Announcing PhotoCine Expo an HDSLR Conference in Hollywood

The PhotoCine Expo will take place on September 25th and 26th at the Los Angeles Film School in the heart of Hollywood. This Expo is brought to you from the producers of last year’s groundbreaking HDSLR event The Collision Conference, where Vincent Laforet, Shane Hurlbut ASC, CSC and Rodney Charters came together to kick start the HDSLR filmmaking movement.

The speakers and schedule are shaping up to become another must-attend expo for the HDSLR filmmaking community. Shane Hurlbut is presenting the evening keynote on Saturday September 25th and a lot of the familiar faces from last year will be on hand again for this event. In addition to the industry heavyweights, we are proud to present some fresh new faces from the viral video world along side filmmaking experts like Roberta Munroe who wrote the “bible” for short filmmakers. Roberta packed this “bible” with insider tips gleaned from 5 years programming short films at Sundance.

There will be filmmaking workshops including a two hour version of Sneal Patel’s highly regarded HDSLR Bootcamp. Sneal leads Canon HDSLR workshops for Film/TV DP’s and camera operators through TheAssociation.net.

This expo show floor is twice the size of our previous event and as a result, we are happy to announce the Post Production Training Hall. This expanded show floor area will feature classrooms taught by industry professionals ranging in topics from special effects and editing to sound post techniques. All workshops are designed for the HDSLR filmmaker. The expanded show floor will also allow up to 40 exhibitors to showcase the cool HDSLR products that you see used by Film/TV professionals and read about on blogs like PCN.

For more information, go to the Expo web site and keep an eye on the show’s facebook page for exciting contest coming soon.

Here’s a look at the conference we produced last year including Shane Hurbut’s keynote presentation and show floor interviews from New Media Webinars.

Good comparative analysis of the quality of jpeg exports from Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl has taken the time to create a javascript powered tool that lets you compare jpeg images exported at different quality levels.

The Lightroom default JPEG export quality of 75, falling in the 70〜76 range, seems to provide for as good a visible result as the highest quality setting for all the samples except for the bridge, which seems to suffer at least slight posterization banding at all levels, including even “lossless TIFF”.

It’s a great read for all photographers, especially ones using Lightroom.

Shout out to Daring Fireball, where I found the story.

Matt Plaxco produces a gorgeous behind the scenes of Alex Lim

Bringing a narrative thread to any sort of documentary project is always a challenge. Especially since the story takes shape in the editing room and not before the shoot like a scripted piece. Behind the scenes (BTS) videos are no different than shooting a mini documentary and should be approached that way. Yet so many of them are not. They end up looking like a wanna be music video with a bunch of vignettes mashed together. Effective occasionally, but not as a norm.

Matt Plaxco was kind enough to share his behind the scenes video of photographer Alex Lim. It’s a fabulous example of keeping the viewer engaged. The location is just a hop skip and jump north of my Sausalito office and is my old shooting grounds from when I got started in this business twenty five million years ago.

Big muchas gracias to Matt for reaching out to us here at PCN.

Photographer Profile: Alex Lim from PlaxPhoto on Vimeo.

Draganflyer Launches X4 UAV R/C

I’ve previously written about the Draganflyer X8 UAV helicopter before as well as an article about how one team is using a similar R/C copter to bypass BP and gain photo/video access to the Gulf oil disaster. If I extrapolate the pricing structure based on the $18K X6 model, I would bet that the cost of the X8 is going to hover a bit over $21-22K. This isn’t really that expensive for an ariel drone that can payload an HDSLR and allow indie filmmakers access to high quality helicopter shots without the huge expense of renting a manned aircraft and camera crew.

The new Draganflyer X4 seems to fill a niche for a less expensive UAV that can carry a smaller payload configured to shoot 720P video using a Panasonic Lumix compact camera. The base price is listed as $8495 but I would expect it to cost around $10K for one rigged with the Photography/HD video package.

Apps for Filmmaking

I’ve been watching the development of iPhone and iPad apps that aid in filmmaking for a while now with the intention of writing an article about the best of breed for each category. I have a collection of clapper apps that I’ve been testing to see which one I preferred and I’ve been looking closely at story board, teleprompter and clip editing apps. This morning in my inbox was an article from Ryan Koos talking about his intention of writing the same article for NoFilmSchool and pointing instead to a couple of good articles already written.

FilmmakerIQ posted 22 Filmmaking Apps for the iPad & iPhone. Their list is pretty comprehensive and even had one or two apps that weren’t on my radar yet.

Paramount’s Insurge Resurfaces

PCN has followed the mysterious development of Paramount’s micro-production unit Insurge with interest. Several media outlets covered the announcement story with screen shots and links to the division’s web site but shortly after, the link was redirected to the main Paramount site and the elusive Insurge web page was never to be seen again. Until now.

Anne Thompson’s blog Tomson on Hollywood, ran a story earlier this month detailing the troubled start for Insurge:

Insurge is happening, but not in the form the studio had originally envisioned. Reportedly allotted a budget of $1 million to seek out promising young filmmakers and give them $100,000 budgets, Insurge is now more under-the-radar . . . . the trade guilds prevent a major studio from funding movies at that level

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WEEK 5: OH YES!

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN – WEEK 4/5 DAILIES from Robin Schmidt on Vimeo.

Praise be, a good day, no, a very good day. After the debacle of the week five weekend that was only a day with everything going wrong we really needed this weekend to be a monster but things didn’t start too well with our gaffer finding paid work that took him off the shoot, and the permissions we needed to shoot in Soho for our grand finale being denied at the last minute… Nonetheless Saturday dawned bright and sunny, and since we were

Ultra Awesome

I know this has nothing to do with anything that we do on this site. Just take a sip of your coffee and laugh your ass off. The campaign was created by Wieden + Kennedy and has gone on to sheer viral super stardom with a string of YouTube videos in which the Old Spice Guy personally thanks bloggers, twitterers and celebrities who have commented about him online. He did 184 thank you videos from his bathroom before he hung up his body wash.

Canon HDSLR Bootcamp This Weekend

Snehal Patel is teaching his very successful Canon HDSLR Bootcamp tomorrow July 17th in Santa Monica, CA. Snehal is a great guy and really knows what he’s doing and his workshops are well respected.

The cost is $350 and according to his site:

Frankie Stu Says Relax

Stu Maschwitz takes a look and pokes a little fun at some leading industry voices including his own. He examines several major complaints about digital filmmaking and wraps them in the context of what people like Vincent Laforet and Philip Bloom are saying or doing. It’s a good read that is finished up with some common sense wisdom:

. . . . we can all use a little reminder now and then that movies work. They’ve transported us, fooled us, moved us, terrified us, and turned us on for a hundred years, all without any yet-to-be invented bells and whistles.

If you aren’t familiar with Stu, you should be. The first book I bought to learn about video was Stu’s DV Rebel’s Guide. In addition to being a filmmaker, he is a special effects guru and is one of the people behind Magic Bullet and Red Giant Software.