A great HV20 video by fellow Greek, George Hantzis. Very good editing and vision throughout the video. HD version here.

Wow, I had no idea, until the thumbnail I was looking on Digg’s pages looked familiar! Scott McIntyre submitted my jellyfish video on Digg, and he managed to get it to the front page! So far the video has acquired 24 new “likes” and over 5,000 new views! Thanks Scott!

More info on how the Crank 2 movie was shot. They used five XH-A1 cameras as primary, and fifteen HF10 ones as crash-cams, sometimes shooting all at the same time (with several random crew members just grabbing a camera and shooting — mostly on rollerblades)! They used very high shutter speeds, between 1/1000th and 1/2000th, and with “neutral” picture settings for saturation and contrast, while they cranked up the in-camera sharpness. On the XH-A1 they also used its cine gamma settings, but on the HF10 it was not possible to use its Cinemode ability because it can’t be used independently to manual shutter speed settings (customizing the shutter speed obviously takes precedence in such an action movie). That’s yet one of the reasons why I am still rooting for that hybrid consumer-prosumer camera that doesn’t exist yet. But NAB is here, so let’s see what Canon will announce in two days time.

A few more tidbits about the movie:
- The movie is actually insane, but in a good way. Here’s a positive review.
- It seems that the movie won’t make more than $6-7 millions in the box office this week, but when you add in that count the next few weeks’ earnings, the worldwide release, and DVD sales, it will easily recuperate its $12.5 million of cost.
- If there’s going to be a Crank 3, it will be in 3D, the directors have let us to believe. These two directors really are cool.
- And good looking too.

Before and after. Click through for larger versions.

Both pictures by Tabass Co./Tatiane Brito, licensed under the Creative Commons “BY” 2.0.

Sony Vegas plugins used: NewBlue Duocrhome, Channel Blend, NewBlue Pastel Sketch, Magic Bullet, Color Corrector, Unsharpen Mask, Bump Map for lighting. Compositing “overlay” mode used.

The digital revolution is trying to take a serious shape. I was watching this brand new TV cop show “The unusuals” and I was thinking that it looked “different”. There is almost no shallow depth of field in it. I kept thinking that they used a cheap(er) camera, and they did: the $10,000 Sony EX3, with its 1/2.0″ sensor. They also use the much more expensive F23 sometimes, but the EX3 seems to be the camera used mostly. The CC and lighting is minimal and that makes the show look cheap, but I guess this is part of the idea behind the show to make it look like a documentary. Still, it’s cool to see a digital camera used for a TV show, because on most of the rest of the primetime shows, they use film.

High frame rates and 3D video are in our near future. Many times I have cheered for 60p over 24p, but I think this won’t be accepted by many directors until 3D becomes a reality. 3D just looks better in high frame rate, and so this might be the catalyst for the move to higher frame rates. Even James Cameron said so.

In the last year, 3D filmmaking has seen a strong comeback as new digital cameras help out with the complicated workflow. Even the TIME magazine did a special article recently about the 3D comeback. However, the true revolution won’t be here for another 10 years, when TVs will display 3D objects without the need for glasses. The current monitors/TVs that do no-glasses 3D are still not very good, so there’s at least a 10 year maturation period in that technology.

I have thought out the traditional 3D process, and I might give it a shot if I get a second HV20 or HV30. All I need to shoot in 3D is a second HV camera, a clapper for synchronization, and this tripod accessory. Then, the workflow to edit in anaglyph 3D on Vegas is pretty straightforward. Sure, there’s some extra work involved, but it’s not unachievable. Maybe one day Vegas adds 3D editing capabilities by automatically packing two or more different clips into a single track (and I am not talking about the “takes” feature here).

I have already exported a small 2D clip I had around as pseudo-3D anaglyph (by misaligning the two stacked copies of the clip in the timeline by 2-3 frames), and even that worked great when using the red-cyan 3D glasses! Download the Vegas Pro .veg file here to see how I did it (use a clip of yours, and pay attention in the track’s plugins, compositing settings and misalignment of the two clips by a few frames). The pseudo-3D trick with the Vegas Movie Studio versions requires a somewhat different workflow, follow it here.

The whole 3D craze started for me a few weeks ago when I saw the above 3D music video by Golden. I even wrote a review for the band’s album too, should be published soon at the local Bay Area OWL Magazine that I occasionally contribute at. Video requires red-cyan 3D glasses, best watched full screen. Download the original HD file for best 3D results.

This is such an unprecedented record for any consumer camera ever, and surely for many prosumer cameras too! There are out there over 250 official music videos shot with the HV20/30 cameras (update: they are over 320 now!!). It really shows how easy it has become to attain high quality output from a $500 camera and how people jump on the opportunity to take advantage of this great deal!

Here’s a recent music video by the Outsider, shot with an HV20 and a JVC camera, I love the song. Can’t wait to get released on iTunes soon!

The only thing that’s mind boggling and shows how slow and stupid big corporations are, is Canon not taking advantage of the huge HV20/30 success and fanatical community in the last 2 years. They do nothing with this unique opportunity, apart from slightly refreshing the brand with the upcoming HV40 model (which was basically a cheap throw in to shut us up). But when I am saying that they should do something about it is not about creating new HV models (their time is passed, people don’t want tape cameras anymore). What I am saying is, heck, where are the official HV20 t-shirts I could buy? Where are the paid firmware upgrades that could make thousands of us flock to pay that 50 bucks per year in order to get full manual control, or native 24p.

The problem is that Canon believes that the way to cater to these needs is to release a new camera. Like these new super-noisy and non-stabilized HF-S10/S100 models. Erm, no thanks. Canon fails to realize that a good percentage of enthusiasts like us don’t move to another product so easily. We are here for the long run. Users who already own the legendary HV20/30 won’t rush to upgrade as easily as someone who upgrades from a Sony HD camera, or from a plain DV camera. Reason being, we already have a “good enough” camera.

Canon needs to wake up and smell the money they are losing for not appreciating this thing called ‘community’. They see their buyers in a flat way, but unfortunately for them, the HV20/30 enthusiasts are not your average customers. And there are thousands of us. Not to mention the whole marketing game that they don’t take advantage of, as many HV videos are very popular and potential new customers keep asking over and over what camera was used.

Patrick Sheffield has developed some very interesting FCP color plugins over the years, but his “Three strip technicolor” and “Luma Toy” plugins are of interest to me, having bumping to these looks often enough in hip-hop music videos. I tried to reproduce the looks with Sony Vegas, and it was tricky, although I got close. Here are some before and after pics. The process involved the Sony “Channel Blend” & “Color Corrector” plugins, the freeware “AavColorLab” plugin (caution, it’s buggy), and in one case, multiple video tracks in compositing mode. Download the project files here to see how it’s done (Vegas Pro 8 and Vegas Platinum 8 project files included).

Original picture

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Check the Crank 2 1080p trailer, from a major movie shot with an XH-A1 ($3500) and some HF10 cameras ($800). Discussion and more information on how the movie was shot exactly, here. No 35mm adapter crap were used, just the bare cameras with probably some ND filters and occasionally a wide-angle adapter.

Very exciting to see cheap cameras shooting big Hollywood movies. As I said in the past, digital 2k cinemas have a huge loss of quality when projected (my Kuro plasma TV has better quality than these new digital theaters, so we’ve stopped going to cinema and are using Netflix instead). Even an HV20 will be good enough in terms of pixel per pixel quality to shoot a full theatrical movie. Only things biting back are the lack of manual controls.