Much love to Jem Schofield for giving Redhead Windscreens some Jersey lovin! About : Jem Schofield, founder of theC47 and the host of gearbox, is a producer, creative director and author who consults on and teaches production and post-production solutions throughout the United States. His company, Buttons Productions, produces video, print, web and motion graphics projects for an ever expanding client base. He’s determined to update his company’s web site one day with some recent work. He’ll probably just post stuff on theC47 instead.
Be sure to check out Jem’s site as it is an invaluable resource for all filmmakers new and old : ) Click to visit site.
Michael Safai with Soviet Montage Productions is doing some pretty cool stuffs on the Canon 5D Mark II. This is the first time I’ve really seen HDR video and was blown away by how cool it came out.. Enjoy the vid.
This video highlights several clips we’ve made using our new High Dynamic Range (HDR) process. Video is captured on two Canon 5D mark II DSLRs, each capturing the exact same subject via a beam splitter. The cameras are configured so that they record different exposure values, e.g., one camera is overexposed, the other underexposed. After the footage has been recorded, we use a variety of HDR processing tools to combine the video from the two cameras, yielding the clips you see above.
HDR Video provides filmmakers with many exciting new opportunities. Not only can HDR video create interesting effects, it can also allow for even exposure where artificial lighting is unavailable or impractical. For example, when a subject is backlit, one camera could be set to properly expose the subject, the other the sky, resulting in video with perfect exposure throughout.
We will continue to develop and improve the HDR video process for better results and efficiency. For more information, check out our website sovietmontage.com.
Music Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Opus 40, Number 9 Performed by Kevin MacLeod Licensed Under Creative Commons “Attribution 3.0″
“RedHead” deadcat fuzzy roadkill windscreen. Works like a charm, a must have for your Zoom H1 to protect against the evil wind monster ! Clear access to side in/out jacks. Held in place with sturdy tubular elastic she’s not going anywhere…
Redhead Windscreens for your Zoom H1 hand held recorder.
The key is understanding the dynamic of the mix and utilizing it to the best of your ability. Look at the sound layers of one of the scenes in the film. “The sequence in one in which two characters sit at a cafe’ and the world around them begins to disintigrate”. I love their use of organic and non organic sounds, hope this vid excites you as much as it did me! Enjoy.
Ok… I’m here to shout in whispers. Well at least be heard whispering over the hiss of bad audio preamps. I’m talking sound here, the difference between good and bad. The reason your movie won’t suck or your music will rule. It’s all boils down to how noisy your equipment is.
In this day and age audio gear is shrinking as fast as anything else but the price for quality is shrinking as well. Let’s take portable audio recorders for example. The spectrum ranges from bad to excellent and I’ve had the fortune and misfortune of owning both ends of the rainbow. Let me tell you my story.
It all started when I picked up a prosumer SD video recorder, mind you this wasn’t a cheap unit. It was what every indy film maker was using to get his chops down. I bumped into a problem with HISS. I thought it must be my mic, then it must be my cable, then it must be my technique… I was completely wrong. I stumbled on a site that discussed the deliberate inclusion of a “hiss-inducing” audio chip in my “pro-sumer” video camera. I was shocked and realized I’d have to get audio into my projects another way.
I spent huge chunks of my cash on pre-amps, matched mics, long cables, a digital mixer and then ultimately a laptop to use as the editing station. If you do the math I spent over $2500 on gear that, today, is easily replaced by a handheld audio recorder.
I jumped in early when I saw this really small unit that promised pro-quality sound. I spent 349.00 on it and until it started failing electronically I was impressed. But the failing was complete, the unit died less than a year after purchasing it. Granted the company replaced it but not before I picked up the Zoom H4N. The replacement unit now sits on the shelf, I’m reluctant to sell it because I can’t bear to have the same thing happen to someone else.
Now let’s move on, let the water run under the bridge along with the hiss of cheesy sound chips. The H4N is just short of achieving god like status in my kit. The minute I un-boxed it I knew I was in a brave new world of location audio. The heft of the unit is nice. Not too bulky and not a lightweight hunk of cheap plastic. The controls seem nicely placed, all except for the stamina mode switch (cleverly or clumsily hidden away under the battery cover for some strange reason), and easy to operate.
It records to SD cards and with the one that shipped with it, I’ve had absolutely zero problems. In the manual it states that some inferior cards might induce erratic behavior or noise, so do yourself a favor and don’t cheese out on a cheep chip. Battery life seems great and it isn’t built in so you won’t need to haul around an inverter or generator or 5 volt usb battery adapter to charge it up. Just throw in another set of AA batteries and your good to go.
It has a multitude of connections and two built in mics that do an awesome job on their own. Now let’s say you want to get fancy. You’ve got a lavelier, a shotgun and want to record stereo audio of the environment at the same time. NO PROBLEM. Plug your 1/4” or XLR balanced mics into the bottom of the unit. Set the recorder to 4 channel and you are set to go. The audio levels are easily adjusted and the files are recorded into a directory structure that, once you get used to, is easy to navigate.
I’ve even patched from the headphone/line out of the unit directly into the camera. It takes some fidgeting around but I actually got it to work. So not only am I recording to the camera but I’m also able to record 4 tracks on the unit that I can later synch up to the video and audio from the camera.
Talking about synching audio, I stumbled on a tip that I hear works fantastically. It’s a software program called Pluraleyes. I’m not sure if it’s available for the pc since I’m using Final Cut on a Mac. It works like a champ. I used to use a clapper board and dreaded doing multi-cam shoots because I would have to line everything up manually. Pluraleyes just seems to do it all for you in a very simplistic way.
So, you can tell I’m pretty happy with the H4N. In fact it’s hard to find a flaw with it but I’m just an inexperienced hack film maker so keep that in mind. I’ll list the pros and cons now and let you decide.
Pros: • Small but not too small, light but not too light. • Quality construction and fairly intuitive layout of controls. • Great set of onboard mics. • Fantastic connectability in regards to mics. • Has phantom power. ( for powering external shotgun’s that require phantom power ) • Has so much cool stuff built in that you’ll be hard pressed to get bored with it.
Cons: • Built in mics are in a precarious position for clumsy users. • Would be nice to have a separate line out so you could use headphones to monitor while you patch it to your camera. • Seems like it could be fragile if dropped, I’m not testing this on my own so just understand that I think it would take a beating if dropped even a few feet onto a hard surface.
Oh yah, one other con: • The foam wind screen blows (literally, across the intersection if it slips off) and transmits wind noise very easily to the mics. It should come pre-packaged with a RedHead!
