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éléments par Ian Lewis

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• 

  Hooray for Hollywood, or Lost in Translation? Movie-making with the Nikon D600

  Publié: décembre 27, 2012, 6:22am CET par Ian Lewis

  There has been a great deal of enthusiasm about making indie movies on Digital SLRs (and even some television -- Joe Wilcox of this parish reminds me that an episode of “House” was filmed on a Canon 5D, as was one of the BBC’s “Wallander” episodes). There are two main reasons for this enthusiastic adoption -- firstly, both camera body and lenses are incredibly low-cost compared to a conventional digital TV or movie camcorder, and secondly, they have full-frame (35mm size) sensors to give that shallow depth of field “film-look”.

  While I’ve followed all this with interest, I’ve never personally been fully convinced.

  The Task

  I’m in Vienna, Austria, as I write, and I’ve been using the recently-launched Nikon D600 to shoot a short piece about the Christmas Markets for our online TV program at www.coolcucumber.tv. So have I now changed my mind? Well, it’s a definite maybe.

  Let’s cut to the chase.

  • Am I converted to D-SLR movie-making? Not really.
  • Am I pleased with the results I’ve been getting? Yes, absolutely.

  First of all, remember that these cameras are designed for shooting still photographs, and for that purpose most reviewers seem to agree that the D600 is exceptional in its price-range. This is a fabulous D-SLR, but movies are different in several respects, and what follows is a personal reaction to shooting video with the D600.

  The Good

  Most important of all, picture quality is excellent. Movies are full HD 1920 x 1080 in 24p, 25p,or 30p, and if a 720p frame-size is enough for you, then you can shoot 50p and 60p, too.

  Since this camera has a 24MP sensor, movies only use a small part of it, and you can choose whether to shoot full frame (for that shallow depth of field) or in DX mode, (using the same sensor area as a normal D-SLR), which still gives you 1080p, but increases depth of field, and the effective focal length of your lenses by 50 percent -- so a 300mm telephoto becomes 450mm. 28mm becomes 42mm, so you lose at the wide end. But, hey, you can switch between shots!

  Vibration Reduction (with a VR lens) is very good. Don’t expect miracles, but if you have a pretty steady hand anyway, then you really can use the longer focal lengths hand-held.

  A very useful artificial horizon can be displayed on the live view screen, so that you can be confident that any wonky angles are deliberate.

  Generally, I found I preferred results with exposure set down about half a stop. This also  gives that extra bit of protection from clipping highlights, something that all digital camera are vulnerable to, however expensive, and however wide their exposure latitude. Once highlights are clipped, they’re gone forever; but you can often pull quite a lot out of the shadows.

  The on-board (mono) microphone is surprisingly useful for background and guide-tracks -- though very susceptible to wind noise. Fortunately there are 3.5mm sockets for mic (with 48v phantom power) and headphones.

  There are two SDHC card slots, so with 2 x 32GB cards (get fast ones) you can record for up to about 5 hours at best available quality.

  The Not So Good

  If you have the arms of King Kong, the eyes and powerful talons of a hawk and that useful third arm to hold add-ons, then this might just be the movie camera you’ve been looking for. Otherwise,  honestly, as a movie camera, any digital SLR is an ergonomic disaster area, compared to a conventional movie camera or a normal shoulder-mount broadcast tv camcorder. Video recording works only in live mode, so you have to use the LCD screen on the back of the camera as a viewfinder, which means holding the camera out in front of you. It’s not lightweight (mine is 2kg with lens) and with anything but a standard lens, it’s very front-heavy. Operating switches as well as holding the camera can put quite a strain on your fingers as well as your arms. The screen is quite bright, but even so it’s hard to see in bright sunlight, and difficult to be sure of focus.

  For this reason, whereas with a dedicated camcorder you would normally operate everything manually, it’s very difficult to work like that with the D600. The good news is that the automatics work well, provided you get used to what they’re going to do for you.

  

  For instance, automatic focus (which you have to trust) is generally good, provided that you set your focus at the beginning of a shot and leave it. There is a focus-tracking mode, but it’s not useable in shot. The servos make a terrible noise (recorded beautifully by the internal mic) and the focus hunts all over the place.

  On the other hand, I found that auto exposure can pull stop reasonably well during camera moves.

  So while it’s a great piece of equipment to grab and shoot stills with, you usually need to stop and set things up a bit before doing the same with moving pictures. Any subject whose distance from the camera changes is a challenge, particularly in FX mode with its shallow depth of field. Such action (even something as simple as somebody walking towards camera) needs to be rehearsed. So this isn’t the camera for reliably catching unpredictable action.

  What you really need is to have the camera on a tripod, a dolly, or a steadicam-type of harness, ideally with a focus-puller manually keeping things in focus. Also, if you have a zoom lens, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to do any zooming in shot. Which is no problem, but again, dictates a certain type of filming.

  The built-in mic is useful for atmosphere and background sound, but not really suitable for interviews or dialogue, so you need an external mic (3.5mm to XLR adaptors are cheap and easy to find), probably on a boom.

  So we already have three people operating this simple, cheap camera. Plus a Grip to push the dolly for tracking.

  Compression

  The quality recorded in the camera is subjectively very good MP4 at 25MB/s. But it’s not good enough for the big screen -- or for the technical standards of broadcast television, where a data rate of at least 50MB/s has become the minimum for full-program production. (These requirements are based, not just on what the pictures look like straight out of the camera, but how well they will survive post-production and the transmission chain, involving multiple stages of uncompression and recompression before reaching the home viewer.)

  

  So this video is fine for occasional shots and short sequences (even for broadcast, where you’re allowed up to 10 percent of a program originated at lower quality), and obviously fine for non-broadcast, small-screen use. But not for the big screen. I’ve compared Nikon D600 footage alongside material shot on a Canon XF300 -- at around $9,000, itself quite an inexpensive camera -- and while the Nikon pictures are definitely very good, there’s something indefinably “better” about the Canon pictures. (I’ve done the same comparison between the XF300 and pictures from HDCAM, and there the Canon is equally clearly, and subtly, behind. But then in both cases you’d hope to get some difference for all the extra money.)

  But there is (or will be) a solution to this particular problem. The Nikon outputs uncompressed HD through its HDMI port. At the moment, the picture is cropped by 5 percent, for reasons that probably made sense to Nikon at some point, but I hear that a firmware upgrade will solve this. Recording these pictures on something like Blackmagic’s (www.blackmagic-design.com) Hyperdeck will give you the technical quality you need. But out on the road it’s an extra cable and an extra thing to bolt on.

  Patterns

  One slightly worrying thing is the occasional appearance of moiré patterning in areas of very fine detail. It’s not too objectionable, but it’s definitely there. So far I haven’t had an opportunity to test whether this comes from the camera itself or the video encoding (I have no way of looking at the HDMI output where I am at the moment).

  Keeping it Alive

  When you’re shooting stills, a single battery charge often seems to last forever -- days, week, or longer. It’s different with video, and any serious shooting is going to need at least one spare battery, since charging takes quite a while. Based on my recent experience, I guess a single battery will probably give you half a day’s solid work. Definitely, by the second half of a day, you’ll be glad you have another available, even if you don’t use it.

  The Parade Moves On

  Further to all this, as far as indie movies are concerned, things are moving on rapidly. There’s now a choice of full-frame camcorders across the whole price-range from second-hand car to don’t-even-think-about-it. More significantly for D-SLRs, 4K is the new game in town -- four times the resolution of HD. Recent months have seen the launch of a number of comparatively reasonably priced 4K camcorders from Sony, JVC, Red and Canon. Certainly, if you want to future-proof your production (as far as that is ever possible) I’d say 4K is now what you have to shoot.

  But I Still Love My Nikon

  This has ended up sounding rather negative, but it’s not at all what I mean. I’m writing from one distinct perspective. This is a great and flexible camera. Terrific for stills, and for short video, non-broadcast video, or as a backup ‘B’ camera -- everything I hoped for when I bought it. Just that it hasn’t convinced me that D-SLRs are good for movies -- and a lot of my comments have to do with the ergonomics and practicalities of using any D-SLR for film-making. Your mileage will be different, and every decision depends on where you’re starting from – and how you got there.

  Photo and Video Credits: Ian Lewis

  Ian Lewis runs The Farnham Film Company (www.farnfilm.com), a small, independent film and tv production company in the UK. He has been following, using and writing about technology since TV news was shot on 16mm film.

  
• 

  What the world's poorer nations can teach YOU about technology

  Publié: novembre 19, 2012, 8:58pm CET par Ian Lewis

  In the last few weeks we’ve been bombarded with a series of really important new hardware or software announcements. Take your pick: iPad mini, Nexus 4 and Surface among many, many, many more. Commentary is relentless from so-called official pundits and overly excited users --what in the days of paper would have deforested an area of the planet the size of Brazil.

  You know what? None of it really matters. For all the noise about what these multi-billion dollar companies make, none of them has produced anything really new. We’ve seen no paradigm shifts. No Big Ideas. Nothing that will really change our lives in any way at all. It’s all been like putting racing wheels on the family car. Looks great, but doesn’t actually achieve anything real. Absolutely, our daily lives in the West have changed in extraordinary ways by this technology as compared to, say, 1990. But not 2012. Has the tide reached its high point? Does IT innovation really matter any more?

  You bet it does. But maybe not close to where you’re sitting. The picture looks quite different when you view it from a less familiar perspective. There are parts of the world where mobile and Internet technology really change lives for the better -- not in corporate reports, music on tap or cool games kind of a way. It's more of a life or death kind of a thing.

  Knowledge is Power

  Imagine that you live in a village in a poorer country -- maybe in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or South America. You’ve never been more than 30 miles from home; travel of any sort is an expensive luxury. You’ve no mains electricity supply. One of the things that makes you vulnerable to exploitation by the richer and more powerful is isolation and consequently ignorance. For example, ignorance of what people elsewhere are paid, of what the products of your own fields are really worth; of sometimes simple solutions to problems that can literally ruin your life. But give you the means to communicate with and learn from others, and life changes overnight. Knowledge is power not necessarily over others, but, more importantly, over your own life. I've compiled some examples.

  Peru. Ashaninka, an isolated village in Peru, has recently acquired a PC, satellite Internet -- and a generator. In a very short time, the villagers have used the equipment to sell their oranges to buyers in the capital, Lima; and to help in educating their children, at least one of whom is now at University in Lima.

  Kenya. A farmer whose crop was infected with potato disease found both a cure for the disease, and a buyer for the crop by searching the Internet at an Internet café in his local town. And now he owns a smartphone so he no longer needs the Internet café.

  Even a feature phone is enough to use the Kenyan money transfer service, M-Pesa, which has more than 17 million users in Kenya, most of whom don’t have traditional bank accounts. It’s much like a text-based version of PayPal -- to which most people don’t have access. The big plus for users is that the system allows long-distance payments, and acts as a trusted intermediary.

  MedAfrica is a website and a mobile app that offers a first aid manual, and helps people find their nearest hospital, look up details of drugs, or check up on their doctor's credentials.

  India. Although some of India’s cities have become technological powerhouses, the economy is still primarily rural, and by far the majority of people of the sub-continent still live in more or less isolated villages, many of them without mains electricity. Internet cafés in towns are revolutionizing the lives of local farmers. They have used the Internet to find going rates for jobs, or prices for crops to make sure that they are no longer exploited. They have been able to find out about support programs that mean they can branch out into new fields of work. They have been able to learn about crop diseases and how to prevent them, so that where only a couple of years ago, a whole community could be devastated by a disease, now they know how to prevent it taking hold. These are questions of survival.

  Although this can all seem quite simple stuff to our jaded and experienced eyes, just stand back for a second and imagine what your own life would be like without any Internet, any telephone, and a very limited radius of travel. The impact of these (to us) simple solutions is like knocking down a prison wall for others.

  End of the Desktop

  It’s interesting that a high proportion of these projects are based on mobile technology. That’s revealing of something else that we tend to forget -- the high infrastructure cost of getting a conventional desktop PC in place, powered up, and connected to a fixed-line Internet connection.

  So those who now proclaim the end of the desktop may be more right than they know. In a global sense, certainly outside big cities, many countries are skipping the desktop-and-fixed-line stage of computing evolution altogether.

  Good example comes today from China. Quoting a China Internet Network Information Center, On Device Research reports: "Mobile phones are now the most common way for people to connect to the Internet in China and over 50 percent of new Internet users, were from rural areas". Among 538 million Internet connected users, 388 million do so from mobiles. Directly from the report: "The emergence of smartphones under 1,000 yuan [$157, £100] sharply lowered the threshold for using the devices and encouraged average mobile phone users to become mobile web surfers".

  The examples I present above are uses of technology which occurred to few, if any, of the original developers of the mobile telephone, or the Internet -- even the World Wide Web; and while we, too, are using personal computing and communications in ways which were not envisaged 20 years ago, our big rush of excitement is over. I find the above stories much more interesting than news of yet another iPad or version of Windows.

  And I find it heartening that the famous (and usually mythical) “trickle-down effect” is actually working in this case: it’s because the rich West has bought so much of this technology, that it is now cheap enough for the world’s poorer nations to use it.

  Photo Credit: Spartak/Shutterstock

  
• 

  Tech tribalism leads to BAD computing decisions

  Publié: octobre 15, 2012, 7:26pm CEST par Ian Lewis

  Computing, and I use the term in the widest sense, has always been tribal to an extent. People have loyalties, and there’s nothing wrong with that. This year, tribes are called "ecosystems", but whatever the current label, looking around the Interweb it seems to me that tribalism is becoming more prevalent and more aggressive. It’s as if everyone stood on soapboxes with their fingers in their ears, shouting "LALALALALALALA", while at the same time (a good trick, this) yelling through a megaphone that theirs is the only way and anyone who doesn’t agree is just too stupid to be considered human.

  Famously, way back in 1994, the writer and thinker Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) compared computing loyalties to religions: Apple followers were Catholics who believed that they would find salvation through following the One True Path. Conversely, PC users, like Protestants, were obliged to find their own way through the many paths open to them, and not all would be saved. And (I guess) Linux users are the hairy prophets who come out of the desert proclaiming, "It’s really easy. Honestly. And these days you only have to scourge yourself with thorns once a week …"

  Tribal Warfare

  Divisions like this cannot be a good thing, and we can’t all be right. Why don’t we begin by admitting that there is no best ecosystem. They all have good points, and they all have weaknesses. It all depends on what you want to do. Because nobody and nothing is the best at everything.

  It used to be axiomatic that you looked at the problem (or need) first, identified the software solution that best fitted what you had to do and purchased whatever hardware you needed to run it on. Tribal loyalties turn that procedure on its head. If you decide on the platform you’ll use before you even know what’s available the danger is that in the end nobody is really happy.

  Multiculturalism Computes

  A couple of examples: a little while ago I was involved in setting up a small digital TV channel from scratch. The decision on equipping the edit suites was entirely software (not ecosystem) driven. We needed editing software that was capable of fitting in with broadcast television stations and facility houses, and which experienced freelance editors had also worked with. The obvious choice was Avid; but we felt we’d rather look at more cost-efficient alternatives.

  Although I personally have worked with Adobe Premiere Pro on Windows for some time, for the TV channel, we chose Apple Final Cut Pro, on Mac Pros -- because that was right for the problem we had at the time. Final Cut Pro is a great piece of software, but then so is Premiere Pro. (They’re extremely similar, partly because Final Cut was initially developed by one of the guys who had previously written Premiere for Adobe.) Final Cut was the right choice in that situation because there were simply more freelance editors around who had experience using Final Cut Pro than Premiere Pro.

  The office desktops, however, were Windows PCs, partly because it was easier to support Microsoft's operating system. But mainly because Windows software was what our employees were used to. In both cases the choice was made to provide the greatest compatibility with the surrounding environment. (And, though I have used PCs and Windows since the 1980s, the experience of trying this combination made me think very seriously about going for a Mac Pro on my own next upgrade cycle. Except now it seems Apple has binned the Mac Pro, and killed Final Cut…)

  PC Pluralism

  Another example. We started out running coolcucumber.tv, a principally Internet TV channel, using Windows media video on a Windows Media Server. This was because at the time we started (about three years ago) the picture quality for a given bandwidth was demonstrably better on Windows video, than on anything else -- especially when combined with Windows streaming server. The situation has changed since then, and the improved quality and popularity of H.264/MPEG4 has made it the obvious choice for streaming video.

  So we have replaced the Windows video with H.264/MPEG4 (re-encoded from the original masters, of course), and moved to a Linux server, because that’s what we need to give the widest accessibility to the video. (In particular, with the software we’re using, streaming to iPads/iPhones only works from a Linux server.)

  These are (small-scale) corporate examples, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do this for yourself. Next time you decide to upgrade your desktop, laptop, or other device, you could take a little time to look at what your habits and needs really are, and whether a different device might suit you better.

  Although we all have personal preferences, the most important thing is the overall picture, rather than an unthinking "well, it obviously has to be Mac, or Windows, or iPad or Android". In the end you might not change anything, but at least you will have looked with open eyes and an open mind.

  And finally… This year’s prize for flexibility of thought goes to the person of my acquaintance who recently, and reluctantly, acquired something that could run Microsoft Word to use alongside his 25-year old RISC OS Acorn machine. He made the decision because he works with so many others who used Word and needed the compatibility. Software-driven, see?

  Photo Credit:  myway2studio/Shutterstock

  
• 

  Let’s not blindly give every latest tech marketing prophet his profit

  Publié: juillet 29, 2012, 9:19pm CEST par Ian Lewis

  

  Another day, another tech product launch, and all those numbers that go with it. We just love numbers, don’t we? And generally the bigger the better. (Except in cases where they’re supposed to be small, obviously.)

  The numbers in hardware and software specs are useful tools, and it’s true that bigger numbers are often better. But those same numbers carry hidden dangers, too, and, like a burger that’s too big to be good for you,  that extra dollop of cream on your cake -- or the Italian town of San Gimignano, where each family just had to build a tower taller than all the others -  we can become addicted to the figures without thinking about what they all really means.  So let’s not blindly give every latest marketing prophet his profit, but consider our own health first.

  Look Before You Leap

  Not all changes for the bigger and the faster do what you think. Sometimes you need to look hard at what you really want. What am I on about? Let me start with a few examples from the field I know best, video and audio technology.

  I’ve recently written a couple of articles about the Samsung Galaxy S III, which packs an enormous amount of power and capability into a small package -- and I’m still very pleased with mine, a month on. It’s an amazingly capable device. Considering what it is.
  For example, it has an 8-megapixel camera. My nearly 7-year-old Nikon D70s only has a 6 megapixel sensor. Yet for serious use, the Galaxy, good though it is, doesn’t begin to rival the Nikon in terms of real sharpness and general image quality. Because the megapixel number is only part of the story. Much more important are the quality of sensor chip and lens. (Also, in this case, the compression used to store the images.)

  Another story to show the importance of lenses: a few years ago I made a number of television programmes using a Sony DSR570 camcorder, which then cost around $12,000 with a lens. The budget made it worthwhile buying the camera, but rather than use the lens that came with it, we threw it away and bought a better one for around $20,000. All the electronic bits of the camera were amazing, but there’s nothing to beat old-fashioned physical engineering for a good lens. That doesn’t come cheap, and, unlike most things to do with electronics, isn’t really getting any cheaper.

  The Galaxy SIII records very useful full HD video, at 1920x1080. But, although the numbers are there, as I’ve mentioned before, it would be foolish to say that picture quality compares with dedicated devices with larger sensors and, again, better lenses.

  Sound Thinking

  Something that affects almost everyone: sound quality.

  Nearly everything that has to do with audio seems to have incredible specs nowadays -- that is going by the numbers alone. Flat frequency response from 20Hz to 20KHz, often silly amounts of output power available. Lots of surround channels. And yet, and yet -- sound from your average computer or mobile device is not really hi-fi. Let’s be honest, often it’s rubbish.

  There are two main influences here. First, and possibly most important: no matter how good your digital devices are, you still have analogue ears, and with analogue devices and transducers (such as loudspeakers, headphones and microphones) we’re back in the realm of physical engineering again. The biggest crunch point is in the conversion from analogue to digital (if you’re recording) or the other way (if you’re listening).

  I was disappointed with the sound from my brand spanking new brand-name standalone CD player. All CD players are the same, right? They play digital CDs. Well obviously not. So I took the feed from the player’s digital output, which gives me the best the player was capable of -- straight from the disk with no mucking about -- and I fed this into an old DAT machine for digital to analogue conversion (DAC) and then to my hi-fi  amp. The difference, playing the same disk, was like lifting a thick woollen curtain. It was like coming into the same room as the music where previously you’d been listening from the bathroom next door.

  But all the numbers were exactly the same. The difference was in how well they were being manipulated.

  You can now buy downloaded files of music at studio master quality -- 24Bit, 192 KHz, which is way better than CD. But what are you going to listen on? Is your hardware capable of playing them properly? You might find that your software plays the music, but dithers the recording down to something much more like CD quality (16 Bit, 44.1 KHz) in order to be able to output on your soundcard or AV receiver. The only bigger numbers that have made a difference to you here are the negative ones in your bank account once you’ve paid for these high-quality tracks.

  Before Your Eyes

  A lot of number-escalation goes on in everyday hardware, too, to keep us buying new stuff we don’t really need. Yes, good stuff is getting less expensive, but I’m not sure of the real benefit of a full HD 1920 x 1080 display on a 15-inch laptop screen (I have one). Pictures and HD movies look great, of course. And program icons are pin-sharp, even through a microscope you’ll need to identify them. And lower-resolution pictures can look worse on such a display, because you have to blow them up to get them full screen.

  Superstore

  It’s great to have cheap, high-capacity hard drives, but do we need them? Although I fill up terabytes with video, my personal data (and I’ve kept pretty much everything for over 20 years) still fits easily on a 500MB portable drive. And if you do fill up a spanking new 3TB disk with important stuff -- well, it’s an awful lot of data to lose in one hit. Safer to use several smaller drives, I’d say.

  Soaking It Up

  Finally, although we seem to have given up on race to ever higher-processor clock speeds, we’ve replaced it with core competition. Again, this is all terrific to an extent; but far more influential than the number of cores, is the efficiency or otherwise of the software, which might need four cores only because it’s sloppily designed.

  But that’s another story: we have increasingly faster hardware, but we still find ourselves waiting while some programs to do their thing. There’s the other meaning of SaaS -- Software as a Sponge.

  You might think that the increasing use of mobile devices will encourage developers to think more efficiently, but a device with a quad-core processor and a 1280 x 720 screen (Galaxy S III, HTC One X etc) is more powerful than some current desktops, so it's more likely that the habits of efficiency that have so far been forced on mobile developers will begin to relax, and net gains for users will be much smaller and slower than you’d expect.

  It’s all magic. We can do so much more stuff now, that in many ways our world really has changed completely in the last 20 years. But it’s not as simple as “newer and bigger is better”. Don’t be suckered. Think about what’s best for you. Let the corporations look after themselves. That’s all.

  Photo Credit:  l i g h t p o e t/Shutterstock

  
• 

  Challenge Hollywood filmmakers with Samsung Galaxy S III [review]

  Publié: juillet 5, 2012, 8:25am CEST par Ian Lewis

  The Galaxy S III is a wonderful beast, whose 8-megapixel stills camera can also shoot video in full HD (1920x1080). So is this a triumph of technological democratisation? Is the Galaxy S III all you need to challenge the dominance of the Hollywood Studios and their ridiculous $200m budgets? After all, some movies are made on Digital SLRs these days. Read on to find out.

  The answer is a definite, well, maybe. As I’ve noted in my review, the S3’s pictures are surprisingly good, and while it would be a stretch to say you could shoot "The Avengers" on a smartphone, there is a lot you can do with this tiny camera. It could certainly be a terrific little helper for blogging, web-reporting and almost anything else you might want to put on the Internet, or produce for home or office use. Obviously it has limitations, even when compared to dedicated camcorders of the same price point, so here are a few suggestions and tips for getting the best out of it.

  Preparations

  There aren’t that many options that you change in the camera setup. (But note that some of them are only available by swapping the shortcuts on the camera screen -- touch the settings icon in the camera). Normally, I’d say turn off all the automatic controls and put everything on manual. But this isn’t a camera that’s meant to be controlled in that way, so here I’d suggest the opposite - leave everything on automatic, since it’s a real fiddle to change anything in the middle of filming.

  There is an option to overlay a grid on the viewfinder, and that seems like a useful thing to do, since it enables you to check that your horizontal and/or vertical lines are where you want them to be, and that you’re only producing arty sloping shots because you’ve chosen so to do, and not because you haven’t noticed that your horizon is on the piss (a technical term used in the British film industry).

  It is possible to adjust the resolution and shoot at frame sizes smaller than 1920x1080. I would suggest that you don’t do that, but always film at the highest quality. It’s easy enough to make things look rough later on, should you desire that particular aesthetic, but if they look rough right from the start, there’s nothing you can do to change it later. Garbage In-Garbage Out.

  Filming

  Standard advice is always to use a tripod. Of course, a great deal of production of all kinds happens without one, but it should always be a conscious decision not to use a tripod, with a reason behind it. Shots should be steady unless you have a  reason for them not to be. This is tough to do with a 130g hand-held device, it’s true, but I would say that your hands are rarely as steady as you think they are, so:

  • Always hold the camera in both hands.
  • If you can, rest on or against something (a wall, or a table, maybe). Or at least brace your elbows against your sides while holding the camera.

  Keep still. Yes, film is all about movement, but there is a temptation with something like this to swoop around like a demented budgerigar because (at the time) it looks cool and it’s so easy to do. It will also give your viewers a headache, or make them feel seasick, and you can probably do without the dry-cleaning bills.  Smooth, planned movement is good. Movement following action is good. Static shots are also good. You need a mix.

  Also, make sure you hold each shot long enough. Count to ten (at least) on a static shot. Count to five at the beginning and end of a move. You can always cut it shorter in the edit, but if you haven’t got it, you can’t make it up later. I once worked with a cameraman who had been a (very good) stills photographer. His trouble was that once he’d seen a picture, he thought that was it, which meant that what I ended up with was a series of – beautifully composed – half-second shots. It was tough to edit, I can tell you.

  Wide-open Spaces

  One thing that is a definite problem with this kind of camera is that you only have one lens, and it’s very wide-angle. That’s great when you’re close to your subject, but it means that landscapes or shots of even not very distant action or scenery are quite limited. You can see that funny lolloping dog 30 yards away. You can imagine a great close-up. But from where you are with the lens you have it’s just a tiny speck in the middle of your frame. The upside is that you can get some really interesting shots with people or objects large in the foreground. You can focus down to only a few inches from the lens, and because the lens is so wide, the depth of field is considerable.

  

  You do have a degree of control over where your center of focus is. A little square appears on the screen to show what you’re focusing on. You can drag the square to something else, which means you can make sure that your focus is where you want it to be, and even (within limits) focus on something very close and throw the background out of focus to give that big movie feel. It’s worth taking a bit of trouble over this, because things that look sharp on your phone screen might not look so crisp back home on your 60-inch TV.

  The Danger of Breathing

  The automatic focus is useful and effective, but if your hands shake, or you move around a lot, or the light keeps changing, it will keep looking for something to focus on. This can result in a "breathing" effect as the camera mucks around with the focus. The results won’t look good, but there’s very little you can do about it because it’s an intelligent camera, right? So if it decides it knows best, all you can do is wait until it’s had its say and try again.

  Exposure

  All digital cameras have two main weaknesses: handling high contrast, and low light. If picture areas are overexposed, there is nothing that can save them. The information is not there.

  

  This photo is overexposed

  If there’s not enough light, the camera adds gain, but the system is being driven hard and pictures will be noisy. However, given the choice, it’s better to underexpose a little rather than overexpose. It’s often surprising how much information can be teased out of the shadows -- though with that risk of increased picture noise.

  

  This photo is noisy

  As a rule-of-thumb, the less the camera costs, the more vulnerable it is to extremes of light and dark, and sadly the Galaxy S III is no exception. Well-lit, evenly-lit subjects will provide you with the best pictures.

  

  This photo is exposed just about right

  Sound Thinking

  Sound is the neglected kid brother of movie-making. But nothing leaves a more amateurish impression than thin and echoing audio even if the pictures are the prettiest imaginable. Now, obviously the Galaxy S3's microphone is built in to the phone and intended for close-up voice conversation and this can be a problem. If you do stick with the phone mic, then realize that what you will get will be fine for general atmosphere and background sound. It will be not too bad for voice recording within a meter or so of the phone/camera. But anything further away will very quickly become unacceptable.

  Solutions

  For field recording you can improve matters by using an i-Microphone  (intended for Apple devices, but reviews indicate that it should work on the S3). This doesn’t solve the main problem of the microphone being in fundamentally the wrong place, but it is a better quality microphone in the first place and also has a wind-gag.

  The real solution for best quality recording is to acquire a suitable adaptor such as this one from B&H Photo and use a professional mic on a longer lead. In general, the closer you get to the subject, the better the sound will be.

  Alternatively, you can plan right from the start to use the live sound only as background effects, and build up your soundtrack afterwards. Whatever you decide, please think about sound from the beginning.

  Afterwards

  Although it’s possible to edit the video files produced by the Galaxy S III directly, to keep the best possible quality, encode them into a digital intermediate format such as ProRes or Cineform. This isn’t the place for long technical explanations, but in a nutshell, camera files are optimized for recording and not for editing. Any transcoding to a different file format needs to be done with care, since the imperfections of one codec can be baked in and amplified by the imperfections of a different one. Digital Intermediate codecs are designed to minimize these problems and give a high quality end result (a so-called Digital Source Master) from which any desired output format can be produced.

  For straightforward cuts editing, a Digital Intermediate might be overkill and you can work with the camera files --  but render the final video out to the highest quality available. If you are planning any amount of visual effects or color correction, then you should seriously consider editing through a Digital Intermediate format.

  Whatever you do, and whatever your intended end-use, stick with the highest quality you can for as long as you can. That will give you the greatest flexibility for digital manipulation and final output quality. Whatever the intended end result, it will look better if it’s encoded from a high-quality original.

  Let’s get Technical

  What are you actually getting with the Galaxy S IIIs video? Examining a recording, we find the following: MP4/AVC (AVCHD), at 17MB/s, 1920x1080; 30.01 fps, 4:2:0 YUV. Audio 128Kb MP4-AAC, 48Khz taking around 130-150MB of storage space per minute.

  What does this mean? Well, for comparison, the lowest cost camera currently approved by the BBC for full-programme HD TV production, the Canon XF300 (around $9,000 including taxes) records MPEG2 at 50MB/s with 4:2:2 color sampling, and audio is uncompressed PCM at 48KHz. Storage space is about 640MB/minute.  And though the pictures this produces are amazing for the money, they still show as not quite there if you put them up against the results from, say, HDCAM camcorders costing ten times as much with lens. You really do get what you pay for.

  Putting aside the quality of the camera hardware and lens, the file format alone would preclude planned broadcast production with the S3. But do not despair. After all, every day we see news footage on TV produced with mobile phone cameras. If the subject matter is powerful and unique enough, then ideal technical standards become almost irrelevant. And we all remember the lo-fi superhit "The Blair Witch Project" (although it has to be said that it wasn’t quite the no-budget triumph it’s often made out to be. Very large amounts of money were spent by the distributors on post-production cleaning up.)

  So I’d say, if you have a strong idea and want to shoot it on a Galaxy S III, then go for it. Plan to use YouTube (and similar) as your primary outlet, but who knows who might see it there and where it might end up?

  Photo Credits: Cheon Fong Liew (top); Ian Lewis (other four)

  
• 

  Samsung Galaxy S III HSPA+ hands-on review

  Publié: juin 20, 2012, 5:48pm CEST par Ian Lewis

  I got my shiny new Galaxy S III about ten days ago -- my first phone upgrade for quite a while. Although I’ve been watching smartphone developments with great interest, I used my Nokia N900 for nearly three years. Nothing out there really looked much better. But suddenly the flagship phones of this generation seem to be a significant improvement over their predecessors.

  So was it worth the wait? Absolutely. There are plenty of reviews which give you all the numbers. This is a personal account of what it’s like to use the beast for real (with my contract committing me to it for two years).

  Unpacking

  The phone (mine is white, because that was what was available) arrives in a smartish white box, which would be perfect for a pet hamster’s coffin. Inside, the suave black lining will be familiar to anyone who’s ever unpacked anything from Apple. But, to be honest, this is a bit as if Samsung had heard about Apple’s packaging but never actually had seen it. Or as if they’re making a gesture they don’t really believe in. Still, we’re not buying a box.

  Apart from the phone there’s a (black) USB cable for data and charging, and a matching charger built in to an electrical plug-top. (Even Amazon supplies white Kindle cables when they’re trying to be smart.) There’s also a battery, and a set of earphones (white).

  Holding the Baby for the First Time

  White would not have been my first choice, but I believe in buying what’s available now, rather than waiting for something that’s promised "real soon". In fact, because the screen is so large, there’s no big impression of whiteness -- you almost don’t notice. Editor's Note: Samsung delayed the blue model because of manufacturing problems.

  The phone is large, but lightweight, and fits comfortably enough in my hands, which are not massive. It’s also very thin and weighs less than my old phone (130 grams instead of 180 grams). Partly because it’s so thin, the S3 slides quite easily into a pocket. Some reviewers complain Galaxy S III feels cheap and "plasticky". Well, without comparing side by side with the competition, it’s not the impression I have.

  The phone feels perfectly solid and grown-up to me, and I’m used to the truly chunky N900. As you’ll have read elsewhere, there are three real hardware buttons: a rocker volume control, a power switch, and the "Home" button at the bottom of the front panel. The other Android "back" and "menu" buttons, on either side of the Home button, are touch-sensitive and light up when available, being otherwise pretty much invisible.

  The touch buttons are very sensitive, and it’s unfortunately very easy to touch them by accident during normal handling of the phone -- with a variety of unintended consequences. It’s irritating, though I quickly get used to avoiding them most of the time. Still, if you’re incurably clumsy, you might want to try this in a store before you commit to buying it.

  Inside the enclosure, the micro-SIM card appears as if you would be able to swap it without removing the battery, but in practice, the battery is just thick enough to stop you. The neighboring microSDHC slot is clear, and although you have to take the back cover off the phone, you can swap cards without pulling the battery or even switching the phone off. Samsung says the phone will take a card of up to 64GB, and the camera defaults to storing stills and video on the card if it finds one installed. It’s worth paying a little extra for faster cards (say Class 10) if you plan to use the camera a lot, or shoot HD movies, since the cheaper cards won’t be able to keep up with the data being chucked at them.

  There’s a micro-USB socket for charging and data transfer, and a headphone/microphone socket. The supplied headset has a four-pole 3.5mm jack that includes the microphone, but you can plug a normal stereo headset in and listen to your music in stereo. The supplied charger is a 1 Amp charger. I tried various other chargers including a Nokia, a USB socket on a power board, and the PC, and they all seemed to work quite happily -- though I guess charging will take longer from lower-powered chargers.

  The screen

  Indoors the screen is beautiful -- good contrast, convincing color and bright enough to hurt your eyes on a blank web page. There are also a number of pre-set "looks" that adjust contrast, saturation, and gamma -- "Dynamic", "Standard", "Neutral", or "Movie" -- choose the one you like best. I found the automatic brightness setting was nearly always too dim, but that 90 percent of the time I’m comfortable with manually setting the brightness to about 35 percent.

  Outdoors is a different story. Even with the screen at full brightness, in common with most backlit screens, bright sunlight makes this pretty hard to use except for big button work like the phone and the camera. Shaded, or in shadow it’s fine, and you’ll have no trouble reading messages or maps and using the phone, but it’s definitely a more comfortable experience indoors.

  Smoothness

  The most wonderful thing about Galaxy S III is that its performance is so wonderfully smooth. There’s no hesitation about swiping, scrolling or switching screens (there are seven home screens). It’s the way it should be. And it’s the way all devices will be in a year or so, but haven’t quite been until now. At last the hardware -- and software -- has grown to the stage where it can handle everything we want our phones to do. (Please don’t say iPhone to me. What I mean is that all phones will be this good, because it’s the way it’s supposed to be -- what we’ve all been waiting for.)

  Connectivity

  Samsung provides a freely downloadable program called Kies to sync the phone with your PC or Mac. Personally, having tried it out, I prefer to go without. Connecting the phone via USB loads the necessary drivers in Windows (without Kies) and the phone appears in Explorer as a music device -- but you can still explore the phone and the SD card and move files about as you can with any drive.

  You can sync contacts and calendar through Google or Activesync. You can also connect to your desktop using Bluetooth, or the built-in "direct wireless" connection, and there’s something called S Beam that lets Samsung devices talk to each other.

  The phone also has NFC, so you can empty your bank account without feeling a thing, and will share files via DLNA. Tethering is available through WiFi or Bluetooth, and is dead easy: simply select the appropriate tick-box in the phone settings. I used the phone as a wireless hotspot and connected my Asus Transformer Android tablet in less than a minute; no need to root or hunt through Google Play store for weird apps. I know this is part of Ice Cream Sandwich, but manufacturers have to play along for it to work properly.

  S Voice and Smart Stay

  Two little refinements that Samsung makes a fuss about in their publicity: Smart Stay will keep the screen lit if the front camera sees you are still looking at it; and S Voice is Samsung’s answer to Apple's Siri. Well, I can only speak for myself, but if these are your reasons for buying the Galaxy, you might like to try them out first.

  Smart Stay never seems to recognize that I have a face, and S Voice -- even if it correctly understood me -- produces some very strange results. I ask for pubs in Farnham, England (where I live). S Voice correctly shows the question on the screen and gives me an excellent list of bars in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Voice search on Google is much more impressive, but I’ll stick with typing for now.

  I certainly don’t feel like trusting S Voice with voice-controlled dialling and texting. But inevitably this will suit some people better than others, and you may have the perfect voice and intonation for it. If you really need voice control, it’s certainly worth trying it out to see for yourself. Editor asks: Could it be your accent, Ian?

  Camera

  The Galaxy S III camera is impressive. It’s probably the first phone or compact camera I’ve encountered that does not overexpose everything, so, especially on the S3 screen, pictures look detailed and the colors rich, though not over-saturated. However, the 8-megapixel shot is compressed to a very squeezed 3MB on the SD card, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to change that -- so a lot of detail is being thrown away, and this shows when you zoom in on details at 200 percent or more on a big screen. It’s an excellent casual camera, but don’t throw away your digital SLR quite yet.

  

  Photo taken with Samsung Galaxy S III

  Usefully, you also have burst and HDR modes, so the camera can automatically take a sequence of shots from which you can choose the best; and in HDR mode will take a number of different exposures and combine them to give you a High Dynamic Range result. All this is excellent and useful stuff for the kind of rapid, ad-hoc use that this camera is likely to encounter.

  Movies

  You can also film mp4 movies in full HD (1920x1080). The results are impressive, even in high contrast scenes, but, again, you have to be realistic about what you’re getting. Movies on the S3 take about 150MB of storage space per minute. (This might sound like a lot, but consider that, compressed with a professional Digital Intermediate format such as ProRes or Cineform, HD footage uses 1GB for each minute, and uncompressed HD needs 8GB to 10GB per minute.)

  Movie playback on the screen is excellent, and, since you can squeeze a whole movie at watchable quality into around 1GB to 1.5GB of your storage card, you no longer have to worry what the airlines are offering on that long flight -- as long as your eyes are good enough.

  Audio

  Music playback quality with the supplied headphones is perfectly acceptable, and a lot better than many supplied headsets I’ve heard. I found it a little bright-sounding, but that’s a good thing from a phone point of view, since voice frequencies are emphasised. Overall I’ll be quite happy using this as my main music player when I’m travelling, possibly using my slightly more expensive AKG headphones, but the Samsung ones are usable.

  I listen with Sennheiser HD600s, which are really quite expensive, to judge the sound of the device rather than the headset. It won’t blow your socks off or threaten any HiFi manufacturers, but the overall experience is enjoyable enough for what it is.

  Phone

  You’re not actually going to make phone calls with this are you? It’s a good phone. Voice quality is good. Signal sensitivity seems average to good. You can set the hardware buttons to accept and end calls if you’d rather not wait for the screen to light up, but the lag is minimal on using the software buttons. Interaction with contacts, rapid availability of the keypad in the middle of a call, the speakerphone -- all these are better and snappier than I’ve often experienced. Text messaging, too, has no surprises and works well.

  Battery Life

  Battery life is the thing that seems to raise the most complaints with most smartphones, and in other reviews and comments the Galaxy S III doesn’t escape. If you have everything on -- WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, GPS -- turn the screen brightness up and play games solidly, then don’t be surprised if you’re running for a charger after half a day. However, I do an experiment: with the screen turned to 35 percent as mentioned above, Bluetooth and GPS off, WiFi and/or cellular data on only when required --- collecting email regularly, web surfing, installing programs, getting maps -- and switched off when I no longer need it.

  I also read books with the Kindle software for maybe three hours, listen to music for an hour, take a few photographs, and make about 45 minutes worth of calls. After 48 hours, the battery is still at 30 percent -- and I leave the phone in standby overnight. So it can be done. It seems to me that expecting to charge a device like this every night and needing to do it every couple of days is very little sacrifice for the truly astonishing amount of power that it contains.

  Prices

  SIM-free in the UK, the phone is selling for around £500/$750 including taxes. With a two-year contract including call and data package the Galaxy S III is generally on offer at £31 to £35 a month (say $45-$53). Except for one offer on T-mobile through mobiles.co.uk where I found mine for £26/$39 a month. So that was pleasing. These rates are more or less the same for the S3 as for the HTC One X, and I agonized over the choice for a couple of weeks.

  Galaxy S III: 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display (306 ppi) with 1280 x 720 resolution; 1.4GHz quad-core processor; 1GB RAM; 16GB, 32GB or 64GB storage, expandable with microSD card; HSPA+ 21Mbps (850/900/1900/2100); 8-megapixel rear-facing and 1.9MP front-facing cameras; LED flash; zero shutter-lag; 1080p video recording; accelerometer; ambient-light sensor; gyroscope; GPS; proximity sensor; digital compass; NFC, Bluetooth 4.0; WiFi N; 2100 mAh battery; Android 4.0 and TouchWiz "nature" UI. Measurements: 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, 133 grams. US models have dual-core processor and 4G LTE.

  From everything I’ve read, and the limited hands-on experience I had with the One X, I don’t think anyone will be disappointed whichever choice they make. Why did I go for the Galaxy S III? I did prefer the changeable battery and the ability to add storage capacity (though I’ve never run out of space on my N900, with 32GB built in, and the original battery is still fine).

  Otherwise, it was purely an indefinable feeling of preference. I still have no reason to recommend one over the other for anyone else.

  Editor's Note: This is the second of two reviews this week, as the first Galaxy S IIIs go on sale here in the United States. However, these reviews cover the international models, which offer faster processors but no LTE. Our American readers interested in reviewing the US model should email joe at betanews dot com.

  Photo Credits: Ian Lewis

  Ian Lewis is a writer and filmmaker based near London, England. He has relied on personal computing in his professional life since the Commodore 64 was cutting edge. He has just finished work on the latest edition of coolcucumber.tv