Billy Fire LLC

DIY Steadicam, Glidecam http://tinyurl.com/krmmwe via http://www.diigo.com/~whittam

I often wondered why all the new flat screen LCD and plasma screens were 16:9 ratio. This is a nice ratio but only the equivalent of cinema widescreen (1.85 to 1 in the USA and 1.66 to 1 in Europe).

I love the Panavision or Cinemascope ratio (2.35 to 1) because this is how we see (i.e. your peripheral vision goes to the right and the left NOT up and down, or at least mine doesn’t!) Many multiplex theaters are designed with widescreen as their optimum presentation format, rather than scope. The reason for this has got to be that it … Continue Reading

Ikonoskop have posted some footage from their new A-cam dII camera.  The samples are short, but they look beautiful with a fabulous depth of field.

Ikonoskop is an innovative manufacturer of movie cameras based in my favorite city, Stockholm, Sweden. A few years ago they created a super 16mm film camera called the A-cam SP-16. The camera was designed to be inexpensive and light. It was able to achieve this by using 100ft spools of 16 mm film (rather than 200 ft or 400ft used by other professional 16mm cameras such as Arriflex or Aaton). They also used a non-reflex view finder arrangement. This means that there will be some parallax error when using longer lenses, … Continue Reading

I recently took another look at the current state of play for AVCHD video editors. Things are definitely improving. I downloaded a trial of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I have been VERY pleasantly surprised.

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition is from the Sony stable of editing software and falls between their entry level Vegas Movie Studio and Sony Vegas. All of which are available for trial downloads. The Studio Platinum Edition trial lasts for 30 days.

The description on the Sony Web site says: “you can import … Continue Reading