What To Do When Equipment Is Ruined

Proper planning often can mitigate disaster, but if the worst happens, follow these strategies for saving your assets

By Charles “C.R.” Caillouet

A still from video taken by “C.R.” Caillouet documenting the results of a flood in his home, the regular HDVP columnist was hit hard recently by a severe storm that deluged nearly four decades of his personal video archives. To contribute directly, a GoFundMe.com campaign to raise reconstruction funds for his neighborhood is available here (gofundme.com/2k7uhr8).... Read more

Get Ready For The Next Wave Of Innovative Broadcast Standards

ATSC 3.0 is being deployed to challenge OTT services like Apple TV and the Internet

By Charles “C.R.” Caillouet

Periodically, we hear that over-the-air (OTA) broadcasting has been diagnosed as dying, laid low by some new technology promising to better inform, entertain or educate us, measure our preferences or sell us products. After each such announcement, we find that broadcast isn’t really dead, but transformed and risen out of the ashes of its past. It’s... Read more

Is HDR What You Think It Is?

What high-definition-range capture brings to video

Text & Photography By Charles “C.R.” Caillouet

When done professionally, HDR results in a massive increase to brightness. The Dolby Vision™ HDR projection system, for example, provides up to 31 foot-lamberts of luminance, while a typical theater experience will offer half that level of brightness at only 14 foot-lamberts. Here, Final Cut Pro X is used to create an HDR simulation with footage from... Read more

Camera Matters

Effects to quality along the imaging chain

By C.R. Caillouet

Do you need a pro camera to make good pictures, or do you just pay for more features? In my career, I’ve had to work with some of the largest and smallest cameras, and to figure out how to get usable pictures from as many as possible. The results haven’t always been satisfying to me. I haven’t always had the time to figure out the best solutions,... Read more

Decoding Deliverables

An alphabet soup of output formats for television and streaming systems

By C.R. Caillouet

Last month, I talked about shooting in 4K or UHD, but does “4 times full HD” make any sense elsewhere in the deliverables chain? I suggested that the UHD shooting decision should be driven by what most viewers actually see, and I noted that it might make sense to put more bits into dynamic range or improved color, instead of more resolution. We... Read more

The New Production

Post should no longer be the last thing on your list

By Ian Blair

For more than 100 years, filmmakers have followed the same three signs on the road to a completed project: You start at preproduction, move on to production and finally end up at postproduction. It’s a simple set of instructions and a timeline that made perfect sense, whether you were making a big-budget studio movie or a small documentary. But... Read more

4K? Maybe So, Maybe Not.

A variety of considerations factor into whether to shoot your next project in UltraHD or 4K

By C.R. Caillouet

These frames illustrate different ways of using UHD/4K originals in production: the “scaled” one retains the framing of the original for converting an entire show to alternate products (above); the “cropped ” one retains the resolution of the original static UHD shot for use in a lower-resolution product (top). Unless you’ve been in a... Read more

Plugging Back In

Why I returned to subscription television

By Neil Matsumoto

In the past few years, online video has exploded. The Internet has become faster and more accessible, online video advertising has become more personalized, and perhaps most importantly, mobile video streaming has become the viewing platform of choice for anyone under 21. By 2017, a Cisco study predicts that video-on-demand traffic will nearly triple... Read more

Is 3D On Its Last Legs?

Not quite, but the writing is on the wall

By Neil Matsumoto

In 2008, I attended the first 3D Entertainment Summit. Delivering the keynote was DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, who proclaimed that in film’s 100-plus-year history, there have been three major milestones that have advanced the art of filmmaking: sound, color and, now, 3D (obvious hyperbole to promote upcoming DreamWorks Animation 3D releases). ... Read more

Film Is Dead!

By Ian Blair

Film is dead! Long live digital! That’s the mantra everyone seems to be spouting these days. Even the most die-hard celluloid lovers admit that even if film isn’t quite dead yet, it’s definitely on life support with digital looking to pull the plug. There’s just one little problem with all of this: The attending physicians (and... Read more

4K In The Mainstream

Is it time?

By Neil Matsumoto

If you attended NAB this year, you probably thought the 4K conversion already happened. Everywhere you looked was a new 4K camera system, 4K recorder or 4K compatible NLE or workflow solution. In the early ’00s, you probably remember a similar scenario when HD (1920 x 1080 resolution) was being heavily pushed, even though few filmmakers had access... Read more

Micro-Filmmaking

How an iPhone app could launch millions of filmmakers

By Neil Matsumoto

It’s often said that the best camera is the camera you have with you, and for most of us, it would be our phone. In the still photography world, camera phones have completely destroyed the point-and-shoot camera market, and for good reason. Many of the new smartphones on the market, such as the iPhone 5 or the Galaxy Nexus 4, contain an 8-megapixel... Read more