10 Reads for August 21, 2012

It seems like lots of great articles came my way this week. Here are the best of them. Hope you enjoy!

• How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time. How do you shoot a 150-day movie? You shoot it one day at a time.” With a lead in like this, you won't be able to stop yourself from reading these filmmaking tips from David Fincher.

• I've been speaking with a number of production companies about generating revenue with paid video. Whether it's selling educational content or something else, it's a passive revenue stream that you can use to help make ends meet. This post has a good overview of some of the different paywall platforms you can use to sell video.

• The dust seems to have settled in the codec battle between H.264 and WebM now that Firefox is slowly working to add native support for H.264 to its browser. Guess that means it's time to move on to H.265, which promises to deliver video twice as efficiently as H.264 when it's released next year. What do files that are half the size with the same resolution mean to you? Better mobile video on low-bandwidth connections, a way around the nasty bit caps that cable companies are implementing, and higher resolution streaming. Let's hope it doesn't mean another round of royalty headaches and licensing problems.

• When Final Cut Pro X added multicam support, many people felt that it set a new gold standard. So how does Premiere Pro fare with multicam? Overall Scott Simmons give multicam in CS6 an A, in spite of a couple shortcomings like how keyboard shortcuts work. A couple tweaks and it will be as good as anything out there.

• Zacuto has posted part three of the Great Camera Shootout. This part is the closest you'll get to a lab test, since all of the cameras are compared shooting the same scenes with the same lighting. This really is a well done series that balances inspirational tips with real world product insight.

• Itching to upgrade to Mountain Lion? If so, read this great survival guide for video professionals on what video software works and what doesn't. Read on for the good, the ugly, and the fixes to many of the problems. A bit of pre-reading could save you some grief.

• Want to know how to stream video live from Mars? I thought so. Here is a cool article that looks at how Rover Curiosity Streams Live from Planet Mars with Adobe Media Server and AWS. It's pretty cool that NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is using pretty much stock services from Amazon rather than streaming from an underground bunker of its own design. Speaks to how far Amazon's Cloud Computing services have come.

• Some good tips in this post on how to get the most out of your crew in a corporate video shoot.

• While we are on the subject of tips, here are 7 lighting tips for shooting video with DSLRs. The tips come from cinematographer Alex Buono, one of the early pioneers of using HD-DSLRs to capture video for television. Thanks to our friends at videoguys for spotting this one.

• Awhile back we did a post on financing your indy film through crowdfunding. Here is a great post that picks up where our post left off and provides tips on how to effectively use crowd funding sites.

• Let's finish this week off with some cool tech. If Peter Jackson is catching flack for using 48fps for the Hobbit, just wait for 1000000000000fps. This TED talk discusses a bleeding-edge camera that was developed for the express purpose of capturing slow-motion images of light itself traveling through space — and, eventually, shooting around corners. Now it's time to dream of what you could do if you could shoot around corners.

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