Red Giant Updates VFX Suite to 1.5 a paid upgrade

Red Giant has released a paid upgrade to it’s VFX Suite to version 1.5. It is a $199 upgrade unless you are subscriber to Red Giant Complete (feels like a 1.5 should have been a free upgrade).
It includes a new Lens Distortion tool to easily figure out lens distortion to help composite and even track.
And they have updated Supercomp with an automatic color matching, color space options, optical glow and layer glow tools, though I am mostly pissed that they have not figured out how to include motion blur which has been my main objection to supercomp.
Optical Glow has been updated with the ability to control radiate which gives directionality, control per channel size and size xy. This certainly makes for an impressive update over the built in glow.
And Shadow and Reflection has added the ability to show shadows only as well as distort based on the image.
I am glad for the update, though as I said I would like them to put motion blur into supercomp to really make it usefull.

Blackmagic replaces the loud and hot Ultrastudio 4K with the mini

Blackmagic has replaced it’s Ultrastudio 4K with the Ultrastudio 4K mini, for the same price of $995 with an upgrade from Thunderbolt 2 to 3, and a headphone jack with volume, an sd slot and a usb port as well moving from 6GB SDI to 12GB and a much smaler form factor!

Damn! I want one! I have an Ultrastudio 4K, and while a powerful machine, I mean it plays back anything I send to it, but it is thunderbolt 2 (so requires a thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter) and it gets hot, I mean real hot, and it’s fans are so loud! It is painfully loud!

Too bad their isn’t an upgrade path!

Blackmagic announces the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K

So Blackmagic surprised everyone and announced the new Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 6K camera, which has a Super 35mm Sensor and an EOS lens mount. The sensor is an impressive 6144×3456 sensor, and the Super 35mm means aps-c size which means a 1.6x crop factor vs the 2x crop of the 4K mft version. And it is $2495 vs $1295, but doesn’t need a Speed Booster, which would have fixed the crop factor, and increased the lens speed, but also added more glass between the sensor and lens.

Now the camera will eat more battery than the already battery eating 4k (That it turns out is why they made the battery grip). And the new camera only shoots ProRes in 4k and UHD, saving BRAW for 6k. And the current manual only lists 4k speeds for drives and Cfast cards.

For someone with EF lenses this is a dream camera, if only I could afford it right now!

BlackMagic Design releases some major camera updates

Along with some impressive new capture cards, Blackmagic has released a new Ursa Mini Pro G2 with a super 35mm HDR image sensor, 15 stops of exposure and 120 fps at 4.6 K and 300 fps at cropped 1080p. All for $5999.

And more exciting for lower end is an update to the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K to add full Blackmagic RAW support with 1:1, 3:1, 5:1, 8P1 and 12:1 compression (as well as removing cinema dng codec because of licensing issues). This is a huge update to this impressive little camera!

Of course no Blackmagic raw support yet in premiere so you will need to purchase something like this from BRAW Studio. It is only $29 so worth it if you have a camera that uses it.

Blackmagic has created an eGPU to work with Apple

BlackMagic has worked with Apple to create an thunderbolt 3 eGPU with a Radeon Pro 580 in it. It is not upgradeable, but has an HDMI and four usb 3.1 connections and a thunberbolt passthrough as well as 85W of power. It is $699 and sells from Apple to work with their laptops.

Very cool, though I think they might have missed an opportunity in not combining it with a Decklink, Intensity or UltraStudio for playback to an external monitor. Even if it used 2 Thunderbolt connectors I think the addition of at least a playback card would have made this a must have solution.

DJI Osmo+ Test Footage at Stony Point, and Color Correction

This is some test footage with my DJI Osmo+ at Stony Point Park. It was shot with auto exposure as I have yet to get any ND filters to stop own the exposure. And the first shot was wrongly white balanced. It was shot with D-Log, Sharpness 0,  Saturation -2 and Contrast -2.

This is the color corrected shot.

This is a comparison as shot and color corrected.

Color Correction Test with DJI OSMO+, Canon 60D and iPhone 6S and Visual Effects of Gun Shots

I shot some test footage with 3 of my cameras, my DJI OSMO+ my Canon 60D and my iPhone 6S. I color corrected the footage using DaVinci Resolve 12.5 and did the Visual Effects in Adobe After Effects.

The visual effects include adding the gun shots, light flashes, and color correcting the orange tip of my gun so it is gray.

I was trying to show my ability to color match the footage from such different 3 cameras, as well as add the visual effects to make an interesting little sequence.

Let me know what you think!

Adobe needs to bring back send to SpeedGrade in Premiere Pro

I have made a lot of posts about Adobe needing to upgrade SpeedGrade, but I had been using it with premiere Pro 2014. And with Direct link to Adobe SpeedGrade you could send your sequence and do a full grade in SpeedGrade, then send it back to Premiere and it showed up as a Lumetri Grade Filter on the clips. It was awesome!

Sure DaVinci Resolve is more powerful, but mainly because it has been consistently upgraded. There are still some things that I like better in SpeedGrade, like not only overall grading controls, but the same controls in light, medium and dark. I love just being able to increase contrast and saturation in just the mids! And the best features was Direct Link because the grade came back to Premiere, instead of being a rendered export from Resolve, making itinerant version changes much easier in commercials so much easier!

What I hadn’t realized because I was using SpeedGrade with an earlier  Creative Cloud, was that not only have try not upgraded SpeedGrade, but in Premiere Pro 2015.3 they removed Direct Link to SpeedGrade!?!?!? So it is obviously gone in 2017.

Sure they have put some Lumetri controls in Premiere, but nothing like SpeedGrade. You can do color corrects, but the controls are very dumbed down, and not nearly as powerful! With most of the masking controls gone, and such simple controls, it is no replacement for SpeedGrade! And while DaVinci Resolve stills works great, the loss of Direct Link is a huge minus! There is of course a thread about it at Adobe Forums, but I doubt adobe is listening!

Honestly this move is so very Apple like. Exactly like Apple buying Shake, making it affordable, then gutting it for the smallest technology out of it. Or Apps buying FinalTouch, turning it into color and killing it. Or killing Final Cut Pro 7 for iMovie Pro, oops, I mean Final Cut Pro X.

And the best part is that while SpeedGrade could use some upgrades, even without them it is still so much more powerful than Lumetri controls in Premiere Pro!

Adobe has made a huge mistake in losing it’s powerful color correction tool. It is a huge sore point missing in Creative Cloud now.

Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 Supports Quicktime ProRes on Windows, death knell for Quicktime

BlackMagicDesign’s Davinci Resolve 12.5.1 has been released and it includes Quicktime ProRES decoding on Windows! You can check out all the new features here.

With Apple having ended Quicktime support for Windows, and now Adobe and DaVinci adding Quicktime Pro Res playback on Windows, that basically means that you can use all the old ProRes files you have, but it is time to move on. And it is unfortunate as ProRES HQ had really become a great intermediate format and ProRES 444 is an awesome alpha format.

And it looks like it is time to move to AVID’s DNxHD format, since like ProRES it is pretty much visually lossless at higher bitrates.