The setup was a little tricky, but only because I’d never set this rig up before. Getting everything to align perfectly was a small chore, but if I owned the rig I’d have to do this once, and then I’m done.

The first thing I noticed right out of the gate is the construction of this bad boy is solid, and once the mount was on the EX1’s lens, and the adapter was attached there wasn’t anything precarious about this setup. Of course one of the best parts about the Letus rig is it flips the image, so I didn’t have to have an external monitor to flip upside down in order to see a properly orientated image. I did hook up a small 10” HD monitor just so I’d have a larger viewing screen, but it was a commodity more than a necessity.  I could have serviced just fine using the EX1’s 3” display.

The footage I got was great! The only issue I ran into was a few shots had some streaking-grain. I’m assuming this was my error in shooting with a shutter that was too slow, and caught the movement of the ground glass. Perhaps? I have yet to completely figure that one out.  I also lost my back focus often, but again I believe this to be a user error. Anytime I felt like I couldn’t get critical focus, it took maybe 20 seconds to stop the ground glass, double check my focus is sharp, start it back up, and on we went!

I did some POV shots that I didn’t/couldn’t do with the Letus. They were from the perspective of the person in the HazMAT suite, so I actually had to put the suite on, and shoot through the plastic face cover.  It was a little awkward with the suite, but the shots turned out great so of course it was all worth it in the end!

The final piece turned out pretty good, and the over all experience working with the rig was fantastic! If I had to purchase a cinema lens adapter again, I would certainly go with a Letus!

I’ll post the finished project when it’s online!

- Tim

You can read the article posted at StudioDaily.com.

I’m still a huge fan of Avid Media Composer, so I’m glad to see they’re making some moves in the right direction.

There’s still some debate out there as to weather or not moving away from the dongle is a good move on Avid’s part, but it personally doesn’t effect me either way. Honestly I think I’d rather have the extra USB port.

For all the Final Cut users out there: How much more likely are you to switch to Avid aftering hearing of these added features? If not at all, what would Avid have to do to win your loyalty?

- Tim Allen

Here are my findings:

At first inspection the hardware seems well constructed with a rubber gripped shuttle ring, and a solid metal jog dial. The rest of the piece is mostly plastic, and the whole unit is fairly light weight. The buttons at the front have clear plastic coverings that can be removed in order to add custom labels to the buttons. Considering there are infinite ways to configure this thing I’d say that was a good call. However, none of the other buttons have that feature, and there’s not an easy way to add a label to these. Not cool. Second thing I noticed is how loud the buttons are! Every button that clicks feels like one of those old plastic alarm clocks – if you know what I’m talking about?

CLICK! CLICK! CLICK! CLICK!

Once the device was plugged in all I had to do was download the driver off the website, and off we go! You have to use their software to configure your controller, which basically consists of associate a button on the controller with a key stroke from the keyboard. This is a pain, and a bad idea. I’ll explain more about that later.

After spending about an hour in Final Cut figuring out which buttons I wanted to do what I was ready to really give this thing a go and see how quick I could fly through my edits. Not bad. I couldn’t really tell if I was faster than with a mouse and keyboard, but I would imagine I will get faster with time. But being able to set and clear in and out points, add an edit, insert and overwrite clips, and of course scrub through the footage all with one hand was sweet. Grant it, I could map my keyboard to be able to that with shortcuts, but the ability to travel through the footage with the wheel felt pretty sweet. Once I configure this to the inth degree I’ll probably be able to do even more. All in all, so far so good.

One of the things I could never figure out was being able to go from the bin back to the timeline or preview window. I can go back and forth from the timeline to the preview window just find, but as when I’m done working on a clip in the bin, I have to move the mouse and double click the clip and want to use, then continue on with the ShuttlePRO. Not a huge deal, but it would be nice if I could find a shortcut to toggle between the bin, and preview windows. Maybe there is. Anybody?

The most frustrating part is that Final Cut doesn’t really support the refresh rate that this thing requires to scrub through footage. Not that it won’t do it – I just think it should be smoother, and I usually find myself several frames past the point where I wanted to stop because it takes the program a little bit to catch up. (Keep in mind I’m on a quad core machine, running some pretty serious hardware – this is a software issue with FCP).

I appreciate the concept behind this tool, but I’m not sure I agree with the way they put it into practice. Every button on the ShuttlePRO v.2 is associated with a keystroke. That means the “Mark In-Point” button is actually just pressing “i” on the keyboard. If you opened up a text editor and hit the “Mark In-Point” button on the ShuttlePRO it would type an “i” on the screen. This means in order for you to get everything out of this device you have to remap a good number of your FCP shortcuts, and set one of the controller’s buttons to be an “Option” or “Command” key in order to add another layer of commands. This also means that if you take your ShuttlePRO v.2 to another workstation you start all over and have to reconfigure everything. You can transfer your keyboard layout, but all the mapping of the ShuttlePRO will have to be reconfigured through their software on the new machine. Dumb. I also found myself inadvertently switching spaces, and changing the volume while trying to scrub through the footage. The ring, and dial use the F1 – F10 commands to jog through footage at variable rates. So in order for you to run the controller you have to deactivate “Keyboard Navigation” in your System Preferences otherwise it will interfere with all the shortcut Mac OX is already using.

All this would be greatly simplified if the ShuttlePRO v.2 could store its mapping configurations on its own internal memory of some kind, and if FCP would interact directly with the device. As of now it doesn’t even know it exists, it’s just obeying the keystrokes it receives.

The ShuttlePRO v.2 is really just a super mouse, or perhaps a simplified specialized keyboard. It doesn’t seem to have much functionality in and of itself. Regardless, I enjoy the experience of being able to tangibly spin a wheel to scrub through footage, and going frame by frame on the shuttle seems much more natural using the dial than repeatedly tapping on an arrow key.

So there you have it. The good, the bad and the it-could-be-better.

If you’ve made it all the way through this post, I’m impressed. Let me know if you have any questions about this, or need clarification on something and I’d be happy to elaborate.

- Tim

After throwing around some ideas for the first couple hours of the night, we were settled on a pirate bit. The prop would be easy to incorporate as it was a pair of binoculars. The line of dialogue would be just as easy, it being, “Where’d you get those pants?” Something somewhat random a pirate might say, wouldn’t you think? And of course, the genre was comedy! So off we were.

We filmed for about 3 and half hours in a cool 114 degrees. Most of us just about passed out from heat exhaustion, but we made it through. The wind was pretty strong, but our sound turned out pretty surprisingly good, and most of the shots we took turned out ok despite our delirium from the heat.

Once the footage was there it was a very nice, cool, air conditioned 10 or so hours later that the film was edited, and we actually turned it in with time to spare!

Once the films were judged there was a screening at a local Harkins Theatre in Tempe, and all the films that survived the 48 hours got their 3 minutes of fame before the actually challenge winners were announced. Sadly, we were not one of the winners.

Pirate Booty, however did get selected into the 2007 Phoenix Film Festival! So that’s nothing at all to complain about.

There are many things about technology I don’t like, most of those things come from Microsoft, but many of them originate elsewhere. Perhaps this will be the ideal place for me to express my displeasures with many of these technological irritations! Yes… I think it is.

So that being said, you can rest assured that in the future you will be blessed with my finite wisdom concerning the evils of tech-marica (the name I’ve just given the world of disillusioned Americans buying into incompetent technologies, and ‘improvements’ in our culture), and how we can educate the people and create for ourselves a greater technological society.

- Timothy D. Allen