Image & Video

Some video plug-in vendors have an app that emulates film stock emulations. They have “ultra-realistic digitally created film stock emulations”. The crucial words here are “digitally created”. In other words, for the money you’ll spend, you’ll get something that may or may not look exactly like the real thing.

In video and motion picture, the making of a grain package is a bit more complicated. You’ll need a camera — preferably one that can handle cinematographic quality — and you’ll need to scan the grain effects for different film sizes, including 35mm, 16mm… Additionally, you’ll need to offer the digitized versions in 1080p/i and preferably also in 2K, 4K or 5K formats.

Bottom line: I’m sure digitally created grain products are fine for an amateur, but for video and film shooters who want a better quality, the “looks like” won’t be good enough. Enter the announcement of Crumplepop. On KickStarter, Crumplepop is raising money to scan in real film stock. The reason they’re doing that is because this one has a bunch of upfront costs. “It requires that we purchase 35mm film stock, pay lab and processing fees, and hire technicians. It’s not like our normal CrumplePop effects, which are all digital,” said Gabe Cheifetz at Crumplepop.

So, if you're into video or film making, and want to see an affordable professional grade grain plugin come to market, pay their KickStarter page a visit.

I just published my first eBook on amazon.com. It's a 6-page analysis of the GoPro 3D Hero system and the Cineform Studio Professional post-production software, and an explanation of the workflow.

I hope people will find it interesting enough to buy the eBook version, but for those who do not but still want to read the contents, here's a link to the free paginated online version: http://photo.it-enquirer.com/2012/03/12/the-gopro-3d-hero-system-from-production-to-post/.

FCPX was bad, it was a toy, it was awful — said the "pros". Then came 10.0.1 and 10.0.2. Those updates made FCPX look a bit better in their eyes.

SilverFast 8 allows you to instantly change an image’s colours. This is how it’s done:

Create a prescan

Make sure the select handles are close to the image borders

Click the Selective Colour Correction tool to make it appear in the toolbar

Hover with your mouse on an area with the colour you want to change

Click on that area — the Selective Colour Correction tool instantly changes colour to reflect your selection

Start dragging the colours on the wheel to add or subtract colours to/from the one you want to change.

Black Magic’s Intensity is a range of devices that capture your video camera’s signal to Uncompressed video. These devices can handle up to 1080HD signals. The most expensive Intensity, the Intensity Extreme, has a Thunderbolt interface.

The Extreme has only one Thunderbolt interface, just like the Sonnet Technologies’ Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt adapter. As far as I can see, the reason for that single Thunderbolt port is the same as for the Echo: the Intensity Extreme takes power via the Thunderbolt cable.

The Intensity Extreme is an aluminium block and has two HDMI ports.

Black Magic’s other HDMI input device is the HyperDeck, a SSD type video recorder without a monitor. The portable Hyperdeck Shuttle records to uncompressed QuickTime and Avid DNxHD MXF file formats, and operates on batteries or 12V power.

A digital camera needs to be white balanced because the camera’s whites, greys and blacks should be calibrated to a known neutral value. From there, the camera can figure out how other colors should be rendered. Photo scanners are different (and so are cameras in studio environments).

Most probably, you're using your digital camera under multiple, different light conditions: artificial light, sun light, in cloudy weather, etc. This makes it virtually impossible to calibrate a camera for all known colours, unless you want to create a colour profile as soon as even the minutest change in lighting occurs.

So, the way we all work is to ensure the camera “sees” white (neutral grey, actually) the way it’s supposed to look, and then rely on the camera's colour accuracy to see other colours as they should be.

Creating colour profiles for a digital camera therefore is usually only done when the camera is used in a studio with lighting of which the colour temperature is known.

A photo scanner doesn’t need white balancing. It can be calibrated by using a full-colour target and creating a colour profile for the scanner. The reason is simple: the scanner lamp has a fixed and known colour temperature and this value will not change over time — as long as the lamp works fine, colours will be fine too.

Could scanning services — services that will scan your photos for you — serve art photographers who are old enough to have learned about film emulsions?

These usually have a library full of carefully conserved slides and negatives. To digitize those, a scanner is all it takes, but a high-end scanner like the Hasselblad Flextight X1 or X5 is pretty expensive. So will a scanning service do? Three issues you should consider before entrusting a scanner service with your photos are:

The scanner used

The maximum resolution they can deliver

The Sonnet Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt Adapter is an aluminium brick of about 10cm (L) x 4cm (W) x 3cm (H). It weighs heavy, which gives it a nice feel of sturdiness. It comes without Thunderbolt cable, with one Thunderbolt port and an ExpressCard/34 slot. I tested this new device with a Sonnet ExpressCard/34 SATA Pro card, the fastest eSATA card Sonnet has, with two eSATA ports on board. The theoretical throughput on this card is 200MB/sec read and about 150MB/sec write performance.

My first real test with the Echo Adapter was a performance test using BlackMagic Design’s disk speed app (available as a free download from the Apple App Store), and another speed test with AJA System test app.

To correct or edit an image, which is better? A set of sliders without visual feedback? The sliders tell you the value you're changing, but you can't tell the impact because there is no visible updating of the working screen. 

SilverFast PrinTao lets you print your images directly from folders, but also from a scanner. It's a fairly complete layout system that allows you to create your individual layout or templates directly.

OK, so scanning isn't hot these days, but scanners are still around, and so are analogue photographs, and it's not because they're analogue, they are suddenly worthless images. Many analogue photos can get a second or third life as stock photograph or even web illustration.

Users of SilverFast know they have a powerful tool for colour accurate scans, but colour accuracy is something they can get out of Vuescan as well -- although with a bit more effort to get it right. SilverFast 8, however, adds output presets that shorten the time to create an end-result that is fully tuned to the output medium.

The SilverFast Web output preset allows users to choose the size of the resulting web image in one of the workflow steps — so far nothing special. However, a user can preview what is meant by “small” or “medium” size in his/her browser by clicking a preview button, after which a default image appears in the selected size.

Beatles drummer Ringo Starr asked and received advice of Audio Analysts, a Colorado-based provider of concert touring audio systems, about which storage system he should use for one of his tours.

They recommended Sonnet's Fusion R400Q [now Fusion R400QR5] for his 10th All-Starr tour, having used the system successfully in previous tours. Curious that Starr got advice on a storage system, and not on a musical system or something more closely related to his own core business.

Sonnet just recently published the list of ExpressCards their new Echo adapter, which functions as a bridge between Thunderbolt and the rest of the world, supports.

While the list contains only Sonnet products, it is expected the Echo will also support many third party ExpressCards.

A major problem with old scanners such as the top of the line Heidelbergs is that software to control these scanners no longer runs on modern OSes.

The original manufacturer scanner control software can be replaced by SilverFast from LaserSoft Imaging. SilverFast is the only app available for Heidelberg CHROMAGRAPH 3300/3400, TOPAZ, TANGO/XL, NEXSCAN and PRIMESCAN scanners on Windows (2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7) and Macintosh OS-X (10.3 – 10.6).