Videography

There’s an interesting documentary in the works if you’re a video editor. With an obvious pun for the title, "Off the Tracks" interviews professional editors, trainers, and application developers to dig into why Apple made such a shift, when their existing app suite was already successful. I’ll provide some background, but also some editorial commentary below, as I feel like this documentary has potential to either be very interesting or completely pointless.

If you shoot or looking to shoot video, one question that you might be trying to think a solution for is how to get smoother video footage. I am not sure how many people would be interested in watching a video that you are trying to produce if it is entirely too shaky especially if that doesn't fit the mood of the video. Some scenes like a chase sequence may work better with shaky footage, but some scenes will work better with a smoother shot.

Summer is in full swing and that means there's plenty of blockbuster films to see over the next few months. One that my son and I are looking forward to is the next chapter in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise starring Jack Sparrow, aka Johnny Depp, along with returning original cast Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. This is the fifth installment of the franchise and it hopes to breathe a fresh take on the story that brings back key characters from the first couple films. In this video, you get a fantastic glimpse into what makes these movies what they are and it gives you a hint at how they do it.

Modern DSLR and mirrorless cameras are capable of shooting razor sharp footage in spectacular 4k 60fps and up. But how do you give your footage a cinematic feel without purchasing pricey anamorphic lenses and professional cinema cameras? Fstoppers is here to help with five great hacks to achieving a cinematic feel to your video without spending a small fortune.

In this video by Andrew Saladino of the Royal Ocean Film Society, the importance of compelling sounds for storytelling is closely examined. With movie scene breakdowns from “THX 1138,” “Apocalypse Now,” “12 Years a Slave,” and many others, we are shown real examples of how the best in the business design their scenes to evoke precise emotions in the audience.

Some of my favorite video editing tricks and tools are quick and subtle edits that have a lot of impact on the final piece. This tutorial from videographer Casey McPerry is definitely one of those tools that I will be adding to my bag.

Joby has released their latest products aimed towards mobile content creators with the GripTight PRO Video Mount and GripTight PRO Video GP Stand. The new mount is designed to be used with smartphones for on-the-go video filming, live steaming, or creating vlog content. Here are some of my first impressions.

Most, if not all, have seen the picture profile settings in our cameras. These can include settings for Landscapes, Portraits, or even Cine-style formats for filmmakers looking to achieve that cinematic look. But what do these mean and how do they affect our final image?

I've been focussing on my video transitions lately. I've noticed the big guys like Peter Mckinnon and Casey Neistat use transitions to create interest and make the videos a pleasure to watch. Now I already shoot for the edit, but I've never really focused on what else I can do to give my videos more punch, until this video. Zach Ramelan shows how you can use audio swells to achieve it. TV Shows have been using it for years, and you don't really notice it until you're told what it is.

Beautiful images are crucial to create an attractive video, but the soundtrack is just as important if not more. Put crappy sound over your breathtaking pictures, and people will probably not even watch more than a few seconds before stopping the film. When creating content for YouTube, finding good music or sound effects can be quite a challenge. But there are solutions, here are three of them to help you out and hopefully make your clips even better!

This year’s Travel Photographer Society (TPS) competition culminated in a beautiful exhibition of interesting and unique work from travel photographers all over the world in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Surrounding the exhibition, TPS also held a series of talks by prominent travel photographers. In his standout presentation and follow-up blog post, Pics of Asia’s Etienne Bossot questions us deeply about the ethics surrounding travel photography and just what constitutes the genre.

If you're constantly seeking inspiration from the same places, it can be hard to move forward creatively. Worse yet, if many others are also using the same sources as you, there is a risk of making work which is just like everyone else's. With this in mind, the guys over at Canon Australia have produced another episode in their series from The Lab, a collection of short experiments designed to shift creative thinking behind the lens.

In reality, this shouldn't even be a comparison. We all know what the outcome is going to be, yet we still love to see the results. That or we secretly hope that the phone in our pocket can really keep up with a Hollywood workhorse that is used to film some of the most popular movies and television shows that are being released.

For a western film you may need authentic props. Maybe you need a cool location. Maybe you need an Arri Alexa with anamorphic lenses. Maybe you need a ton of lighting. Maybe you need an expensive software to edit the project. Well, some of these are not that essential.

Just over a week ago, Matthew Allard from News Shooter reported that several Premiere Pro 2017.1 users were having media files suddenly disappear, with some having their footage deleted completely. Adobe scrambled, and it looks like they have resolved the problem.

"If I want to shoot great video in the future with my 4K, video enabled DSLR, what should I buy first?" This is a question a get a lot of the time from photographer friends. Given they already own a tripod, my first answer is always to start with a cage. Here is why.

I like biking, I even like mountain biking, but there is no part of me that wants to take a bicycle full-speed down this track in Mandelieu, France in broad daylight, let alone at nighttime, and I guess that's why I'll never be featured in one of Red Bull's brilliant extreme sports videos.

One of the worst gut wrenching feelings any content producer can face is opening up a memory card only to find that a file is corrupt or missing altogether. Recently we sold most of our Nikon gear and switched over to the new Panasonic GH5 cameras because of their better video features, superior image stabilization, and overall smaller size. Unfortunately we have found that unlike our Nikon cameras, the GH5 can corrupt files pretty easily if you are using their battery grip. In this video, I show you how these files can easily corrupt as well as a few software options you can use to recover any files corrupted during a loss of power.

It's an ancient art-form, and it's something you need to know to get your location photography set ready for action. Have you ever needed to put up a scrim while being able to tighten it after the knot's been made? This video is for the photography and film industry

There was a time when smooth, stable footage was the stuff of Hollywood, while us lowly plebeians dabbled with our shaky VHS home movies. But now, I can order laundry detergent delivered to my door by pressing a button on my washing machine and those magical devices in our pockets shoot in 4K. Here are four great ways to get with the times and give your footage that smooth, cinematic look.

Back in March of this year, ESA Astronaut Thomas Pesquet and NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough went for a spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Pesquet recorded the walk, and the footage is truly astounding.

In this short documentary video from TIME, Dutch creative Erik Kessels explains his interest in amateur photography, including where it started and what he sees in it. What started as simply buying discarded family photo albums has now stirred an interest with the mortality of an image, where with the proliferation of sites like Flickr and Instagram, photographs now have a much shorter lifecycle. This culminates in a very interesting exhibition, featured at the end of the video.

Have you ever been so immersed in your shoot, directing, getting the model to do what you intended and more, and forgetting about time and matter and anything other than what you are doing right now? If not, this video will tell you more about flow and give you some indication of how you can achieve it. Evan Puschak, who is the guy behind The Nerdwriter Youtube channel, really get’s into how you too can benefit from it, create great work and get over a creative block should you ever be experiencing one.

Filming weddings is a real challenge. This helpful video shadows a wedding videographer throughout the day and shows off some great techniques and tips you can incorporate into your own shooting as he talks you through his process.

As photographers and videographers, we can get really caught up in our tech. After all, gear is fun. But gear is the means, not the end. This great video serves a reminder to always return to the pursuit of better storytelling.

The YouTube channel Rideable Entertainment may just have created the most impressive DIY camera slider I have ever seen. It's made partially of wood but not in a cheap way. It has more of a Steam Punk look to it with some effort put into the finishing. The most impressive part is that they even managed to make it motorized, something that a lot of affordable sliders in the early days couldn't even do.

Just when you think you've seen it all, Skittles comes out with a new ad like this. Skittles has always done some weird commercials but this one is definitely on the top of the list, especially with mothers day right around the corner. I personally do not see how this is a way to advertise Skittles, but hey... who am I to talk? At least the audio is nice and crisp!

One thing to remember in life is that there is always someone cooler than you. Today, it's this guy. He decided his '96 Suzuki needed a little boost to be sold, and I don't think anyone could have done a better job. Even I want to buy that little car now.

Drones are being used in so many creative ways these days that I can’t even keep up with all of the beautiful and exciting footage being shared daily. Some things do catch my attention more than others, however. Like drones being used as precision weapons to take out bikers, instead of filming said incredible footage.

Those who have never been on a glacier may not realize how big a crevasse can be and how dangerous falling into one is. Last December, Jamie Mullner while skiing in Zermatt discovered it all within a few seconds when he tripped and ended up at the bottom of a crevasse. He wasn’t injured, but happened to have his GoPro on and documented the accident. The video is quite impressive but also surprising!

Machine learning is an incredibly powerful thing. Damien Henry, a technical program manager at Google, took advantage of this, feeding a machine learning algorithm a single image and asking it to generate an hour-long video of approximately 100,000 frames by predicting the next frame based on the previous one. The result is gorgeous to watch.

A widescreen aspect? A certain kind of lighting? Maybe shallow depth of field? What do you think makes for a cinematic look? In this piece from CookeOpticsTV, a few professional cinematographers were asked this very question, and while their answers are not the same, they all provide some thoughtful perspective on the topic, and perhaps agree that it's not just one thing that makes for a cinematic look.

In this episode of #BehindtheGlass, Albert Ayzenberg sits down with Cinematographer David Klein on the set of "Homeland" to discuss preparation, video gear, and what it's like to join in on an Emmy Award-winning show already in full swing. There's a lot of great insight here on what goes on behind the scenes of filming for television.

Whether it's a style or a genre, film noir has that signature high contrast look we've seen in many old black and white films. Modern filmmakers also adopted that style of lighting and post-processing in their drama and thriller movies. In this video you'll go behind the scenes of how to achieve that film noir look in camera.

I saw the first minute of this video on Instagram and walked away from it thinking to myself, wow. The flying in this video was very good, the choice of lenses stood out, and it was filmed in some rather tough lighting conditions. I went back to the video on Instagram, found out who made it, and watched the full thing on Vimeo. While I was watching it again, I realized that this video was way different from what I had expected it to be. At first it began with straight forward camera movements along with flights through some tight spaces/buildings that would require a really good pilot. After a few clips of that, the movements began to get very unique and had me wondering what they were doing to achieve these looks.

Drone footage is everywhere nowadays and it probably makes you want to buy one! However, not everyone can justify the price of a good unit. So how about a device that costs less than $60 and can take advantage of your GoPro? Looking at Nicolas Vuignier’s latest creation it seems to be quite fun and it could even replace a drone in some applications even though it’s not as practical.

As you probably know, Fstoppers has recently switched over our video system from Nikon D750s to Panasonic GH5s. The GH5 is absolutely perfect for our style of shooting and I really don't have much to complain about... Except the lenses. Why do they cost so much?

If you're a professional photographer you need to be seriously looking at the medium of video as a skill that should be in your repertoire. Making the change isn't as hard or scary as you may think.

I am a fan of good music. We all are. What I like even more is when a music video is directed to the music I like in a creative way that leaves me questioning how it was done, and how I can use the same tricks in my editing if at all possible.

In case you haven't heard prior to this article of this series, a few years ago, Pennzoil started a brilliant marketing plan to release a series of videos showcasing a car being driven to its absolute limits in a seemingly real-world environment (for the most part), and they are pedal-to-the-metal hardcore action movies from beginning to end. If you're a car guy like me they even give you goosebumps and get your heart pumping. Just a few weeks ago, while I was on my way back from Sweden, Pennzoil dropped their newest addition to the series with a short film dubbed "The Last Viper," and it's an action-packed thrill ride from beginning to end.

Anyone that has dabbled in the world of color grading knows it's a complicated art and science that can require a certain level of dedication and obsession to really get that perfect look to your videos and work. In order to do that with as little strain on you and your psyche as possible, there are a few things that you can do that will definitely aid in your work, but none are as valuable as setting yourself up with a dedicated monitor for your grading work. While setting up a fully rigged coloring studio is not a trivial expense, thanks to Aram K, you can learn how to create your own setup on a budget and still get accurate results.

Simple differences in the quality of light on a face can have a significant impact on how a person is perceived. I'm always a sucker for seeing how those different looks are achieved, and the team from The Lighting Channel has put together a video that demonstrates 10 different lighting looks on a face, along with the moods they create.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been given the opportunity to try out one of the widest Micro 4/3 lenses out there, the Venus LAOWA 7.5mm f/2.0. After testing it for some time, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on how it performed and what I liked and didn't like about it.

Since the birth of digital cameras, there has been less need to print your photos. Many of the newer photographers have never printed or even sent their photos to be printed at a lab. Why should you if your audience is all online?

Your phone takes the best pictures, right? That’s why you bought it.

Not so fast, says tech vlogger Marques Brownlee in a YouTube video, where he pits the top five smartphone cameras on the market in a blind test against one another to see which one comes out on top.

The first time I landed in a foreign country at night was when I went to Costa Rica in 2009. I remember being wide awake for the last hour of the flight and looking out the window at the yellow spider webs of city lights as I descended over Central America. Seeing populated places from above at night was new to me; the patterns of the streets, the sprawl of the towns, the promise of life popping up at random amidst the calm of the surrounding darkness all made it one of the most exciting flights I'd ever taken. And that's not even mentioning the stars overhead.

Avid’s Media Composer is, despite all odds, the industry standard for video editing. So if it’s good enough for Star Wars, it’s good enough for you. Luckily, users will now be able to get a dumbed down version for free this year.

The Swiss flash manufacturer, Elinchrom, and the innovative video light maker, Light & Motion, announced today that they are joining forces to bring new game-changing products to the market. The news comes in right after Elinchrom made the Skyport Protocol open to other brands. Thus, it’s no surprise that the new partnership is unveiled along with two new wirelessly controllable video lights.

DJI continues to push the video production industry forward with the drones and camera accessories it has been introducing into the market over the last few years. Just announced at NAB 2017 is a brand new version of their popular gimbal stabilizer, the Ronin 2.

Shooting suspended objects in your images can be done a few different ways, from the use of Photoshop to the simple and effective use of wire or fishing line. My first instinct would be to grab clear fishing line. Not having done any work with fishing line in suspending objects, I would not even have thought about getting brown or even a greenish tint line to use in the set, as Jay P. Morgan from The Slanted Lens packs in his fishing line kit box for various projects and scenes. In this video, he shares all his tips on this approach, including how he decides to use a certain color based on the background.