as an avid HDSLR shooter for the last 3 years, I have to say… the new release of Canon’s EOS C300 EF has got me absolutely drooling with envy and that 2 year old “I WANT IT NOW!” syndrome.
from witnessing all of the recent field testing by those who were lucky enough to get their hands on one, I’d say that the one thing I’m most excited about is the ability to crank up the ISO well over 8 billion… (okay, that’s an exaggeration. more like up to 10,000 ISO)
but with a camera body that allows you to boost up specs that high with little to no digital grain… there’s obviously something absolutely amazing about this new body. the days of unfortunate dark situational shooting are officially over.
we’re all impatiently awaiting the Canon EOS C300 EF version (allowing interchangeable EF type lenses) since its mention at Canon’s event in the Paramount Studios back in early November. This bitchin’ body will be available sometime in mid January, 2012 for a whooping $20,000. yikes… a bit more pricey than the DSLR route… but definitely not a terrible deal.
as for the C300 PL verison of this beautiful masterpiece… that’s TBA in the latter part of March, 2011. (PL version obviously built to take PL industry standard type lenses)
For a rather spectacular breakdown of every spec known to man (thus far) with this camera, check out Jonathan Yi’s video discussing it all:
Canon EOS C300 = Awesome from Jonathan Yi on Vimeo.
-Jon Acosta
This weekend was spent in Savannah, GA shooting 2 television commercials for our client, E2 Marketing. Here’s a Behind the Scenes video to show you how much fun we had!
The concept for our commercials were rather simple and geared more towards the “female age 25-40” demographic. Production went super smoothly as all of our actors, including the kids, were 100% on point with their characters.
Both spots that Acosta Productions were contracted for were shot on a Canon 7D using Canon 35mm and 20mm lenses… a perfect fit since our client wanted most all of the framing to be kept rather tight.
Biggest hurdles of our production: Since we were on the 3rd floor of a photography studio right off of West Broughton St. in Downtown, Savannah, it was a bit difficult to pull off a shot of a kid on the outside of a window… unless, of course, he could float/fly. And since our kid actor didn’t attent the school of Hogwarts, we decided to just green screen his part altogether.
The same issue occurred with our 2nd production where our talent was supposed to be relaxing on a hammock. Unfortunately, the set prep failed to gain stands for a hammock… so we had to fake it. Using and blowing out a green screen, a manfrotto tripod, and a super massive ladder, we were able to pull it off!
To really establish these post-digital tricks, we dynamic linked our production into After Effects (via CS5.5) once the commercial was cut in Premiere. From there, it was a simple keying out of the green screen using a wonderful plugin from The Foundry, “Keylight 2.0”, compositing a bit of background, and keyframing the exact movements we were looking for in each frame.
…okay, maybe it wasn’t THAT easy… but the production was an absolute pleasure to shoot! Hope you guys enjoyed the behind the scenes look. :)
-Jon Acosta
Time lapsing our way back to Atlanta @Gibadlo #Atlanta #7D (Taken with instagram)
WELL! a lot has gone down in the past few months since my last production post. the latest news is that Acosta Productions has officially migrated over to Adobe CS5 for the plain and simple reason that, well, it just makes damn sense… the Dynamic Linking (or “round tripping”) from one app to another seamlessly tends to give me a metaphorically digital erection every time the action takes place. and yes, i mean that whole heartedly.
so what’s been up in the last few months for Acosta Productions, you ask? well… we’ve recently been doing quite a few corporate promotions, the last one taking place in Vegas last month (Aug ‘11) for a few days as we captured the ever-evolving technologies of Tekla Structures, an architecture software company that competes directly with Autodesk… and will be “#winning” so good very soon as they have just been aquired by a direct partner, Trimble, which uses Tekla’s BIM files in most all of their devices.
I know all of this is probably jargon to most of you, however, I like to understand my clients and what kind of field they are in before I tackle their projects via video production. It’s taken me 2 years to fully understand the madness behind Tekla, but their team is solid and quite awesome, in my opinion, which makes it impossible to not want to understand how they handle their day to day work.
TIP:: for any of you corporate video producers out there… ALWAYS fall in love the business of your client. It will make for a much more flawless production as the both of you will have an easier time speaking the same language and understanding how much “awesome” there needs to be vs. how much dry “business oriented” content needs to be presented as well. There has to be a fine balance. Without it, no one will ever see your content. you will not be referred to other corporate cliental. and you will become dormant to the same clients (who probably hate your work as well, but it’s “good enough”, which is just TERRIBLE to be called) for the rest of time…
sorry for the rant. back to basics…
Acosta Productions teamed up with Drew Gibadlo of Downstairs Studios to capture all of the on-location sound, as well as interview segments via our makeshift greenroom (which was actually a pretty rockin’ boardroom in The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas). flying out of Atlanta, we packed very lightly with two cameras (Panasonic HMC-150 & Canon 7D) as well as an entire suitcase to carry our sticks (tripods), and a 5 point green screen lighting kit (however, we only used a 3-point lighting technique to actually pull off the interviews). for sound, we captured all audio using the fantastic Zoom H4n to plug into the hotel’s sound board and clipped lavaliers onto our interviewees in the greenroom.
as for post… well, this was the first project that was tackled entirely in CS5, and it went absolutely perfect! since Adobe Premiere has a super simple “convert shortcut keys to FCP7”, i was able to simply adjust that setting and whalaa! instant gratification. if only life were that simple…
even more goodness: the Dynamic Linking between After Effects and Premiere probably saved me about 8 hours in terms of rendering time, AND! the fact that the entire software uses multiple cores and all of the RAM that it can get its hands on from your CPU makes is about 678903454642 times faster than Final Cut Pro 7.
so. all in all, a beautiful transition coming from someone who used to worship FCP, and will now never look back. RIP FCP…
RIP…
-j. acosta
following the trend that youtube.com and every other video hosting website out there has created, authors and publishers are starting to catch onto the online motion picture drift - and using it as a genius marketing tool…
i’ve been in pre-production with author, Casi McLean, for the last 2 months as we’ve taken her newly published novel, “Wingless Butterfly”, and dissected it into a visual masterpiece. what Casi has asked from Acosta Productions is to use certain scenes in her novel and create what is known as a “book trailer”. in a nutshell, this means
on april 24th at 6AM, myself and writing partner William McCanless (owner of bitsywords.com) finally began production on a film that we wrote 6 years ago… this film is called Back Alley Strut.
now, rather than getting into a synopsis of the intricate story and fantastic characters that were created to tell the tale of a long lost degenerate who comes back into his crime ridden past in order to salvage his dignity and take back his lover… oh wait. i think i just told you what the movie was about… okay. let me start over… ;)
by 1:30pm last sunday, my cast and crew found ourselves
