What a day… firstly at 10am this morning I was in the HUB which is a very media savvy building just across from BBC Scotland, there I was introduced to AVID’s latest editing software Media Composer 6, this was an interesting seminar produced by CVP, Glasgow.

George Fox from CVP took us through a slide show giving us the updated information of everything Composer 6 is capable of. During the morning Deepraj Sandhar, AVID Application Specialist walked us through “Artist Colour” a colour grading desk.

We broke for tea and coffee at around 11.30am where a lot of networking got done, Colin and Danny from CVP were also on hand for advice. The morning was attended by 29 people all in the media business.

My question was “Why should I spend a further £2000 on an AVID system” the reply was “Because AVID has a future” that was an obvious dig at Apple and to be quite honest quite rightly so, FCP-10 ver 10.0.03 came out yesterday with the promised multicam addition and broadcast monitoring output though all the 3rd party developers are still playing catch up. My own Matrox MX02 MAX have not even bothered to mention the new update on their web site let alone have drivers for 10.0.03.

AVID is good but if like me you are Mac driven then the one major flaw with Composer 6 comes after the edit…you can’t produce a DVD on your Mac it has to be a PC and that one hurdle stops me in my tracks from even considering AVID as a serious contender in my search for a new Mac based edit system.

Lastly when I got home my new baby had been delivered the Canon C300 and after some playing and tinkering I saw the pictures…STUNNING. My thanks to John Preston for providing me with one of the first Canon C300s in Scotland and yes I am buying it before you ask…I now have the luxury of ND filters, Canon lenses that focus clockwise, 4:2:2 and 50MB/s recording and pictures to die for.

I will be producing one of the first “user” reviews all next week and hopefully have it edited before I go down to BVE in London.

Everyone thinks that shallow depth of field is part and parcel of the film world but not everyone was happy with SDoF.  When one of Hollywood’s biggest directors Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane a film made in 1941 which was not only directed by Orson Welles but stared the very man himself, director Welles insisted on having a large depth of field for many of his shots.

This gave the crew a nightmare as they had to bring in far more lighting when Orson decided his next shot was to be filmed at T11 or f11 to you and me. T11 in those days ment blasting the set with light in order to allow the iris to stop down to f11, if nothing else things must have got very hot indeed.

If on the occasion enough light was not the answer they would use a split lens to give them two seperate depths of focus now this was tricky as you had to make sure your foreground actors and background actors never crossed the “invisible” line.

As an example you would use the edge of the door as an invisible line then pop on the split lens giving you two separate focusing fields.

As you can see the actors could not move from that position or the effect would be ruined. So you see it’s a savvy director who decides not to follow the rest of the field and give the viewer a visual experiance that in those days was new and different to the norm.

Think out of the box like Orson Welles did seventy years ago, the internet is a great tool but many of you are trying to emulate and be influanced by what you see on YouTube, Vimeo etc. The best films or videos today are fresh, free of influances from what others do and say, it does not have to be the “Film Look” for everything you do, video and its larger depth of field still has a place, it’s the power of your story that matters the tool to do the job is secondary to that.

My thanks to Norrie for the background info.