I’m back from San Francisco and have a drive full of photos to work through!

I spent a lot of time working the city landscapes at dawn and dusk and learned to use the Helios app for my Iphone4 to accurately predict when and where the sun would rise. That combined with Google MapsGoogle Street View, and Google Earth let me do most of my scouting from my couch in NYC!

That said- the biggest wildcard in SF was the fog- on several occasions I had set up and was ready for a dawn shot only to never get any sunlight!

I’ve included a selection of shots here, but I have quite a few more on my flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ewestpheling/

Helios is available on the App Store and they have some info about the features here:

http://chemicalwedding.tv/helios/helios.html

Entrepreneur.com has started posting some of the videos we’ve been working on over the last few months. More to come soon!

Sweet Revenge / Cupcakes and Beer in the West Village

How to start a bar with Niamh Conway

This was my first trip to SXSW, and what a great trip we had!

A little background- Frank Gruber from TechCocktail linked up with me to produce an interview series aboard the Zappos “Delivering Happiness” bus. We set out to shoot some of the most influential and exciting people who were coming to Austin, over 80 in total, during the main portion of the interactive festival.

Browse the entire video series here

It was a non-stop blitz of interviews and media management. There were a lot of optimizations that really kept everything moving full tilt. In order to keep people seamlessly moving and not getting bogged down swapping lapel mics, I went with Blue Microphones – Encore100 vocal mics. They sounded vibrant, looked brilliant, and allowed people to just pick up and go.

The next bit that really kept things moving was my Sony PMW-EX1. Its now over 3 years old, and practically everyone at SXSW was running around with a 5D, 7D, or 60D on some sort of handheld rig with bits hanging off. Since we were shooting interviews, I knew we’d be fighting the 12 minute clip limit on the Canon cameras. The Sony (with SD card adapters) could roll indefinitely if we needed it to.

Finally, my 13″ Macbook Pro with ShotPut Pro for media management. On board the Zappos bus I wouldn’t be able to spread out drives and power adapters all over the place. We were also sharing the bus with the Delivering Happiness folks, any of their guests, and anyone who might be waiting to be interviewed. I needed to be able to bail at a moments notice, even while downloading cards.

I created a rig that attached right to the Speck polycarbonate shell on my macbook pro. Using several Maxpedition pouches I attached 2x G-Tech 500GB 7200rpm Firewire 800 Drives alongside a Hypermac 60WH battery pack and an Elgato Turbo.264 HD hardware H264 encoder. Then wired it all together with right angled cables to make it all slim and less likely to get tangled. I described my modded-out Macbook earlier this year, but in short I had removed the optical drive and stock hard drive and replaced them with Solid state disks.

Using ShotPut Pro, I was able to put an SD card full of footage into the side of the computer, and with two clicks have it duplicated and verified to the external drives. After doing this it would format and eject the card from the system- all completely automated.

Then ProxyMill would automatically make ProRes LT versions of everything to a project folder on the internal hard drive, and using the Elgato Turbo.264- make low res versions for the clients to watch back in their rooms.

We kept a spreadsheet going that kept track of camera clip numbers associated with each interview, the names of each person, and any relevant info for lower thirds graphics.

That gets us through the shooting portions! I’ll post an update with the optimizations I put together for posting these that let me edit together 2 interviews each night before I needed to crash and get some rest!

This is the first of a series of interviews Alex Peterson and I shot at BET’s headquarters on 57th st. I’m heading to SXSW tomorrow so I’ll keep this short- I’ve been really pushing to tweak the EX1 color matrix settings to get the most out of it. There was no color correction done to the footage here- its right out of the camera. I’m pretty happy with it, its nice and simple, which is exactly what they asked for.

Whats great about the EX1 is that if the client needed an even higher quality version we could have recorded the SDI-Out at 4:2:2- something that my 5D will never do!

I’m shooting everything at SXSW on the EX1, mainly for workflow reasons, but I am excited that I’m now getting colors and contrasts like I’m used to having with my 5D. Stay tuned!

Terrence and I have shot several indie hip-hop videos over the last few years. Its always fun to have a client who keeps coming back because they love the quality work.

The DSLR revolution has really raised the bar for the kind of product independent artists are expecting, but the key is that most producers really don’t have access to someone with years of experience working with lighting–which makes all the difference, no matter what camera you’re shooting with.

We shot on location in New Jersey and had some fantastic clear weather to show off the recent snowfall. The video is going to have some really nice varied scenes and moods. It begins with a great natural vibe with some of our exteriors and daytime interiors–then descends into a series of dark and troubled night interiors. We even had a bunch of SFX shots to content with, including some green screen work with a treadmill.

I’m looking forward to seeing a cut asap!

Youth advocate, business leader, and New York Times bestselling author Wes Moore spoke about role models and the importance of education for a visiting group of Philadelphia 9th Graders today at Random House’s NYC Headquarters. His message was drawn from his book The Other Wes Moore and punctuated with stories from his own past where he had struggled to stay on a path to success.

To cover the event I decided that we should use the strengths of both my EX1 and 5D to get solid coverage of Wes as well as the eager room of teens. The EX1, with its Fujinon 8:1 zoom, let me work everything from a wide shot to a closeup of Wes as he spoke to each side of the room. Working at a focal length of 25 to 85mm at an f4, there was plenty of depth of field to keep him in sharp focus as he paced back and forth. A lot of people overlook the fact that to get some of these same subject sizes with a 5D you would need the a lens like the 70-300mm, with its incredibly shallow depth of field.

Having done my research and seen other clips of Wes’ dynamic speaking style, I chose to let the 5D roam around the room and pick up reaction shots of the audience. I gave Alex Peterson my 50 and 85mm f1.4 and specified that I wanted him to work with very shallow focus, to highlight the rapt attention of individuals in the audience. I was also hoping this would eliminate some of the drabness of the conference room setting, really pushing the closeness of the audience to Wes and his lecture.

In the end I think the two cameras worked well together, they really are two great tools that can be paired well. The EX1′s broadcast style zoom lens and greater depth of field really allows coverage of fluid situations, while the 5D allows you to emphasize a single face in a crowd.

The conference room was a mix of cool white fluorescents (4400K) and 6000K-7000K western skylight- which made it particularly challenging to find a pleasing white balance. We settled on a color right in the middle, but that left us magenta and green casts from both sources. In such a large conference room I always encourage companies to install Daylight balanced fluorescents, it really makes a world of difference even when they are shooting on Flip cams.

In post-production, I made an extra effort to pull out much of the green, but these cameras both record a minimum of color information, and this was really the first time that I’ve really run into it as a problem. I find that most of my color correction work happens with the Luminance values, to add a little “pop” of contrast to footage, and with the 4:2:0 space this isn’t a big deal. While correcting out the green and magenta I found that there wasn’t enough information to shift the green towards taupe and orange and the magenta back towards blue without adding a lot of noise. I’ve successfully done some corrections like this with still photos in the past, but in that scenario we were working with 14-Bit raw files.

I also am curious about taking the EX1 to Abel Cine Tech or All Mobile Video and having a broadcast engineer make up a custom Color Matrix for the Sony EX1. After working with footage from each camera in post, side by side, I found that there are ranges of color the EX1 and 5D see in completely different ways. It is possible to program a custom set of colors for the 5D using the Canon Picture Style manager, but in general I like the look and feel of the colors more than the Sony.

By putting them both in front of a Chroma DuMonde color chart, an engineer with a waveform monitor should be able to create a custom matrix for the Sony to emulate the Canon colors as much as possible.

I’d like to thank Alex Peterson, my B Cam operator, and Brendan Murphy from SilverSound for their great work on this piece too. The edit was done by Brian Dalton.

Play video:

It’s great when a group of really talented, hard-working people get a break.

Thats exactly what has happened at Next New Networks this last month. After our 2 pilot shoots, they’ve landed the contract for a YEAR of episodes for AOL’s front page show The One. I can best describe the show’s style as a video blog crossed with a makeup commercial. They have repurposed one suite in their spacious office as a permanent studio, and we are currently outfitting it for the long haul.

Its all very exciting and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of people than Kathleen and Tim at NNN.
Congrats guys!

The Gregory Brothers:

This was a quick shoot at Michael Cunningham’s lovely Chelsea apartment. He and James had a great conversation about what it means to be a writer, as well as James’ studies with Michael.

The two authors have books on sale later this month, Michael Cunningham’s Nightfall (FSG), and James Franco’s Palo Alto story collection from Scribner.

I shot with my EX1 and 5D and have come a bit farther in making a picture profile for the EX1 thats contrasty enough to match the 5D’s output. I need to sit down at some point with a great monitor and really dig into the EX1′s color matrix settings to match the reds in the 5D’s Standard and Portrait profiles (my favorites).

Another great day with the crew from Next New Networks, putting together a fun pilot for a top tier media website.

We are shooting with DSLRs again, and trying to make a really great looking video blog/confessional.

Lots of HMI and kino action, and I’m really enjoying the digital horizon/level feature on the 7d for making the architectural lines square on screen.

A quick peek behind the camera at mega-bestselling author Sophie Kinsella’s reading at New York’s Limelight Marketplace.

The 5d is an amazing camera for this kind of documentary work. The degree to which you can separate your subject from a potentially distracting background is so far beyond what you’ve ever been able to do before!!

Part 2- Reading with fans: