Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

The NULL Lens optical collimation device has been a very popular product. It is the quickest, easiest and most accurate way to set the backfocus on the RED One camera. We have fulfilled all our pre-orders and now have units in stock and ready to ship.

Now, we are introducing the first accessory in the NULL family, the NULL Target. The NULL Target mounts to the front of the NULL Lens and allows easy and accurate backfocus adjustment by projecting a focusing screen onto the RED One’s sensor. Watch the video to see how easy it is to use.

Please note: the NULL Target is still in the prototype phase. We do not yet have pricing or product availability details on this item. Stay tuned for more information.

When cinematographer David Mullen, ASC, was hired to shoot Fox’s Jennifer’s Body, director Karyn Kusama had already planned several key sequences of the film. The dramatic ending featured a fight between the two lead actresses with some crucial moments to be shot at extreme high speed. While the rest of the production was photographed on Kodak 35mm stocks using Panavision cameras, Mullen chose the Phantom HD camera to capture 1000fps. Actresses Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried performed the action sequence repeatedly to capture the unique sequence. David Mullen has graciously provided us with this excerpt from his personal production diary. Jennifer’s Body is currently in theaters nationwide.

We had a hydraulic rig to lift the two characters four feet off of the bed and then flip them end to end. That had to come up through a hole in the floor on the opposite side of the bed. Then we had to saw a hole in the wall of the headboard end for another rig that rotated them lengthwise in mid-air like. Then the characters had to drop separately, one after the other, back onto the bed. And that portion had to be shot at 1000 fps on the Phantom.

…continue reading David Mullen: Phantom HD on “Jennifer’s Body”

Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6) has been causing problems for many of us, and P2 owners have also felt the pain. One of the most popular methods for downloading P2 cards onto a Mac is using the DuelAdapter from Duel Systems. The DuelAdapter adapts PCMCIA P2 cards to the ExpressCard/34 slot on MacBook Pros. Unfortunately this device just doesn’t work with Snow Leopard, and Duel Systems will not be producing future drivers. So Panasonic made a small announcement on their site:

• P2 card in a DuelAdapter is not recognized on Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard), since there is no DuelAdapter driver software for Mac OS 10.6.
• Please use DuelAdapter on 10.5 (Leopard).
• When using a P2 card on Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) of MacBookPro, please use a P2 camera, P2 recoder or P2 drive equiped with USB2.
• Panasonic is developing a new 1 slot P2 drive which works on Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and planning to launch it in the spring of 2010.

This is an annoying situation for sure, but the last line is what really caught my eye. Panasonic is making a single slot P2 card reader. There are many different P2 solutions out there, but most of our clients want a simple single card solution. There might still be an updated driver for the DuelAdapter, but the Panasonic reader is great news for all you P2 camera owners.

If you’ve been working with an HDSLR camera or are interested in purchasing one, then you should know that audio recording can be an issue. The cameras themselves have built in microphones, but the quality is not exactly what most video professionals are looking for. So we approached Jem Schofield from theC47.com and asked him to put together a round up of different audio recording options. He created a great article that we posted in our HDSLR specialty shop. Check out his article here – HDSLR Audio Roundup. It is a great resource for anyone interested in these unique cameras.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I recently traveled to Chicago to shoot a music video on an Sony PMW-EX1 camera. Much of the shooting was on greenscreen so I brought along the nanoFlash from Convergent Design to increase the quality of my recording. While the EX1 records excellent quality video, I really needed the bitrate and color sampling improvements that the nanoFlash offers. I shot both to the EX1 in XDCAM EX at 35Mbps, and to the nanoFlash in XDCAM 422 at 160Mbps. The quality difference between the two versions was significant, and I found that the nanoFlash footage was very easy to key. Watch the video to see my review of the nanoFlash, and the difference between the XDCAM EX footage and what the nanoFlash recorded. Update: The latest firmware for the nanoFlash also offers 24P pull-down removal.

If you haven’t yet upgraded to Snow Leopard on your MacBook Pro then you may not have heard about the problems with SxS cards. After installing the new OS, any SxS card inserted into a ExpressCard/34 slot would cause immediate kernel panic. That is when you insert an SxS card the screen goes black and you have to restart. Not a good thing for EX1 & EX3 owners for sure. But the good news is that Sony got on the ball and released a new version of their SxS drivers that fixes the problem. I tested out the latest drivers on my MacBook Pro – running Snow Leopard 10.6.1 (released over the weekend) – and everything is working again. So cheers to Sony and here is a link to the download site – SxS Driver 1.045.

Recently I was asked why we sell seemingly similar lights at such different prices. The easy answer is that they offer different lensing, which means different performance. But I thought there had to be a better way to quantify and qualify that, so I made a chart that lays out some of the technical differences such as number of footcandles at a given beam spread. That’s easy, as it can be gleaned from any manufacturer’s website. So I also set up a comparative display of three lights to show qualitatively their differences. I compared the Lowel Pro 200w, Arri Junior 150w, and Dedolight 150w. Both the chart and the display are set up in our NY showroom, and you can watch a video of my test on our website.