Last week, I attended  a talk about Color at the Montreal Final Cut usergroup and, at the end, a rep from a third party reseller told us that he had been ask by Apple to schedule meetings after the NAB with his clients who have attended the conference.

Anyone in the business knows what it means: new product!

The question is: what is this product going to be? It is probably not a piece of hardware since it wouldn’t make sense to meet clients to talk about a new Mac (book)Pro. So it has to be a new software or a major change to an existing one.

Some people talked about a new version of Final Cut Studio, I doubt it. The people behind Apple are brilliant and usually follow a well crafted roadmap. 2010 is the year of the iPad in Apple strategic plan. This is why I think the announcement will be related to the iPad. More precisely, it will be some authoring tool targeted at iPad content supplier.

I have no idea of the format of the tool: plugin to FCP, pro version of Pages, totally new app, etc… Yet, I am pretty sure that it is coming. I hope this tool will be accessible to business of every size, like what they did with the App Store instead of the Music Store which is only available to major players.

I know this is all speculations right now but, from a big picture point of view, it makes sense to have such a tool to standardize content development across suppliers.

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Before going into the list of available options, I think it is worth looking at the effect of wide aperture on wide lenses. After all, the goal of this exercise is to find a wide angle lens that will give us some control over DoF. As we all know, a wide aperture allows more light into the camera which allow us to shoot in lower light which is always good. The other result of aperture is too control the depth of field (DoF), which is another familiar concept. The thing you might not be aware of is how hard it is to get a shallow DoF when shooting ultra wide.

For most of us, this is a good thing because it allows us to shoot in low light without having to worry about keeping the subject in focus. But what happen when you need to shoot wide and want a shallow DoF? Lets look at some numbers.

Suppose a subject that is 1m away from the camera and see how much DoF (in cm) we can get with the following aperture 1.4, 1.8, 2, 2.8, 4 and focal length 10, 12, 14, 17, 20 and 24. One meter may seem close but when you are shooting below 24mm, it almost looks like a medium framing.

As you can see, the DoF gets bigger pretty quickly as you increase your field of view (use small mm lenses). If you increased the subject to camera distance, the DoF increases even more (not shown in the chart). The rules of optics haven’t changed for wide lenses, it is just that most people don’t realize how the formula reacts when applied to short focals.

So, how do you get a shallow DoF with a wide angle? Same rules as when shooting a portrait: get the subject close to the camera, the background as far as possible and use a large aperture!

Now that we have a better idea of lens requirements for such a job, lets see what is available.

Canon

16-35mm f/2.8L II USM
The the standard wide angle zoom of many pros. While the first version had some technical issues, this one is pretty close to perfection and insanely sharp.  My only complain would be its price. At over double the price of the 17-40L (see next), you have to wonder if the added stop of light is worth it. This is especially true for video where you dont need all the resolving power this lens has to offer compared to cheaper alternatives. It is also good to know that it uses a 82mm filter so you might have some issues with your ND or circular polarizer. This lens is quite useful once mounted on a Steadicam since its wide aperture allow it to have enough DoF to shoot in low light while maintaining a reasonable depth of field to keep the subject in focus.

EF 17-40mm f/4L

This is my favorite lens because it can zoom to a natural perspective (35-40mm) or truly exaggerated perspective at the wider end . All the things we said about the 16-35L holds true for this lens except its filter size of 77mm and lower cost.

14mm f/2.8L II

This is the widest Canon lens you can get. Ridiculously sharp, its usage is limited but always spectacular. The lens is not a fish eye, in fact straight lines remain quite straight which make it a favorite among landscape photographers.

24mm f/1.4 L USM II

While 24mm should not be considered super wide angle, this lens deserves mention as it is in a class of its own. It is the widest aperture wide angle you can get (from any brand), which make it the best choice for low light shooting, while performing incredibly well for both stills and video. Of all the lenses we are listing above, it is the only one truly able to shoot wide and have a shallow DoF.

Sigma

12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX DG IF HSM

This is the widest Canon mount zoom lens you can get. While the aperture is too small for shallow depth of field (you hit the hyperfocal very quickly at 12mm) or low light shooting, it is an excellent lens for everything else.

20mm f/1.8 EX DG

I already talked about this lens on the best third party lenses article. It is wide and ridiculously fast. Looking at the chart above, we can see that it the only lens with the Canon 24L to be able to really get a shallow depth of field and achieve subject isolation. And want to know the best part? It is almost four time cheaper than the Canon lens! I would never rule this lens over the 24L for stills but, for video, it is sharp enough to get the job done. Of course the lens has some technical issues, like not being super sharp when wide open, but that is not such a problem when doing video since you are working at a much lower resolution.

Nikon

14-24mm f/2.8G ED

If there ever was a reason to switch to Nikon, this lens would be it. It is nothing short of extraordinary. Of course, it is priced to match its performance. Still, in my opinion, it is worth it! I have never used this lens on my 5D (only on a D3) but since there are no aperture control directly on the lens, I suppose the aperture will stay at f2.8 if you plug it on a 5D with an adapter which is what we want anyways.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a low light/wide aperture wide angle, there isn’t much choice: go with the Sigma 20mm f/1.8 EX DG it will get the job done. If it is not wide enough for you, you will have to look at the zoom alternatives we have outlined above but understand that none of these will allow subject isolation like the Sigma does.

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I need your help. I am planing to visit Iceland (exclusively to shoot video/photo) at the end of April. I have a few questions regarding travel in your gorgeous homeland, the first being how I am supposed to pronounce ‘Reykjavik’!

For your troubles, I will bring you a (real Canadian) beer or can of maple syrup!

You can find my contact info in the about page of this site.

Thanks!

No related posts.

Still, I am an happy camper. On top of having a more film like look, 24p clips will take about 20% less space on my CF cards or be 20% longer.

Are we going to see another firmware update until the 5DMrkIII? I doubt it. The 5D has now evolved into a full cinephotographer tool and Canon answer to the Red Scarlet is probably going to come in some other form.

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I am not going to go over every new features since a lot of people have already done it. Instead, I am going to talk about the stuff that matters to photographers.

Speed

I am very sorry to say that but the current version of Aperture is slow. Browsing from one picture to the next is slow unless you are in quick preview mode (Press P to toggle). Once you get into the habit of switching between modes, it is not that much of a burden but remember that you can only edit pictures in normal mode.

Before some fan boys reply that it isnt slow, know that I did everything I could to speed it up: rebuild library, use a fast machine with RAID-0 drives, etc… With the same setup LightRoom runs circles around A3.  That is sad.

Adjustments

Noise

Aperture 3 noise reduction is good and would stand well on its own if it was not of the spectacular results one can get in LightRoom 3 or with Neat Image. If shooting in low light is important to you and you want to use A3, get Neat Image.

The Presets

I have a love/hate relationship with presets. Amateurs see them as the be all end all of image editing, thinking they can get pro results with a click of the mouse without even understanding what is going on. A3 surfs on the preset wave started with LR to get pretty much the same results (given the same adjustment panels). Actually, I prefer the way A3 handles presets than LR: you can either combine presets by picking them one after the other, or replacing them by option clicking the new preset.

Curve

A3 has a nice curves adjustment tool. You can select a color from the image and it will place an adjustment point at corresponding position on the curve. Quite useful to clean up background or changing cloths color. Remembers me of the way Capture One 4 handle curves.

Brushes

There are a lot of talk about the new non destructive adjustment brushes. Here again, the A3 team fell a bit short. While the brushes work very well, you cannot use the same brush with two different adjustment level. I correct myself, if you click on the option gear, you can add as many distinct adjustment brushes as you want. Cool!

The missing adjustments

Where the hell is the grad filter? It has to be one of the most important filter one can use, yet it is not there. It really makes me wonder if the Aperture dev team actually use the software!

The other missing adjustment is the tone splitting. While I think LR user overuse this tool (especially in presets), it has proven time and again to be a key feature to quickly set a mood on a batch of pictures. Here again, the adjustment isn’t there.

The vignette tool has not evolved at all. I was hoping to at least get the choice of going toward white instead of black as in LR or to select the desired affected corners but we got nothing new.

Import

I love the new import screen and its link to Places. If you have a mix of geolocated pictures and non geolocated ones, once you start to import, the software will ask you if you want to associate the locations. Brilliant!

Conclusion

Unfortunately, A3 is not what I would call a release ready product. While it has some incredible features that I havent covered (slideshows & hybrid stuff) it fails to cover the basic by giving photographers what they need the most: speed and controls. The dev team spent too much time working on ‘new’ features instead of working the app core.

Hopefully, a software update will come in a few months to correct these issues but right now I can only recommend A3 as a slide show editing platform. Actually, pro photographers might want to get it for that feature alone. It is really that great!

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The features are:

• Manual sound recording level & meters
• Histogram display when shooting in manual mode
• AV and TV mode for shooting video
• Increased audio sampling rate to 48k.
• 24/25 fps at 1080p.

So what does that mean?

First, no 60p720. That really sucks if it is true! I wont talk too much about this simply because everybody must feel the same as I do about it.

On the other hand, the new features are great! Shooting in AV/TV mode is an incredible feature if you need to shoot a subject moving in a variety of exposure and want to maintain a constant look.

While I dont care too much about the audio features, I know a lot of people who will appreciate it.

I kept the histogram for last. If there is one feature that can redeem the lack of 60p720, it has to be this one. While it is impossible to get a perfect exposure by judging the LCD image, using the histogram makes this job ridiculously easy.

What about stills?

Seems like there is nothing new for still photographers. This is a little bit ridiculous. How hard can it be to add a 5-7-9 exposures bracketing or auto ISO limits? Lets just hope there was a second slide to this presentation.

Shipping date

The week of March 17 is the rumored date and fits in the time line I was given (post Olympics) so I tend to believe it. I guess we will see soon enough!

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Canon also used the opportunity to send a quick jab to Nikon when talking about H.264: This is an ideal file type for video capture in an SLR camera, delivering relatively compact file sizes with image quality noticably superior to alternate video compressions (such as Motion JPEG).

From what I have been able to gather from the various screenshots, there is not much new. On the contrary, some of the wished for features (lens & exposure metadata) are not present.

As I predicted, the sentence ’start editing right form the CF card‘ wasnt really true. The plugin converts the clips to ProRes (you can pick any variations) before you can do anything with them. Canon talks about a 3x speed gain over the standard Compressor transcoding. That is nice but that is about the same thing you can get by using MPEGstream clip. Actually, I wonder if that is what they are using under the hood!

For who is this for?

Log and transfer is a workflow tool. It is near useless for 95% of the 5D users, but, for those who are going to use it, it is incredibly useful at helping them to organize their files and automating their backup strategy. Oh, there is also that Timecode thing that would be so useful if there was an easy way to synchronize the date/time on multiple camera at once.

While there is no harm in installing the plugin once it is available (March), unless you are shooting against a script, the organizing features of the plugin will be overkill.

BTW, thanks to David Guset for the link to the Canon page.

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First, got this email from BeachTek:

To everyone waiting for the new DXA-5Da XLR adapter for DSLR cameras, they have now shipped ahead of schedule to both B&H and Adorama. The first shipment is in very limited quantities but we are expecting the next, much larger batch to arrive before the end of March.  The new DXA-SLR with built-in preamplifiers and phantom power is still on schedule to be shipped by March 30^th.

next, the MultiMount5D will be available at the end of March for 89$.

Vimeo goes 1080p and HTML5!

You can read about it here. I dont know which one is the most important: 1080p or HTML5… So far, these upgrades wont affect many people/video since most people are not using a HTML5 browser and the clips are rarely uploaded at 1080p resolution.

At least, now you know and you should change your Compressor presets to use the new resolution.

5D Firmware update

A lot of people have been talking about the upcoming firmware update. Planet5D is now talking about a March launch. Guess what? That is what I have been talking about since 2009! The release of the firmware was bound to the Olympics. Canon wants videographers to shoot the events with the 1DMrkkIV and not the 5D (they want people to see pro using the pro bodies). Once the Olympics are over, they will push the new firmware.

Zeiss new HDSLR lenses

I could say a lot of things of why this is big news, but Vincent did it very well already in his post.

Aperture3

I have been using A3 for over a week now. Expect a detailed review by the end of the weekend.

Edit: forgot to add this link to a quick overview of the video feature of A3 by the folks at Still Motion.

New content

I have been working on a few personal projects recently expect to see some of my work soon. Both in stills and motions.

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Visit the link and register to get your clips because you never have enough cloud/wave/nature/etc clips. The quality is incredible and with some color correction, you can give these clips a totally different style. Best of all: they are all free!

Actually, just browsing the library is a nice source of inspiration (just wasted 12 minutes doing so)! I love the church series for example.

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