Around this time of the year, you start seeing a lot of talk about what’s going to be released at NAB. It’s always interesting to look at some of the larger trends that are out there. Of course, what’s trending for Digital Anarchy is Beauty Box 3.0. The photo version just got released (see below) and the video version is not far behind. But beyond that…

There are some of the obvious ones:

4K is coming whether we need it or not. Having seen some of it at CES I’m not especially blown away by it. It’s better, for sure, but the imagery I saw wasn’t so much better that I wanted to run out and spend $20,000 on a new TV. Or even $1000 for that matter. However, I guess as we move towards everyone having a 90 inch TV, the extra resolution will matter. So there’s already been no shortage of announcements of 4K cameras with more to come I’m sure. I can’t really complain since it’ll certainly increase demand for Beauty Box Video. If people thought they looked bad in HD… ;-)

The Cloud. Nobody knows exactly what the hell that means, but it’s big. And fluffy. Adobe has some potentially interesting collaborative solutions. Not sure how  well that works in the real world, but better collaboration tools are probably needed as more people work remotely. The one thing I don’t think you’ll see is professionals editing video in the cloud. This is more of a bandwidth issue than anything else. You just can’t move gigabyte files around the internet effectively. On the consumer side you’ll see more of it though as the files are smaller since, if you’re broadcasting on YouTube, compression isn’t so much a concern.

One of the smaller trends is content curation. With all those YouTube and Vimeo videos how do you find things? It’s hard enough finding something with 500 channels. Add in the unlimited number of YouTube channels and it’s a daunting task. So anyone producing content needs to almost approach it as a website and consider SEO to be a critical part of the production. There seem to be a variety of firms popping up to help with that.

The Second Screen trend is also very interesting. Lots of people are watching TV with a laptop, tablet, or phone next to them. How is that changing the way we view TV? What kind of ancillary content makes sense for these devices? How can we use mobile devices to interact with what’s on the big screen? (and yes, ‘big screen’ now means that 108″ 4K flat screen in your living room) NAB has a day long sub-conference devoted to this. Looks like it might be worth checking out if you’re concerned about such things.

Of course, the most interesting thing at NAB will be Beauty Box Video 3.0! Maybe we should rename it Beauty Box Video 4K. The Beauty Box 4K Cloud? The mind boggles.

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Yesterday, our new iOS app, Beauty Box Photo, climbed all the way up to #6 in the Top Free Photo Apps! That’s 3 spots behind Instagram! Pretty impressive for an app that’s only been out for a month. (ok, in the screenshot it’s at #7, but it was at #6… you can trust us! ;-)

Given that there are over 19,000 photo apps in the App Store, getting into the top 10 is a pretty impressive feat. It requires a LOT of downloads, so we are really thrilled by it.

Even more exciting is that version 1.1 is coming out in a couple weeks, adding all sorts of cool stuff. 1.0 has gotten mostly 5 stars reviews and if folks liked that, 1.1 should be really well received. Stayed tuned for all the details once it’s available in the App Store.

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So I’ll jump into the fray. Yes, I’m playing armchair psychologist here. I have no inside info and am making all this up based simply on having watched Apple intently (and been subjected to their whims) for 25 years as a customer and developer. Take it for what it’s worth.

So why the about face when it looked like the MacPro was done for just a year or so ago? I think the main fact is that Steve Jobs is no longer with the company.

From Apple’s perspective there is no business case for the MacPro. Apple certainly does not need the MacPro. It’s a complete distraction from their incredibly profitable consumer products. The engineers and resources devoted to the MacPro could be devoted to products that are likely to sell 10s of millions instead of a few hundred thousand. The main reason I think we’ll see new MacPros is loyalty to a user base that has stuck with Apple through thick and thin.

I do not think this would be the case if Steve was still around. He was very quick to throw anything under the bus that he didn’t think was the future. (The MacPro is definitely not Apple’s future. I rather doubt Jobs was interested in keeping it, hence lackluster updates to the line and rumors of it’s demise. I don’t think everyone in Apple feels this way. I think there’s a lot of people at Apple who appreciate the professional segment and don’t want to see it go. So without Jobs around pushing it under the bus, the MacPro got a revival.

If you want to see how important the MacPro is to Apple, look at Europe. The EU claimed the MacPros didn’t meet regulations, and instead of making a few changes, they just pulled it off the market. You don’t do that with products that are generating lots of money and are an important part of your business. Of course, with new MacPros coming later this year, how long will Europe really be without them? Probably six months or so, but still. Apple knew these regulations were coming and could have built them into the last rev of the machine.

The easier question is does anyone still need the MacPro? This came up on one of the panel discussions I was on at CES… won’t people just do all their photo and video editing on a phone or tablet? Can’t we just tell Siri “Edit my video” and, boom!, it’s done?

Uh, no.

Especially with ever increasing resolutions, desktop machines are still needed for anyone doing professional work. HD is barely a mature technology and we’re already seeing UltraHD (4K) popping up as the new buzzword (thankfully replacing 3D).

I guess we’ll see what Apple gives us later this year, but I suspect it will be aimed at professionals and will make most of you happy. You can thank Tim Cook that you’re not getting thrown under the bus…  Yet.

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If you’re going to enter contests it’s a good thing to read the rules, but it’s almost a certainty that if you bust out the clone tool or use Content-aware Fill you are going to be disqualified. Obviously if it’s a photo manipulation contest that’s different, but most photography contests want you to do everything in camera, limiting adjustments to minor tweaks like cropping and contrast, things that were relatively easy to do in the darkroom days.

While you might argue what’s the difference between cloning a trash bag out of the photo and cropping it, it’s a very slippery slope. It rapidly becomes more about your Photoshop skills and less about your photography skills. If it’s a photography contest, then it should be about your photography skills.

Here’s the disqualified image, click on it to read the full article and see the original.

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Ok, maybe not quite weirder, but my god, does the world need 1001 makers of iPhone cases and headphones? That’s innovation? I know those kids in those iPod commercials looked cool and all, but really? 1001 companies? And why did the Postal Service have a booth with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators? Not to mention the man sized Qbert looking things standing around a table sized Surface device playing a kids game. And then there was the keynote. Fear and Loathing in Vegas indeed. No acid needed.

When they say ‘consumer electronics’, they mean it. It’s not just TVs, it’s every last little doodad that can be plugged into a wall. And in fact, there were many innovative items floating around, but my main interest was video related stuff, so I’ll chat about that. Although, the Audi booth was a photographers dream. Basically you were inside a giant softbox with a bunch of great cars. Very cool if you wanted to work on your car photography.

I still don’t think the TV manufacturers get it. Panasonic and Samsung sort of did. LG and Sharp not so much, and Toshiba didn’t even have someone that spoke english. The Panasonic and Samsung second screen and internet TV offerings were pretty well thought out as a way to control the TV and content. However, you get the feeling that Apple is going to roll into this space and change the way we think about what a TV will do, in the same way they changed what we thought a phone could do. The current offerings just seem lackluster, with the internet tacked on. Not actually rethinking what you can do with a big internet connected screen.

3D was mostly dead. Only LG had a 3D showing… a giant 30 ft wide/12 ft high screen showing headache inducing 3D graphics. Like 3D TV overall, it was a Fail. Good riddance.

UltraHD (4K) is officially here. From the content I saw I have a hard time believing it will get the response HD did. SD compared to HD was night and day. UltraHD is better, but not so much better that it’s a nobrain upgrade. I guess we’ll see. The manufacturers have given up on 3D, so UltraHD is the new 3D.

A few camera vendors announced cameras that could use apps. Samsung will use Android and Sony, of course, will use their own operating system. Sony _could_ do what Amazon does and tweak their own version of Android and create their own store. But, no, they’re going to roll their own and have 6 people develop apps for it. And yes, they’ll be releasing training videos for this new Sony OS on Betamax. Didn’t Sony lose like a trillion dollars last year? No idea why.

And really, the keynote was f’ing bizarre.

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Since Beauty Box can involve some render time, we’ve wished that Apple would authorize one of the newer GeForce cards for the Mac. No such luck. So we’re tired of waiting. We took a stock PNY GeForce 570 and put it into our MacPro. And lo! It works!

So… what’d we do and what are the caveats? This was not a 570 with ‘flashed’ ROM. This was just a straight up 570 which we use in one of our PC machines. Nothing fancy. We did need to download a few things:

- Latest Nvidia driver for the Mac, which can be found here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-304.00.05f02-driver.html

- Latest CUDA drivers for the Mac, which can be found here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html (as of this writing, v5.0.37 was the latest)

- If you’re using Premiere you need to update the cuda_supported_cards.txt file to add the name of the video card. In this case it would be: ‘GeForce GTX 570′  To do this, you need to go to the Premiere.app file, right+click on it and select ‘Show Package Contents’. Once you do that, this is what you’ll see:

Once that’s done, you are good to go!

Now that caveats…

- It does not appear to be as fast on the Mac as it is on the PC. It’s about as fast as the Quadro 4000 or ATI 5770 on the Mac, but not faster. And in some cases it’s a bit slower. Then again, it’s also 1/4th the price. Most of the speed testing was done around Beauty Box, so this is probably not representative of After Effects 3D rendering or the Premiere Mercury Engine. Beauty Box uses OpenCL which ATI and Nvidia support. AE and Premiere use Nvidia’s CUDA, so replacing an ATI board with the 570 should give you a big boost.

- FCP didn’t seem to like the card and was sluggish. Again, we didn’t do a ton of non Beauty Box testing, and I’d like to do some additional FCP-only testing. But as it stands, if you’re not using Adobe products, I wouldn’t recommend the 570.

- You’ll need two 6 pin PCI-E cables. I _think_ the MacPro comes with these, but you’ll need to check. If you need to purchase a cable, get the 6+2 PCI-E cable if you can find one. Many of the newer cards require a 6pin cable and an 8 pin cable. You won’t need it for the 570, but you may need it if you eventually upgrade to another card. The GTX 690 requires two 8 pin cables. Crazy.

- We didn’t see any crashes or other problems with the card. However, we have heard of reports of problems by some folks who’ve done this. I highly recommend having an officially supported video card lying around in case you’re in the middle of a project and all of a sudden things start crashing. We did try a GTX 560ti which was causing crashes all over the place. So have your original video card around just in case. This is technically a hack after all.

- Not all Nvidia cards will work. As just noted, the GTX 560ti we put in the same machine caused massive problems in both After Effects and Premiere. I definitely would NOT try this with a GTX 690. Premiere has problems with the multiple GPUs that card has even on Windows where it’s officially supported.

- As mentioned, you do not appear to need a card with ‘Flashed’ ROM. Ours was just a stock 570. This is consistent with other reports I’ve seen.

Anyways, bottom line though is that the GTX 570 works and with Adobe apps, it’s really fast. Just don’t expect to see an order of magnitude speed increase over an ATI 5770 or Quadro 4000. You will see that on the PC side, but not likely on the Mac. Also, I’ll note that we used both 10.8.2 and 10.7.5 without problems and CS5.5 and CS6, although we did a lot more testing on CS6 on 10.8.

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If Apple comes out with a TV, I don’t think it’s hard to guess what it’ll be. It will not be a TV. It will be built from the ground up as an internet device with a big ass screen whose primary use is displaying content.

There was a survey recently released that said less than 15% of Smart TV owners are using the smart features. This isn’t particularly surprising because most ‘smart’ TVs aren’t very smart, don’t have well thought out apps that take advantage of it, and still want you to use a remote. Why? Because TV manufacturers still think they’re selling TVs.

Let’s go back to what Apple would release… and if they do, all the other manufacturers will go ‘ooohh… that’s how you do it. (And I’ll point out that I’m not an Apple fanboi… but they do have a habit of releasing game changing devices, so I’m using them as an example.)

Anyways…  features of an Apple branded big screen internet device:

- Great, easy to use User Interface. It will be different than the Mac or the iPad, as they are good about customizing the UI for the device, but probably bear a resemblance to the iPad. This is something other manufacturers have not wrapped their head around. The UI for accessing Smart features usually sucks and is not friendly to non-Techies. Also, you will be able to interact with the device via your laptop, iPad, phone, whatever.

- Remote? What Remote? You will be able to use any internet connected device to run an app that controls the TV. Many (if not most) of us watch TV with another device in hand, and this trend is growing. There is no reason to have a remote when you can use your secondary device to search for content, drive apps and games on the TV, and seamlessly move content from the small screen to the big screen with a swipe of the hand. And don’t forgot about Siri…

- Apps and Games: From the getgo, there will be some cool, very polished apps and games that take advantage of the bigger screen and environment a ‘TV’ is typically in (e.g. living room). Games are one of the biggest catagories on iOS devices. I’m assuming Apple would go after casual ‘Wii’ users with a vengeance. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could purchase an add-on game controller. You’ll certainly be able to use your iPhone or iPad, but if you’re staring at the larger screen, the feedback you get from physical knobs and buttons is useful for games.

- Easy way of channel surfing. With all that content, automatically finding content you’re interested in and allowing you to flip through it will be critical. AppleTV already has a good recommendation system, look for that to be improved on and be a central component.

- Fast processor: Putting a processor in the machine that’s fast enough to do what’s needed is critical. Too many current Smart TVs are still developed as TVs and thus have crummy, underpowered processors making the ‘smart’ experience sluggish. Couple that with the lousy UI and you’ve got a horrible user experience. It’s no wonder no one uses the smart features.

I think there’s a lot of folks out there that want internet connected devices with a big screen. They don’t want TV with an internet plug. It was called WebTV. It sucked 10 years ago, and the idea still sucks today. I don’t want to move a cursor around with a remote. I want to use my mobile device to access different intuitive screens that let me easily find content and view or play it on the larger screen. And with 10,000 channels to select from, it better have really smart content curation so I can channel surf and EASILY find content I’m interested in.

I’ll be at CES and I’m sure there will be many TVs with internet plugs. We’ll see if anyone actually gets what they’re supposed to do with that plug. I don’t think it’s that hard to figure out. But you have to stop looking at the device as a TV first, internet device second. It’s just another screen in our multi-screen universe. And it’ll probably take Apple to do it right.

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48fps. Looks great!

I have no idea if the Hobbit is a good film. The ‘soap opera’ look of 48fps combined with 3D was distracting and outright ruined many scenes by making them look like a low budget Saturday morning cartoon. The climatic scene actually works out pretty well, but for the first 2+ hours it’s an awful movie experience. Peter Jackson has gone on record as saying that 48fps makes 3D more enjoyable. Whatever he is smoking, please send some of it to San Francisco. 3D tends to brighten the image up to begin with and you add 48fps to that mix and the result is so bad it’s comical.

I was hoping the initial reports of the look of 48fps were exaggerated and due to viewing unfinished shots. I think it’s clear that in both cases it’s not. It looks like 3D humans suffering from the ‘uncanny valley’ effects. It doesn’t look like film, but it doesn’t look real either. It just looks like bad TV. With Hobbits. Maybe they can resurrect the Ewok Christmas special and shoot that in 48fps, 3D.

I realize there’s a lot of new technology out there and you have to test it out on something. But to test it out on a major motion picture? Honestly, I wish folks would just try to make better movies instead of screwing around with all this stuff (48fps, 3d) which doesn’t make the films look better and rarely adds anything to the story. In the case of the Hobbit, it really affected the story poorly.

I do think there’s some technology which will change movies for the better. The super high resolution cameras produce great looking imagery. Internet connected TVs will change the way we watch movies and how they get distributed. But 48fps is just crap. So thank you to Peter Jackson for proving that.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you think it’s going to be and what you expect.

Do you want a Canon 5D markV running Android and apps?
Do you want it easier to add metadata like keywords?
Editing in the cloud?
3D photos? (god forbid ;-)

It will be interesting to see what kind of changes happen to photography over the next five years. One trend that will definitely continue is making it easier to take great photos on a wide range of devices. Can you see a camera phone with a 3/4″ mount for interchangeable lenses? This is of obvious concern to pro photographers. What do you feel you need to compete in a world where even a simple camera phone can take great shots?

Wifi and GPS will become standard on all cameras. Removing the need for a tethered cameras and making it easier to add location metadata. How do you see this affecting you?

How big of a deal is all kinds of metadata? What do you use it for and how would you like to use it if the data could be added automatically or with little effort?

Personally I would love to see cameras running Android. Much of what what we need to attach a camera to a computer for can, and maybe should, be done on camera. Imagine doing a portrait shoot and having the ability to automatically watermark the image with your web address and  upload it to the subjects Facebook page as you’re shooting. Or doing school photos and having the camera scan a QR code without additional hardware and add the info to the metadata of the image.

What about the cloud? Do you even want to edit ‘in the cloud’? Do you see yourself needing to edit from different devices in different locations? What kinds of things are you doing now in the cloud or do you think would be useful?

I’d love to hear from you about any of this stuff or anything you think will be a factor in photography 3 or 5 years from now. Post a comment or shoot me an email at jim@digitalanarchy.com.

Of course, since I’m the one speaking on the panel I’m supposed to be the expert.  But mostly it means as a software developer I may have a better read on some of the newer technologies than some folks. Then again, since I’m not a pro shooter I may be reading those technologies completely wrong. I guess we’ll see, but I would definitely value your input!

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Due to popular demand, we are porting Beauty Box far and wide. Even farther than you might imagine, but you’ll hear more about that over the next few weeks.

For now, we have builds of Beauty Box for Avid and Nuke that we think are working well. We need some folks who actually use these host apps on a regular basis to verify that for us. So if you (or someone you know) might be interested in beta testing, please drop me an email at jim@digitalanarchy.com. Please let me know what platform/program you’re on, if you’ve beta tested before, if you’ve used Beauty Box with other host apps, and if you like fruitcake. We’re pretty flexible about who we allow to beta test, but I draw the line at fruitcake. With eggnog we have a don’t ask, don’t tell policy. Champagne and snickerdoodles are fine by us though.

We’re very excited about both these apps, so we’re looking forward to getting Beauty Box out there.

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This is always a tricky thing for software developers. On one hand we realize many folks have multiple machines and since they’re only one person, they can only use one machine at a time. We would like to allow them the flexibility of having it on a couple machines. On the other hand, if you’re a studio with multiple machines and multiple people we think that if our software is good enough to be installed and used on all those machines we should be paid for it. Making sure that happens sometimes gets in the way of how a single user is using our plugins.

Companies

When you buy a license of our software, you’re buying it for one user. If you’re a company with multiple machines and multiple artists/editors using those machines, then there’s not much gray area and you need a license for each computer being used. We offer pretty good volume discounts and site licenses for this type of situation, you can contact sales@digitalanarchy.com for pricing.

There is one big exception to this… if you’re using After Effects’ network rendering. You do not need extra licenses for After Effects render nodes. You can install Beauty Box on as many render nodes as you want for free.

People (and, no, companies are not people. I don’t care what the Dread Pirate Roberts says)

If you’re just one person with multiple machines then there’s some gray areas. The software can be installed on a couple machines, but we use the internet to determine if the plugin is being used on multiple computers at the same time. So if you have a desktop and a laptop and you’re using one or the other depending on whether you’re at home or at the office, no problem. You’re good to go.

However, if you’re in your studio/office and trying to use both machines for rendering/editing at the same time, you may run into problems. If so, here’s what you can do:

1)      You can purchase a second license. We do offer discounts for second licenses. Contact sales@digitalanarchy.com.

2)      Use the second machine as an After Effects render node. As mentioned above, you can use Beauty Box on as many render nodes as you want for free. So if the machine is just being used to process frames sent to it from another machine you shouldn’t have any problems.

3)      Our licensing is set up so that you can install on two machines, they just can’t be in use simultaneously.  The way we check this is via the internet. So if you disable the internet connection on one machine, then we can’t check it. This is a hack and technically violates the license. However, since the spirit of the license is for one user, as long as it’s the same person using the machines we’re ok with it.

4)      Render out the Beauty Box clip on one machine while working on another part of your project on the second machine. BB just gets watermarked on the second machine, so it’s still usable.

Like most of you, we’re running a small company. We try to be as flexible as possible, but if you’re making money using our software we would like you to buy the correct number of licenses. Please support the companies that make the tools you use and that help you be successful.

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This has led to them receiving emails, including some amusing ones such as the one below inviting them to speak at a conference. While I’m sure Ms Peanut would be more than happy to speak, her expertise tends to be limited to mobile device viewing, particularly games and media for… well, cats.

Why, yes, we’d be delighted to speak at your conference. Will there be tuna hors d’oeuvres?

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(ok, so this is from the Sony advert that’s very funny. See post from last week.)

I think mostly what he’s upset about is a new generation of photographers. I suspect when he got out of school there were a bunch of old photographers bitching about all these kids with their Canon AE-1s running around in bell bottoms pretending to be photographers and working for peanuts.

But change happens. A new generation comes along, new ways of marketing appear, and new cameras are released. Just because you think Twitter is the dumbest thing since the Pet Rock, doesn’t mean you don’t have to use it. (At least Twitter doesn’t limit who’s sees your posts like Facebook does now) Marketing has always been critical in photography and it’s even more so now. It’s just the way of doing it has changed somewhat. It requires a little more consistent engagement… like this blog. Which you’ll note I’m not writing on Facebook. I’ll post the link on FB, but because FB limits who sees it, it much more effective to do the writing here and link to it from the various interwebs.

If a few Moms with Canon Rebels are on the verge of sending you out of business, I don’t think the issue is the Moms. Hell, hire one of them. If you can get in with the Mom Mafia you’re golden!

And besides, given the amount of tradeshows I go to that are nothing but geeky guys, I’m having a hard time seeing what the complaint is about a little gender diversity (hot pants or no). But it’s no secret why you’re seeing a lot of women in photography… they tend to communicate better than men, have more emotional intelligence, and are excellent shooters. I mean, who do you think a bride is going to want to shoot her wedding? The energetic gal in hot pants or the grumpy, old guy? It’s all about being a good communicator these days, whether it’s on social media or during a shoot. Don’t be the grumpy, old guy.

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In this 30 minute video, Mike touches on all aspects of Greenscreen photography: Shooting and light setup, managing photos, setting up actions, and doing the keying. If you’re new to chromakey photography, regardless of whether you’re using greenscreen or bluescreen, this is a great video. Even if you’re an old hand, it’s always great to see how other folks are doing it. So check it out!

http://vimeo.com/53470129

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One has to ask… What is Sony going for here? This is only funny if you know something about DSLRs. The camera they’re advertising is a point and shoot with some fancy features, but they’re pretty much insulting the people they want to buy their camera. Seems like an odd teaser campaign… but it is funny!

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(You can get more info on Beauty Box and a free trial version HERE)

So where are we getting these numbers and how do YOU get them?

We tested NVIDIA Quadro 4000 and GTX 570 boards. The GTX 570 was the faster board, which should be exciting for those of you on a limited budget.

All the tests were focused on Beauty Box, so there weren’t any other effects, 3D, or other GPU using stuff. In After Effects, we had a two short 1080p comps, one 17 seconds and one 10 seconds. With both of these, we saw about a 500% speed improvement. Going from a render time of 5:01 down to 61 seconds using the GTX 570.

The big difference was in Adobe Premiere, where we tested Beauty Box on a minute long 1080p clip. Using the GTX 570 the render was sped up by a whopping 800%! It rendered the clip in 5:44 vs. 49.32 for the cpu rendered clip. The Quadro was a bit slower, rendering in 7:58, but still a 600% improvement.

If you’re using Adobe apps, Nvidia is the obvious choice since Adobe uses CUDA to accelerate a lot of things. Beauty Box uses OpenCL, so we’re mostly agnostic about the video cards. However, as mentioned, the Nvidia cards have been the most problem free cards, so we tend to recommend those. If you have an AMD card you should see significantly faster rendering in Beauty Box as well.

If you don’t have an updated video card, you’re probably spending a lot more time rendering than you need to. Especially if you’re using Beauty Box. You don’t necessarily need the latest and greatest video card, the GTX 570 is only about $250, and AMD 6000 series cards offer good bang for your buck as well. If you’re on a Mac, your ‘official’ options are either a GTX 285 (does not support the latest version of CUDA) and a Quadro 4000 (good board but expensive). So look into getting a PC card and ‘hacking’ it to make it work. It’s actually pretty easy. Here’s a blog with info on how to do it for a 570.

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You can download it here:

http://www.digitalanarchy.com/demos/ugly.html

I think one of the biggest surprises we had when we released Beauty Box 1.0 was that people kept asking us if it could make people look worse. Considering how much detail you can see on HD and how bad some people looked on HD, I didn’t really think there’d be a need for a filter to do that. But… we give our customers what they want though…

With Beauty Box 2.0, you could set Skin Detail Smoothing to a negative number resulting in, yep, Ugliness! It takes the skin texture, amplifies it and sharpens it making your talent either look a bit older or flat out hideous depending on their skin and the settings. Ugly Box, the fitler we’re releasing for free, let’s you use that aspect of Beauty Box. It’s a bit of a one trick pony, you don’t have all the control you do with Beauty Box, but it can definitely make the folks in your videos look a lot worse.

Anyways, all the details are below, so download it for free and have fun with it! I figured it’d be a great Halloween treat for all you visual effects artists and editors doing last minute scary videos (or election videos…). ;-)

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So let’s try Bay Photo. Good reputation as a lab… so I ordered a matted print from them. Good print, but this is what the corners of the mat looked like:

Seriously? Why even offer matting if you have zero quality control?

Looks like I’m doing this myself. Which meant calibrating the monitor and printer. I’ve got the ColorMunki for this purpose, but hadn’t used it for awhile. I’d sort of forgotten how easy it is use and set up. I have to say I love this thing. The Cinema Display and my Epson R2000 Printer are amazingly in sync. It’s not perfect… you sometimes have to calibrate the monitor a few times to get it right and I’ve heard it doesn’t work well with older monitors, but for me it works great.

One thing I discovered is that you should calibrate the printer with full ink tanks. Changing the ink can require recalibration. The Cyan was low when I did the initial calibration. I got 3 prints out of it before it ran out. Replacing it resulted in a color shift and recalibration.

Printing yourself is still a bit of a pain in the ass, it’s not the cheapest option, especially when you factor in your time. So I may end up printing with a lab anyways. But I’m always impressed when technology works the way it’s supposed to. The folks over at X-rite have done a nice job with the Munki hardware and software.

<shameless plug> If you’d like to see some of the prints, it’s Open Studios in San Francisco this month! I’ll have a few prints at SMAart Gallery on Sutter St. exhibited with Lily Yao’s ceramics. SMAart is open the first two weekends of Open Studios: Oct. 13/14 and Oct. 20/21, so if you’re in the Bay Area come on over. More info can be found here:

http://smaartgallery.com/

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It is true that if you hook up a really nice lens to your DSLR and learn all the things that a video camera does that a DSLR doesn’t do (and that you now have to do manually)… you might get really beautifully looking footage. If you are an experienced videographer and/or filmmaker, you can get brilliant footage out of a DSLR. If you’re not an experienced videographer, the footage is just as likely going to be shaky, out of focus, and have bad audio. (Of course, some might say that if you’re not an experienced videographer your footage is going to look like that no matter what camera you use. ;-)

For the types of stuff most people are shooting on DSLRs, a sub-$2000 video camera, like the Canon XA10, will probably serve them much better. Actually, $800 handhelds are often more than most people need. I’ve got a Panasonic that shoots absolutely beautiful HD. I know, I know… it’s not as cool, but for most things, even stuff that Pro Video guys shoot, you need to jump through hoops to get a DSLR to do what you want. For example, it’s doubtful I’d let someone with a DSLR rig shoot my wedding. IMHO it’s not the appropriate camera for the job. Most people using a DSLR to shoot a wedding are probably trying waaaay too hard to be a ‘filmmaker’ and probably not as focused on just shooting my wedding. Besides, I really don’t want someone wearing a rig that looks like an orthodontic headset for Frankenstein wandering around my wedding.

Using a DSLR to shoot video is sometimes an endeavor worthy of Dr. Frankenstein.

(Of course, if you’re into creating a monster, the RedRock DSLR rig shown is a good one)

All that said… it is possible to get great footage out of a DSLR and you get to use all those super awesome lenses. The gist of this post is to get you thinking about the hype that surrounds DSLRs and video. The cameras have a LOT of shortcomings that most people are going to find difficult to workaround, even video pros that are used to higher end camcorders. Before you go running off trying to use a DSLR for video, consider what you’re shooting and what you want to achieve. Examine the features that DSLRs are lacking, how that will affect what you’re shooting, and what you will have to buy to compensate for the missing video features. Use that as a guide to determine whether you should spend the time and money on outfitting your DSLR to shoot video or just buying a video camera that’s designed for video from the ground up.

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What does this mean?

The most immediate result is that we will probably see better produced sneezing cat and laughing dog videos. This alone is exciting. Think of the cat videos we can get with a full cyc greenscreen! The possibilities stagger the mind.

Seriously though, there’s not a lot of info about it, but the promo video doesn’t give me reason to believe any post houses or production facilities should be sweating it too hard.

Is it going to be significantly less than other rental spaces? If so, it will likely be extremely hard to book, so better suited to non-professionals that are not time constrained. Judging from the promotional video, they’re aiming it at college students producing the mindless tripe that YouTube is famous for.

Personally I thought YouTube was trying to encourage more serious productions and episodics. So you would think the promotional video might show a semi-serious production. No. It’s college students jumping around and using a greenscreen to put themselves in a fish tank. Who the hell needs a full production studio to do that? ;-) Whatever the equipment you have you still need half a clue as to what you’re doing. So it remains to be seen how they plan to allocate the resources and if they will cater to those trying to make professional productions.

They’re also promoting the education aspect fairly heavily, so my feeling is that the private art schools in the area of these Creator Spaces probably need to worry more than the real production facilities.

Either way it looks like another resource for budget constrained filmmakers, so that’s a good thing.

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