lights from NAB 2013

There were acres and acres of LED lights at NAB.  Actually, I don't think there were any tungsten lights.  Not one.  But: here's what is worth paying attention to.

#1.  Cineroid.  Never hear of them. They make really really good, really bright LED lights. They're composed of funny little square flat LEDs. The color is excellent.  They boast of 95 CRI on their 3200k lights! It does look like it. I would buy these in a second.
They have a model that's about 6x8".  Takes a v-mount or anton bauer.  Awkwardly large battery for a small light, but I guess it pulls a lot of juice and needs a big battery.  That's a bummer ergonomically, but this light is really good.

This is one of them, wearing an Airbox Macro.  LED Panel lights don't look so nice on people without a frame or a softbox. They make a little one and a big one.  Just my luck, the big one fits inside the Airbox Macro and the little one works in the Airbox Mini.

#2. Aadyn Tech

An LED Spacelight/9-light fay.  It works as both, either on a stand or hung, equivalent output to 6k of tungsten.  Good color.  And... pulls less than 7 amps!!

This is what the light was plugged into.

#3. Remote phosphor stuff. Again, like last year.  Only this year there were three of them that I saw, not just one.  Cineo bought themselves back from PRG because PRG wisely decide to stick to what they're good at, being a gigantic theatrical gear rental house.  Why mess with what works?  Oh, because you have zillions of dollars.

There were three remote phosphor units I saw- Brother& brother, Cineo, and Zacuto. I really like the color on "tungsten" remote phosphor units.  It's more appropriate to think of them as a replacement for tungsten rather than as another LED unit.  Remote phosphor units don't have your basic LED advantages, being lightweight and battery-op and super low power draw. They're chunky and heavy and require a remote ballast and are expensive. But they've got great color and a great quality of light.  They're actually soft.  The reason they can have so much better color (according the the Brother&Brother rep) is because when you get the phosphors away from the heat source, i.e. out of the little LED capsule, you can use chemical formulations that have better color, but would break down quickly inside a regular LED capsule.

Zacuto's was nice looking.  Relatively small.

Zacuto:

Cineo:

#4: Frezzi!  You know Frezzi?  The newscaster on-camera lights?  Horrible little Mr-16s on top of a news guy's camera?  They've made some impressively powerful single-chip LEDs.  HyLight is the name. These are HMI replacements, not LED replacements. Seriously powerful.  I don't know what the color's like, but it seemed ok.  Daylight balanced.  Two different units, one about 6x8" and one about 10x12". They sell them in nice little kits.  In a pelican case with two units, two stands, all the stuff you need.  The smaller of the two fits great with an Airbox Macro, for when you don't want an evil laser beam melting your face.  I was really impressed by how bright they were though. Here's the smaller of the two wearing a Macro. NB- I haven't tested a Macro on one for a long time period, and I do have concerns that these will be too hot for a PVC softbox.  We'll find out.  We're in discussions about cooperating.

#5.  F&V light.  They're a great combination of affordable and powerful. (3 1x1s for 1000$!!!) If they send me some samples I can speak with more confidence about what the color is like. I like that their lights can be powered by more than one different kind of battery, either an external recharchable sony battery or else with internal AAs.  that's clever.  And they dock together, so you can take several units and dock them together into a bank of lights that's brighter. I discovered also that one of their small units fits the Airbox Mini.  The Mini is not dead just because the old Litepanel MiniPlus is increasingly a dinosaur in the LED lighting realm. 

LEDs need softening. Except when you're outdoors in the daytime. Airbox inflatable softboxes. Yes, I am pushing the products I manufacture, but I'll never tell you that a crappy light is good.  Even if they pay me. 

#6. Hexolux- a hexagonal-housed LED fixture that can be docked edge-to-edge with other units, letting create your own little Maxibrute-like thing that's very bright.  Bulbtronics came out with a light basically like this last year, but I never heard anything else about it after I saw it at DV Expo.

Hexolux-

As soon as i can make it happen, I'll bring out Airbox models to fit the half x 1 size format of LED and the 1x1. Stay tuned. Every time I shoot, I use my 1x1s.  And every time I  use my 1x1s, I wish that I had a softbox for them.

yours

post NAB 2013

Tom Guiney

Panel lights at #nab

More #NAB- #zacuto has a plasma panel. Like a 1x1, but 40% brighter. Not super expensive; 1350.00. Can do battery. Annoying- has a remote ballast. I love the no-nothing attached nature of 1x1 panels. Color looks a little funky on casual inspection, but so do LED lights. Could be a winner? We'll see. Hey zacuto! Send me a demo unit to try out!

For plain-old panels- deal from f&v light- 3 1x1s for a thousand bucks!thats a deal. Again, I haven't inspected the color. I assume they're a bit green since they're so bright, an may be overdriving their leds the way a lot of the cheap Chinese LEDs do. But that's a great deal or an entry-level kind of shooter. Or mid-level? Dedotec panels seem to be the nicest in color around still.

NAB 2013- we're here by the beer garden!

Finally at a trade show, not running around guerrilla style with a light on my shoulder. On the plus side I can get more exposure. On the down side I don't get to run around and see much stuff.

One thing I did see right at opening before we had a lot of traffic- handheld gyro stabilized rig. Freefly miro. Expensive, but pretty cool. Makes those top-handle walkin shots actually work. Irons out footsteps really well.
http://youtu.be/PbrXLUUSWWk

Tom
Airbox inflatable softboxes
Airboxlights.com
#nab 2013

Stopmotion

I have a romance with stop motion that I think I need to consummate.  By doing it. Um, learning to do it I should say. Who's got some good resources for me?
Here's an exercise I did just to check things out.  Shot on a Canon 20D, edited in FCP6.



Seems the big thing for me to figure out is armatures to make characters hold still in the postures you set. The creepy rabbitoid had no armature at all. Good for certain things...

Lit, of course, with 2 LED units wearing Airbox Inflatable softboxes.

Airbox LED softboxes on: Mirrorless better than DSLR for video?

Is mirrorless the new deal for DSLRs and lower-budget smaller-scale video shooting?  Or I guess I should say "DSLM".  That's the new term I heard at the WPPI trade show in Las Vegas last week. It was most often mentioned cheek-to-jowl with the term "hybrid" photography, which was also new to me. Mirrorless and hybrid are a trend, which you can see with the field dominating Canon releasing its EOS-M to jump into the fray.

Will Crockett feels strongly this way.  his aurdience is primarily photographers who are transitioning over towards video, since their clients are asking them to.  Some of mine are asking me the reverse:
"did you shoot any stills when you were shooting that part?" And my answer's always, uh, no, because I was shooting video. I didn't shoot any stills.  Maybe that's a lack of planning on my part, that maybe I SHOULD shoot stills along the way when I'm shooting video. So shooting "hybrid" is apparently more and more of the new deal for all of us.

I pressed him on a few of the points in his video.
1.Why's he think it's so much easier to shoot video with mirrorless like a gh2 or gh3 than with the old favorite the 5d?
response:  a) autofocus actually works on mirrorless cameras for video, but autofocus in unavailable in video to DSLRs other than the Sony a99.  b)mirrorless is natively 16:9, making post a little easier. c)more video options like 720 or interlaced available in mirrorless and Sony alphas  d)better overall low light performance in mirrorless.  Performance in his words being a combination of being able to autofocus, judge AWB, and produce good image quality above ISO 2000.



2. Autofocus for video:  I said I still find the autofocus on my GH2 not sufficiently reliable for video work. Sometimes it can follow a moving subject, sometimes it just completely blows it and makes the background really sharp.
Response: Agreed, but still better than you can't ever use it at all.

3.Lots of lenses available:  My impression is yes, you can use lots of lenses on a micro 4/3 mount, technically the most of any format, but in reality, a lot comes down to the quality of the adapters, and a lot of the affordable ones are crap. The lack of iris control on my Canon EF mount lenses when on a m43 mount, not to mention the sloppy wobbly connection between the lens and the camera, makes those lenses basically unusable on m43. There is that cool 550$ smart adapter from redrock micro, but that's pretty spendy. Not to mention the 2x crop factor of the M43 sensor, where your nice wide 24mm EF mount is all of a sudden basically a normal perspective lens.
Response: agreed.  He tries to avoid using adapters except for his Leica glass. Using native lenses is far preferable in most cases.

One thing that can be handy about mirrorless is they're much smaller and usually less expensive for both bodies and glass than pro DSLRs.  Now that Lumix has put out a series of top-quality lenses for M43 format, it feels like a real alternative. When I first got my GH2, there was no fast "normal" zoom available, the equivalent of the Canon L 24-70 2.8. It caused me some heartburn.  Thankfully, now there are the Lumix G X series lenses, which are awesome.  And small! And not that pricey! Only about 1200$ each.

Small camera? Small can be very good sometimes.
When you're just using it as a SLR-style camera, or traveling, that's cool.  I find once I kit it out with all my crap for video, like my d-focus cage, rods, monitor, full-size tripod, and mini slider, it's far from small. Sure is nice to rig up on something.

Here's when little is a big advantage. Check this out:

I don't think you could do that with a chunky SLR with a big lens on it.  well, maybe, but it wouldn't be as fast and it would be harder to do and bounce around more and maybe not work.



Conclusion:
While it's not the only way to shoot video, and all of our favorite DSLRs are still leading the field, I think the day isn't that far away when it will just seem like the more logical choice to shoot video with sleek little DSLMs packed with pro video features than with "big" DSLRs. They're just more video-friendly.  I'm not going to get into the partisan fight about which camera looks better, but there are a lot of just plain practical concerns that make mirrorless attractive. HD live feed to your monitor, for one, so you can keep stuff in focus once you start rolling.

When you're shooting small like this, you'll want your lighting kit to be pretty compact too. What better way than totally collapsible almost weightless softboxes for your LED panels? Check us out.
yours
Tom Guiney
Airboxlights.com
Inflatable softboxes for LED Panels

Airbox photo contest

Hi all.

Hey happy Airboxlights customers-  we need your photos.  Your photos that show you lighting with Airboxes, ideally also showing someone or something in front of the light looking dapper.  I'll send you an Airbox kit, your choice of size, to the person who sends me the best on-set shot. Promise.

yours
Tom Guiney
Airboxlights.com
convictionfilms.net