Cinegrain Indie Filmmaker Collection

Steve Sherrick — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 04:26:12 +0000

Digital cinematography has really taken some major leaps over the past few years, and cameras such as RED ONE, RED Epic and Arri Alexa have even made diehard film purists take notice as these cameras are now viable options for shooting major motion pictures. When properly exposed these cameras deliver pristine images, but perhaps a bit too pristine at times. Sometimes the image calls for a little texture like you would get with film, or maybe there's a need to give footage the look and feel of a particular era which film grain texture would be appropriate. Generally speaking to achieve this and make it look believable takes high end tools such as Arri Relativity. Cinegrain is a company that specializes in grain and film textures/effects and have been serving the high end commercial market for years. Recently they offered a product aimed at the indie filmmaker, named appropriately The Indie Filmmaker Collection. This collection is made up of various Super8, 16mm, and 35mm film grain, as well as dirt/scratches, head and tail leaders, flash frames, splices, specialty flares, and even looks created by combining various clips. The footage is in ProRes format, and there are actually two versions you can purchase. A 1080P ProRes or a version that has 1080P ProRes HQ as well as 2K ProRes HQ. They are priced at $299 and $499. The only catch - your project has to have a budget of $50,000 or less.

I will be posting examples here as I continue to experiment with this collection. There are various techniques that can be used to add the grain or other effects. Here is a page that explains those techniques.

Okay, here is an example of 35mm at 64ASA Daylight. The subject is the very talented Callaghan. Check out her work here. Keep in mind that Vimeo won't really show you the best look at this. For those who can view ProRes, please do a save as on this link.

NEXTO NVS2500

Steve Sherrick — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:03:49 +0000

The NEXTO NVS2500 is the swiss army knife of photo/video data backup while on location. It supports the following solid state media formats:

SDHC/MMC/MS
CF/MD
SXS
P2 (With included card adapter)

The interface is simple. Pop a card in, turn it on, and it will ask you if you want to copy the media. It also gives you the option to verify data, as well as a safe mode that will scan for bad sectors and only copy data to good sectors, at the expense of speed. Once your data has been copied successfully, it will inform you it's now okay to remove the media. For those working out in the field, where time is money, you'll appreciate the very straightforward interface.

Now, for some, data backup is not complete without a visual inspection to make sure there is in fact video files that will play flawlessly when they get back to the edit suite. NEXTO has attempted to do this with a preview option that gives you a small video window that will play back your clips. This works, but to be honest it's not fully implemented yet with all codecs. Keep checking in on NEXTO's website for updated support. They are continuously adding features and support for various formats.

You may be wondering what kind of hard drive support it offers. At the moment, it will support:

SATA 320 & 500 GB drives
SSD 128 GB Drives

My guess is more will be supported in the future. A 500GB SSD drive would be amazing. Warning, opinion on the way: SSD prices are still way too high, and capacity is still way too low. Let's go guys. Get those things out there in volume and let's start getting them into cool devices like the NVS2500.

Speaking of drives, there is a drive management section where you can:

Get info on how much data is on the drive
Do a self test to make sure everything is working okay
Delete temporary files that are stored when a backup fails
Format the Hard Drive

You're thinking to yourself, okay this is great and all but data doesn't exist unless it's in two places, so I probably need to have two of these in the field or I need a computer to transfer from the 2500 to a backup drive. Not necessarily. All you really need is a USB drive. The 2500 will sync to the USB drive, only copying files that have not been previously backed up. Brilliant! You can even copy concurrently to both devices if you so choose to do so. Even more brilliant!

Does it work with RED CF Cards? Absolutely. And does a very good job in my experience with it. In particular, it seems to have no issues with RED 16GB cards which are optimized to keep up with data rates of the RED. So far, every frame has come over just fine. Have not run into heat issues causing corrupt frames, something that has happened with other CF card readers.

You can attach the NVS2500 to a computer via:

FW400
esata
USB

The unit has an internal battery that can be charged via a 6.25v charger. You can also power it via a cigarette power adapter, a AA battery component, or via your computer's bus power (esata needs USB power or AC adapter)

The flexibility combined with the simplicity make this a solid choice for media backup in the field, whether you are a photographer or a videographer. With an SSD drive in it, you could practically attach it to your belt and be backing up data as you continue to shoot more. I've been very impressed with this tool and think it's worth the price, especially if you do video where it's not uncommon to have various formats used on a shoot.

For more details visit NEXTODI

To purchase, check out the fine folks at International Supplies

Reviews

Cinegrain Indie Filmmaker Collection

NEXTO NVS2500