The SXSW fest offers a launching pad for up and coming artists to get their presence known. The same goes for the accompanying film, music video, and interactive work. There are quite a few filmmakers who I’ve discovered through SXSW over the years, and I continue to follow their work today. People like Jason Koxvold, and his video for ‘Citizens Here and Abroad’:

That was almost 5 years ago, and since then the music video scene has exploded, with the advent of accessible quality through new cameras and sharing culture. With that in mind, these are a few of the stand-out music videos from this years festival: Read more

Music Video Production Association

The MVPA Awards are due at the end of the month, so if you’ve made any videos over the last year – you might want to consider submitting. The categories run the gamut from ‘Best Of’ genres, to specific disciplines. Keep in mind, submitting will cost $65 per video, as well as an additional $75 to join the MVPA as a director. This, their website states, will give you access to all related galas and parties that they hold.

With Music Videos changing in both budget and scope, it will be interesting to see what sort of competition will be lurking in the “Best Video Produced for Under $25,000″ category.

Full category listing: Read more

The Crop Factor Conundrum

There has been quite a bit of discussion lately on the crop factor of cameras like the Scarlet. There is a recurring phrase that I’m seeing which goes something along the lines of, “You will need to shoot at 30mm because the lens will become a 48mm.”. Yes, that’s true – the lens will have a 1.6x magnification factor, and 30 multiplied by 1.6 is, in fact, 48 – but guess what? That 30mm will still behave like a 30mm, regardless of if your field of view changes or not. However, let’s take a step back for a second, because we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Back when I first began making films there was a de-facto camera for indie filmmakers – the DVX100. A plastic fixed zoom lens gave you plenty of framing options, allowing the camera to shoot anywhere you wanted to in glorious 24p. Jump forward to a couple years ago, and we had the 5DMKII, a camera which changed the indie landscape and gave people the added bonus of using custom glass. Here’s the snag, a lot of people that have shot on the full-frame 5D are now moving on to shooting with other cameras and becoming flustered when their 50mm is now an 80mm equivalent in terms of Field of View (FOV). This is nothing new, in fact many cameras have an ASP-C crop sensor, oftentimes Read more

How to Pull Focus with the REDMote

A recent post from Sean Brown shows the method of using a REDMote to pull focus. I’m on the fence about how much time this would save, as well as options for using glass – since it would require your lenses be either electronic, or servo-synched to the camera. In addition, for my Scarlet-X setup, I find things like the REDMote and Sidehandle to be superfluous and unnecessary. However, if you already own one, in addition to some electronic glass – then by all means this could be a handy trick to achieving critical focus quickly without doing a 1:1 zoom or using a tape measure. Check out the video below: Read more

How to Unlock Premiere CS5.5 and use your NVIDIA video card with CUDA acceleration

Although my beloved NLE Vegas has been using R3D native for years now, there have been some incredible leaps made by Adobe as of late. CUDA acceleration within Premiere CS 5.5 allows the software to utilize the GPU processing power from your video card. This means editing 4k/5k material is faster than ever, and doing things like adding effects and grading is applied in realtime – without a hitch. The only thing standing in between you and taking advantage of the acceleration? Adobe has essentially “short-listed” a few higher powered video cards that will take advantage of CUDA GPU. If you don’t own one of them, then you will have to run CUDA in software mode only, which means you will have to take a serious performance hit.

Until now.

Read on for a step by step how to for “hacking” or “unlocking” Premiere, and get the most use out of your video card. Before you decide to Unlock Premiere for CUDA acceleration – a few caveats to be aware of:

• Will only work for NVIDIA cards
• Your card should have at least 1GB memory
• Also must have DDR3 or DDR5 memory (DDR2 clashes with the Mercury Engine)
• Works better on Intel chipsets
• You will need to repeat this process each time Adobe patches Premiere

There are a ton of video cards out there, these are most of the recent offerings from Nvidia. If you are on the fence about trying to run CUDA acceleration with your current card, check out the list below for some extra insight – created by the guys at Studio One Productions.
Read more