Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

Now, this is a story all about how
My butt got flipped-turned upside down
And I liked to take a minute
Just sit right there
I’ll tell you how I got the RealSpace Pro Quantum Chair

In the western world I wasn’t born, but raised
On a chair I spent editing most of my days
Chillin’ out maxin’ relaxin’ all stiff
And shootin some paper b-ball in the office
When a couple of girls
Who were up to no good
Startin making trouble in my neighborhood (office)
I got my chair worn out and I got scared
So I said ‘You’re leavin’ and I’m gettin’ a new chair!’

Herman Miller chair, yo this is bad
So, this is how the pro editors be rollin’ first class.
Most of us don’t have of $800
So Ima give the next best thing a holla’

I zoomed to office depot and when I got near
The price tag said $300 and it had mesh in the rear
If anything I can say this chair is rare
Now I thought ‘This is it’ – ‘Yo homes my new chair!

I pulled up to the house a lil late
And I yelled to the chair ‘Yo homes smell ya later’
I looked at my kingdom
I was finally there
To sit on my throne, the RealSpace Pro Quantum chair

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If you’ve never done editing before then you probably don’t know that you will be sitting in once place for a number of hours. Any normal office chair will begin to hurt your butt after four to six months of use. I personally have been through four different office chairs in the past two years.

Ideally it would be great to have a Herman Miller Aeron chair to spend one’s hours working on. That is one amazing peice of equipment. Unfortunantly most of us don’t have $800 in the budget for a chair including myself.

So here I am, stuck between worn out cushion and a hard place and the desire to not want to repeat the same process in another six months. What do I do?

I purchase the next bext thing! Office Depot had the RealSpace Pro Quantum chair for about $300 and man this is FAR better than the hard chair I’d been spending my time editing on.

Keep in mind, chairs aren’t only good for editing, but great for watching videos/movies, working, chillin out maxin’ relaxin’…um…anyway. Watch these two videos on the Herman Miller chairs. They’re really cool!

InshaAllah, when I’ve got my own studio with editing and production workstations, I’ll make sure that my editors and workers are comfortable where they sit!

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Nikon recently released the D90 which is the first in its own category. Its a camera that takes amazing still photos and has the ability to shoot real HD video footage.

Watch the video that the New York Times released about the camera and what it can do here: New Photo Revolution

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After having watched that video I’m really excited to see what other cometitors such as Canon and Sony come out with. This is really going back to the origins of motion picture photography. Lumiere brothers simply made their camera take 16 pictures every second. I can’t wait till the day they have 50 megapixel (theortical size of 35mm film) cameras shooting at a solid 120+ frames per second.

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

Which camera am I talking about?

A couple weeks ago I made a post about the Canon FS100 and HF100, one of which I reviewed. Read about it here:

• Canon FS100 Review and Process

After going back and forth I was undecided on which camera to purchase. Here’s what I had going for each camera when compared head to head:

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Canon FS100 Pros:

• Cheap! Close to $300
• I could add extra accessories like the Steadicam Merlin and Lavaliere Microphone for the extra cash
• Easy editing

Canon FS100 Cons:

• No manual audio gain control
• No HD (not really a con at this point in time)
• No lens attachment feature (I fixed this with a lens adapter)
  

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Canon HF100 Pros:

• Has HD (but wont be using it really)
• Had manual audio gain control
• Can add lens to it without and fiddling

Canon HF100 Cons:

• $600+ causing me to go out of budget with other accessories

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So what did I purchase?

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Canon FS100

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Transcend 8GB & 16GB SDHC Flash Cards

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Lens adapter with 52mm to 37mm step down ring

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Audio Technica ATR-35S Lavaliere Mic

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Tiffen Steadicam Merlin Camera Stabilizer

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I’ll be posting about my experiences with this camera and how well the steadicam merlin performs after this weekend. I’m also planning on doing a head to head comparison of the Merlin with the $14 steadycam I built and tested here: http://www.leechon.com/14-steadycam-9.htm

If you have any questions of comments to share go ahead post them before the end of the weekend.

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Update: 9/16/2008

The following are YouTube videos that I made with the Canon FS100. These videos have been processed and color corrected.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzRhO9MftPc
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWZpcQaa0I4
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKHV77LpQF4
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFzTRRHccPs
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za6a0y3kcG8
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiHTfas-CqA
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH-mt476Y9Q

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Update: 6/22/2008

See below for .MOD test files:

• Indoor Shot – Black and White – Talent on Screen (me)
• Outdoor Shot – “Tracking” Shot – Red BMW
• Outdoor Shot – Sky, Sun, and Clouds
• Outdoor Shot – Zoomed in at 20x – Birds Chirping

I tested out the solution that was provided at Eugene Turkov’s Blog to change the files to .M2V via the command prompt (see link for what I mean) to be far more efficient and quicker.

I’m going to purchase the lens adapted and test it out at a Best Buy to see if it will fit on the camera or not. If it does them I’m going to go ahead and make this purchase in July inshaAllah.

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Original Post: 6/21/2008

The Canon is the on the loose!

I’m about to become a raving fan of Canon. If you guys have been keeping up with some of the stuff I’ve been writing about you’ll notice that I’ve begun taking quite an interest in recent Canon products. See the following previous posts I made on the subjects of:

• Canon HV20/30 and HF100 cameras
• Canon Powershot Digital Cameras

A friend of mine recently got a Canon FS100 digital solid state camcorder for about $400 from Best Buy withan 8GB SDHC flash card. Having played around with it I got to testing it. Now I’m not going to write a full review for this. Camcorderinfo.com has alread done that here:

• Canon FS11 Camcorder Review — only difference between FS100, FS10, and FS11 is the onboard memory capacity. The FS100 comes with no onboard capcity and takes only SDHC cards, which isn’t really a downside.

When I got to testing the FS100 camcorder there were two things that I realized.

1. The format that the video records in is .MOD files. For those of you who don’t know, this format is basically MPEG2 in a highly compressed form. In 8GB you can record up to 110 mins of video at the highest quality. Video editing programs don’t import .MOD files.
2. The camera doesn’t allow for any lens attachments. So this means if you want to add a wide-angle or telephoto lens out of the box, you won’t be able to do that with this.

Solution to Point # 1

To edit files in Premiere (that’s all I tested it in) all you have to do is rename the file extention from .MOD to .AVI. This way you can simply import it into Premiere. Now once imported you’ll notice that the aspect ratio is off. To take care of this simply right click of the file in the bin and click “interpret footage” and tell it to “Conform to” D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2). This will take care of the editing process.

Bye bye TAPE!

Another solution is to simply install a plugin into Premiere CS3 to enable the program to read .MOD files. There is more on this at Eugene Turkov’s Blog.

Solution to Point # 2

In the post about Canon Powershot digital cameras I wrote, I mentioned a lens adapter.

My question is whether or not I can use this adapter on the FS100 or not. Has anyone tried it? You think it will fit on the Canon FS100 camcorder? If it does, then I’m sold.

• Less than $350 for the camera (Amazon price)
• $80 for a 16GB flash card
• $70 for the lens adapter

That makes for ~$500…umm…wait a sec….

…for ~$150 more I can get the HF100 camcorder (see Amazon).

What are the Pros and Cons for spending the extra $150 now?

Pros

• It has the ability to accept lens attachments.
• Records in HD
• only $150 more

Cons

• HF100 only records in HD (no standard-defintion option) and AVCHD isn’t easily edited unless you put it through some conversion mumbo jumbo.
• They’re probably going to come out with a new generation of AVCHD solid state camcorders very soon that have better imaging. I’m personally probably better off sticking holding off on going HD for now.
• HD isn’t widely used for most consumer objectives and currently not widely demanded from my current client base.

What do you guys think? Give me your feedback.

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

Stu Maschwitz (author of The DV Rebel’s Guide) post on his blog the other day a trailer for a short film by Ayyaz Waraich (judging by the name, I think he’s Muslim) titled “White Red Panic.”

What do I mean by “filming totally naked”? The trailer above was shot with a “naked” Canon HV20…

…without any special 35MM lens attachments or gizmos. Just your simple $600 camera.

It’s amazing what sort of results keeping to simple principals of video, photo, lighting, sound, and editing can get you.

Personally I’m looking to get the Canon HF100.

It’s similar to to the HV20 in price and features, except that instead of recording to tape in HDV, it records to SDHC flash media in AVCHD (compressed high definition) format. Personally I hate tape and the time it takes to transfer.