Journal

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We Heard Music

I had pleasure to shoot formal profile photo if baritone Inoue san in Shinjuku park. This one turned out to be the best.

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Important Thing

Probably all would agree that equipment management is crucial for working photographers. It’s not very professional to arrive to set and notice your battery is empty or even worse, missing.

Canon’s camera manual advices you to make test shots before important shoots, or even take camera to be checked up by Canon’s authorised service professionals for check-up. Sound advice, I say.

I have a principle to always have backup for everything, including the camera body. Even though modern DSLRs have sensor cleaning mechanisms, it is possible that something gets to the sensor, piece of hair or skin for example. Bulb blower is a must have, but sometimes even that doesn’t help. Bring extra body, just in case something goes wrong. And camera’s shutter has always a limited lifespan anyway, so sooner or later it’s going to break. Extra camera body might save your day and reputation.

And after the shot, take super good care of that memory card. It’s like your digital negative. Now that we have tools like iPad, it’s very handy to have one of those camera connection kits (especially with Retina display iPad) with you. It’s great for on-location previews and backups.

There are some theories that large memory cards might be more prone to failure than smaller ones. I am still shooting with 16GB card and it’s unlikely that I would ever get larger card than that. And if you split the shoot to two cards, even if one of the card fails, you wouldn’t lose everything. So far, I have never had memory card failing on me, but I have heard many horror stories.. especially after someone has shot a multi-million-yen wedding.

Rather than deleting photos from memory card, I would recommend formatting it. I have heard this reduces the chance of getting some kind of (eh, I don’t really know what I’m talking about) logical error in the data of the disk.

So, the lesson here is that pro or semi-pro photographer must take very good care of his/her gear. That gear is probably expensive (and if you are sports photographer VERY expensive), and it’s your lifeline really, much like parachute is for skydivers.

If you do pro shoots daily, my advice is to keep every necessary item in your camera bag always when you are in home or studio. Then you will get into the habit of never forgetting anything, and basically just recharge batteries and format memory cards in advance, and then take that bag and you’ll be ok.

Good luck for shooting!

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X100 and large memory cards

I have recently noticed strange behavior with my Fujifilm Finepix x100.
If I import the photos with iPad connection kit or memory card reader to my mac, and then put the card back to the camera without formatting it (in camera), the camera will take several minutes to start up.
The card is 16gb Sandisk and I have updated the firmware of my x100 to the latest one.
If anyone know how to solve this issue, I’d be really glad.

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My little Final Cut Pro X Review

Recently I have been editing the material I caught in Jeju in my new favorite tool, FCPX.

I really love the workflow in Apple’s new version of Final Cut Pro. The simple workflow makes a lot of sense to me. It’s so easy to learn and use that there’s almost no need for a manual.

I have no intention of going back to Premiere.

And FCPX really flies. By default settings, FCP does effects rendering in background, which is really cool; take a cup of coffee and when you return, you see the video is ready for smooth playback. Exporting is GPU accelerated which is wonderful, wonderful thing.

As a nice touch you can now just quickly drop in cross-dissolves in both audio and video; the same thing works for audio as a crossfade. There are many nice little touches like that all over in the application which gives the impression that the people who created it have actually thought about the needs of the video editors.

And VST & AU audio effects work fully with this application which is excellent thing; with most used video scopes and audio metering this really is fully featured video editing application.

It’s really easy to make a watchable DVD straight from FCPX although the process doesn’t give you much options regarding letter-boxing or fine tuning of menus. It would be nice to see some kind of mini-DVD Studio Pro bundled with this application. So It’s still necessary to have Toast installed if you intend to do any serious DVD authoring.

And it’s real cheap. Costing less than 300 dollars it’s a bargain, and with App Store you can now legally install it in multiple machines. Makes a lot of sense for small editing studios with multiple workstations.

There are however couple of things that I’d like to see fixed. One is that often the UI doesn’t refresh always properly when working in timeline. And sharing to Vimeo or Youtube works unreliably despite my fast optical (internet) connection. And if you unlink audio it seems impossible to relink it (I might be wrong, if I am please teach me).

And broadcast monitoring doesn’t work unless you have Lion installed.

Overall, I find FCPX joy to use. I can recommend this to anyone who has upgrade plans in mind.