The lucky guys over at Mercedes-Benz Digital Media get to shoot promos for all of the newest cars, and these promo videos appear on television and in Mercedes-Benz dealerships across the country. Recently they approached us to test out the Sony SRW-9000 on one of their shoots. With its 4:4:4 recording, extreme dynamic range and the high quality of the HDCAM SR format, the camera made for an easy choice. I traveled out to Lompac, CA – a city near Santa Barbara that boasts incredible views of the Pacific – with two cameras packed into a small rental car. Once there, I met up with DP Robert Campbell, Production Supervisor Kyle Smith, and the whole Mercedes team. They put one SRW-9000 on a special camera car rigged with a crane, and another on sticks for pass-by shots. Additionally, they used the CamTram system for some tracking shots. Fujinon provided several lenses, and Mercedes already owned the amazing HA13x4.5 lens with built-in precision focus. Robert, the DP, really liked having the ability to change frame rates up to 60P in 1080, and especially appreciated that the camera could ramp the frame rate while shooting. The shoot went smoothly and Mercedes-Benz captured some beautiful footage of several cars, including the new SLS. Check out the video above to see some of this footage, as well as some behind the scenes shots. Notice how well both highlight and lowlight information is preserved, especially during the sunset shots; we also ramped several shots so keep an eye out for those as well.

One of the great advantages of HDSLR cameras is their small size. One of the supreme disadvantages is that there can be all sorts of little fiddly bits to keep track of. My old Super16 Aaton kit was a dozen cases — when I had to pare down to a Run ‘n’ Gun doc kit, I could get it to four — but that’s not how so many of us fly these days. We needed to get a fairly complete camera kit into a single case.

With this in mind, Abel and PortaBrace worked together to develop the “ultimate” HDSLR shooter’s case. The goal was to fit a camera built with front rods, follow focus, mattebox and optical viewfinder, along with a complete set of prime lenses or zooms, an HDMI/HD-SDI converter, and lots of batteries, chargers, CF cards, etc. It had to be easy to run around with on a shoot and fit inside a hardcase for shipping. After much work with PortaBrace, reconfiguring some products and creating new ones, we think we’ve come up with the Ultimate HDSLR Travel Kit. Take a look at the video to see more.

ARRI’s ALEXA camera offers several recording options, including recording directly to SxS cards in Apple ProRes format. This is called the Shoot to Edit option, and it makes for a very simple workflow. ProRes has proven to be a high quality and robust video format that is widely used in the industry today. The ALEXA has an uncompressed video output, but I believe many productions will choose to record in ProRes directly in the camera. Here is a 3 step guide for how to import ALEXA footage into Final Cut Pro.

…continue reading Simple ALEXA Workflow with Final Cut Pro

A camera can only be as good as the recording made from it. In the past year or so we’ve seen some interesting new portable recording devices such as the AJA Ki Pro and the Convergent Design nanoFlash. Now comes the Cinedeck Extreme, which is not only an excellent recorder but also doubles as a full-featured on-camera monitor. The Cinedeck Extreme can input HD-SDI in 4:2:2 or 4:4:4, as well as HDMI, and record it to the wavelet-based Cineform codec. Coming soon (with a firmware upgrade) will be Avid DNxHD, as well as Uncompressed HD. That’s right — an Uncompressed 12-bit RGB HD recorder for under $12K that sits right on top of your camera. Recording media are consumer 2.5″ SSD drives designed for laptops.

The Cinedeck’s monitor offers functions such as waveform, vectorscope, false-color exposure meter, audio meters, pixel-to-pixel zoom for focus, grid and frameline overlays, etc. All this in a package about the same size of a standard on-board LCD.

Watch the video for more on the Cinedeck Extreme and to see it mounted to the new ARRI ALEXA Digital Cinema camera.

New firmware for the Nexto Video Storage Pro (NVS2500) was recently released, which adds several new features to the product. These updates include preview support of AVCHD clips, preview support of the new Canon XF300/305 video format, and greatly improved data protection and backup options. One of the new backup options includes the ability to copy data back to Compact Flash and SDHC cards. It may seem a bit odd to backup video footage shot on one memory card to another, but there are some advantages. Compact Flash and SDHC memory are relatively inexpensive, easy to find, and fast to download. So if you are working with P2 or SxS cards, the Nexto can copy them to its internal drive, and then to another card for delivery or storage. Or if you are working with CF or SDHC, the Nexto can be used to make a copy. Why walk away from set with one memory card when you can walk away with two? Because the Nexto is not capturing video in real time, you could even utilize cheaper cards with slower read/write speeds as backups. Download the latest firmware here, and make sure to read Nexto’s workflow document to learn about their new data protection and recovery options.

DSC Labs recently introduced the RED CamBook, which is designed for the RED One and other future RED cameras. It has three pages of framing charts, exposure aids and color alignment scales. Watch the video to see all the features of this useful tool.

Many cinematographers use warm and cool cards, like the DSCLabs White N’ Warm cards, to create a look in camera. By white balancing your camera on a card with warm (red) color the camera will produce a cooler (blue) balance. The opposite is also true; a cool (blue) card will give a warm (red) white balance. If you white balance off the same card in different lighting environments, then you can consistently achieve the same warm or cool look. What many people don’t know is that this same method can also be achieved in camera through white balance offsets. This option is available in many pro cameras and is simple to set. Depending on the camera, an offset can be applied to the preset, A or B white balance settings. The offset works simply by adjusting the white balance to be cooler or warmer. Just like using the same warm/cool card, the offset will be applied to any white balance that you run. The advantage to using the offset over using the cards is that you can white balance off any white surface and still get the look you are after (of course a nice white card is still advised, if available). Here are a couple examples of how this is set in different cameras.

…continue reading Using White Balance Offsets to Create a Look