Archive for September, 2009
The third event that I ‘ve filmed for Harley Davidson this year is the European Bike Week which takes place in the small village of Faak in Austria.
Although this event is likely to be that last this year, it ‘s by no means the smallest, in fact it is by far the biggest event in the HD Europe calendar. The event is reported to have attracted over 100,000 visitors, most of whom are bikers.
Sony have released a new SxS driver for the mac which supports OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard). The driver can be downloaded from here. There are still issues with the Sony XDCAM Transfer app on 10.6 but I use the ‘Log & Transfer’ app in Final Cut instead which works fine.
I opened my Steadicam case today to find some rather strange looking metal pieces laying loose in the bag. I’d not noticed any issues before but these parts had obviously come from somewhere so I decided to give everything a good check over.
It didn’t take me long to notice that one of the bearings in the upper of the two parts of the arm had failed. I’m not sure when this happened, I didn’t find any of the actual balls from the bearing which would lead me to think that it must have failed whilst in use, although I can’t remember actually sensing it go.
Tiffen UK have been extremely helpful and very quick to respond to my request for help. Ill be sending it for repair next week.
** UPDATE 30-09-09 **
My Steadicam arm arrived back from Tiffen today, just a few days after I sent it to them for repair. I’m really pleased to report that it’s as good as new. The guys at Tiffen have been incredibly helpful, I can’t express enough how nice they have been to deal with and what fantastic support they gave me.
Thanks Tiffen!
After my initial wingeing about snow leopard I’m starting to notice some of the good stuff about the new OS. The first of those things is that Mac OS now sets it’s gamma to 2.2 by default, and not only that but in the display calibration pages it actually lists 2.2 as being standard!
This may seem like a small thing to be pleased about, but the way Final Cut Pro has dealt with gamma up until now has been the cause of much confusion amongst editors. Because Apple assumed mac users were using their standard gamma setting of 1.8 they decided that it was a good idea to have Final Cut Pro & Quicktime display video slightly darker than it really was to give the user a more accurate representation of how the rest of the world would see their video.
The problem with this approach however is that if like me you want to see content in the same way as the majority of the world, you would set your gamma to 2.2 which makes the whole OS display similar colours to PC’s & TV’s. The trouble with this though is that Final Cut was not aware of the change and would still apply the compensation making your video appear darker than it really is.
before I understood what was happening with the gamma in FCP I spend endless hours colour correcting footage only to find that it looked washed out once exported and uploaded to vimeo, YouTube or other online streaming service.
Now that Apple have finally settled on a standard gamma of 2.2 it seems that they’ve stopped this happening, at least it appears to be the case with version 7 when used with Snow Leopard.
Here’s a screen shot showing the same clip in Final cut, quicktime X and VLC. While the colours do vary slightly in VLC the gamma now seems to match.
As somebody who likes to keep all my software up to date I decided to buy the latest operating system from apple (OS 10.5.6 Snow Leopard). After installing the upgrade on my MacBook Pro I couldn’t help feeling a bit confused after the final reboot when everything seemed pretty much the same as it was before with the exception that some of my apps no longer worked. The worst of the affected software is the driver for Sony SxS cards, the result is that I can no longer offload the cards from my EX1 using the MacBook Pro’s ExpressCard slot. Apparently Sony are working on a new driver but they are warning that due to Snow Leopard being a new release it might not be available until next spring.
Didn’t Sony know Snow Leopard was being released?
[edit] Mon 14 Sep
Sont have now released an updated SxS driver that supports OS 10.6 For more info visit the Sony Website.
