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Panasonic AJ-PG50EJ is a portable field recorder with AVC-ULTRA codec and microP2 card compatibility, HDMI input/output, and data transfer over a network. The AJ-PG50 memory card recorder is compact and lightweight. It supports the AVC-ULTRA codec family, is equipped with two microP2 slots and a P2 card slot. Operates from either a battery pack or AC adapter. It also comes with a high-resolution QHD LCD monitor. The AJ-PG50 offers high speed and high quality at a reasonable cost, and flexibly and supports the most advanced AVC-ULTRA workflows. Available at the end of December 2014.

LightWave 2015: New Features, New Price!

The LightWave 3D® Group, a division of NewTek, Inc., opens the door to a new era of creativity for artists, animators and designers working in 3D with the release of LightWave 2015 3D software for Windows and Mac operating systems.

LightWave 2015 offers many new workflow enhancements and features that are designed to streamline a variety of pipelines—from visual effects, motion graphics, and game development to architectural visualization, product design, and advertising and marketing. With the release of LightWave 2015 comes new pricing: $995 (USD) for a full license and $495 (USD) to upgrade from LightWave 11.x or earlier.

"At Stargate Studios our VFX workflow for hit shows like 'The Walking Dead,' 'Grey's Anatomy,' and 'NCIS: Los Angeles' require massive stability and performance—LightWave delivers both," says Al Lopez, VP of Creative Services, Stargate Studios. "We are excited to add all of the new tools in LightWave 2015 to our pipeline because LightWave enables us to get the impossible done…every day."

LightWave 2015 introduces new features that are ideal for character animation, visualization, dynamic simulations, and more. It also extends the functionality of popular features like the Genoma character rigging system, Bullet Dynamics, dynamic parenting, rendering enhancements, and more.

New hightlights for LightWave 2015 include:

Bullet Constraints

Take control of dynamic simulations with new constraint types such as Point-to-Point, Hinge, Slider, Cone Twist, Spring and six degrees of freedom (DOF) constraint types. Whether it's a car rolling over a terrain with fully working suspension, or a rag doll falling down the stairs, constraints help make the movement believable.

Importance Sampling

Greatly improve the quality of scenes lit by GI and HDR images or background lighting. Importance sampling intelligently concentrates rays into important areas and eliminates the noise and splotches that arise from highly differing light intensities for cleaner, more predictable renders.

Match Perspective Tool

Whether matching plates or simply placing objects in photographs, matching the camera position and rotation can be a time consuming process. The new Match Perspective tool can quickly sync the LightWave camera to an original photo or plate.

Genoma 2 Character Rigging System

This rapid modular rigging system, which at the base level is a complete rigging development kit (RDK), can be used to quickly rig characters for animation without the need to set up complex rigs from scratch. Genoma 2 can create expert rigs and generate custom presets that perfectly fit into any character animation pipeline. It supports the use of Math Expressions and Scripts and includes new and improved human, feline, and arthropod preset rigs.

Edge Rendering

Intersection Edges can now be drawn where geometry intersects on the same object and/or separate objects, allowing for more creative control over cel rendering. Use Patch Border Rendering to make Sub-Division patch borders visible in the renderer with the click of a button. It is perfect for modelers who want to showcase their mesh topology combined with the full render. Edge Buffer can be used to render all edges into their own buffer, allowing for post-process manipulation in a compositing software.

64-Bit QuickTime Support

Loading and saving Quicktime movies is now possible to those using 64 bit versions of LightWave for Windows. LightWave 2015 includes new enhancements to the Viewport Preview Renderer (VPR) and introduces many new features and improvements such as Interactive Dynamic Parenting, Textured Falloffs in Modeler, Fiber FX, GoZ Multi-tool and Unity 5 support, and more. It also supports the latest interchange formats such as Alembic 1.5 and FBX 2015.

Pricing and Availability

LightWave 2015 for Windows and Mac OS is now available and priced at $995 (USD). Registered LightWave 11.x or earlier users can upgrade to LightWave 2015 for $495. Educational pricing is also available. Download a no-cost 30-day full-feature trial of LightWave 2015 at www.lightwave3d.com/try.

Press Release

Blackmagic Design announced that Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras were used to capture the first person point of view essential to the new suspense thriller film “Sympathy Said the Shark,” a new film executive produced by Zak Bagans, host and executive producer of the popular hit show “Ghost Adventures.”

Produced by LA production company Chicken Bear Productions, “Sympathy Said the Shark” is a dark thriller set around a love triangle that unravels over a single night, with all three of the main characters placed in deadly danger. The film aims to bring the audience right into the head of each character through point of view (POV) imagery. To capture this, Devin Lawrence, director of the film and long time editor on “Ghost Adventures,” and Mark Lafleur, director of photography and veteran of some of the biggest reality TV shows, including “Ace of Cakes” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo,” worked together to build POV rigs around Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras.

“This movie is all about the characters’ perspectives as they go through extreme circumstances. To get that visually and to get into the heads of the characters, we needed a POV camera that didn’t impede on the actors’ abilities to tell the story, that captured high quality imagery and that could be easily graded so we could build specific feelings and emotions into each POV shot. The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera fit perfectly,” said Bagans. With 75 percent of the movie shot from the lead characters’ point of views, Lawrence and Lafleur worked together to develop a new POV rig that would fit over each of the main characters’ heads and that gave a close up and personal view of what each character was going through. Shooting in ProRes HQ, Lawrence and Lafleur were able to easily take the footage acquired and move it to post production to add specific grades and color correction in DaVinci Resolve, and each character was given their own color scheme.

“The POV helmet rig was born out of necessity. My goal was to make the POV shots feel as real as possible, and Mark’s goal was to make them look as cinematic as possible. I wanted to be able to see the arms and legs and wounds of whomever’s POV we were in and allow the actors to interact directly so that their performances weren’t hindered,” said Lawrence.“When searching for the right camera, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera absolutely nailed all of our three main factors: cost, weight and quality. The camera is lighter than any DSLR I know of, which is very important when mounting it to a helmet that someone wears while performing long five minute takes, and the image has a distinctly cinematic quality that makes it feel more like film,” continued Lawrence. “For our prototype POV rig, we bought a motorcycle helmet off the Internet, drilled a hole and then hung the camera from a single Israeli arm. That was enough to know that we were on to something. From there, Mark personally took the rig from toaster to Terminator by attaching all kinds of gadgets and stabilization gear.”

“We wanted to overlap and hear and see things differently with each character. And we wanted a cinematic look that had lots of latitude and had to have a realistic skin tone. To do all of this, we built a rig that included 15mm rods, a remote follow focus, an HD video transmitter, a Bartech remote follow focus, a Paralinx Arrow wireless transmitter and a power source. And the rig also had to be lightweight, balanced and durable enough to survive stunts. All built around a small camera that gave us the highest quality images,” said Lafleur. “The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera gave us this as well as a huge amount of options for how we could build these rigs. We really pushed the latitude of each camera and got great results.”

“When the actors wore the rigs, you felt a visceral connection to what the characters were going through. The actors were acting with you, not just acting in front of a shaky rig held in front of them. We couldn’t have shot this with any other camera,” said Lawrence.

Press Photography

Product photos of Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera are available at www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/images.

About Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and film restoration software for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including stereoscopic 3D and 4K workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, United Kingdom, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. For more information, please check www.blackmagicdesign.com.

Panasonic announced new firmware update for the LUMIX G Interchangable Lens Camera, DMC-GH4. The firmware Ver.2.1 will enhance the performance and controllability with upgraded functions of HDMI output, which will be highly valued in professional video production. With this firmware, time code and recording control signal can be embedded to the HDMI output signal, when connected with the products of ATOMOS Global Pty. Ltd. or the products complying with the extended specifications of ATOMOS. Now both FHD at 30p/25p native or at 60p/50p is selectable to output via HDMI while recording video in FHD at 30p/25p. The Interface Unit DMW-YAGH will also be updated with the new firmware 1.1 to support these functional upgrades of GH4. Plus, 60i/50i (30PsF/25PsF) or 60p/50p is selectable for the output via SDI. The new firmware programs are scheduled to be released in December, 2014.

Blackmagic Design has released a Camera v1.9.9 update. This release contains new features for Blackmagic URSA camera, including:

New RAW 3:1
The first feature is a new compressed RAW format called RAW 3:1. The format will enable to record up to twice as much RAW footage using RAW 3:1 with great quality. This format will also be needed to record high frame rates on URSA. For example, you can record about 7 minutes of RAW on a 128 GB CFast card but 14 minutes if you use RAW 3:1. The great thing is that it is still 12-bit RAW.

URSA's frame rate is now 80 fps in 4K!
Blackmagic Design has also increased URSA's maximum frame rate to 80 fps in 4K and all existing URSAs will have this enabled when the software is updated. To shoot up to 80 fps, users will need to use ProRes or the new RAW 3:1 codec. Even at 80 fps using RAW 3:1, users can still record to single CFast card!

Variable frame rate settings
URSA now features two new settings: a Project Frame Rate and a Sensor Frame Rate. The Project Frame Rate is the native playback frame rate of the recorded footage and in the standard video frame rates like 23.98, 24, 25, 29.97 and so on. The Sensor Frame Rate sets up how fast the URSA sensor is running and can be selected from 5 to 80 fps in 1 frame increments. This makes it really easy to shoot off-speed in camera now. If you set the Sensor Frame Rate to 48 fps and the Project Frame Rate to 24 fps, you’ll end up with a 2x slow motion clip. The great thing about this is that the clip is tagged as a 24 fps clip so you can immediately play the clip back and view the off-speed effect in camera! It also plays back in the desired speed when you import the clip into Resolve without having to manually change any clip properties.

New Frame Guides and Dashboard
Blackmagic Design has also added the following frame guides that can be enabled on the 10” display as well: 2.40:1, 2.39:1, 2.35:1, 1.85:1, HDTV, 4:3, and Thirds. There is also a new URSA Dashboard view that can be toggled by the DISP button. This will allow you to display options for formatting the CFast card, turning zebras on/off and also the front SDI output overlays on and off. There are also added scrollable menus in URSA. For example, in the Display settings, you can individually adjust the brightness of each display or turn on or off the overlays on each screen or SDI outputs.

In-camera formatting
URSA now supports in-camera media formatting. This allows the user to format the CFast 2.0 cards in URSA. We recommend you to format your media in the cameras as they optimize file system for the best performance.