Your Guide to Creating and Publishing Great Video
Blackmagic
Cinema Camera
in-depth review FOCUS ON LIGHTING Lighting Gear Buyers Guides Animated Lighting Rosco Litepad Loop Pro Kit Reviewed
Meet the new breed of digital cinema cameras!
Learn how you can create breathtaking video with these revolutionary new cameras. Free download at: videomaker.com/NewBreed
Contents
Features
22
Lighting Solutions - Choosing the correct lighting source An essential element in producing excellent video is correct lighting. too much, too littleor the wrong kind and you’re in for dissatisfying results. by Mark Holder
Lighting Accessories for an Industry in Change
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Good lighting improves the look of your video tremendously. But having the right light is just a part of the story. There’s a whole collection of accessories that can improve the light you cast. by Bill Davis
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2013 International CES: The Gear of the Year The worlds largest annual innovation event featured exhibitors from every segemnet of the electronics industry and of every size, from crowd funded gadget startups to multi-billion dollar household brands by Russ Fairley
Spotlight on CES 2013
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VIDEOMAKERS annual spotlight awards by Jackson Wong
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Trendy Tricks - Five Favorite Cool Camera Moves Here are five tricks to “wow” with only a camera and some practice by Steve Everson
Columns
Reviews
02 Basic Training 48 Profit Making 51 Lighting 54 Audio 59 Editing 61 Take 5 61
06 Cool Contraptions Cool Jib 11 Rosco Lightpad Loop Pro Kit 14 intensiKey 16 iMovie for iPad 18 Editing 20
Viewfinder
Living in the Video Community by Matthew York
Shooting Tips for Beginners by Kyle Cassidy
Live Internet Streaming Income by Earl Chessher
Animated Lights by Terry O’Rourke
Diege “tic Sound by Hal Robertson
Double your Editing Speed by Chris “Ace” Gates
5 Reasons to Shoot from a Low Angle by Jackson Wong
Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Cinema Camera by Brian Peterson
Camera Support by Tony Gomez
Lighting Kit by Paul Hildebrandt
Post-Production Software by Greg Olson
Editing Software by Mike Wilhelm
Parabolic Microphone by Zac Fernandez
5
TAKE
Stability
Emotional Composition Keep the camera low, but point it upwards and you'll create the feeling that the audience is small and the subject is gigantic. This will be emphasized when the subject takes up the majority of the frame, so the distance between camera and subject will play a big role in this shot. Belittlement is the key here, so if you need a bully in your scene, shooting low with your subject down towards the bottom of the frame can further accentuate the height of the monstrous subject. Basketball players, skyscrapers, mountains and stacked items are all easy subjects here.
Animal / Object Perspective
3
No More Eyes In The Skies There are plenty of reasons to see the underside of obstacles. If you've got doorframes that are warped and pesky coffee tables that do nothing but stub, then you might have very good reasons to frame for low shots. Consider a dropped fork viewed from beneath a chair (isn't that how carefully planned escapes always start?) Letting your audience see a parent's shoes from beneath the passenger side door can put a thrill on a delinquent's situation. If you're still looking for intensity, consider races: how often do you see low angle shots of cars' tires or runners' heels before the start? Placing the viewer beneath a runner's heels or at the tailpipe can help sell the speed of a race, but it's all in giving viewers the experience of watching something that would otherwise be impossible to see.
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1
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If you're like me one of my early videos included a talking hat in an otherwise real world ... Ok, so that's probably not many of you, but if you want inanimate objects like Legos, dolls, My Little Pony, Hot Wheels, and other toys to have a perspective in your video, go with their point of view using low angles because life-size toys are rare. A simple pan from the eye level of a doll can demonstrate a character discovering a new world outside the toybox. The three "Toy Story" movies are good research subjects to get ideas of a toy's low angle point of view.
Your camera's center of gravity is the focus of camera stabilizers across the board. It may take a physicist to explain, but it should be pretty clear that anything having a low center of gravity is going to be much harder to move. Like a well-engineered structure, give your camera a good foundation and get your camera low. Many cameras have a handle on top and will help make this happen. Getting flexible can have positive health effects, but it can sure make it easier to squat for an awesome shot. Work on smoothly bending your knees and ankles so that your body becomes a shock absorber for the camera. Low and steady wins many a race.
Objects Have More Impact
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A sure way to show depth of field is to have objects in the foreground or closer to the camera than the focal point. The focus is going to be paramount when it comes to shattering impacts, so lining up your camera with a solid surface is a great place to start. Glass, now that's a nice example; but anything that shatters on impact can be a great subject for impacting. A slow-motion shot that is even with the impact surface can play directly into emotional feelings. Getting low to a surfaces like counters or roads can pretty well guarantee that you have a good reference for you viewers that what's in focus is exactly important, and the rest can be one big bokeh.
Lighting Solutions
An essential element in producing excellent video is correct lighting. Too much, too little or the wrong kind and you’re in for dissatisfying results. Achieving correct lighting is an art form in itself and requires the right mix of knowledge, experience and equipment. Whether you confine your work to the studio or run-n-gun in the wild, there’s a lighting solution that’s just right for you. In this buyer’s guide we’ll explore several types of lighting options and their uses.
Tungsten
Fluorescent
Tungsten lights have been a video and film lighting mainstay for many years. A tungsten filament, combined with halogen gas and enclosed within a quartz envelope, produces a constant output and color temperature throughout its life. They are affordable and produce large volumes of very bright, high-contrast light, producing sharp, crisp shadows. Fortunately, light modifiers are available to control and soften tungsten’s brilliant beams as needed. Available in a wide variety of styles, configurations and output ratings, these lights may have a simple bare be fitted with a Fresnel lens (pronounced fruh-nel). A Fresnel lens is identifiable by rings on its front surface that form a series of steps, producing an intense, highly-focused beam of light.On the downside, these lights use a lot of power and get very hot. They can burn you in an instant or set fire to your client’s furniture if you’re not extremely careful. Tungsten lights produce light in the 3200K range and will need to be corrected with gels when mixed with daylight. If you’re on a tight budget tungsten may be the best way to go. Buy lights individually and build your kit over ti r you can purchase pre-made kits from most manufacturers. Kits usually come with several lights, stands, modifiers, diffusers, some gel holders, gels and a case to carry it all in. Although they sell other types of lights as well, a very popular name in tungsten and kit lighting is Lowel. Their highly flexible, focusable, Omni Light list price is $220, including lamp, and comes in a variety of output ratings. The Lowel DV Creator 44 is an extremely versatile kit with four lights and stands, softbox, umbrella, light modifiers, gels, hard case and more for $1,920.
Fluorescent lamps produce a very pleasing soft light that wraps beautifully around the subject, making them great for portraits and other applications requiring more diffused lighting. The light-producing tubes are affordable, have long lives, consume much less power than tungsten, are cool to the touch and available in both 3200k and daylight color temperatures. Fluorescents put out considerably less light than either tungsten or HMI lamps. Bank lights are available with multiple tubes and greater output but are larger, heavier and too bulky for easy travel. Newer designs, however, seek to resolve some of these issues. CFLs (compact fluorescent lamps) are daylight balanced and similar in size to common household light bulbs with the same screw-in base. Hong Kong-based Tokina Company Limited produces a variety of both spiral (CFL) and straight-tube fluorescent light banks as well as its Digital Studio Kits for shadow-free image capture of small objects. The full kit can be had for about $995. The Kino Flo two-foot Double Select provides a two-lamp remote-operated fixture with built-in barndoors. The KSH2057P-SB Triple Fixture Shooter Kit from Videssence provides everything you need for a great lighting experience for around $1,270.
HMI Another lighting option that is very popular with professional video producers is the Hydrargyrum Medium-arc Iodide lamp, or HMI. Unlike traditional lights, HMIs are daylight balanced and produce a great deal more light than tungsten halogen lights of the same wattage. For example, a 600W HMI produces as much light output as a conventional 2000W unit with daylight filter and a 2500W HMI is equivalent to the output of 10,000W of traditional tungsten. Requiring less power, they run much cooler, and like their tungsten brethren, they can be modified to contain and direct all that awesome brightness. HMIs are considerably more expensive to buy and maintain than conventional lights and each requires its own bulky ballast to crank the voltage up into the necessary range. Once switched on, they cannot be used immediately, as they require a bit of warm-up time before reaching the correct color temperature. ARRI makes a variety of HMI lights in a number of styles and output ratings all the way up to a paint-blistering 18,000 watts. On the more affordable end of the scale, however, the ARRI Compact 125 Watt HMI Fresnel Light runs around $1,400 bulb extra.
“Whether you confine your work to the studio or run-n-gun in the wild, there’s a lighting solution that’s just right for you.” LED Individual light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are very small and are commonly used as indicator lamps on electronic devices. Many LEDs, combined into single panels, however, have numerous advantages and are fast becoming extremely popular lighting solutions in the video world. LEDs are daylight balanced, consume low amounts of energy and are very cool to the touch. The diodes have extremely long life spans, rated in the tens of thousands of hours. On the one hand, they can be very compact, perfect for on-camera use or hard to light locations, such as lighting car interiors. On the other hand, they can be bundled together into large multi-panels for a cumulative effect. The intensity of LEDs can be varied, without altering the color temperature, while the color temperature itself can be independently changed between 3200K and 5600K.
The primary disadvantage of LEDs are their cost. And while their output is less than either tungsten or HMIs they may well offer the best of each world. They have the compact size and light weight of tungsten; the low power requirements, cool operating temperatures and longer life of fluorescents; lower cost than HMIs and, on some models, variable intensity and color temperature. At just 1.2 lbs. including battery, the ikan iLED312 provides an excellent on-camera light source with built-in dimmer and variable color temperature for $399. Further along the budget spectrum is the Litepanels Ringlite Mini. For about $2,300 it mounts around the camera’s lens and has fully dimmable top, middle and bottom segments for greater control. For a great kit setup, FloLight’s LED Video Lighting Kit includes three light panels, stands and padded carrying bags for $2,000.
Reflectors If you’ve been asking yourself if your next lighting purchase should be tungsten, color-balanced fluorescent, or LED, you’re not alone. Most video producers are struggling with these same questions. Ready for some good news? There’s a whole class of lighting equipment you can buy with great confidence knowing that it really doesn’t matter which kind of lights you end up buying! We're talking about lighting accessories such as reflectors, diffusers, and color correcting gels. These classic lighting tools work the same no matter what type of gear you use them with. These often modestly-priced accessories allow you to direct, shape, and control your light and are always a great option for expanding your lighting inventory. When assembling your accessories kit, reflectors are a great place to start. A reflector takes light coming from one direction and re-directs it to another. If one side of the talent’s face is too shadowy, a well-placed reflector can effectively brighten it up. Simple white foam core boards can be a great budget solution, but they aren't very durable or flexible — so a more lasting solution would be something like the Lastolight Bottletop collapsible 5-in-1 30-inch circular reflector ($84) which provides a rugged 30” diameter frame with extra swappable coverings to allow you to reflect from silver, gold, or white surfaces — and includes a diffusing fabric option.
Lighting Accessories “they’re designed to pass through much of the incoming light while simultaneously softening and spreading it out over a larger surface area.”
Diffusers Similar to reflectors, diffusers come in the same popular forms – but instead of reflecting the light they’re designed to pass through much of the incoming light while simultaneously softening and spreading it out over a larger surface area. A large square or round fabric diffuser - flown over a talent in the harsh outside sun - lowers contrast and lets you achieve a much more pleasing exposure. Indoors, you can combine the same fabric diffuser with a bright light source to spread soft light over a large interior area. High-efficiency LED light units like the LEDZ Brute 9 ($1,660) combined with a stand-mounted diffuser fabric panel let you rapidly rig a large soft source - then move outside and use the same light without the diffusion panel to brighten the features of a talent that might be positioned outdoors in the shade.
Scrim
A scrim is a special kind of light-control device. Its job is to cut the amount of light that passes through it without overly changing the shape or quality of that light. Large fabric scrims called “nets” are commonly used outdoors and placed behind talent to lower the level of a bright background to allow a more pleasing exposure between the talent and background scene. The F.J. Westcott Co. sells both large frame outdoor scrims as well as the more personal-sized options such as the Fast Flag Scrim Kit with two collapsible 24-inch x 36-inch frames, single black net, double black net, 2-stop silk, and black block fabric, the kit costs $252. Fabric like the black block are often carefully inserted partially between a bright key light and the subject to reduce the light's brightness on silver or blond hair, or to lessen lighting hot spots on a forehead or bare shoulder. The term “scrim” also applies to a form of wire mesh inserts often attached to the front of focusable lights to cut down on the intensity of the light without affecting the users' ability to shape the beam. Circular scrims, used in conjunction with barn doors are common on Fresnel-lensed light. If you already own a lighting kit, you can check to see if scrims might be available as an affordable add-on. The Cinemills website (www.cinemills.com) has a wide array of metal scrims available in sizes from three inches up to 29 inches in diameter, suitable for many location sets.
Gels Gels are the colored or textured plastic sheets used to correct or filter lights. Gels from GAM, Rosco and Lee Filters are made to precision recipes with careful attention to color and light transmission properties. If you have a room with both a tungsten lamp and a daylight window, there’s a gel color available to precisely match the color temperature of one to the other. The Rosco Laboratories CalColor kit runs about $50 and includes 33 10x12 gels covering typical color correction and color effects. It’s a great way to start to learn about these critical lighting accessories.
Gels aren’t always for color correction and there is a host of gels designed for diffusion, as well like the popular LEE 216 and 250, and Rosco's Tough Frost line. These are placed in a gel holder or just clipped on the front of the light, adding diffusion at the source. In fact, by employing a frame-and-gel approach you can take a super-bright instrument like the ultra-rugged Sumo100 LED - ($3,195) and add a custom color, and larger surface output via gels so that one powerful fixture can be suitable for more specialized jobs.
Most of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera's functions are accessed through the touch screen display. The number of functions are sparse but nothing critical is missing. The touchscreen is responsive and we were able to enter some basic metadata, change the ISO and select our recording and display preferences in a matter of a few minutes. Because the sensor is less than full-frame, it uses only part of the image circle projected by EF-mount lenses resulting in a crop factor of 2.4. So our Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L lens effectively became a 120mm lens. For our wide angles we relied on our Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L for a full-frame equivalent of 19-36mm. This crop factor does mean that even moderate telephoto lenses will get you very close. The popular Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L may now zoom you to 480mm. The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is designed to control the electronic iris of EF and ZE mount lenses but as of firmware version 1.2, there remain several popular lenses that are not communicating with the camera. Check the Blackmagic Cinema Camera forum on Blackmagic Design's website for the latest list of compatible lenses.
The term is often overused, but when it comes to breakthrough image quality from low-cost video gear, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera earns the title of “Revolutionary.� There are still some quirks but firmware updates may take care of the majority. If you want the highest possible quality image that rivals the look of film at a very affordable price, and are willing to go to the effort, then you owe it to yourself to seriously consider the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.