Blog | Mystery Box

Nov 2, 2020

Quest for DIT Station Perfection

Mystery Box has been dreaming up the perfect DIT station for years now. There may not be one setup that checks ALL the boxes, but we’ve...

Feb 5, 2020

Dolby Atmos | MacPro + HDR New Best Friend

“We believe that when it comes to sound, Atmos is the future of media consumption. Object-based mixing in Atmos makes content...

Dec 12, 2019

2019 MacPro First Impression + Stress Test

Technology plays an exciting role in our line of work. On one hand, we couldn’t capture, edit, or deliver any of our 8K 60p HDR content...

Apr 15, 2019

FCPX's Metadata: Post, But on Steroids

In 2011, when Apple officially released Final Cut Pro X, the reception was less than stellar. Many industry pros who had, for years,...

Mar 28, 2019

Dolby Vision and Independent Filmmaking

Jacob Schwarz and Samuel Bilodeau of Mystery Box will be presenting on grading in HDR and using Dolby Vision at the Dolby Booth at NAB...

Mar 17, 2019

OWC ThunderBlade: Data Backup Dream Machine

Of the many joys a DIT has on-set, waiting for a file transfer is not one of them. After a long day of shooting when the crew starts...

Jan 28, 2019

2018 Mac Mini Editor's Workstation

Mystery Box was in the market for a new dedicated editing machine. To be honest, when Apple announced the 2018 Mac Mini, it wasn’t on our...

Jun 3, 2018

70mm Film Projection Vs. Cinema LED Displays

Never in my life have I been able to have a film vs. digital cinema experience akin to the one I was able to have this past weekend in...

Jan 8, 2018

Panasonic GH5S & Shooting HDR10

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working with Panasonic to create HDR10 content for the release of their new micro four-thirds...

Dec 18, 2017

Studio Grading in HDR on the SmallHD P3X and Atomos Sumo 19

Our first major blog posts here on the Mystery Box Blog was a five-part series on HDR video - how it works, and how to work with it in...

Nov 10, 2017

Multi-Space Color Correction: The New Paradigm

Our last technical blog post talked about color management, including considerations for maintaining color accuracy through the post...

Oct 8, 2017

RED MONSTRO VV SENSOR Thoughts

First off huge thanks to everyone at Red for getting me this camera so quickly. Like many of you, we’ve been holding out and waiting for...

Sep 6, 2017

Display Calibration & Color Management

There are many different ways for consumers to experience your content today - so many that it’s often difficult to predict exactly where...

Aug 20, 2017

Filming Smoke Grenades in 1000 FPS

Pre-Production: It’s no secret, we (here at Mystery Box Video Production) love filming in high frame rates. We get so enthralled with the...

Aug 6, 2017

Protecting your Digital Ass(ets) Part 3: Recovering from Failure

There’s a common idiom that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Hopefully even if you use the metric system you can...

Jul 23, 2017

Protecting Your Digital Ass(ets) Part 2: Best Practices

In Part 1 we looked at the strategies your computer and other hardware use to prevent data corruption when the data’s being copied or...

Jul 9, 2017

Protecting your Digital Ass(ets) Part 1: Checksums & Digital Errors Debunked

The switch from film and analog video into digital video technologies has had a great freeing effect in every area of motion content...

Jun 29, 2017

Resolving Post Production Bottlenecks

Our first challenging 8K project involved color grading and mastering footage from our trip to Peru. Prior to that trip, we’d done some...

Jun 13, 2017

When Should You Buy a REDROCKET-X?

It’s no secret among those we work with that we love RED. The first digital cinema camera we used on a regular basis was the RED ONE,...

Apr 10, 2017

Shooting 8K HDR in Peru

After a 2 year break from posting YouTube videos and solely focusing on our commercial careers, we decided to pack our bags with the...