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Film Tools on my iPad/iPhone

I am finding myself using more and more film tools on my iPad and iPhone these days. I am shooting more and with some of my new productions using the amazing HDSLR cameras. These offer amazing quality in addition to unique challenges and there are apps that make life easier. Here are a few:

Movie Slate
This has become a standard on every shoot whether straight up video shoot, multi-camera shoot or film style dual system HDSLR shoot. I simply love it.

Movie Slater is a clapperboard and shot log. Each shot is logged and tagged with all the detail you could ever want including FPS, camera, roll, and complete camera optics including ISO, shutter speed etc etc.

I started out using the iPhone version but it was a tad too small for me. When I got my iPad, Movie Slate was the first thing that went on it.

Two cool features are the ability to take notes while in the during or after a shot and also the ability to take an audio note. Back at the edit ranch you can quickly see your day laid out shot by shot, camera by camera, roll by roll. If your memory is anything like mine, you will appreciate this.

Movie Slate supports multiple projects so your log is always clean and easy to navigate and export. By following some basic workflows you can have a full log complete with notes, circled takes, shot names and more.

For multi cam projects you can sync multiple Movie Slates together. You cam also remote control one slate from another (control your iPad from you iPhone for example). This comes in handy on bigger sets and stages with multiple cameras in use.

Speaking of stages, there is a very cool iTunes sync feature. You can set playback ‘areas’ on a tune and Movie Slate will play back the area, update the takes, sync the time code and bingo… music video production heaven.

If you do your research you will find that a standard electronic slate runs about $1500 (and that’s without any logging features). Movie Slate weighs in at $19.95 and is so worth it. iPads run around $500. Tell your significant other you need to get an iPad to save yourself $1000.

Artemis
Artemis is a modern day electronic Director’s Viewfinder. Being on my iPhone it adds some features that take it from a gimmick to a useful tool.

First, Artemis allows you to choose which camera you have and which set of lenses you will be using. When composing a shot (I use this as a pre-visualization tool) Artemis, using your iPhone camera, gives you a view from whichever lens you choose to use. Then, you can take and save the shot into your photo gallery and include notes including GPS coordinates!

Understand that for the first part of my camera career I was a run and gun documentary VIDEO guy with a ZOOM lens. Now that I am working with prime (non-zoom) lenses I find that this kind of tool really helps me figure out my lens choices ahead of time. If I have the luxury to get to the location ahead of the shoot date I can make some lens choices and then rent the set I need from lensrentals.com

I have also used Artemis to collect images and put those into a storyboard.

I can run and gun with the best of them, but given a chance to do a walk through and pre-visualize first… priceless.

Storyboard By Cinemek
Speaking of storyboards yes – this this is SICK! I come from a professional commercial editing background. We didn’t do ANYTHING without a storyboard. It gets everyone on the same page at the same time. Speilberg uses stoyboards to define the shots of his movies. I can’t begin to tell you how much time and money a good storyboard saves your production.

Storyboard rocks. You can add shots you have taken with your iPhone and add people (silhouettes) add camera moves, add notes, arrange and rearrange shots etc.

Now, get this, in addition to creating a pdf exportable full-on storyboard with camera moves indicated, you can even PLAY BACK your storyboard with all the moves you indicated! That’s right… Indicate a PAN and the scene will pan in real time. Zooms, pans, tracking shots too. Then export this a a quicktime file and you got a handy little pre-viz tool that is super cool.

Simple DoF
This is an easy to use Depth of Field indicator. Set your camera, pick your lens, select your focus distance and Simple DoF will show you what will be in focus. For example, my Canon T2i with 50mm lens when focused on a subject 8 feet away with 1.4 aperture: the focal range is from 7.80 feet to 8.21 feet. Again, coming from strictly video (where EVERYTHING is in focus due to the size of the chip) and now also working with HDSLRs, this is indispensable.

ProPrompter
I have this on my iPhone and iPad both. It’s great for quick little scripts or even scrolling bullet points to remind me of what I want to say. It’s got a great editor so I can edit the script or simply cut and paste from an email. You can also upload scripts to the ProPrompter Producer website.

One cool feature is that you can remotely control the speed of one ProPrompter with another ProPrompter (your iPhone can control you iPad for example). For serious Prompting work I use PrompDog on a laptop but for quick and easy, I use ProPrompter on my iPad.

AJA Data Calc
This app lets you see how much disk space your 3 hour talking head presentation will take up. Settings for image formats and codecs allow you to compare. (One hour of HDV = 12.3 GB) You can mail your findings from within the app. So now your clients can see why you are charging them for the extra drives.

iTimeLapse
I have begun to take time lapse video of my setups. Its a fun snippet that I can use in the production if I choose. iTimeLapse is an iPhone app that does exactly what it says. Shoots high quality images in predefined intervals.

You can set the interval from 1 per second to one per day. You can set the resolution from 120×160 to 1536×2048 (3GS)

Cool features include the ability to start on a particular time/date as well as stop after a certain number of frames have been taken or after a set amout of time has passed OR a particular date.

After you have takes your time-lapse you can render it out to quicktime and even include a soundtrack. Very fun tool.

Non-Film tools that I use to get the job done.
FlightTrack (flight tracking)
Dragon Dictation (amazing transcripts instantly)
TweetDeck (follow clients, friends, trends, topics)
Facebook (post reports)
Kayak (find a cheep flight/hotel)
Skype (calls, chats, etc)
Apple Gallery (great for showing off your work)
iDisk (great for accessing your work)
GPS Drive (great for finding your gig)
SoundHound (great for finding the name and artist of a song on the radio)
Where (Find stuff near you)
Netflix (watch movies – works on iPhone and iPad!)
CC Terminal (immediately billing)
Godaddy (buy that domain name that came to you while out)
OpenTable (find a great restaurant, make a reservation)
Mashable (What’s the latest)
Bento (beautiful database)
Flipboard (the future of online publishing – wicked awesome)

What are YOUR faces? Let me know below by posting a comment!