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Cinema gear reviews and so called film courses suck
  • It is so hard to see most of the cine gear video reviews.
    You constantly thinking if reviewer has gun behind his back and being forced to tell you about this crap :-)

    Review must force you to buy stuff, not to hate it :

  • 33 Replies sorted by
  • Keyboard salesmen come from a different planet. I think that if any camera reviewer were to do a 'video' related review like Bert they would probably end up destroying their camera.

    Read below with Berts accent:

    "and now we are going to film live tigers with the exteli mode... really fantastic"
    "now we are going to work in low light with only one candle, great stuff"
    "now, moving onto an adult film production- rolling shutter is hardly noticeable even with lots of movement"
    "moving onto filming inside a volcano now- the amazing codec really shines here with high intensity colour"
    "now - strapping the camera onto a home-made rocket, we see that even when completely destroyed the SD card is still readable- truly remarkable..."
  • >I think that if any camera reviewer were to do a 'video' related review like Bert they would probably end up destroying their camera.

    I don't care if they destroy their camera in a big blast.
    But.. Fucking shit, let me want the thing that you are reviewing.
    Do something like Bart, make me believe that it is keyboard(camera) that makes all this stuff :-)
    At least for short time.
  • I used to sell a lot of those keyboards. Rep's from the MI industry are quite good. This guy is top noch.
  • After this you could find and look at Laforet and Bloom courses, and ask why they cost so much, as they need to be about $300 (and here I mean the sum given to you just to stay).
  • I think the reason he can be so much more enthusiastic about the keyboaards than reviewers are about DSLRs is that these keyboards have been around for 2 decades longer and are now near(er) to perfect for most things. He has so much skill that his creativity is not in any ay bounded by the device.

    DSLRs on the other hand almost always lack some small things that say, the Arri Alexa has to offer, and so we hear reviewers gripe about them. Also, it takes a lot more work to demonstrate a camera by filming lots of amazing stuff than to demo a keyboard with your (his) amazing repertoire.

    To be fair to him, I think Phillip Bloom's Skywalker Ranch at dawn vid was an amazing camera demo, right? It didn't show how good the camera was exclusively, so much as how skilled at that atmospheric style film he is.
  • @LucasAdamson

    I completely do not agree with you.

    Cameras and camera gear are much older and can be presented even better if presenter will be good.
    Let's face simple facts most of this guys can shoot some movies (good only in very specific niche).
    But they are fuckingly bad presenters.
    They hardly prepare. Like themselfs and not the people.
    From all of them, I like only Jem. He is fun and very interesting sometimes.

    >To be fair to him, I think Phillip Bloom's Skywalker Ranch at dawn vid was an amazing camera demo, right?

    Nope.
    You could find better players than Bert. But this alone not make them better presenters.
    Plus I really hate most of Phillips moving slideshows.
  • Well, I'm not too keen on Bloom's moving slideshows either, especially as it seems to have set the norm for the kind of films that people are using their cameras for. 1. Buy DSLR, 2. Buy Slider, 3. Go out on your own, 4. Film countryside, sliding, no people 5. Set to music. It's pretty banal. Where are the stories, the dramas, the people? This type of film is good for one thing - camera demos where you don't want to do a technical comparison test. That's what he does, Bloom, and I think he does it fairly well, if you consider that's what they are - camera tests! It is not art, and I don't want to make these films, and I wish so many others would do something more narrative too.

    They are not too enthusiastic at these presentations, Vitaliy, because it's harder to do well, and there is more to be critical of.
  • I've never been on one of their film courses, so I wouldn't know about that. I imagine they are a bit of a waste of money.
  • jem is funny but sometimes i feel too much talking heads with his vids, i would like to see the stuff in action.
  • >jem is funny but sometimes i feel too much talking heads with his vids, i would like to see the stuff in action.

    Btw, he wants to do it for long long time, but still no sign.
  • These are my favourite product videos, also synth-related





  • Jordan Rudess, Half salesman - half piano genius...
  • @johnnym

    Most of the time they show how complicated their products are. And all is so slow...
    If you ask me, audio plugins went the strange route. Most of them are complicated and powerful.
    With lots of little unusable knobs and other controls.
    And guys now are really mad looking for new sounds only. So, we have piles and piles of music that you can't remember even 2 minutes after you finished listening.
  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev

    Yeah, nobody can use that softsynth like Persing does. He probably only wrote it to satisfy himself.
  • >If i remember programming a DX7. That's difficult.

    Modern synths have quite good interfaces.
    And most have computer software with quite clear interfaces.

    >I think there's more bad music, because prices for synths have dropped, and many more people (often without talent) are trying to create, not because the synths have become worse.

    I do not mean this.
    I mean that searching for particular "special" sound is widely spread thing. And endless tweaking is boring.
    Plugins like OmniSphere are geared toward making specific sounds you want, but hard way.
    I much prefer to have simpler approach like "Make me same sound but more dark. Ok. Now more distortion. No, remove it." What I mean is - I want all the knobs removed, at least until final small tweaking.
    Want all plugins to include online librraies, so I could search, select try and purchase necessary parts.
    And I mean not to search for "Guit_80s_dist_plus_fl".
  • You can do all those things with Omnisphere. If i understand what you want correctly, it is the synth par excellence that has the kind of interface you describe. Although i'm aware it may not show from the video and i'd better uploaded one of the earlier videos.
  • @johnnym
    Are you sure?
    I am interested in real instruments or, at least, very close to them.
    My understanding is that Omnisphere is just collections of presets for highly complicated artifical synth.
  • Omnisphere is a beast!!! Use it all the time. One of many tools of course - virus and z3ta+ get use here as well.

    @Vitaliy_Kiselev and @LucasAdamson - Word..... about the proliferation of the slideshows. Not a fan any more and all this has done is make me itch to get something useful out there now and stop being a pixel peeping armchair critic. The gear is not the bottleneck now. Some of these guys have all the cameras money can buy and yet there is little in the way of definitive work. Some who shoot this stuff are spoken of in the same breath as award winning cinematographers. I don't get it - suppose that's the power of the internet - Rebecca Blacks video says alot.

    We could all do with a lesson in shooting challenging narratives at the risk of being flamed by a watching world. It is only in failing that we can improve right? Next year I will be doing some substantial work. I am also tired of testing now and watching test videos as well. The gap between top stuff and useable cheap stuff is ever decreasing.
  • bert's demos are great- never saw him before, but he's convincing

    after his demos, makes me Want to buy Yamaha,
    which I'd never say minutes before.

    On the other hand, i'd need 5 years of lessons to go with the Keyboard
    to sound like him ...
  • I am more into Hollywood Strings or Edirol Orchestral plugins :-)
  • >On the other hand, i'd need 5 years of lessons to go with the Keyboard

    I think it is very conservative estimation. :-)
    Most of the guys I know who finished 7 years of school and practiced since many years can't play at this level :-)

    Music learning (and work) is fuckingy boring thing, in reality. Repetitions, repetitions, plus practice and practice.
    After this you could prepare for a month, go on stage and make 5min demo.

    Btw, one important thing abour Bert is how fast it looks. Good things must look like time passes faster (even if they are slow in nature). He is making many preparations, put this all in Performance settings, after this just click one button to go to next performance (with voice and effects settings, splits, arpeggiators, etc)
  • I too didn't get the hysteria surrounding the skywalker ranch video. Moving slide show is apt description. It's a nice place, and if you wake up early and point your camera you'll get pretty good images, but that doesn't make you Conrad Hall. If you can light a sound stage to look like sunrise at that ranch? Now I'm impressed.
  • Vitaliy Edirol Orchestral? Now that's a blast from the past. Always felt you need lots of reverb to make them sound okay . VSL - with the new Vienna instruments pro they can produce incredible results?
  • Music learning (and work) is fuckingy boring thing, in reality. Repetitions, repetitions, plus practice and practice.
    After this you could prepare for a month, go on stage and make 5min demo

    100%
    LASS strings also are very good VK. Kontakt is the ,most inst plugin i use in my studio, because its sample based plugin.The interface is little hard to get use to , and not that simple, but it get the job done