[Angelo Lorenzo]

Try a demo of Lightroom 4. I haven’t tried myself but it has some video features (I don’t know if it’ll support XDCAM, but I’m sure it’s just borrowing from Adobe’s video engine anyways so there is a possibility) so you might be able to make contact sheets of the thumbnails.

Alternately, you could use Photoshop Extended to batch still frames and then create contact sheets in Photoshop or any other myriad of imaging software.

If you have After Effects you might try some scripting to render out still frames (allows you some control over placing the play head).

Just my initial thoughts concerning what is in the Adobe family.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s about 1.5-1.6. It’s similar in size to Canon’s APS-C sensor but a little wider and shorter.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Many places build motorcycle batteries with a power inverter into a Pelican battery case. We’ve gotten about 3-4 hours on them in mixed standby/shooting. It might handle 80 minutes shooting to media. Element Technica makes a binary plate for IDX batteries that allows hot swap https://elementtechnica.mybigcommerce.com/technica-3d-binary-idx-dual-battery-mount/

As far as media for the Red Epic, a 256gig card at REDCODE 8:1 @ 4K can hold 100+ minutes of media (accounting for overhead, 100 minutes is 240gigs).

The Arri Alexa should do 103 minutes with the same amount of space at ProRes444/2K. I assume its recording mechanism is a hard drive or SSD (I never rent Alexas, so excuse my ignorance there)

Hard but not impossible.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Vignette? There are a ton of ways to do it https://ae.tutsplus.com/articles/news/vignettes-in-after-effects/

Easiest? Black solid, put an oval mask over it set to subtrack, set it to feather and turn down the opacity of the layer… done deal.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

https://www.filmskills.com/ – My acquaintance teaches cinematography through them and I trust the fact he knows what he’s doing… and he a handful of Emmys to prove it. Covers camera and equipment, lighting technique, and so on.

https://masteringfilm.com/author/jason-tomaric/ has a few samples

It sounds crazy, but I don’t find any of the “still shooters turned filmmakers thanks to the dslr” very good in terms of cinematic quality. I wouldn’t waste a dime on anything by Harrington or that entire brood.

Take it as you will, but I have a feeling most people are better off learning more general information then information on a camera that it kind of a kludge to use.

There are the old standbys:
Filmmaker’s Handbook
ASC Manual
Light: Science & Magic

[Angelo Lorenzo]

In what field of study? There are plenty of tutorial dvds for lighting interviews and so on. Are you looking primarily for dslr operation or something else?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

I’m not so sure it’s Adobe’s limitation, DVI as a connection is always limited to 8bit. Better off using HD-SDI from a proper output card for really serious color grading. Rec 709 is a scene color profile, and consumer televisions display with an output in sRGB. Once your monitor is calibrated you should be very close but you’ll probably have issues with banding and finessing some corrections.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Try the trial of II that came out; MB is using different technology for this version as their original partners on the plugin were bought up by Google. I use Neat Video which uses cpu/gpu combo rendering and the slow down is acceptable for 4K footage.

Use noise reduction first. It removes the noise (basically color contamination) before the matte is pulled and can smooth matte edges because it’s resampling and blending colors.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

RED cameras are unusually noisy in the blue/yellow. Run it through some modest noise reduction (Neat Video or Magic Bullet Denoiser II) and you should see your screen matte clear up.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Along with Todd’s confirmation, I think Adobe mentioned something along the lines of major releases every 2 years with .5 releases yearly (aka reasons to stuff more features in). Before it was roughly every year and a half.