Canon and moving images

I can recall dreaming of owning a Canon Scoopic back when I scraped money together to pay for film stock to put in my spring powered, non-reflex Bolex with its odd assortment of C mount lenses. I was pleased to see the name Canon pop up in the realm of motion pictures again for a product other than their lenses. David Heuring wrote about the Canon 5D in Digital Video magazine. The camera was cinematographer Sam Levy’s pick for shooting ‘Frances Ha.’ His black and white images are reminiscent of the French New Wave films. Heuring delves into cinema aesthetics in his discussion of making moving images with this DSLR.

Using the Canon 5D to Capture ‘Frances Ha’

 

Using the Canon 5D to Capture ‘Frances Ha’

Techniques Nonlinear Cinemapocalypse

The 1989 NAB saw the introduction of the Avid/1 and spawned the mildly confusing term nonlinear editing. The software that followed was to have its effect on film scholars who can now easily make temporal calculations of things like ASL – Average Shot Length. Once again, a great tidbit from the folks at nofilmschool.com. This is written by Justin Morrow who claims time on Steenbeck editing tables;

From Flatbed to Avid

Also from nofilmschool.com come these notes on the future of cinema distribution from a panel discussion at the USC School of Cinematic Arts last week. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas made some comments that might be summed up as the big screen becoming a niche market. V Renee Barden is the author of this one;

Will Independent Film Survive?

It’s always a treat to find the mix of opinion and conjecture in the postings at nofilmschool.com.

 

The Next Big Thing

NewBay Media provided this quote in one of their email offerings;

“Something beyond HD might have no interlace, more resolution, finer pixels and these are all great. But what else is there? It has to deliver a new viewing experience. It has to be something consumers want to have… It also has to have improved motion portrayal and it has to have dynamic range. You are missing an evolutionary technical step if you don’t deliver that treat to the eyeballs.” – Chris Johns, BSkyB’s chief engineer/broadcast strategy

Advanced Television has Chris Forrester’s full article;

BSkyB: “Early days” for Ultra-HD

 Advanced Television looks to be a good site for following the implementation of 4K and above. We can shift towards central Europe and get this perspective;

Sky-D commits to Ultra-HDTV

I will still maintain that the definition at 1K is a great plenty for the home. The ‘next big thing’ need to exploit dynamic range to add the “treat to the eyeballs” that Chris Johns talks about;

It’s not tone, it’s texture

Verschränkung – Entanglement

Verschränkung is said to be a word coined by Erwin Schrödinger. Entanglement is the approximation of the word in English. I learned this after Schrödinger’s Cat popped up as a character in several recent Dilbert cartoon strips.

Krzysztof Byczuk did a well organized presentation and said this about the concept;

-Entanglement is a quantum correlation in quantum many body
system
-Entanglement does not depend on particular physical representation
-Entanglement is a resource like energy
-Entanglement can be quantified and measured

His 2005 presentation, available here;

Verschränkung

– – goes on to point out that the correlations provided by measurements do not constitute superluminal transfer of information or energy, His one sentence summary of the Bell theorem is, “Nature itself is fundamentally non-local, expressed in a subtle correlation between two lists of otherwise random data.”

Schrödinger’s 1935 thought problem involving a cat in an undefined state before measurement is said to be the origin of the word verschränkun. It is certainly possible to suggest that many of the problems we have in understanding the world are the result of the vocabulary and grammar we use as tools as we try to describe it. “We shape our tools and then they ape us” is the first variation on the McLuhan description of the process. The other relevant quote I came across when Googling about on this topic is from Yoko Ono, “A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.”

And to think all of this text sprung from two recent Dilbert cartoon strips. The boundary between physics and metaphysics gets smaller all the time.

 

Superposition and Collapse

There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks. —Erwin Schrödinger

Sri Lanka National Museum 17-Oct-12

I was treated to a reiteration of the problems posed by Erwin Schrödinger’s 1935 thought problem in a couple of recent Dilbert strips.

I was treated to this image of the Buddha last year in Colombo’s (Sri Lanka) National Museum when I unpacked my camera, air conditioned overnight, in a humid environment. The condensation on the lens was something I had not anticipated after the previous fifteen months of life in desert-like dryness.

Today was a day to ponder whether such things are merely fortuitous or are the result of some conscious intent of the universe or maybe the result of past actions.

Saturday (8 June) was Scott Adams’ birthday.