Top Cinematographer, Indie Guru Praise and Critique Canon’s HD Video DSLR
I was fortunate enough to attend the second year of a panel at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention in Las Vegas this week where Director of Photography Rodney Charters (24, Dollhouse) and Stu Maschwitz (co-founder of The Orphanage, blogs at ProLost.com) spoke about shooting a million dollar feature on a thousand dollar budget. The panel was moderated by Brian Valente, partner of Redrock Microsystems, LLC who specialize in anachromatic lens adapters for camcorders like the Canon HV20 and HV30.
Both panelists lauded the new HD Video /DSLR camera – the Canon 5D MK II for its “why didn’t they think of that before” adoption of HD video capabilities in a unit that inherently features a larger optics chip and shallow depth of field – in addition to the ability to use Canon or (with the right adapter) Nikon optics via pro lenses – something only possible before with lens adapters that run over a grand in themselves (from such companies as Redrock Micro).
The only gripe? The camera, in its present incarnation does not support 24p – shooting instead at 30P. Also, they 
both begged for more manual control – as of now, one has to do a “Nikon Lens Trick” in the vein of the olde Cell Phone Trick for the HV20 - the Nikon trick involves using a Nikon adapter half-screwed on to pull off some important manual adjustments.
I will be stopping by the Canon pavilion here at NAB 2009 to ask about any developments in the direction of a 5D MK IIa or MK III…
If you have any questions you would like me to ask, shout at me in reply to this post or on Twitter @ConstantChange
NAB 2009 – Taking Requests
After being invited to speak at Career Day for the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, I have made it an annual pilgrimage so that I can find out what the big guys are thinking long before the new technologies and operating methods come down the pipe. Hey, it’s free to register for the exhibition floor. I was fortunate enough in my first few years to have a delegate pass so that I was able to sit in on various panels and seminars on topics ranging from After Effects, the new 3D cinema movement, and podcasting to how to shoot professional video on a thousand dollar home camcorder and monetizing a blog.
There are some very cool cats attending and speaking at this year’s conference. Stu Maschwitz – creator of the Orphanage and author of the excellent (and must read book) the DV Rebel’s Toolkit, will be speaking on a panel hosted by Red Cameras about making a million dollar film on a thousand dollar budget. Also, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Outliers will be there to expound on how to find topics for new books and ideally shed some insight on how he figured It all out.
More so than usual, this is a turning point year; the NAB is really working hard to figure out the irrevocable sea change going on and what broadband and ubiquitous internet-based streaming sites will mean to television. This year President Barack Obama signed legislation to delay the transition from analog to digital TV by four months. I remember two years ago when NAB was pushing hard to ensure that Americans understood how to apply for Government subsidized $40 vouchers towards their digital receivers. When I went to Radio Shack to submit my own I discovered that I didn’t need it after all – my Sony Bravia HDTV already had a digital tuner and the converter was for legacy TVs. This is something that NAB failed to get across. And I was there, hearing it from the horse’s mouth!
At any rate, this post is an invitation to readers of this blog to comment with ideas and questions they would like me to take to NAB 2009. If you can’t be there, might as well have me do the work for you, right? So send me your questions, concerns, gripes and curiosities, and I will do my best to get you answers at this year’s conference.
Thanks for reading and see you on the other side.
Vegas – ho!
Why you love the Canon Hv20 and first NAB 2008 report
I just returned from NAB 2008 (the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas – exhaustive coverage to follow) and yanked my Vegas strip footage out from the HDMI port on my HV20 directly to the HDMI port on my Sony Bravia, and God it looks glorious. All uber-techie discussions aside, the fact of the matter is, there is no camera in this price range (especially now that the HV30 has taken over the original price point, so this cam is down in the 5 – $600 range) that can dare compete.
This blog is here to show you how to get your footage to work in the most competitive way in the HD/film-replacement marketplace, and it can be laborious to create deliverables that are required by the film fests etc., but that is a challenge for anyone who wishes to compete – I just wanted to reiterate that this camera looks absolutely beautiful. The colors are full, the 24p looks completely pro, and it just makes whatever you shoot miles beyond SD.
I won’t leave you without at least some taste of what I saw at NAB 2008:
Leader showed Cinelite, an amazing new vectorscope/histogram on its proprietary monitors that superimposes its luma and color information directly on top of the image in real time. No more analyzing blobs and shapes – now you can see directly from the images you are shooting where things are clipping and what your colors are doing.- Ikan’s new V8000 HD is crisp a new HD hotshoe camera-mountable monitor coming out in Fall 2008. MSRP is $799. Looks sharp as can be and totally rivals similar models from Marshall and other competitors for a significantly lower cost.
- Iconix, makers of the world’s smallest HD cameras showed an HD 2k stereoscopic camera system alongside Digital Ordnance who were demoing their on-set 3D playback system. The entire package can be had for about 300k. 300k gets you into full HD/film-scan level 3D cinematography!
- Mogulus is a new company offering linear broadband television broadcasting online. If you are a broadcaster who doesn’t want to have to deal with the massive overhead of traditional broadcast/carrier models, this company is worth a look. Especially since they have a free model alongside their ad-free pro-model. Ever wanted to run your own TV station? Here is a very real solution.
- Look into LairdShareHD for an extremely well designed storage/network system for HD. Up to ten editors can work on your HD content at once. At their low price point this is one major contendor for the emerging storage solutions issues arising from the massive data collected by the new gen cameras. Here is the blurb from their site which will explain the system better than I can paraphrase:
“The Fastest Plug & Play Server on the Planet Screaming 8+ Simultaneous & Unique Instances of Professional Hi-Definition (DVCPRO100) or 24 streams of DV25 over your existing Gigabit Ethernet network! No expensive and complicated Fiber Channel networks or special software needed! Utilizes the Latest Green Technology with only 300 watts of Power Consumption at Idle. Built-in redundancy using the latest RAID-6 technology to safeguard storage systems from data loss due to hard disk drive failure. Multi-Year Service Programs available.”
- And just for fun, if you have ever wanted to get into the world of digital animation, perhaps my favorite find at this year’s show was the latest version of Animation Master. Although it is marketed as a simplified tool for creating your own spline-based 2 and 3D animation, it is a robust and extremely rich software environment with some very unique features that can get you up and going in no time. I will cover Animation Master in greater depth in another article, but it comes with my highest recommendation. The only thing that boggles my mind is that the software is now 21 years old and I have only recently heard about it. Visit their site to see how great the output can be.
