I hadn’t yet heard of the Cinedeck EXTREME, but it looks to be a fairly cool and useful tool.  There’s a press release over at Broadcast Newsroom which talks about a documentary shot by Evolve IMG Films in which the Cinedeck was used.  The Cinedeck is an external recording device that has a 7″ “high res” preview/focus/playback monitor.  It boasts an internal solid-state hard disk, and accepts HDMI, HD-SDI, and LAN camera inputs.  According to the press release, Evolve IMG used it to record from both their Alexa and a Canon 5D.  It stores recorded video as Uncomressed 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 HD, Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD, or CineForm DI files.  You can find more information on the Cinedeck Here (all-flash somewhat non-intuitive website… bleh), and the Broadcast Newsroom article here.

Vincent Laforet has gotten very excited about a little gadget from Freelance Audiovisual Services call the Lockit Buddy.  Essentially, it plugs into your camera’s mic input jack, and writes Timecode information to the right channel, and your reference audio to the left.  It handles all the impedance and level conversions for you.  The embedded timecode should work out of the box if you’re editing with Avid, and there’s a tool called FCPauxTC by VideoToolshed that will strip out the TimeCode data and create an auxiliary time code track for you to use in Final Cut Pro.

There’s been a lot of hype about a popular South Korean director Park Chan-wook shooting a movie entirely on an iPhone 4.  Film School Rejects took a look at the teaser and were, frankly, unimpressed.  I have to say that I agree, it’s sort of anticlimactic.  Repeat after me, kids:  Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

Blackmagic Design will be hosting a series of free workshops to attendees of the Final Cut Pro User Group’s annual SuperMeet in San Francisco on January  28th, 2011.  Here’s your chance to learn DaVinci Resolve for Mac, and bolster your knowledge of color grading for motion pictures.

Zacuto has introduced the “Z-Cage”, which sort of appears to be the Swiss Army knife of DSLR mounts, that will allow you to attach and position virtually everything you might need for a run-and-gun shoot. It’s certainly a bit of a departure from the traditional rails mounts, which may be both a good and bad thing.  Good in that it’s always a good thing to think outside the box and make something that solves problems for people, bad in that I’m not sure this particular problem hasn’t already been solved with the tradition rails mounting systems, of which Zacuto already makes several variants.  What do you think?

via Rob Galbraith

Our friends over at PetaPixel have an awesome still of the setup used while capturing Leo the Lion for the famous MGM logo.  Personally, I would have loved to have been that close to the Lion, though still a bit nervous.

According to ‘Brodcast’ in the UK:

“Sony is to introduce an ‘affordable 35mm camera’ as it looks to move in on the market currently dominated by Red Digital Cinema’s Red One. … Details were thin on the ground but Sony did reveal that once completed the new shooter will offer a shallow depth of field, PL mount and cost less than the Arri Alexa.”

Sony’s always been a little scattershot IMO, but they might stumble into something big, here.

Electronista is reporting on Red shipping their new Mysterium X sensor in the Red One body to the public, and can be had after a deposit is made and a week or so’s wait.

Petapixel points us to an interesting camera prototype Canon is showing off at it’s Expo currently.  This seems much more fleshed out than the concept camera we saw at world expo, but my biggest question about it is what sort of compression would it have on the raw video footage?

5DtoRGB is a standalone tool that converts footage shot with Canon EOS series cameras (5DMkII, 7D) to Apple’s ProRes or to high-quality DPX sequences for use in special effects.  RareVision, the tool’s maker, claims that this conversion is better than Canon’s Final Cut Pro plugin called “E1″.  The tool is in beta right now, and there’s no indication about how much the tool will cost once it leaves beta.  I’m interested to see how it will compare with the E1 plugin after the new version is released in mid-September.

To go along with their new 60D, Canon will be updating their EOS Movie Plugin-E1, which converts the native H.264-encoded files from the camera to Apple ProRes, at approximately twice the speed of Apple’s normal conversion. Here’s where you’ll find info and a download link for the current revision of the plugin.

‘Amélie’ has been chosen as the best-shot film of 1998-2008.  Other nominees included ‘Saving Private Ryan’, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, ‘Fight Club’, and many others. Congratulations to Bruno Delbonnel, who shot ‘Amélie’.

The Criterion Cast is reporting on RED’s CEO Jim Jannard announcement that Steven Soderbergh’s new feature film – Contagion – will be shot entirely using the RED EPIC, which has yet to be released to the general public, and has been codenamed “tattoo”.  Soderbergh has long been a RED user, and this will be the 6th film in a row which he’s shot using RED cameras.

Red Giant Software has just released a new version of their popular color grading software.  It plugs in to Adobe’s Premier and After Effects, as well as Apple’s Final Cut Pro.  New features include a more powerful color keyer, 8 HSL channels, a new “pop” slider to add visual “pop” to your footage, and highlight recovery to bring detail back into blown-out areas of the image.  The new version is available now at Red Giant’s website.

MARVIN Technologies has announced that it will launch an integrated solution to automate the creation of digital backups, LTO tape masters, Quicktime proxies for offline editing, and DVD dailies all in one step at the IBC Exhibition in Amsterdam this September.  Looks like data wrangling for cinematography is about to get a lot easier.