Skip to content

Hot Shoe

Digital Production (DE)

19 stories

Digital Production (DE)GermanyOmniscient: Blender Gets a Handheld Camera Omniscient: Blender Gets a Handheld Camera For those who don’t know the tool: Omniscient Virtual Camera uses an iPhone or iPad as a live handheld camera controller for Blender, including…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyFLAPI: Baselight Beyond the Grading Suite FLAPI: Baselight Beyond the Grading Suite For those who do not know the tools: Baselight is FilmLight’s colour-grading and finishing system; Daylight handles dailies preparation, colour management…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyArnold 7.5.4: Pixels, Pauses and Speed Arnold 7.5.4: Pixels, Pauses and Speed For those who don’t know the tool: Arnold is Autodesk ‘s Monte Carlo ray-tracing renderer for film, animation, VFX and design visualisation.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyBeeble SwitchHDR 2.0: 4K, 480 Frames and an AI Tool With an Actual Purpose Beeble SwitchHDR 2.0: 4K, 480 Frames and an AI Tool With an Actual Purpose For those who don’t know the tool: Beeble SwitchHDR 2.0 reconstructs extended dynamic range from SDR footage and delivers…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyDaVinci Resolve 21.2: New Touches, More Fixes, and One Tired News Writer DaVinci Resolve 21.2: New Touches, More Fixes, and One Tired News Writer For those who don’t know the tool: DaVinci Resolve combines editing, color grading, Fusion visual effects, Fairlight audio…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyPhysics Scatter: Substance Meets Gravity Physics Scatter: Substance Meets Gravity For those who don’t know the tool: Physics Scatter is a third-party tool from material artist Gilad Baruch for Adobe Substance 3D Designer .

Digital Production (DE)GermanyOpen Test Patterns Joins ASWF DPEL: Finally, the Right Bars Open Test Patterns Joins ASWF DPEL: Finally, the Right Bars For those who don’t the tool: Open Test Patterns generates precise color, HDR and geometry reference images in the resolution, color space…

Digital Production (DE)Germany3DGarden: Vegetation Without File Gardening 3DGarden: Vegetation Without File Gardening For those who don’t know the tool: 3DGarden is ITOOSOFT ‘s scanned vegetation asset library for ForestPack Pro in 3ds Max .

Digital Production (DE)GermanySculptForge 0.9.3: Free Clay, Big Ambitions SculptForge 0.9.3: Free Clay, Big Ambitions For those who don’t know the tool: SculptForge is a free, GPL-3.0 digital sculpting application from independent developer Tony, also known as islandmed.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyiZotope Photon: Fixing Production Audio Without Becoming an Audio Engineer iZotope Photon: Fixing Production Audio Without Becoming an Audio Engineer For those who don’t know the tool: iZotope Photon is a standalone, GPU-accelerated application and ARA2 plug-in that…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyKaveLight: Build Sets, Keep Your Fingers KaveLight: Build Sets, Keep Your Fingers For those who don’t know the tool: KaveLight is a Mac application for planning sets, blocking, lighting and camera framing before a shoot.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyUcupaint 3.0: More Paint, Less Panic Ucupaint 3.0: More Paint, Less Panic For those who don’t know the tool: Ucupaint is Yusuf Umar’s free, layer-based texture painting add-on for Blender .

Digital Production (DE)GermanySony RIALTO 65: Bigger Sensor, Same VENICE 2 Sony RIALTO 65: Bigger Sensor, Same VENICE 2 For those who don’t know the system: RIALTO 65 is a sensor-head extension for Sony’s VENICE 2.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyNuke Stage 1.2: DMX, LTC and the Mac Wait Nuke Stage 1.2: DMX, LTC and the Mac Wait For those who don’t know the tool: Nuke Stage operates between VFX content preparation and in-camera capture.

Digital Production (DE)GermanySketchUp 2027: The Small 3D Toolbox for Post SketchUp 2027: The Small 3D Toolbox for Post For those who don’t know the tool: SketchUp is Trimble’s 3D modeling application, widely associated with architectural and spatial design.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyFinally, No More Post-its: Procedural Canvas for Houdini Finally, No More Post-its: Procedural Canvas for Houdini For those who don’t know the tool: Procedural Canvas is Alexander Klymak’s visual reference board for SideFX Houdini .

Digital Production (DE)GermanyUgly is free. Beauty Costs Extra. Ugly is free. Beauty Costs Extra. For those who don’t know the tool: Ugly Box is Digital Anarchy’s free skin-processing plugin, derived from its commercial Beauty Box retouching technology.

Digital Production (DE)GermanyChristmas Assets: Eight Weeks to Look Festive Christmas Assets: Eight Weeks to Look Festive For those who don’t know the tools: Greyscalegorilla ‘s Holiday Workshop and Holiday Materials supply festive 3D props and surfaces for product…

Digital Production (DE)GermanyDRACARD: The Complete Character pilenine the houdini way. DRACARD: The Complete Character pilenine the houdini way. Houdini Rigging: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving APEX The promise of procedural thinking: model the character so that the…

On the calendar

· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

On view

This week, from that corner the newest stories from the corner of the industry you picked

The wire their own posts, translated

How pictures get made in 2026 from the industry's own reports

Sources

Fetched every six hours, linked to the original

About

The small bracket on top of every camera, from a phone rig to an ARRI.

The hot shoe is where the flash goes, and the microphone, and the monitor, and whatever the next decade bolts on. Every camera has one and nobody photographs it. This magazine is named after it because that is where the whole business meets: the body, the glass, the light, the sound, and the person holding it.

I shot news in Gothenburg for nine years and documentary for hire after that, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools. Since 2021 I live in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, which is not an accident: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm, Panasonic, Ricoh and Sigma make almost everything worth pointing at a subject, and their own press writes about it first, in Japanese. So this magazine reads it there, and in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and in English from the reviewers who actually put a card in the slot — around eighty sources and thirty channels, counted and plotted so you can see what is moving.

Bodies and lenses, cinema cameras and drones, film and the darkroom, firmware and the software that finishes the picture, the rumours before the launch and the reviews after it, and the photographers and shows the rest of it is for. I test what I write about on a job before a word goes down. I shoot film on Sundays and do not think that makes me interesting.

A story here is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link to whoever reported it. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the photographer or the maker. A story written in Japanese appears in Japanese, as its author set it down; the link goes to the original.

— Mara Lindqvist, Tokyo