My New Favorite Lens

   Hey guys... Sorry it's been so long since my previous post. I've been busy with multiple things, some in the film world, some not. And you'll get to hear about those events in the posts following. But right now I want to talk about my what I might call... my new favorite lens. My Canon FD 24mm f/2.8.

   Since I shoot on a Crop-Sensored camera, it's harder to get a wider shot. This lens isn't particularly wide on a crop. But at 38.4mm after the crop, it's wider than my new second favorite lens, Canon FD 50mm f/1.4, which equates to about 80mm on a crop. So it is a little bit wider, and that opens up things I could shoot vastly. I can be in tighter quarters and get a more pleasing shot, and since it's a wider lens, it a lot easier to manually focus.



  This shot is amazing. And currently, I could have only gotten it with that lens.

   That's it for now. I'll try to update the blog more often and get you guys more current media to enjoy. This is George saying, ¡Adios!

New Lenses! Part Two

Hey George here!

   There are a lot of things happening over at Tem.Teen Studios right now, and I wasn't able to put up a post earlier in the day. But I'm here now for part two of my new lenses series. If you haven't read part one, you can do that by clicking this sentence. So here is the rest of the review.

   Canon FD 50mm f/1.4

   For starters, 50mm is THE standard lens focal length. I honestly love that I now have a lens that is of a large aperture & a standard focal length. Now since I'm shooting on a crop-sensored camera, it's really about an 80mm. But I'm hoping within the next year or two I'll be shooting Full-Frame or Super 35 (which is only slightly larger than APS-C, but you get what I'm saying):

I LOVE this lens. Super sharp, super crisp, super awesome!

   Canon FD 300mm f/4

   My favorite telephoto lens... HANDS DOWN! Take a look and you'll see why I love it:

   These are amazingly sharp, considering how easy it is to miss manual focus with this lens.

   So looking at these lenses, I have filled out two of the three requirements I wanted from the new glass. Sharpness, and being brighter. The third being autofocus, isn't possible because these are all manual lenses. So I have to control the focus, and aperture on the lens itself like a cine lens before I take a picture or shoot a video. But for free, what can you expect? :-) Now in the future, I hope to get some Rokinon/Sigma or Canon EF lenses to shoot with. But for now, this is what I shoot with. Maybe I'll add some more old lenses to the collection. Who knows...

   When I get the final adapter, I will review it alongside the M42 adapter. But until then, this is George saying, adios.

New Lenses! Part One

George Again!

   I’ve been using just the kit EF-S 18-55mm & EF-S 55-250 kit lenses for photography/videography for quite some time and they have preformed very well (Click Here for Sample Shots). But I kinda hate these lenses for a couple reasons. First, they’re very slow lenses. What that means is that they have a small aperture and intern, you have to crank your ISO up or lower your Shutter Speed. Sometimes this can lead your video/photos into looking like film, but more often than not it makes it WAY harder to color grade certain shots. And at least with the 18-55, it’s not that sharp, it isn’t of the best quality and is a little slow to focus. So with this, I wanted a few things with the new lenses: 

1. Fast autofocus
2. At least a stop or two brighter* 
3. Be sharper

   Now I’ve looked at lenses like the Tamron 24-70 f/2.8, Tamron 17-55 f/2.8, and even the Sigma 18-35 f/1.8. But I don't exactly have $700+ to spend on a lens as of the writing of this post. Now my father used to be into photography back in the days of the Canon F1 (“F” for film) and had a whole host of primes that are now in my possession. Lets take a look at some of the lenses I got.

Canon FD 100mm f/4 Macro

   An unbelievable piece of glass. The ability to focus within a few inches of the subject is really mind boggling. Even at f/4 I get amazingly shallow depth of field. Take a look at some images:



   Nothing but super sharp, crisp images come out of this lens.

M42 135mm f/2.8 & M42 2x Teleconverter

   This lens and teleconverter setup is by far my favorite. It is almost a telephoto lens with a very large aperture for the length. That makes my subject isolated from the background and really focuses your attention onto the in-focus areas. What I also love is how small & light this lens is, almost weighing about as much as a portable hard drive. And at f/2.8, this lens is good enough for most indoor shots. So I can keep this in my camera bag without adding practically any weight. Below is an image that I used the teleconverter, and I just fell in love with:

   Look at how sharp the bird is, I'm just amazed. Even with the Teleconverter, it looks amazing.

Next week, I'll cover the rest of the lenses I got.

   That's it for now, George out!

Editing in Different Software

Disclaimer: Adobe didn't sponsor me to do this, these are just my honest opinions about their software. May involve terms not commonly know by the masses. So if there is any terms you don't know, don't hesitate to ask.

George Here!

   

   So as you guys know, I'm a Final Cut Pro X editor. I've used it since September of 2012, and I fell in love ever since. It's fast, easy to use, and it's relatively snappy with lots of video formats. But I've kinda been mad at FCPX for a while for a couple reasons:

1. Slow Exporting: When I have finished my movie in Final Cut Pro X and go to export it, I will normally be looking at a 6 hour export for a 10 minute movie.
2. Color Correction: I honestly don't like the color correction in the program. It isn't powerful enough for what I do. And it's not the best laid out way for me to edit colors.
3. Poor RAM Managing: On my machine with 8GB of ram, my machine can't handle more than basic cuts without needing to render. Normally it's fine, I would just render what I need then play the rest. But still, I don't want to have to do that every time I make a change.*

   I know I'm editing on a 13" MacBook Pro, which lacks a Graphics Card & a Quad-Core Processor. But the beauty of Final Cut is to have not just the people with the $10,000 computers running it. It's meant for everyone as well as the pro's. So for the next episode of Cassie & Miley, I decided to change things up a little. I decided to edit in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.

   My first impression was that the layout is very similar to Final Cut 7, which is what I was used to before X. I imported the footage from Google Drive, and created a new sequence. But every time I hit a key command, it would go to a different thing al together. I realized  that the key commands were different, so I changed them to the ones in Final Cut. Now things were getting interesting.

   After editing the show in it, I can honestly say that I fell in love with it. The speed is amazing, the color correction is fast, and it doesn't eat up all the ram I have. Here's the list of my favorite things about it:

1. Dynamic Link: This is my top favorite thing that I miss from FCP7. In Premiere, I just have to right-click a video or audio file. Then click Dynamic Link, it then loads the video file into after effects, or the audio file into Audition. This is huge for me. I don't have to export, edit, reimport, then re-export if I want to make changes outside of Premiere.
2. Fast Rendering: The rendering in Premiere is amazing. I don't know what it does to make it so fast. But it does it great
3. Color Correction: The color correction is just amazing. Very easy for me, as well as powerful.
4. Amazing RAM Managing: I don't need to render every little change I do.
5. Exporting: Exporting is pretty darn fast.

   Take a look at some screen shots of my editing:

   So overall impressions are great about it. Now the big question, will I replace FCPX with Premiere CC? The answer is... No. I love Final Cut because of what it is. I can create templates much easier in it. Multi-cam is way faster. And the file organization is far better than in Premiere. But I now have another piece of software to add to my arsenal.

   That's about it, talk to you later guys! George out!

*The one thing that I think is faster in FCPX is the Render. I think the reason it is faster is because it takes more advantage of the Mac platform.