Studio Berezin Film

For the last year or so I’ve been playing with DSLR photography with my little new toy, Panasonic GH-1. This summer I happened to visit India, and naturally, couldn’t help but try my hand at photographing Taj Mahal. I’m learning a great deal about the raw format, wide lenses, and all sorts of other little things on landscape and architecture photography. Check it out !

I am happy to announce that not only my latest short film “ Don’t Forget The Staples! ” is complete, it also received a Scary Cow members award! Thank you, Scary Cow, the voting members, and most importantly, my cast and crew! PS. Can I call myself an award-winning director now? 🙂

After the infamous Apple’s mess-up of its Final Cut Pro X, I seriously started to think of covering my back and learning Adobe Premiere. Just in case, so I can continue my work if the good old FCP 7 fails to run after another upgrade, and new FCPX versions fail to meet my expectations. And with the awesome 50% SWITCH discount – when else will I have another chance like that? So, I downloaded a trial of Video Production Premium and ran through the features I’ve been using the most in Final Cut. The result is the following table that I hope will be helpful to those trying to decide between the two systems: Premiere vs. Final Cut I’m actually comparing the entire suites – Adobe Video Production Premium CS5.5 and Final Cut Studio 3. Overall, the two systems look surprisingly similar, but there are a few fundamental differences that make me want to own both at the same time. Here are some highlights. Adobe’s great at: Mastering & burning Blu-ray in Enc...

My friend Jennylyn Gleave has interviewed Steve Wozniak on her show, Give It A Name with Jennylyn . Steve is quite inspiring to listen to. For those on the run, I’ve edited a short teaser below. You can also  watch the complete 30 min interview  at  Give It A Name TV .

Or “what mischiefs have I done this summer” – a movie that we shot together with my brothers. For English subtitles, enable closed captions (CC button or that upward triangle under the video): Based on a story by Alexei Berezin. Starring: Igor Ovchinnikov Roman Toschakov Alexei Berezin Ekaterina Alipova Natalia Berezina Director, editor: Sergey Berezin Producer, Sound Editor: Dmitry Berezin Cinematographers: Marina Vedernikova, Dmitry Berezin Production Assistant: Yulia Grinko Music by Alexei Vedernikov & Kevin MacLeod © 2011 Creative Association “Berezin Film” in collaboration with Studio Berezin Film, NSK Records, Elephan in a Wheel Special thanks to the staff of the House of Children’s Art (Novosibirsk, Russia) and personally to the director Olga Vagner *************************** По одноимённому рассказу Алексея Березина. В фильме снимались: Игорь Овчинников Роман Тощаков Алексей Березин Екатерина Алипова Наталья Березина Режиссёр, монтаж: Сер...

A friend of mine started a new show at a local public access TV station ( KMVT ), and I’ve designed the opening and closing titles for her in Apple Motion: The effect is designed as a static 3D model, and the only moving part is the camera. The camera moves are programmed with the camera framing behavior – I specified the locations, and it flies right in. In the closing credits, the final move to the disclaimer is programmed with “null objects” – a couple of invisible rectangles. The camera first frames one null object, showing the cool 3D perspective I wanted, and then proceeds to the other null object with the disclaimer text attached to it, making a nice turn. This is a technique I learned from the MacBreak Studio podcast . The flashing “floor” is another technique from a book. The floor itself is a static rectangle. The flashes are also just a single rectangle with animated gradient fill, replicated a bunch of times with a random start fram...

I had an interesting discovery about Final Cut Studio today (FCS 3, FCP 7). I went and shot something with my HD camera in 1080/60i format with the idea of using it later in the SD NTSC timeline (the NTSC DV, to be exact). My camera shoots HD only, so I didn’t really have another option, and I naively thought, what the heck, it’ll just work. Well, not so fast… First of all, my camera’s real-time downscaled RCA output to NTSC for some reason looked pretty bad compared to that of native DV cameras on the same shoot. Bummer. So I tried to drop my HD footage into the DV timeline to replace the bad looking clips. To my utter disappointment, the HD footage in Final Cut looked horrible, even worse than the RCA feed.WTF? So, after a number of hours and extensive tests, here’s what I finally concluded. First, my RCA output is not that bad after all. Even my horribly outdated DV palmcorder digitized a decent picture from that output. Something must have gone wrong in...