So, maybe about four times a year, I’ll be filming on a building site (or similar). It’s exciting work, I love it – it’s like getting an anatomy lesson in architecture, the people you meet are so NOT media but share a passion for what they do, and it’s a great antidote to Corporate Head Office Syndrome.

But today – a recce – was interesting. Half of our motley crew could not visit the site because they’d not brought their ‘PPE’. It brought back memories of school and not bringing the right PE kit. With the thankful exception that the site manager would not make us do our job in our underwear, unlike many PE teachers.

Okay, so luckily Pete the Lobster had some spares in his van and if the truth be told, Mr AirCon’s big DMs could pass as Steel Capped Boots (steelies), but a couple of chaps would have to pass on the tour.

I had to pass on a message to a fellow shooter about this, and suddenly realised – heck, who would even think about this unless they’ve been through the ritual humiliation before? Some poor chap dragged from his duties to dig up a pair of unloved and overused boots for you in a size that will hopefully avoid permanent toe damage, the location of a Hi Viz vest that’s decidedly lo-vis and almost ‘Camo’ thanks to a community of bacterial life forms based on a gene swap Lichen and Thrush. A hard hat that conspires to provide both whiplash and a medicine ball for your head whilst transferring arcane versions of transmissible dermatitis.

Dude, you go through this once or twice and suddenly, you buy your own kit. It then sits in your car for a year, untouched.

Then you go on site visits, recces, shoots, and each time, you avoid brushing your Hi Vis jacket against tar, soil, sand, cement, glue or anything. Your boots are protected from the worst of the elements by architectual pebbles and galvanised walkways, your hard hat never contacts anything more onerous than the plastic storage bag you received it in.

A couple of years later, and you’re out on a site visit, and your PPE is still in showroom condition. You suddenly want a ‘distressing service’ to tamper your day-glo jacket and shiny boots to avoid the glares from the engineers around you who already resent the fact that you’re here to commit their labours to video.

For what it’s worth, it can cost you less than £50 to get your hat, gloves, boots and vest, which you can pack into a bag and let sit in the car for ever and a day. For those of us in this community that will never need to film on a building site, no worries. But believe me, over 10 years, it’s nothing. I’m very glad to have it in the car, and suddenly a job comes up and that PPE kit will save your bacon.

Or even your life.

Even in these days of extremely sensitive cameras, lighting is still an essential part of video work. Even if it’s a bit of addition with a reflector or subtraction with a black drape, you’re adapting the light to reveal shape and form and directing the viewer’s eye to what’s important to your story.

Of course, we can’t all travel with a couple of 1-Tonne lighting trucks full of HMI Brutes and Generators, or even a boxful of Blondes and Redheads. I’ve had a little interview kit of Dedos, Totas and a softbox with an egg-crate, but then these create a separate box of cables, dimmers, plugs, RCDs and stands, and whilst easy to throw in the boot of the car, it’s not exactly travel friendly.

I recently invested in a couple of 1×1 style LED panels, run off V-Lock batteries. These have been a revelation – the freedom to light ‘wirelessly’, and with enough brightness to do a dual-key two-up interview with three cameras has been great. I’ve got the entire kit into a Pelicase with stands, reflector, batteries and charger – but at a gnat’s under 30 Kg, it attracts ‘heavy’ surcharges when flown (and eye-rolls from check-in staff). Then add a tripod bag, then spare a thought for the sartorial and grooming needs of Yours Truly, and the prices go up, as do the chances of something going missing. Also, a stack of pelicases and flight cases lets everyone know that the Media Circus is in town. Such attention isn’t always welcome – especially from those in uniform.

So I’ve been shopping.

I’ve found some little LED lamps on eBay that clip together and run off the same batteries as my FS100. Add a couple of lightweight stands, and the Safari tripod, add a few yards of bubblewrap and a ‘Bag For Life’ full of clothing, all thrown into an Argos cheapie lightweight suitcase. I reckon the case is probably good for three, maybe four trips when reinforced with luggage straps, but getting three bags into one, and doing so under 20 Kg, is a very neat trick. No excess baggage charges, no additional overweight baggage charges, no trips to oversize baggage handling, no solo struggling with four bags…

The six LED lamps and three stands allowed for basic 3 point lighting, and their native daylight balance meant that, for the best part, we were augmenting the available light in our locations. Even outdoors, 3 LED lamps bolted together, about 1.5 meters from the subject (and a foot or so above his eyeline) produced a beautiful result. Without the lamp, we’d have ‘just another voxpop’, but with the lamp, with the ability to bring his face up one f-stop from the background, we had a very slick shot. And because it’s all battery driven, we could do this outdoors, we could run around to different locations, and never have to worry about bashing cables – or even finding a power point that worked.

Now, there’s LED, and there’s LED. These were not Litepanels lamps, and there is a little bit of the ‘lime’ about the light. CRI was below 90, which isn’t very good. However, this was easy to cheer up using FCP-X’s colour board, and quite frankly most humans would not see the green tinge until I carefully point it out and do a ‘before/after’ – and even then, my clients weren’t in the slightest bit bothered – just thought I was being a bit of an ‘Artiste’.

We shot on my Canon 550D using the Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS zoom and a Sigma 50mm 1.4 in some of the smaller locations (to really throw the background out of focus). For GVs and B-Roll, the Image Stabilisation was essential for getting shots where we couldn’t take a tripod, or for working so fast a tripod would have been a liability. You’ll have to imagine standing at the edge of Cairo traffic, or wandering through back street markets – or filming buildings next to razor wire blockades guarded by soldiers…

So, the camera could be thrown in a backpack with three lenses, a Zoom recorder, a couple of mics, batteries, charger, a little LitePanels Micro ‘eye-light’ and of course the Zacuto Z-Finder. Everything else, including tripod, stands, lamps and chargers, plus clothing, go in the suitcase.

I really prefer the Pelicase, I love my 1x1s, I’m so glad to be back on the Sachtler head and using an FS100, but I’ve got my ‘low profile’ kit together now. And with the little panels using NP-F batteries (or 5x AAs), clipping together to make a key, or staying separate for background lighting, it’s a very flexible kit.

Two little quotes come to mind: at a MacVideo event a while back, Dedo Weigert (the DoP of Dedo lamp fame) asserted that lighting is not about quantity, but about quality. On a recent podcast, DoP Shane Hurlbut stated, in reaction to the sensitivity of cameras ‘not needing extra lighting’ that it was a DoPs duty to control light rather than to accept what’s already there. I’ve taken both of these to heart with portable LED lamps, as there’s no longer an excuse to shoot without.

PS: I’ll be doing some further tests with the lamps, and intend to make a video from the results.

I came out with the following headlines:

• £10k is so much better than $20k, it’s back in the game, but still a lot of money
• Expensive looking pictures when graded
• Clean pictures from raw rushes, but didn’t see Canon’s log images and how they grade
• Viewfinder isn’t as magnified as I’d like, not so sure of focus as, say, an EX3
• Top LCD is like FS100, not much help if I were interviewing David Prowse (i.e. lens well above my eyeline)
• Not as heavy as I’d expected, but temptation is to shoot hand held from chest height
• Audio inputs – XLRs only when wearing ‘LCD Panel hat’, or there’s an interesting addition of 3.5mm jack (radio mic? Reference audio?)
• Power consumption – 2-3 big batts (similar to BPU-60s) for a day’s shooting
• Price and marketing aside, it reminds me of Canon’s answer to the PMW-EX3
• Wifi dongle allows camera control via browser – including iPhone, iPad. Lens can be focused remotely – set up two focus points and pull between? Not yet. Bother – that could have been a killer feature

The emotional similarities to the EX3 are, perhaps, my biggest takeaway at this price point. Okay, so it’s got an S35 sensor and a 50 Mbit 422 codec which are way ahead of the EX3, but it feels about equal in terms of its bulk, fit and finish. Certainly all those little features we love in the EX series are here: intervalometer, cache record, slow accumulation shutter, and so on.

We didn’t get to see the switch between Camera and Media mode. On the original EX1, it seemed a very long time. The EX1R is quicker, the F3 and FS100 don’t have a ‘power down, power up’ media mode, just a button that brings up thumbnails – first time I saw that, it was a real wow moment. Alas the C300 has a sort of Washing Machine dial to switch between modes, which feels a bit ‘last year’.

However, I’ll admit to finding the C300 to be a lovely breath of fresh air in camera design. Like the FS100, it’s an amalgam of DSLR and video camera, trying to capture the spontaneity and and immediacy of a DSLR whilst capturing video that will survive the broadcast chain. However, its challenging new looks will turn a few heads – it certainly is NOT something you could claim to be prosumer. It’s ‘medium format’, reminiscent of the Pentax 67 rather than the FS100’s Bronica ETRs (happy days).

At Visuals’ event, there were lots of talk about cages, bracketry and hardware. That’s one thing I’d forgotten as an FS100 owner – the 300C has a tripod screw or two at the bottom, a cold shoe on the top (!) and that’s it as far as I could tell. If you needed an EVF (in my opinion, you would want one), you’d need something else bolted onto the camera to bolt it onto.

Overall? I’m not trading in my EX1s yet. There are still plenty of situations where a 1/2” sensor is perfect. Should I have waited before buying my FS100, and perhaps held out for the 300C? I would have spent twice the money on hardware and my clientele wouldn’t have paid me any more. At £8k, this would be a very very exciting camera – and for any less, I’d find a granny to sell – a no-brainer shoo-in for medium format corporate and broadcast work. at £10k, you’re leaving the corporates behind save for the commercial end, and that tends to favour Reds and Alexas which are rented rather than owned.

As a digital cine camera, it’s up against the Alexa, Epic and S65 – three very, very good cameras for cine work. It will be the budget end of that. As a Corporate machine, it’s at the high end during a recession. So I’m going to sit on the fence for a bit, keeping my eye out for a C100.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop

Of course the (at time of writing) unnamed 4K DSLR-style camera might just be that – which is extremely interesting. Whilst it is billed as a 4K device, the intention is that it will shoot HD (1080p) too. Now, if it’s basically the 1-DX but with a clean output and some audio controls, that is a very important device.

After all, if your 5D could be free of moire and aliasing, with very good resistance to ‘jello’ image sheer during pans and quick movement, and record to the new 1DX format or even a more robust format such as prores or DNxHD with an external recorder, how would that change things?

Filmmakers embraced the video DSLR as much for its form factor as its low light sensitivity and shallow depth of field. So quick and visceral to shoot with, not standing out or intimidating its subjects, many shooters are convinced they’ll keep shooting with DSLRs even though we have a wide choice of more, ahem, suitable cameras.

I’m in that camp. I really enjoyed shooting with my Canon. Still do, now and again (though only for jobs that won’t be ruined by moire or aliasing). The areas where it had let me down in the past could now, to all intents and purposes, be fixed. That resets my attitude to DSLR shooting.

I guess we could all find room in our menageries for a well behaved DSLR sometime next year.

What am I talking about? Any editor will tell you that, in ‘How To Edit 102’, we learn about the J cut. Very simply, it’s when a simple cut between two shots has the audio of the second clip start at just a fraction before the picture starts. Or, put it another way, the second shot starts with new audio over the old shot, then the video cuts to the new shot.

Let’s imagine a string of 3 comments by 3 different people.

We edit the comments so that they flow. But the magic of the J cut is that as we look as the first person, we hear the second person starting to talk – like we do in a discussion round a table in real life – and then (AND ONLY THEN) we look at them. There’s about half a second or maybe a bit less between hearing them and actually looking at them. So we start the audio when it should, then the video follows between 7 and 12 frames afterwards (that’s a quarter to half a second – we’re being subtle here!)

When we see this in television and film, it mimics our every day experience, and it feels very natural. Comfortable.

It’s an editing ‘condiment’. Like adding a bit of salt to food, it’s not clean and pure, but it feels right.

So looking at the clips in the timeline, there’s an offset between when the audio cuts, and when the picture cuts.

It works both ways: if sound cuts before picture, it’s a J (see how the tail points to the left, indicating the lower (audio) track starts first in our left-to-right scan. J-cut. If the pictures cut first and then the audio cuts, we get an L-cut – visually speaking.

SO we cut our first take of a sequence, and we’re really trying to get the sequence of what people are saying in a logical sequence. Let’s not worry about pictures and cutaways now, let’s get the ‘radio programme with pictures’ version done. Sometimes, it gets messy and we’re cutting little bits of words and halfwords together so a parenthetical comment is allowed to stand alone. So long as it sounds right, we’ll cover the messy pictures with their jump cuts with a cutaway.

The reason for my ire is that this mainstay of professional editing, this 1 step operation in FCP7, this ‘thing you can sum up in a letter’ is peformed thusly in FCPX:

http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/mac/10.0/#ver1632d82c

It’s like trying to put hospital corners on a duvet: it can be done, but that’s an awful lot of effort for something that should be quick and simple.

After all, when firing off a bunch of edited interviews for a client, hands up those who, in FCP7, Avid or PPro, would perhaps slip a few edits to add a little polish? Then unslide them back again to continue editing? Exactly.

Well, now and again I find a really good reason to switch from PPro or FCP7 into FCPX, but then spend an afternoon bumping my shins and grazing my scalp whilst climbing through its ‘little ways’. Well, I lost my temper big-time over the whole J-cut thing and turned to good friend Rick Young for solice. He’s writing a book on FCP-X, he’ll know how to do it.

And he did.

“Basically, detatch all your interview clips’ audio so they’re separate from the video, and use the T tool to slip the video. Simple!”

But that’s quite an odd thing for an app that touts to never suffer bad sync – dangle your audio off your video for ever? Deal with a double-track for every clip that could be in a J-cut? In a modern bit of software destined for the next 10 years of editing? That’s madness! Actually, I think I put it a little stronger than that.

It sounded like my solution for getting a pet dog through his dog door was to cut him in half and re-attatch with velcro once he’s through. Just live with a dog for ever more that has to be cared for in case his velcro join comes apart. Yes, I do have funny feelings about my footage, but if you were to spend so much time with them you’d go funny too.

And here’s the conclusion: Rick’s method works – it works fine. It works great, in fact. Give it a try, drop that beastly Apple method.

But here’s my finishing salvo: Apple’s FCPX team shouldn’t feel ‘oh that’s all right then’ and not implement an offset tool. It’s so simple: apply an Option key behaviour on the T trim tool. Thanks for XML and all that, I’m sure multicam will be great too. Just finish off your tool with a way to turn radio edits into J cuts *Just* *like* *you* *used* *to*. Put the Pro back into FCPX!

The release of iMovie Pro has been somewhat mucked up by its publisher, Apple. They’ve decided to release it with under the ‘Final Cut’ brand, and this has caused a backlash in their established user community. In doing so, they’ve elevated expectations as the FCP brand is a ten year old product that, while creaking a bit in its old age, has a reliable and stable workflow with lots of workarounds to hide the issues with such an old product. To introduce this new package as its next generation is about as subtle and believable as a 1920s SFX shot of teleportation.

Let’s say I cut Apple some slack here: Final Cut Pro was born in the mid 1990s as a PC package, then ported over to Apple’s senescent OS9 and vintage QuickTime technologies that were approaching their own ‘End of Life’ or ‘Best Before’ dates. Nevertheless, Apple soldiered on and built a strong following in the Non Linear Editing market, excusing FCP’s little ‘ways’ like one ignores the excessive, erm, ‘venting of gas’ from a beloved Labrador.

As time goes on, Apple has to look at the painful truth that FCP is getting old. It’s just not able to easily evolve into 64 bit and new video technologies, and rewriting it from the ground up could be a long, frustrating process of ‘recreating’ things that shouldn’t be done in ‘modern’ software. After a few big efforts, it becomes painfully obvious that we can’t make a bionic Labrador.

So Apple were faced with a difficult choice: rebuild their dog, their faithful friend, warts and all, from the ground up, which will please a few but will never help the greater audience, or… and this is hard to emote: shoot it in the head, kill it quickly, and do a switcharoo with their young pup iMovie, fresh out of Space Cadet Camp, full of zeal and spunk for adventure but still a little green.

So here’s where the scriptwriter faces a dilema. Do we do a Doctor Who regeneration sequence, or do we do a prequel reboot a-la Abrams’ Star Trek? Or do we substitue an ageing star with a young turk with is own ideas on the role and hope the audience buys it?

Exactly.

Imagine if Apple said this: ‘hey guys, FCP can go no further. Enjoy it as is. From now on, we’re investing in iMovie’s technologies and will make it the best editor ever – our first version is for ‘The Next Generation’, but it’s going to grow and develop fast, it is tomorrow’s editor, it does stuff you’ll need in the future – welcome to iMovie Pro’.

Okay, so you’d have to invest $400 in this new platform, but it’s got potential. Imagine letting producers do selects on an iPad, emailing you their collections ready for you to edit. Imagine identifying interviewees (not in this release) and linking them to lower third and consent metadata, or (as would have been really useful) ‘find this person (based on this photo) in my rushes’ (again, not in this version but the hooks are there). Imagine not having to do all the grunt work of filing twiddly bits, or identifying stuff shot in Slough. This is clever. This is exciting. And skimming? Actually yes – I like that.

But if Apple tries to sell us all this sizzle as Final Cut Pro, I want my controls and my media management clarity. I want to know why I am paying $400 for an upgrade that gives me less features.

The new FCP-X has iMovie icons (see those little ‘stars’ on projects?), offers iMovie import, looks like iMovie, works like iMovie, has iMovie features and then some. It IS iMovie Pro, and I am happy with that. All the crap that Apple get for them calling it Final Cut Pro, which it is most certainly and definitely (nay, defiantly) is NOT, is fully deserved. May they be bruised and battered for their arrogance.

Apple: rename FCP-X to iMovie Pro. It’s the truth, and it’s good.

The exhbition area needed to be filmed from high up, but there were no vantage points a person could film from. It meant fixing a camera to a bit of building, then running a cable. There were no convenient power outlets nearby, either. Once rigged, the cameras would be inaccessible until the show was over. The footage would be required BEFORE the cameras were taken down. There wasn’t a limitless budget either.

So… we couldn’t strap a camcorder or DSLR up – how would you get the footage? How would you change battery? Webcams need USB or are of limited resolution. Finally, I settled on a pair of SNC-CH210 ‘IP’ Cameras from Sony (supplied by Charles Turner from Network Video Systems in Manchester). These are tiny, smaller than the ‘baby mixer’ tins of tonic or cola you’d find on a plane. They can be gaffer taped to things, slotted into little corners, flown overhead on lightweight stands or suspended on fishing line.

The idea is that these cameras are ‘Internet Protocol’ network devices. They have an IP address, they can see the internet, and if you have the right security credentials, you can see the cameras – control them – from anywhere else on the internet using a browser. The cameras drop their footage onto an FTP server (mine happens to be in the Docklands, but it could be anywhere). They have but one cable running to them – an Ethernet Cat5e cable – which also carries power from a box somewhere in between the router and the camera. Ideal for high end security applications, but pretty darn cool for timelapse too!

So I’m sitting here watching two JPEGs, one from each camera, land in my FTP folder every minute. I can pull them off, use the QuickTime Player Pro’s ‘Open Image Sequence’ function to then convert this list of JPEGs into a movie at 25fps to see how the timelapse is going. So far, so good.

The most difficult thing, which I had to turn to help for, was the ‘out of the box’ expierience of assigning each camera an IP address. Being a Mac user with limited networking skills, the PC-only software with instructions written in Ancient Geek was of no help. A networking engineer soon had them pulling their identities of DHCP, and other than one mis-set DNS, it was a smooth process to show each camera where the FTP server was, and what to put there.

It was quite a surreal experience, sitting on the empty floor of the NEC with nothing but a wifi connection on my MacBook Pro, adjusting the cameras on a DIFFERENT network, and checking the results from my FTP server somewhere ‘in the cloud’.

The quality is okay, but not spectacular – I’d say it’s close to a cheap domestic HDV camcorder. But at a few hundred quid each, they’ll pay for themselves almost immediately, and they’ll get rolled out again and again. I doubt they would be of interest to the likes of Mr Philip Bloom et al. Notwithstanding that, I just need to sharpen my networking and cable-making skills!

Matt administering an IP camera from Wifi

They may work fine for you. They’re not working for me. I’ve given it a year, at which point I’d promised to trade up, or trade out.

As a videographer (a shooter who edits the material they shoot) in a field where there’s no rehearsals and no take twos (we’re talking corporate events here), I was, perhaps unfairly, looking for a ‘run and gun’ camera. I’ve been shooting with EX1s for a while now, and really appreciate the image quality and the benefits of a bigger chip than most fixed lens camcorders.

But the DSLR Revolution changed and enabled many things.

- Selective focus (shallow depth of field) looks great and really helps your subject pop out of a messy background

- Very good low-light performance, getting video where many camcorders would make a horrible grainy mess

- Special lenses (rather than do-it-all fixed lenses) make higher quality images with less fringing and better contrast and sharpness, and can go ‘wider’ or ‘longer’ too

- The small, neat, unthreatening dimensions of the camera enable you to get candid video where a bigger camera would be out of place (or unwanted)

- There’s something about the way the DSLRs create video that is very flattering for portraiture – and that equates to the hardy perennial ‘talking head’ in video terms

So I’ve dipped my toe into the DSLR waters with a 550D setup, and have loved the results – when the results were good. But DSLRs can also screw up in fairly fundamental ways, and can be a real handful to shoot with due to problems with ergonomics.

What’s tipped me over the edge are not the usual serious issues like aliasing and moire (which are bad enough), but the day to day issues of living with a Video DSLR:

- Overheating: sorry guys, I almost threw the camera in a bin after a shoot where the camera overheated towards the end of a fraught time-pressured interview. No, the talent wasn’t going to wait, and yes – a spare body may be the way to go if I were going 100% DSLR, but even then it would be a pain. It’s bad enough to halt a flow between journo and talent to get over the 12 minutes per take, but to have the camera demand a rest was just beyond the pale.

- White Set: DSLRs just don’t really get this. You’re asked to switch to photo mode, take a still, return to video mode, select Manual WB, then select the photo to base the WB on. However, differences between your picture profiles can really screw it up so badly, one feels safer in Auto WB mode, but then your shots don’t match – or worse, colours drift during a take. I want a White Set Button!

- Battery level: the 550D battery level is not merely coarse, it’s more of a traffic light – and a bad one at that. I purchased a power grip, but then you’re faced with double the batteries to charge overnight, which means setting your alarm for 2-3 hour chunks and getting a really bad night’s sleep. It’s like feeding a baby all over again.

Okay, there’s a slew of other niggles – the Z-Finder fogs up at the most inappropriate times, the start-stop button is in a stupid place, even a 60D style twiddly screen is no match for an EX1 or EX3 panel, and the list goes on. You can spend a hideous amount of money curing these ills, but at some point, one must call Time Out and look at a Red of some sort.

I loved the good times, but I’ve had bad times – probably because I’m using a DSLR in an inappropriate situation (hand held run & gun).

My path is clear – I am moving to Sony’s NEX-FS100 ‘medium format’ video camera, taking all my Canon glass with me and adding some Nikkors to boot. The 550D will still be with me, but relegated to Stills and Timelapse duties, and I think it will really shine in that respect.

So, I’m not selling my DSLR. I’m not giving up my DSLR. I’m not trading up, nor am I trading out. Just putting it to work in the best way for my needs.

An afterthought: one of the ‘benefits’ of my last year with a DSLR is learning and exploiting the value of having good quality stills that match your video – NOT to replace a professional photographer, but just to have nice mug-shots and ‘signature’ stills of your video programme for print, publicity and web.

Well, today I finished up with a shoot – CURSING the bloody DSLR. It had overheated and wouldn’t play ball. Right in the last 10% of a slightly tense interview. I had been fighting the focus, I had been nursing the cards (now rare precious things due to use of Magic Lantern), and in the small airless and windowless room we had to film in (on a hot sunny day), I was struggling to see through the steamed up Z-Finder on these long 10 minute handheld takes.

It had started badly with a long trek from car park to venue with heavy kit, the briefest of recces to work out how we were going to film this, and there was very limited time to set up two cameras, lighting, audio, and props. Within 10 minutes, interviewee had arrived, and we were off.

What’s worse is that I was sure that there was something definitely up with the white balance, but I’d ‘done the right thing’ by taking a still and setting it as a custom white balance. I was fighting the urge to ditch the location and go outside to film there. I was fighting with the mental map of how to shoot this ‘casually’, and just let the situation ride whilst I kept the camera moving, the composition still and the subject in focus.

At the end of the shoot, as I walked back to the car, I swore that AS SOON as the FS100 is available with the Birger Mount, my little Canon is going to be retired to Stills duty. I want a proper viewfinder, I want proper white set I can trust, I want NO OVERHEATING. EVER.

Horrible, horrible, horrible nasty DSLRs.

I pounded the steering wheel on the way back. FS100 – the way forward. Birger Mount. I like the lenses, I like the IS, just hate using a Z-Finder (or anything like it), remembering to button on and off before you hit the 12 minute limit, and absolutely hate that ‘sorry guys, need to switch the cameras as the DSLR is on its Lunch Break.’ excuse.

And now I’m home, and I’m looking at the rushes – now that they’re all synchronised with beautiful 24/48 audio and the colour corrector has removed the blue tint. And…

It’s like 16mm film.

The EX1 shot is very competent. It’s technically wonderful, exciting, responds well to light. No problems at all.

But the DSLR image has soul and charm and charisma. It’s like my days with a Moto Guzzi T3 motorcycle. It was infuriating, you could see rust forming whilst waiting at traffic lights. I’m sure it did more miles on an AA rescue truck than under its own steam. One day I hired a VT500 (Guzzi was ill again) – the VT50 was the motorcycle courier’s 500cc standard mount by which all others were judged. It was better, faster, safer, more frugal, smaller engine, and had no bloody soul. It was a simple (but well engineered and leakproof) machine.

The Guzzi was, well, an emotion – a zephyr of memory and sensation encapsulated in aluminium and steel. When it was in a good mood, it transcended metal and became something almost alive. Trouble is, it broke throttle cables, seemed incapable of holding its oil in, and if you did a particularly sharp right turn, the electrics cut out.

But my happiest motorcycling memories come from the Guzzi.

However, I’m not shooting for pleasure, I am shooting for profit. Time to think like a courier rather than a tourer.

I don’t need to make my Canon match my EX1R, I need to make an FS100 or AF101 look like a DSLR.

Don’t get me wrong – FCP really needs a full re-write and rethink. FCP has been broken for a long time: nesting sequences can be a hairy experience. Font handling is so bad, I have to use Motion for lower thirds. Some fonts just didn’t even show up! FCP was so single-tasked you’d lose huge chunks of work time just to render out a finished file. Memory was so badly used, projects over 40 minutes in length got wobbly, requiring you to split your programme up. Managing bins became a zen like experience as dragging a finder folder into your bin didn’t make a link to that folder – any changes to the contents had to be done in both the finder and in FCP. FCP is riddled with little inconsistencies like this.

So, FCP needs a change.

However, there are times when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. Final Cut Pro is a ‘professional’ package – people earn money with it. People build businesses around it. Large amounts of money are at stake based on the way a bit of software works. Muck around with the fundamental way a bit of pro software works, and it will affect the ability of a swathe of people to put food on the table. Okay, that’s a little too melodramatic, but you get the picture.

Another way of classifying ‘Professional’ software – for me at least – is to denote an acceptance that there are many ways of doing something. If I have problematic audio, I can choose the most appropriate combination of application and plug-in, rather than hand over the responsibility to the application.

For example: audio compression is a pretty standard need for voiceovers. FCP has access to a couple of compressors, albeit rather simplistic and built on an interface made of string and clothes pegs. Over time, I switched to the lovely iZotope Ozone 4 which admittedly costs almost the same as FCPX, but replaces many thousands of pounds’ worth of hardware to give the sound I want.

It’s not just that – I’ve invested a LOT of money in plug-ins that are essential to the work I do – colour correction, compression, animation, motion tracking and so on. I’ve invested in them because the raw tools in FCS weren’t up to the job.

Neither do I want Pro software to hide the annoying little details from me – I do need to know if I’m rendering in YUV 10 bit over RGB. I do obsess over little details that differentiate my work from others on both a creative and a technical level.

So, if the new version has some jaw dropping tricks to stabilise video footage and clean audio, can I please use the software I’ve already got to do that rather than rely on Apple’s implementation?

I see an interesting shift: Adobe Premiere used to be the ‘domestic’ editing application whereas FCP seemed squarely set on the Pro market as a serious choice over Avid. Now it looks like FCPX is positioned as ‘the editor for content makers’, rather than ‘the editor for editors’ – a role that Avid has always occupied, and Premiere Pro seems set upon establishing.

It will make a very big ‘ecosystem’ for Final Cut Pro, and will win new users – but at the expense, perhaps, of the higher end who will drift back to Avid or jump over to Premiere’s very comfortable way of working.

Editing is mostly about ‘In’ and ‘Out’ over ‘time’. We have a lot of choice of NLEs, but their interface shouldn’t be dazzling or clever, it should be invisible. I stopped using iMovie when it got all scrubby and trying to help me do the simplest stuff. I fear the new FCP interface is going to try to do the same thing and will interfere with how I do my J and L cuts, and require a whole raft of new plugins… But the really horrible truth may be that in 12 months time, I’ll have jumped to the new version and will love it so much that this little note will sound like the rantings of a ‘stick-in-the-mud’ grouch.

Editors are (and should be) a rather conservative bunch who take things like upgrades VERY seriously. Bumping up a ‘point revision’ can take weeks of agonising, months waiting for a gap in the schedule to allow for a full backup, the creation of a ‘sand pit’ of the new version, testing all the little things that make or break your given workflow, then rolling out the change. Apple are asking editors (EDITORS! for crying out loud…) to perform a leap of faith into what is basically a 1.0 NLE. Whilst my inner-geek is hovering over a virtual ‘buy’ button in the App Store, the editor within me is wagging a warning finger – do I want to bet the farm on this? Now?

So, even though I got up at 0400 in the UK to catch the first morsels of news about FCP X, I’m not in the least excited about it. There’s not much that’s really new, unlike Premiere’s useful approach to metadata. We don’t really know much about FCP-X other than a slick presentation. Hmph. Time to get back to work – editing in FCP of course.

A good summary, and another one. I note that the Apple website hasn’t updated its info, and FCP-X doesn’t even make the ‘Hot News’, though Larry Jordan’s blog has satisfied me that this natural and to be expected.

The world of moving pictures has gone by a number of pet names, one of which describes one of the pitfalls of having to pay for your recording medium by the half-cubit or ‘foot’ as some would say. ‘The Flicks’ were just that – flickering images in a dark room, destined to cause many a strained eye.

Whilst motion could be recorded at or above 20 frames per second, there was a problem in that the human eye’s persistence of vision (that eye-blink time where a ghost of a bright image dances upon your retina) means you can perceive flicker up to about 40 frames per second. So your movie had smooth movement at 24 or 25 frames per second, but it still flashed a bit.

Of course, clever engineers realised that if you showed every frame TWICE, so the lamp illuminated each frame through a revolving bow-tie cunningly pressed into service as a shutter, then hauled the loop of film (due to mass, intertia, etc – tug the whole reel and you’d snap it) down one frame and give that a double flash. Rinse, repeat.

Every student of film will get taught the special panning speed to avoid juddery images – then forget it. Ditto the use of shutter speeds beyond 180 degrees. And so we’re stuck with motion blur and the last vestiges of flicker in the eyes of an audience reared on a visual diet of 75fps video games.

A collection of flim makers, some with their roots in the DV revolution of the 1990s, are looking to their true source of inspiration, trying to mimic the hallowed ‘television look’ by the simple expedient of shooting a higher frame rate. This gives their work a sense of ‘nowness’, an eerie ‘look into the magical mirror’ feel.

As post-production 3D gains traction, Directors are taking a further leaf out of the Great Book Of Video by using a technique known as ‘deep depth of field’ – where the lens sharply records all from the near to the far. An effect very reminiscent of the 1/3” class of DV camcorders. This will, of course, take huge amounts of lighting to achieve pinhole like apertures in their ‘medium format’ cameras such as Epic, Alexa and F65, but as leading lights such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson jump on the bandwagon, the whole industry can now concentrate on achieving ‘That Video Look’.