Filmmaking with your nerd out.
Prolost Watches and a Heuer Solunar, a weird and cool watch from the 1970s that tracks 14 days of high and low tides. After my experience being rejected from the App Store, I was left with an unscratched itch to ship a native iPhone app. Staying well away from my day-job turf of tools for motion artists , I created an app to support a hobby I fell into. Prolost Watches is an iPhone app for…
Today Maxon announced the return of Autograph , a modern compositing and motion graphics tool. Autograph is incredibly powerful, and it’s been a thrill to work with the original creators to fold it into the Maxon and Red Giant ecosystem. Even more exciting: Autograph is completely free for individuals. You can download it today and start discovering how powerful and fast it is. If you have a…
Log your nog with Drinking Buddy. I made an app! A real, native iPhone app coded in Swift and SwiftUI. It’s a thing of beauty. I love it and use it every day. But I can’t share it with you, because Apple rejected it from the App Store due to “Physical Harm.” Don’t worry, I figured out a workaround. That’s how determined I am to harm you. Everyone, Finally, Can Code — by Not Coding I created this…
I know, I know, another video about shooting video in log on iPhones? I promise I’ll move on to other topics, but two events happening in one week pushed me into making this video: Samsung adding log to the Galaxy s25 Ultra My brother-in-law texting me “Do you have a fix for iPhone videos looking washed-out?” Why is log important, even to Samsung, who never met a color they didn’t crank to eleven?…
The new Kino app recording ProRes Log with a custom preview LUT. Yes we’re still talking about shooting video on iPhones. But I also want to talk about digital cinema shooting in general, in a world where top camera makers are battling to give filmmakers everything we want in a small, affordable package. How does the DV Rebel spirit — born of camcorders and skateboard dollies — live on in a time…
Still from Apple’s “Let Loose” video. Apple unveiled their new line of iPads yesterday in a pre-recorded video titled “ Let Loose .” As with the previous “Scary Fast” MacBook Pro launch video, “Let Loose” ends with a tag proclaiming “Shot on iPhone” — this time adding “Edited on Mac and iPad,” and the fine print: “All presenters, locations, and aerial footage shot on iPhone.” During the live…
This is a blog post about a video, which is about new color-conversion LUTs for Apple Log footage from the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (updated from my first set ). The video is also a mini-travelogue of my recent trips to Taiwan and Peru. After my explainer video on Apple Log , this one dives a bit deeper into practical LUT workflows, and my state of mind about shooting digital-cinema-grade footage…
Still frame from Hello! by Goro Fujita, created in VR using Quill Today’s the day to pre-order Apple Vision Pro , Apple’s first “spatial computing” device. It’s an expensive VR headset that either represents an opportunity to beta-test the future, or double down on past failings of VR promises. I’m a VR skeptic in many ways. I don’t want anything to do with “the metaverse,” and I’m beyond annoyed…
A still from Apple’s “Behind the scenes: An Apple Event shot on iPhone” video Apple Shot Their “Scary Fast” October Event Video on iPhones And We Had Feelings You’re somewhere on the spectrum of occasionally shooting video on your iPhone to a professional-ish video maker with some gear, and you see at the end of Apple’s October “Scary Fast” event announcing new Macs with M3 silicon that the entire…
And I’ve got some free LUTs for you. The iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max feature log video recording. This is a big deal, but there’s already some confusion about it. Where consumer devices and pro video overlap, that’s where the Prolost Signal gleams brightest in the night sky. So let’s get to work. First, what exactly is log? It’s short for logarithmic encoding, which is a math thing, but what does it…
If you’re reading this blog, you probably know the story — at least, you think you do. As Steven Spielberg began production on 1993’s Jurassic Park, he and Industrial Light and Magic’s Dennis Muren planned to execute the all-important visual effects component of the film’s prehistoric predators using tried-and-true stop- and go-motion animation 1 . But a bleeding-edge computer animation test…
From the Lightroom Blog : The same edit controls that you already use to make your photography shine can now be used with your videos as well! Not only can you use Lightroom’s editing capabilities to make your video clips look their best, you can also copy and paste edit settings between photos and videos, allowing you to achieve a consistent aesthetic across both your photos and videos. Presets,…
Mac Studio with M1 Ultra and Apple Studio Display, running Cinema 4D and Redshift. In October of 2021 I got to test a 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor. It performed so well, that I, along with many Mac power-users, questioned whether it could replace my desktop Mac. Last week, I reported that the answer turned out to be no: What makes a computer powerful, for my workflow, is not just…
The 2021 MacBook Pro alongside the cable-management fail of my iMac Pro Back in October when I got a chance to use a pre-release 14″ MacBook Pro with M1 Max processor, I openly questioned whether this laptop could replace my venerable iMac Pro. Four months later, I’m back with an update. A good amount has happened since then, for example: After Effects: Explores the Cores Yes, I figured out how to…
Apple opened their October event with a young musician creating an Apple-inspired music track in a dingy garage filled with gear worth tens of thousands of dollars. Some viewers commented on the unrealistic portrayal of a creative professional. But I felt like I was looking in a mirror. If Apple’s target market for the new MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max processors are scruffy weirdos in…
Imagine a digital 50% gray card. In 0–255 RGB values, it’s 127, 127, 127. On the RGB parade scope , the card is a perfect plateau at 50%. Now imagine increasing the exposure of this scene by one stop. “Stops” of light are an exponential scale, meaning that subtracting one stop is cutting the quantity of light in half, and adding one stop means doubling the light. The “light” in our image is…
Was it worth buying a Pro Display XDR just for this joke? Yes. Apple caused quite a stir with the announcement of their Pro Display XDR , a High Dynamic Range display that occupies a convoluted space in the market. It seeks to be both a Very Nice Computer Display, and a reference HDR video monitor — but by most measures it’s far too expensive to be the former, and not quite up to the rarified…
It’s a big day at Maxon/Red Giant! We’re releasing huge updates to Magic Bullet and Trapcode Suites. Trapcode Particular continues to embody our ethos of power and ease-of-use, with a completely modernized simulation engine that allows particles to behave more naturally, with real physics forces working together without limitation. In other words, yes, Air and Bounce finally work together — but…
TLDR; a short film I DP’ed is playing tons of festivals, and you can see it stream this Friday! The Call to Action In early 2017, my buddy Mark Andrews asked if I would be his cinematographer on a short film. Mark and I met at CalArts and have been making films together most of our lives, on and off. Most recently we collaborated on Brick & Steel , a fake-trailer-slash-birthday-gift for another…
Prolost Beta is a new subscription offering on the Prolost Store . It's an occasional email from me containing a download or a link to something cool I'm working on, that's not quite ready to become a product yet. Or maybe ever. This will most often be Lightroom presets or profiles, After Effects presets, or Apple Shortcuts, but it could be just about anything. Prolost Beta is $2/month, or…