2.5K camera

The market for high resolution digital cinema cameras is really expanding. It's really interesting watching right now, when there's so much competition. Prices are also falling, which I like! Right now, I know of two different 2K RAW cameras for about $3000. That's still pretty expensive, and they don't include lenses either, but that's still less than something like Canon's 5D MK III.

Below: A photo of Black Magic Design's 2.5K camera from their website.

http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/blackmagiccinemacamera/

It's really neat seeing what's happening right now. Another big plus of this camera is that it records to 2.5" SSDs, so recording media will be easily available, not proprietary, and it will also be easy and quick to transfer data.
Anyway, this isn't exactly related to the project, but it is of general interest. At the rate things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if we shot our next film in 2K! Maybe wishful thinking, but you never know...

Now those are some good fireballs:

http://mango.blender.org/random/smoke-simulation-tricks/

That's what we'll aim for in our movie!



It looks terrific, but I'm 70% through baking, and while it's manageable, it sure takes a long time!

720p vs 1080p

I really don't want to make this choice... But, it does have to be made. If I remember right I said a while ago that we would probably shoot this in 720p. However, I've been working with video, (from the 1D MK IV), and 1080p really looks drastically better than 720p. Some of this may be due to the fact that I'm viewing the video on a real screen, uncompressed from the camera, not a YouTube version on a smartphone. When we're done though, I want to be able to put this in our home theater and show it to friends without being ashamed of it (thought I'm sure I will be able to see / hear flaws)
The problem here is that we can shoot 24 or 30 frames per second 1080p, OR 60fps 720p. The 1080p looks much better, but it only takes 30 fps, so slow motion will be very limited. Right now, I'm thinking we will probably shoot the trailer in full 1080p to get a feel for it, and see if that will be feasible for the whole thing. It's possible that we could shoot the film in 1080p, and switch to 720p for the slow motion parts, but I don't think we'll do that.

Trailer coming soon!

(we hope)

O.K., we've decided to start work on a trailer for the movie. That will give us some idea of how things are going, and what will need to happen. It will be a good chance to test out a number of ideas and tweak our setup. We'll continue work on the script in general too, but focus will be shifted to the trailer, because we can test out how things will work with that.

A while back I had a little fun with some trailer templates from my Magix video editor. Here's one of them:

Improved camera

Now with aperture!

In case anyone's curious, it takes about 40 sec- 1 minute per frame to render with a node chain. (That's with my CPU overclocked) 

Concept Artwork

Click for full 2K! This is the current result of some of my work for this movie. This is supposed to be a lens for the satellite's camera. (the gray box at the bottom will be the camera / satellite) The boxes around the lens are supposed to be the controls for focus and zoom.

What do you think? I know it still needs a lot of work, especially texturing. What could be improved? I'm thinking of adding an iris behind the lens, but haven't yet.