Back in 2011, Canon approached director Ron Howard about creating a short film inspired by a framework of eight photographs, which were culled from over 100,000 submissions through an online contest. Howard declined on account of his busy schedule, but offered to mentor a filmmaker through the process. His pupil in Project Imagin8ion was none other than his daughter, actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Through the exercise, Bryce crafted the 29-minute when you find me, a short film written by Dane Carbeneau about two sisters grappling with the death of their mother through space and time. A photograph of a dilapidated …

For many, the release of the Canon C100 has prompted one question: Which one do I get? Or, in other words, is the C300 really worth $9,500 more than the C100? These cameras have the same sensor and very similar bodies, and Canon even includes C-Log on both, but there are a lot of differences. Perhaps the most notable: C300 records internally 4:2:2 MPEG-2, while the C100 records 4:2:0 AVCHD 60p recording (at 720p) is available on the C300 but not the C100 C300 has HD-SDI & Genlock, C100 just has HDMI C100 is smaller There are other differences: The …

Rear projection, a technique that involves projecting a background image onto a screen behind your actors, is a technique that was popular in the 40s and 50s, particularly for shooting vehicle interiors. It wasn’t perfect; the image can seem washed out compared to the foreground actors making it easy to spot the technique, and rear projection requires a fairly large studio space. Rear projection has been mostly replaced, first by front projection, and by blue- and green-screen techniques. Even low-budget NLEs now include very good green-screen filters that produce excellent results; though it’s your technique when shooting the footage that …

Since its release, the Canon C300 has received a lot of praise for its image quality and low-light sensitivity. But some users have reported problems with color fringing: incorrectly colored pixels that appear on in-focus vertical or horizontal borders adjacent to a blown out – or nearly blown out – background. This most commonly appears on man-made objects like railings and window edges, though it can also be seen in specular highlights on ocean waves. The Canon C300 is not unique in suffering problems like this. By all accounts the Sony NEX-FS100 exhibits far stronger fringing. Any single-sensor camera is …

In a previous article (An Afternoon Music Video Shoot with the Canon C300) I documented a day shooting scenes for a new music video for the band Air Traffic Controller. The completed video, as well as a making-of piece have now been posted. Director/DP/Editor Rick Macomber explained that he decided to do this video after seeing Dave Munro from ATC perform the song acoustically. Said Rick “I was listening to the lyrics and I knew how close the song was to Dave’s personal life and it touched me. So when he came to me and asked which song I would …

In Part Two of this interview with Patrick Moreau of StillMotion, Moreau discusses the settings used while filming the short film Pulse with the Canon C100, as well as the lenses and audio hardware they used. He also discusses intercutting footage from the Canon C100 with other cameras. See also: Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100 Part One Filmmaker: For this project you were recording to AVCHD? Moreau: Yes. We used AVCHD in this situation because we wanted it to be as natural as possible, which is possible with this small footprint. We did an AT&T campaign for the Olympics …

When manufacturers are preparing a new camera for release, they often loan pre-production units to filmmakers in the hope that they’ll make a video the company can use to promote the camera. Such is the case with the Canon C100. Canon loaned the filmmakers of StillMotion two C100 bodies and financed the making of a short video, Pulse. As StillMotion described in their blog post on the making of the video, the idea for the video came from a potential client: We’d recently been approached to make a Kickstarter film for a team who had created a pretty remarkable innovation …

It’s a late fall Sunday afternoon and Rick Macomber is setting up his Canon C300 on a bridge near Harvard Square to shoot some inserts for a music video. The video is for the band Air Traffic Controller, and the plan today is to shoot two sequences of a couple that illustrate “happier times” in their relationship. Rick will first be shooting them crossing the bridge, and then they’ll move to Harvard Square to shoot some additional scenes. With his production company Macomber Productions Rick has been shooting music, promotional and wedding videos since 1995 and has been using DSLRs …

Canon went and shrunk the C300! The company just announced its baby brother, the C100, which looks very similar but is slightly smaller and is absent a feature or two. Most notable, perhaps, is the use of the AVCHD codec, and the LCD has been moved to the back of the camera from the detachable handle. But the C100 has the same sensor as the C300, and may produce a very similar image. All of those issues may be less important, however, than the price; at around $8,000 it will be half the price of the C300. To get the …

Part Two of our interview with Tim Mangini, the Director of Broadcast for WGBH’s Frontline: (Read part 1 here) Filmmaker: Do you feel like you’re now moving away from DSLRs at Frontline? Mangini: When Canon made the 5D they added the video capability almost as an afterthought. It was not, “Hey, let’s revolutionize filmmaking.” Well little did they know, they revolutionized filmmaking. Along the way, people started asking for things like, “It would be really great to be able to record audio that was worthwhile, or it would be really good if the files could be transferred easily, or it …