Photos in motion; DNG sprouts wheels

  • As you probably don’t need me to tell you, Canon has just announced the 5D Mark II, complete with the ability to record HD-resolution (1080p) video.  This follows on the heels of Nikon’s D90, itself capable of 720p video capture.  My initial thought was that DSLRs capturing video is kind of like dogs walking on their hind legs–not done well (e.g. no autofocus), though interesting to see done at all.  Nikon’s sample videos, however, have gotten me thinking about the possibilities, and film effects pro Stu Maschwitz sees lots of promise.  (He calls Canon’s decision to shoot at 30fps instead of at 24 "almost unbearable," however.)
  • On the other end of the tech spectrum, I’m a big fan of the little Flip video camera.  Now a guy named Reid Gershbein has given a tilt-shift appearance (how, he doesn’t say) to footage from the wee cam.  Hmm–this may motivate me to try applying Lens Blur as a Smart Filter on video using Photoshop Extended.
  • Ikonoskop’s rather potent-looking, weirdly named A-cam dII is, it would appear, first to support DNG for motion capture. "The buzz at IBC is DNG," they write, "so people seem to understand and start to follow our lead in DNG together with Adobe." [Via Scott Sheppard]
  • Interesting video of an SLR: Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion. [Via Zalman Stern]
  • Photojojo’s got some ideas on making flipbooks from your video content.

0 thoughts on “Photos in motion; DNG sprouts wheels

  1. In April, Adobe and other announced they were developing a new specification “CinemaDNG” to become a standard cinema raw file format.
    This announcement by Ikonoskop appears to be based on the current DNG!
    What progress is being made on CinemaDNG? Will current DNG be a proper subset of the new format, enabling stills to be processed as normal DNG files?
    (Does anyone actually know?)

  2. very interesting about Canon and Nikon’s latest cameras and their video capture abilities. However, my money is on Jim Jannard and the crew at Red to redefine the digital still camera. They are in the first stages of completely changing the whole technical game in the movie industry and have declared their intentions for the stills industry.
    http://www.red.com/
    Take a look at the recently announced 3K Scarlet and imagine that going head to head against the Canon 5D MkII!
    Then read a little of this thread to start getting an idea about what might come to be:
    http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=18710

  3. Re: Tilt/shift effect
    Reid states in a comment on his site that he used FCP and gives a brief description of how to do it.
    Now I don’t use the Adobe video products (strictly PS and definitely not FCP!) but surely one could import video file into PS3 Extended as frames and run the lens blur filter using an alpha channel with a reflected gradient to determine where (and amount) of blur.

  4. I hate to break this to you, but no professional video or film shooter uses auto-focus. I this case though, your comment may be right on because the extreme compression these cameras use makes them unusable for anything beyond amateur home movies.
    Hopefully these companies will pay attention to the market and move towards a RAW format like RED has.

  5. “this may motivate me to try applying Lens Blur as a Smart Filter on video using Photoshop Extended.”
    Dude, I bet I could hook you up with a good deal on After Effects. I know people.
    I hear it’s sort of like Photoshop for video.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *