Author Adam Wilt

Adam Wilt

Adam Wilt is a software developer, engineering consultant, and freelance film & video tech. He's had small jobs on big productions (PA, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", Dir. Robert Wise), big jobs on small productions (DP, "Maelstrom", Dir. Rob Nilsson), and has worked camera, sound, vfx, and editing gigs on shorts, PSAs, docs, music vids, and indie features. He started his website on the DV format, adamwilt.com/DV.html, about the same time Chris Hurd created the XL1 Watchdog, and participated in DVInfo.net's 2006 "Texas Shootout." He has written for DV Magazine and ProVideoCoalition.com, taught courses at DV Expo, and given presentations at NAB, IBC, and Cine Gear Expo. When he's not doing contract engineering or working on apps like www.adamwilt.com/cinemeter, he's probably exploring new cameras, just because cameras are fun.

Acquisition

9 Jun 2013 Adam Wilt Sony NEX-FS700 in the Raw

At NAB 2013, Sony announced the raw upgrade for the NEX-FS700, allowing this $7500 camera to send raw 2K and 4K video to external recorders. In the middle of May, Sony sent me a prototype raw-enabled FS700 camera, an IFR5 raw adapter, and an AXS-R5 recorder. After ten days of frantic shooting, grading, and editing, Art and I presented “FS700 in the Raw” at Cine Gear Expo. Most of what Art discussed he’s written about here; what follows is my part of the presentation.

Post Production

10 May 2013 Adam Wilt OS X: Fixing AVCHD media to avoid the dreaded “CANNOT OPEN”

If you’re using OS X and you copy AVCHD media folders to a NAS (network-attached storage) or a case-sensitive disk, you may run into problems: opening the media in 10.8’s Finder gives you “CANNOT OPEN” instead of a clip browser, FCP X can’t see the clips, and so on. Fortunately, you can fix this.

Show Reports

27 Apr 2013 Adam Wilt NAB 2013 Reflections

In Ye Olden Days, every part of the production, storage, postproduction, and transmission chain was built around analog hardware following well-defined standards: 3.58 MHz subcarrier, 13.5 MHz digital sampling; format-specific tape decks, NTSC II encoding and OTA transmission. Moving to HD required replacing all of that with something new.

Now? Sensors and displays are hardware, but the stuff in the middle is a string of ones and zeroes. There aren’t hardware vision mixers any more, just T-handles driving encoders that tell DSPs what proportion of channel A to composite with Channel B. A hard drive doesn’t care if it’s storing 720p, 1080i, 1080p or 2160p, or whether the images refresh at 23.98 Hz, 50Hz, or 59.94Hz. You can wrap anything in a broadcast transport stream; it’s just bits.

Canon EOS

4 Apr 2013 Adam Wilt Quick Look: Canon EF-mount Cinema EOS Lenses

When Canon lent me and Art Adams a 1D C and a C500 for review, they also left us three cine primes and a compact cine zoom, all in EF mount. Here’s a quick look at these lenses.

Canon EOS

4 Apr 2013 Adam Wilt Quick Look: 2K/4K Recorders for the Canon C500

Quick Look: 2K/4K Recorders for the Canon C500 So you’ve gone and booked a gig with the Canon EOS C500, and you wish to partake of the camera’s detail-rich, uncompressed 2K or raw 4K goodness. You’ll need something to record that on, as the C500 doesn’t capture 2K or 4K internally. The two most common choices for Canon-compatible, uncompressed /…

Canon EOS

4 Apr 2013 Adam Wilt Review: Canon Cinema EOS C500

The US$26,000 Canon EOS C500 joins the $16,000 C300 and the $6,500 C100 as the Big Daddy of Canon’s Large Single Sensor cine cameras. All three cameras share the same Super35mm-sized 4096×2160 sensor, the same general body design, and the “Canon look,” but diverge in their recording formats and output capabilities. The original C300 records 8-bit, 4:2:2 1080p using the Canon XF codec, and offers HD outputs on SDI and HDMI. It pioneered the “potato-cam” form factor, with a superb side handgrip and a removable, tilt-and-swivel monitor unit. The C100 is a simplified AVCHD ‘corder with the same great handgrip, an integrated LCD in place of the monitor unit, and HDMI output only (no SDI). Read More…

Acquisition

4 Apr 2013 Adam Wilt Review: Canon EOS C500 HD/4K LSS Cine Camera

Canon EOS

19 Mar 2013 Adam Wilt Review: Canon Cinema EOS 1D C

In the beginning… there was the Canon 5D Mk II. It wasn’t the first HD-capable DSLR, but it was the first one good enough for serious work. Once Vincent Laforet’s “Reverie” went viral, there was no putting the large-sensor, low-light, super-shallow-depth-of-field genie back in the bottle—no matter how soft the images, how prevalent the aliasing, and how much bother it was (for the two years prior to firmware version 2.0.3) to deal with 30p images in a 24p world.
Fast-forward five years: Canon’s EOS-1D C, announced at NAB 2012, is now shipping. It’s a full-frame DSLR with an 18 Megapixel sensor, full-frame and crop-mode HD recording, and true 4K at 24fps: 4096×2160 pixels. Yep, 4K in a DSLR package. And it’s only… $12,000.

Acquisition

19 Mar 2013 Adam Wilt Review: Canon EOS-1D C HD/4K DSLR

Fast-forward five years: Canon’s EOS-1D C, announced at NAB 2012, is now shipping. It’s a full-frame DSLR with an 18 Megapixel sensor, full-frame and crop-mode HD recording, and true 4K at 24fps: 4096×2160 pixels. Yep, 4K in a DSLR package. And it’s only… $12,000.

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