In Portland, OR directing a TV show about the The Circus Project.
The Circus Project helps homeless and at risk kids get off the street and help get back on their feet through learning circus arts.
Epic.

Breaking new ground---I had a documentary project that took me to Paris, Budapest and Prague---I took my high school daughter as sound person, she did a great job and we had tons of fun. We were filming ad students and folk dancers.

3 Oakley Spots I shot with Justin S. several weeks back. Our homey Shonka took the editing duties. Jack Blodgett and Paggio Handled the logistics. Nice work everyone.

Just spent 2 and half weeks in China.
Lovely.
Classical music every night, so powerful.
Good People,
and a Jazz club in Shanghai with this cat, Charlie Carr.

Spent an awesome day with Brad and Aunt Bun Bun.
Last night we had a very powerful interview with Brad about life as a pro athlete, hope, peace and cancer.
Check out First Descents here.

In Colorado now, Moab, Utah tomorrow. I am directing and shooting a TV show about folks with cancer that are going to camp, this week rock climbing. I met the guy that started this camp about 8 years ago on a shoot for Subaru and Dagger Kayaks that I directed for OLN. Brad Ludden is a goofball and a wise guy with a big heart. We did a very powerful interview with a beautiful woman from Colorado that was going to camp in the morning. Check out First Descents here.

We didn't have anything to do with this. But it's cool stuff.

OK, a bit of a welcome change. I am directing a 5 part TV series about the College of Fine Arts and Communications at the university I graduated from, byu. It is a behind the scene show about kids doing art and the like. I will be shooting till Christmas. I am shooting the play "The Diary of Anne Frank," going to China with the chamber orchestra, doing a modern dance program that will take us to a Frank Llyod Wright building in Arizona, doing a printmaking exchange with art students at the University of Hawaii, going to New York City with some ad students that may turn into a Paris trip and a handful of other projects yet to be determined. I love exploring the creative process and I like having an artistic view of the world. I believe that being an artist is about what you put out into the world and just as much about how you take the world in. I will be doing other gigs too but this will be my main project for a while. Peace.

I've been shooting with my boy justin stephens for the last 4 days.  3 moto dudes for a 30 second oakley tv spot that will run during supercross races.  Jack blodgett killed it for us by dialing it all in.  we had a high reach at every location.  Super stoked on the shoot!

Shot with bubba stewart yesterday.  His compound was amazing! 

Shooting ryan villopoto mx today

Things change.
I love doing sports stuff but by work has been swinging towards the art world these days.
The Tongan with a bird on his shoulder, the bread girl that writes on her bread... well it was magic day of art that I don't need to explain.
Thanks to all that were there.

I've been in west palm beach shooting Rory McIllroy, Ian Poulter, and Ricky Barnes for Oakley.  We did 11 short videos while i was here.  They will trickle out over the next few days of the Honda Classic PGA tournament.  This is the first one.

So panasonic issued a firmware update for the af100.  It's not a huge change, but it is a big step for panasonic who has not typically put out firmware updates to address customer feedback.  This one was clearly in response to a thread over at dvx user titled AF100 improvement wishlist 

The main thing it does is fix a very slight hue shift in the LCD.  Also,  if you look at the lower left corner of the screen in the photo.  That's A.REC with a red slash through it.  It pops up when you are in VFR mode to remind you that no audio is being recorded.  You still get audio to the headphones and meters still bounce.  So it's still not ideal, but it's a good start.  Kudos to panasonic for stepping up their firmware delivery.  Here's hoping for more in the future.

Panasonic also announced that native avchd editing is coming to FCP through a plugin that they are developing.  This is also a huge step for Panasonic as they have historically been very slow to support anything on the mac platform. 

I spent the last week in Daytona shooting the NASCAR races.  Crazy loud, crazy fast, and crazy crazy!

I'm shooting a bit of PGA golf in Arizona.  I really don't know much about golf, but this is hole 16 at the scottsdale arizona course.  It's famous because it's the only hole on the pga tour where heckling takes place and is in some ways encouraged.  It's pretty funny to hear drunk folks from the top deck yelling things out at top tier golfers in a situation where there is usually dead silence.

Jerry Warren is the mountain director at sundance.  We got to spend a day with him doing another mormon.org spot.  Jerry shreds the mountain on skis and bikes, I hope i'm half as fit as him when i'm 63.

I had a meltdown looking for a cable yesterday and it led me to tear everything out of my drawer and build this organizing rack, something I should of done years ago.  if any of you need any sort of usb or firewire cable please give me a call I've got a whole garbage bag full.

We've been working with some great folks lately for the mormon.org profile videos.  Here's Jeremy Jones in his garage.  Got to spend half a day on the mountain with him, and then a few hours at his place.  This guy is amazing.  check out his entry into the x-games video comp.

http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=6009096

Here is a trailer for Season 4 of CAMP WOODWARD on Fuel TV. Tim and I produced the stuff with Chad Kerley the BMX kid. It was great to be at Woodward and work with some great people. Thanks!

Thoughts on the AF100 after 1.5 days



Overall, it feels absolutely frick'n fantastic to be shooting with a video camera again.  I think I never want to pick up a DSLR for video again.  Having a moveable viewfinder is priceless, The flip out monitor is beautiful and in conjunction with the focus in red, is easy to use for critical focus.
Audio, Duh.  Feels like I'm back on the HVX, audio controls and inputs are straightforward and require no workarounds.
1080 Variable Frame Rates.  In a word, stunning.  Goodbye 720.
Push button waveform monitor.  Awesome.
Slow shutter during time-lapse (up to 1/2 sec), thank you.
The four thirds chip feels like a great middle ground in terms of depth of field control.  If you need shallow, open up your stop, crank the neutral density wheel and you've got it.  Need deep focus for more uncontrolled situations?  Crank the ND wheel to 0 and stop down.  Compared to the 5D where I always was sweating about focus, unsure if I was focused or not, particularly on a wide lens where the fall off is not as obvious.  With this camera, I will never feel that way again.  Also the ND wheel is something I will never take for granted.  It's so fast and easy, this will be a HUGE timesaver.
One surprise was that the autofocus with the lumix 14-140 lens is actually quite useable!  I had no intentions of ever using it, but when testing it out, I thought it performed quite admirably and I'm now sure I'll find myself using the manual mode with pushbutton auto quite often.  One slight bummer is that auto focus for some reason cannot be used if you have VFR turned on.
Another nice surprise was the function knob.  It's main use is to move a box on the viewfinder to set where you want autofocus and auto iris to take readings from, but the nice surprise is that you can use it to adjust the whitebalance in kelvin.  Just set the whitebalance switch to preset, toggle from 32, 56, to VAR.  Then the function knob can be used to adjust it manually!  Very cool, I'd love to see the use of the function knob expand to allow other things like switching scene files without going into the menu.
The image itself is fantastic in my eyes.  It's not noise free, but it has that panasonic "mojo" look.  It's not crispy clean like the sony's, it's got some character to it, and that's a positive in my book.  I'm not looking to eliminate every tiny bit of noise, to me it's just texture and character.  I wasn't afraid of grain in the film days, and I still prefer an image with a bit of character, I'll take this over the plastic look of grain free images.  That being said, I think the 3200 ISO on this camera is very clean for the sensitivity it gives.
Another positive is the wide range of tweakable settings in the menu to dial in the look you want.  If the small amount of noise the camera generates bothers you, you can dial it out.  See editman's tests at http://theeditman.com/blogg/2011/01/01/PanasonicAF101NoiseTest.aspx.

There is one big drawback and a few minor ones that I want to mention after using the camera for a day and a half.

First up, the big one.  Perhaps this won't matter to other folks, but to me it's a MAJOR problem.  When VFR (variable frame rate) mode is on, no audio is recorded.  That's not a major surprise.  BUT AUDIO METERS AND HEADPHONE AUDIO ARE ACTIVE WHEN RECORDING IN VFR, BUT NO AUDIO WILL BE RECORDED, EVEN IF YOUR FRAME RATE IS SET TO 24.
In other words, if you have VFR on, frame rate is set to 24, you start recording, you will hear audio in your headphones, the audio meters will be responding to audio, but when you stop recording and play back the shot, there will be no audio.  YOU MUST TURN VFR OFF TO RECORD AUDIO.  That's gonna catch a few people.

The minor problems are more just growing pains on my end.  The main one is that I really really miss the scene file dial.  That thing was a piece of engineering genius.  It made it so easy and fast to switch frame rates.  It seems like they traded it on the AF100 for the shutter/frame rate wheel.  I can get use to it, but I'll always have a place in my heart for the scene file dial.
Another bummer is that you only have 3 sensitivities to choose from at one time.  You have to go to the menu to set the sensitivities you want to use as high, medium and low.  It would be nice to have it work like the whitebalance does where you can use the function knob to set it manually.
Another minor complaint is that the time-lapse mode only allows intervals of 1 sec, 10 sec, 1 min, 2 min.  It would be nice to have more options between 1 and 10.  Also, once you turn interval recording on in the menu, it only lasts for one shot then turns itself off.  It would be nice to have it remain on until you turn it off.

Overall, I'm super happy.  As a documentary/ sports shooter, I am so stoked to be moving on from the SLR world back to a video camera that feels like the right tool for the job.  Thanks to Jan and Panasonic for taking this step into the large sensor video cam world.

All the best, Tim