All Tagged Articles

I happened upon these little lights and out of curiosity ordered a couple. There are a number of small battery powered LED lights out there now, at a variety of price points. My go to light is an Area 48, which is stunning light in terms of quality, flexibility and, sadly, cost. I also have a small LED panel from Aladdin as well as a bi-flex lite panel, both of which i really rate. With the ability to become more and more portable on the camera side of things, it’s wonderful to see the numbers o...

This has been my favourite light since i got it at the beginning of the year (actually last year now, how time flies). Review done.Okay, a bit more. I’ve always had an issue with most of the LED lights out there at the moment. They’ve never seemed ‘right’ to my eye, nor on most recorded footage, especially on skin tones. I’ve tended to use those panels for rim lights and accents rather than keys. Admittedly I’d not been using the really expensive panels but the expensive ones i’d seen, or the fo...

Camera Rigs, Man Cages, Man Handles, whatever you want to call them, we all need them. Lets get away from the obvious question of why most camera manufacturers cannot design an ergonomic camera in the first place and seem to think that square bricks are the way forward, and jump straight into some of the options we’ve looked at, used and moved on from.This is specifically for the FS700 (and FS100 to a lesser degree).Why do we need to rig the camera? Well, because a shooting camera - be it handhe...

This is such a simple but elegant idea that i'm kicking myself that I didn't come up with it! The AirBox light solves one of the more annoying issues with all those LED panels out there -- how to diffuse the light so it's actually soft. Without any form of diffusion the hundreds of little LEDs combine to produce fairly harsh light and ropey shadows. Most LED Panels allow for some diffusion to be attached to the front but it's a little too close to the panel itself and doesn't always produce that...

A big facilities house will spend a lot of time and money on their infrastructure and network as the performance of this will have a knock on effect on practically everything they do. Typically, networks will be SAN based and the costs can run quite stratospheric. Here's a quick run down of some typical optionsTypical Network ChoicesFibreChannel requires a FC capable server, FC switch and FC host bus cards in each machine running it. There are numerous varieties and speeds range from 2 to 16 gb/...

It's a common dilemma. You need a graphics card for post production: do you go with a consumer/gaming card or a 'proper' workstation card?On paper at least, the specifications of the consumer cards are orders of magnitude better than the substantially more expensive Quadro based workstation cards. So in most cases the consumer cards seem like the sensible decision, however after going through several options i've been made to see things a little different.The general theory goes that the only di...

We knew we wanted some kind of decent dolly. We had a slider, which was a bit lightweight but useful for some moves but we needed something longer. We'd considered a floor dolly and in fact at one point we were hoping to get someone on board who also happened to have a Chapman but sadly for all sorts of reasons we were unable to get things to work out, also the floor of the location was only smooth-ish. It was polished concrete but with quite a few bumps and joins. Most importantly a lot of the ...