filmmaking

So, the Oct 30th RED announcement has been and gone.  RED are clearly working very hard but they have also clearly been extraordinarily ambitious.  Perhaps too ambitious?

I look forward to hiring one of those RED cameras.  But I now know for sure that I can't afford to buy the Scarlet S35 that I was so hoping I'd be able to buy.  The S35 brain price hasn't been announced but the module prices alone put a working S35 camera out of my budget.

PLL tubes, ballasts and holders

Why the Canon HV20 is a poor choice for car mounts

The bottom line is that the HV20's single CMOS imager has a rolling shutter (i.e. it doesn't read one entire frame at a time - instead it reads the top line first, then the second line, then the third etc etc). This produces nasty artefacts when the camera is vibrated. The resulting images look a little like jelly.

Not all wide-angle adapters produce barrel distortion. Aspheric adapters are particularly distortion free. The "Bolex Aspheron" (or some-such name) is apparently "the best wide-angle adapter" available. But you have to make your own housing for it and it costs about £420.Tom Hardwick over on dvinfo.net knows lots about aspheric lenses. Wittner-Kinotechnik in Germany sell aspheric adapters

There are loads of threads on dvinfo.net about wideangle adapters

Tests and thoughts about de-interlacing footage using Premiere Pro and aviSynth

I've made quite a few notes over on this thread on DVinfo.net. The main observations are:

Control of cameras for time-lapse photography

Using PICs

PICs (programmable integrated circuits) to have timers etc so it would be possible to make a decent time-lapse controller using a PIC but it would take a lot of effort to programme. Advantages: low cost, lost power consumption. Disadvantages: would take ages to develop, would only work with a camera that I'd hacked, would only control one camera, can't be network-attached, can't control camera settings etc

Using a laptop

gPhoto

Runs on Linux, supports loads of cameras, is scriptable

Forums

http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/217/618?univpostid=618&pview=t