Ash vs. Evil Dead

Lookin’ good!  Lookin’ sweet!

The man, the myth and the chainsaw return in the official trailer for the STARZ Original Series #AshvsEvilDead #SDCChttps://t.co/swcdfkMnz6

— Ash vs Evil Dead (@AshvsEvilDead)

July 11, 2015

Guardians of the Galaxy #20 (2014)

So I just finished reading Guardians of the Galaxy #20  and the big reveal of what happened to Richard Rider wasn’t exactly a big reveal.  I found it pretty confusing to understand.  Did he die or did he live?  Peter Quill says one thing, but the artwork kind of suggests another thing happened…

After getting his arm severed by evil Cap from the Revengers, Peter, Drax and Rich are watching Thanos fight the Revengers and Thanos comes out of that fight with the cosmic cube.  Rich & Peter manage to blast it away from Thanos, and Rich ends up with it.  Rich tells Peter & Drax not to tell Gamora about what happened in the Cancerverse, asking them to never talk about it.  He talks about how he loved Gamora and doesn’t want her to be hurt by what happened.  Keeping Thanos at bay using the power of the Nova Corps and the cosmic cube together, Rich opens a portal, to send Peter and Drax home.  His intention is to sacrifice himself to get them home.  He opens a doorway and in a bright flash, Drax, Peter and Thanos are back from the Cancerverse and in the regular universe.

Peter assumes Rich is dead, however, after being dropped off on a barren planet, we see a streak of light, ending in a starburst far away in space.  After finishing telling the story to Gamora, she leaves the room that the rest of the Guardians are in and cries to her self, where we see three bright stars through the window behind her in the shape of the circles on Rich’s chest.

There’s a lot of problems with the story.  At the beginning, Rich is written as being near death after losing his arm. But a few pages later, he’s blasting Thanos with new resolve.  His name is spelled as “Richard Ryder” and “Richard Rider” throughout the book.  The editor did a really bad job of keeping it constant.  Rich talks about wanting kids, and being with Gamora, but the end of Nova vol. 4 and Thanos Imperative, Rich’s love was Namorita, who he’d rescued from a parallel universe and being worried about keeping her safe (and being really happy at finally being reunited with her) was forefront in his mind.  Gamora was a thing of the past to him, so this whole loving Gamora thing really doesn’t make any sense.  Rich, Drax and Peter being worried about Rich dying also doesn’t make any sense since it’s been established in this 3 issue arc that death doesn’t exist in the Cancerverse.  We also know that Rich losing his arm shouldn’t have been a worry, since Peter lost all of his intestines after being killed the first time by Thanos in the Cancerverse and came out whole.  The best thing to have done would have been to have let Rich die and come back whole.

There are a lot of inconsistencies in the 3-issue arc.  It’s plagued with them.  Rich’s characterization is off, the logic of how things work in the Cancerverse is off.  The Revengers seeming to be surprised that they don’t die in there when in the last issue they talked about dying and coming back and fighting for hours because of it doesn’t make any sense.

The only good thing about this is though Peter says Rich died getting them home, the artwork clearly shows something was still there after they were teleported.  Also, when the GOTG returned to the Cancerverse earlier with the Avengers, they were asked how they got home the last time and then a few panels later, they were back in the regular universe no fuss, no muss.  So the obvious conclusion is that Rich is still alive and acting as the doorway between the 2 universes for now.

Also one last thought… After merging with the cosmic cube, Rich’s power is no longer yellow, but blue.  Like the new Nova, Sam Alexander. The timing is off since the Black Nova’s have ben retconned into existing for at least 15 years, but it’s something to think about.  I don’t think Rich’s story is finished being told yet.

My Thoughts On My New Canon XA20 Summed Up

So I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up a Canon XA20. I love the XA10, but since I bought it, there were a few things that I wished it had, but didn’t. For the most part the XA20 addresses the issues I found with the XA10.

The biggest one for me was being limited to 60i for a frame rate with the XA10. The XA20 lets me record at 60p which is huge. Not only does it let me do it at a bitrate of 35mbps (which when slowed down to 24fps is only a measly 14mbps) like a lot of camcorders that record 60p, but it’s one of the few that do a real overcrank. What that means is I choose the bitrate and tell it what speed and the camera records the fully slowed down footage at that bitrate so there’s no need to slow it down in editing. I can record 24mbps with the XA20 which gives pretty great results. 24mbps vs. 14 is a whole lot of more info stored in each frame! Compared to the XA10 which only shot at a max of 24mbps (which means only 9.6mbps of info in each frame when slowed down from 60i to 24p) and you can see why I’m excited about it. A lot of my videos use slow-mo so this is awesome!

The other things that are huge for me are:

- Having an even wider lens when zoomed out and having a 20x optical zoom instead of the 10x optical zoom.

- There’s a proper zoom rocker on it and it doesn’t have that fiddly start and stop that most videocameras in the $3000-$7000 range have.

- The XLR inputs have a better and cleaner signal compared to the XA10 that properly match up with broadcast standards.

- The low light performance is a bit better than the XA10, which was already fantastic.

- It’s noticeably bulkier, but it still fits in my bag, after some adjustments, and it shouldn’t be a chore to bring around with me in all of the random places I go to film. It definitely looks and feels less like a toy than the XA10 did.

- Because of the extra size, Canon was also able to add more custom control buttons on the outside, allowing me to control everything from my focus, white balance, exposure, audio, stabilization from a touch of a button and not have to dive deep into a touchscreen of menus.

- Wifi file transfers are way too complicated. I tried setting up a FTP server under Windows through Windows and a 3rd party program and after 3 hours trying to figure it out, I gave up and plugged in the USB cable. My thoughts on the wifi iPhone controls are the same. It’s faster and easier to just work the camera itself.

- The joystick is surprisingly useful. I found myself using it a lot, and I was on the fence about it. It’s nice not to get fingerprint smudges on the screen, but the touchscreen is really responsive and nice when you use it!

- The 5 assignable buttons are really handy. It’s so nice to have touch buttons and a control wheel. I put the things I most commonly use on these buttons, like white balance, stabilizer, manual focus/auto focus, exposure settings and audio controls. It’s nice to not have to go deep into the menu for common things!

- Timecode! :)

- I need to test more, but it looks like Canon took a step backwards with the AVCHD codec. I noticed more artifacts on an indoor test shot using AVCHD compared to MP4. (Those shots aren’t in this video.) I recorded both at 24mpbs and 30fps. The same shot on my XA10 looked to be the same quality as the MP4. What it boils down to is I need to figure out what works best for recording the highest quality internally since there are so many different options. MP4 @ 24mbps 24fps would seem to me to have the highest bitrate per frame with the best compression right now. Playing more with the camera will let me know for sure.

- Overcranking/undercranking. Undercranking isn’t something I’d really use, but overcranking is. Getting a solid 24mbps at 24fps when overcranking compared to taking 60fps and slowing it to 24fps in editing and getting only 14mbps when recording at the higest bitrate (59.94 @ 35mbps) seems to be a no-brainer. The downside is no audio’s recorded when overcranking, and so far I can’t spot the difference in the quality of the video as far as any more or less digital noise. Like the codec question, I’ll have to play with it more to make up my mind on it.

- The Dynamic IS system isn’t switchable when you’re recording. Which means if you started recording with it off, it stays off until you stop recording. However, you can assign Powered IS to a preset button and turn it on and off during filming. The Powered IS works really well, much better than Standard IS. Until I figured that out, I was a bit bummed out that I didn’t have any IS options available to me once a recording started. If the wind picks up suddenly on a shoot, it’s a really handy feature to have! Keep in mind, if you started shooting with the Dynamic IS turned on, the only way to shut it off is to stop your recording.

The big difference right away is the quality of filming at 1080p at 60fps. I can see the difference between filming at 60i vs. 60p without any effort. Even when I did some test recording on a Blackmagic drive to see if it would be worth picking one up or not, I noticed right away the difference between the quality of 60p recorded in camera and the “30p” recorded on the Blackmagic drive. The drive converted 60i to 30p and the loss in image sharpness was amazing. (The drive doesn’t support 60p input through HDMI.).

Though I did notice less compression artifacts in the ProRes (HQ) codec recorded on the BM drive, the pixels were all larger than when reordered on the camera. Recording in 24p, which BM says should work isn’t an option for me because I hate that look. As far as any compression artifact problems in the on board recording, it was really only noticeable when I really tried to trash my footage with an insane amount of brightness and contrast adjustments. Even then it was only reserved to the darkest spots of the recording (blacks). If the colors weren’t that dark then I couldn’t find any artifacting even when the video was adjusted to extremes to look for problems.

As far as any extra gains 4:2:2 might add to color correction, I couldn’t find any. The 4:2:0 footage held up just as well under some pretty extreme grading. If anything the ProRes footage looked worse because of the larger pixels. Surprisingly even color keying worked better with the MP4 footage compared to the ProRes. The higher resolution gave sharper edges and a better all around key for almost all the colors I tried. Only yellow seemed to be slightly better under ProRes.

All that means for me is SSD 4:2:2 recording through HDMI in a Blackmagic drive isn’t something I’ll be looking into. The loss in picture resolution and no obvious gains anywhere else just don’t make it a worthwhile addition. Some quick looking around on BM’s forums show other people have the same problem with getting proper progressive recordings on their gear and they’ve said that 59.94p recording isn’t on their list of priorities even though the hardware should be able to handle it and it’s a much requested feature. Sometimes decisions like these just leave me scratching my head. So in the end, the compression artifacts that AVCHD and MP4 have in the very dark colors is something I’m more than happy to live with. I can’t think of anything I’d shoot that I’d need to brighten up to the point where it becomes visible or a problem.

I finally had a chance to seriously play with the new image stabilization system in the XA20 for a continuous shoot of about 40 minutes and it was amazing. I’m seriously blown away by the quality of it. Canon did a great job with it and I was able to do things handheld that I’ve never been able to do before. Tying into that, the 20x zoom is great and a huge step forward from the XA10. I was able to get some shots I would’ve never been able to get from my XA10.

What I’m looking forward to now is an opportunity to go out into the woods somewhere and do my thing and really give the camera a go doing what I bought it for.

For the price, I couldn’t find anything that beat the feature set this camera offered. Sure it still records in consumer codecs, but with 4:2:2 HDMI out, if I need better, I know I can have better. Truth be told, 9 times out of 10, AVCHD & MP4 at high bitrates look just fine.

Until the time comes that I need a 4K camera, this is the one I’m settling on as my long term camera, no matter what else hits the market. I’d been looking at it for a year and the more I saw, the more I liked.

So what’s this going to be all about?

Well, pretty much anything that enters my mind.  I’ve got a lot of different interests, and I experience a lot of different things, so expect the unexpected!  Anything from sports, to travel, current events, life experiences, pictures, videos, movies, games, cars to comics.  If I’m thinking about something, it’ll be here!  Very much randomness awaits…