Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/983981
www.postmagazine.com 6 POST MAY 2018 BITS & PIECES LOS ANGELES — I have been working with Canon since they entered the professional cinema market, when the video function on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II became an unexpected craze in the cinema world. When Canon came out with the C300, their first cinema camera, followed by the C500 and C300 Mk 11, the cameras were embraced, especially among documentary shooters. For me, being on the short side, the ergonomics of that camera were tough for me when shooting handheld. It was hard for me to see the little screen and the camera could never feel balanced no matter which accessories and viewfinder I added. The vertical rather than horizontal design of the camera may have been better for taller cinematographers who cradle the camera on their waist. I learned with cameras on my shoulder and prefer that kind of form factor to this day. When I first tested the new C700 (with a Full Frame sensor), I was delighted to see that Canon had listened to working DPs and made us a shoulder camera! It's very ergonomic and lightweight. The menus are intuitive and accessible. When I was shooting the demo short, A Dishful of Dollars, I needed to go from Steadicam to dolly and back again — it was a very quick conversion between the two, a huge advantage when the sun is going down and there is still a lot more work to do. The full frame sensor allowed me to use some of my favorite lenses. For exteriors, I chose Hawk Anamorphic Primes and Zooms, for their good flare characteristics and sharp images that were not too clinically perfect. I also used Angenieux Anamorphic zooms. On the interiors, we went with the spherical format. I used Leica Thalia primes as well as Zeiss zooms, all of which covered the full sensor. While the C300 series has mostly been used in documentaries, I feel that Canon's full frame camera has a good chance to be embraced by the film and television markets. — By Nancy Schreiber, ASC HANDS ON: CANON'S EOS C700 FULL FRAME CAMERA STUTTGART, GERMANY — Vicon (www.vicon.com) has announced the official release of Shōgun 1.2, the latest update to the leading motion cap- ture software for film, broadcast and games. Shōgun 1.2 arrives with 11 new features and improvements, including SDI video support, custom prop and skeleton solving and an improved Shōgun Post workflow that will help users deliver improved skeletal data in a matter of hours. "Being able to solve and animate directly onto a game or film rig using Shōgun has been our number one feature request," says Tim Doubleday, VFX product manager at Vicon. "Users want to be able to see their characters in real time, in engine, without the need of additional retargeting software." With Shōgun 1.2, mocap teams can add and record up to two HD SDI vid- eo camera devices for easy overlays of 3D footage. Blackmagic cameras and capture cards are now supported, with more options planned for the future. There are a number of other new features, including the ability to create custom skeletons from meshes within Shōgun Post. Newly created custom rigs, complete with mesh and textures, can be loaded into Shōgun Live and applied to the capture pipeline, allow- ing game and film rigs to be driven directly using Vicon's robust full- body solver. Shōgun Live now supports prop creation with mesh and gives users the ability to modify the position and ori- entation, which ensures that elements like virtual cameras line up exactly. The Post workflow also now allows artists to validate skeleton solves in Maya and MotionBuilder, through seamless exporting of undistorted video and camera positions via FBX. VICON LAUNCHES SHÖGUN 1.2 SANTA CLARA, CA — AMD (www. amd.com) and Adobe (www.adobe. com) announced a new solution to meet the demands of 4K and 8K video workflows that enables seamless editing of popular video formats, accelerating the production process while giving editors a high level of control of their projects using high-resolution, uncompressed foot- age. A 2018 NAB Show launch, the new version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC includes native support for AMD Radeon Pro SSG graphics, a solution that combines the performance and capabilities of AMD "Vega" GPU ar- chitecture with 2TB of NVMe storage integrated onto the graphics card. Together, Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG represent a solution for high-resolution video production, supporting 4K and 8K footage in popular native camera formats, including Arri Amira, Canon XF and RAW, Panasonic AVC and P2, Redcode RAW and Sony XDCAM, XAVC and RAW. Working directly with these source formats typically requires extraordi- nary computational performance and memory capacity to decode them in real-time. The Adobe and AMD work- flow reduces the CPU and memory bottlenecks traditionally encountered, allowing editors to work with uncom- pressed visual fidelity. Most productions today film in high resolution — 4K or 8K. Yet, according to AMD, there has been no effective way to edit multiple streams of that footage at full resolution. Editors have been forced to do their work with proxy files rather than the original high-resolution footage, transcoding to lower resolutions that are more easily managed by most workstations. With the combina- tion of Adobe Premiere Pro CC and Radeon Pro SSG, editors can now work with multiple streams of 4K or 8K footage at full resolution in an uncompressed format as smoothly as they could with lower-quality proxy files. The solution reduces CPU utili- zation and eliminates the burden on local memory, allowing edits to foot- age while preserving the base cache if anything needs to be reverted or changed, and serves as a persistent cache that can be moved from work- station to workstation as needed without having to reload footage. AMD & ADOBE ANNOUNCE 4K/8K VIDEO PRODUCTION SOLUTION Nancy Schreiber AMD at NAB