Would you believe me if I told you we shot meat for two days? Well, we did. We spent two days in a studio shooting artisan deli meats: salamis, prosciuttos… for Columbus. As you can imagine, we sampled the delicious fare.

This is an example of one of the many point of purchase videos we have produced.  This one in particular is all about appetite appeal and will show on a large screen at your local deli counter.

Did I say we love food shoots!

Tags: Point of Purchase video, SF Video Production

We recently got to do a shoot with Adobe for John Mayer’s latest music video. Since it was to be a greenscreen shoot and placed into a pretty high-profile piece we decided to pull out all the stops. The timing worked out pretty well because it coincided with Apple releasing the nee ProRes 4444 codec which would allow us to do a 444 capture on the fly and then key directly in After Effects without super-heavy files. So, we lugged our 8-core Mac Pro with the Kona3 card down to LA and installed two 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives (RAID 0 for throughput) into the mac. We needed the Kona3 because we wanted to pipe the super-clean dual link image from our brand new Panasonic HPX-3700 (P2) camera. We decided on the Varicam over the RED ONE because there were some pretty great reactions to it during the ASC Camera Test that was conducted in LA. Then to help insure that we’d get a crystal clear image, we put some Digi-Prime glass in front of the full-raster 1920 X 1080 imager of the Panasonic Varicam. Also, since this was an Adobe gig, we bypassed Final Cut Pro altogether and used the Kona VTR Xchange utility to capture to ProRes 4444 and then could drop the files directly into After effects to do our test keys.

Here’s the dual-link interface from the Kona 3 control panel.

Doing an on-set test-key on the footage with imagery from the boards.

In the end, the footage was some of the cleanest we’ve seen. Even with the heavy shadowing from the dummy green furniture that we placed on set, the key came out great (with some rotoscoping here and there). All in all, it was a very smooth process combining the Panasonic HPX-3700 with the Kona 3 and the new Apple ProRes 444 codec. Bring on the next one!

Tags: John Mayer, music video, P2 Varicam, ProRes 4444, SF Video Production, Studio B Films

Studio B got to work with Adobe on another fantastic project for John Mayer’s next music video. We shot him performing his new single “Heartbreak Warfare” for an augmented reality piece that is built by the agency Blitz in LA. We’ll have more details to come once the project is released! In the meantime, here is the link to the Wired Magazine behind the scenes footage from the shoot.

Tags: Augmented Reality, John Mayer, SF, SF Video Production, Studio B Films

Adobe brought Studio B in to create a Mythbusters spoof (Myth Hackers) to explore why the iPhone doesn’t run Adobe Flash. And then they unveiled (at the Adobe Max expo) a new option to use Flash for building stand-alone apps. We did actual explosions on set but mostly the faked ones made the cut. Check out the video here: Adobe Mythhackers.

Tags: Adobe, Comedy, iPhone, SF Video Production, Studio B Films