Earlier this year, daredevil BASE jumper Jeb Corliss leaped off a cliff in Switzerland in a wingsuit and wearing 5 separate GoPro cameras. One of the things Corliss did afterward was create this ethereal slow-motion video with the footage using Twixtor, the artificial slowmo program that has become quite popular as of late.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a short documentary film directed by Oskar Barnack (father of 35mm photography and inventor of the Leica camera) showing the workings of the factory where the first Leica cameras were made. The film includes footage showing the assembly of the Leica 1, produced between 1925 and 1932.
(via Leica Rumors)
P.S. Did you know Leica stands for Leitz camera, named after the founder Ernst Leitz?
Cinematographer James Miller spent two years developing a technique for converting 8mm footage to digital by beaming it directly onto the sensor of a Canon 5D Mark II. He replaced the bulb on an old projector with LED lights, and used elements from a disassembled lens to focus the light. You can read a step-by-step walkthrough of this project here.
Read the rest of this entry »
When’s the last time you saw some amateur video shot from inside North Korea? There’s a good chance the answer is never, given how secretive the country is and how tight the policies are for what outsiders are allowed to do. Photojournalist Steve Gong, however, captured some really high quality video from inside the country using a Canon 5D Mark II.
Read the rest of this entry »
This surreal video might seem like some sort of abstract, computer-generated art project at first glance, but take a closer look and you’ll probably realize what’s going on. Flickr user cshimala attached a GoPro Hero HD to his front windshield and shot some footage as he drove around Chicago. He then mirrored the footage in post, sped it up, and set it to Liquid Summer by Diamond Messages.
If you don’t have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in “slow motion”.
Too bad Twixtor is still pretty pricey — a license will set you back a few hundred bucks. Does anyone know of any cheaper alternatives?
(via cinema5d)
Chuck Patterson was SUP surfing with friends one day when two sharks joined them and circled around for 15 minutes. Rather than have the encounter deter them from surfing there again like it would for mortals, he returned to the same place the next day at the same time with a Go Pro HD HERO camera at the end of 10 foot pole.
Within 5 minutes a Great White shark approached him, and this time he was able to capture the encounter on film. The footage is pretty creepy, and reminded me of a Godzilla movie I saw when I was younger, where a scuba-diver runs into a freaky looking Godzilla-tadpole thing underwater. No ocean swimming for me.
In the spirit of the iPhone 4 vs. Canon 7D side-by-side camera comparison video, filmmaker Brandon Bloch has made a wonderfully clever juxtaposition of the Canon 7D and Mattel’s Barbie Video Girl. The Barbie Video Girl alone is a thing of wonder — it’s a really bizarre bionic-looking glitz and glam doll with a camera built into her chest.
The two cameras go toe-to-toe, pitting class against sass — but is Barbie Video Girl as good as the 7D?
Since Sony’s announcement for the NEX-VG10 video camera, Sony has released another demo video with actual footage taken by the camera. The demo video has a slightly creepy storyline of a videographer following a girl around with the NEX-VG10. Nevertheless, the video has some gorgeous footage, filmed in Bali, that really emphasizes the camera’s ability to take advantage of the lenses depth of field and wide apertures in low light. Also, keep watching for the clever shadow puppet show during the credits, complete with a puppet version of the NEX-VG10. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s an interesting video by Take Zero Productions that compares the footage of the same scene recorded by both an iPhone 4 and a Canon 7D. You can also head on over to the Vimeo page to compare the footage in HD, since HD is disabled in this embedding.
Note that in the description, they write,
I was mainly focusing on the iPhone video here and didn’t have intentions of making this a comparison video so some of the 7D shots aren’t properly exposed and some aren’t even focused. But here it is regardless.
What do you think of the iPhone’s video capabilities compared to the Canon 7D?
(via Imaging Insider)
