Over Thanksgiving weekend, there was a discussion on the Cinematographer’s Mailing List (CML, cinematography.net) about new camera technologies and future trends in our industry. Neil Smith of Hollywood DI asked me to give Abel’s perspective on what’s to come. Since writing my response, numerous people have commented on it and suggested we re-post it for others to see. It is presented here for you to read and draw your own conclusions.

From Neil Smith, Hollywood DI:

Mitch, I’d be interested to hear your views on how you see the industry changing over the next 12 months … you guys have been in the game a lot longer than most of us and have never ceased to adapt and change and continue to deliver great products and services.

My response:

What we see as the big change in the industry is how the market now leads the manufacturers. Unlike what so many sometimes think, the manufacturers have always tried to listen to their customers to develop products with which everyone will be happy. Focus groups and meetings with large clients worked well in the past, but the business of Image Capture has expanded at an exponential rate. And there are also forums such as this that communicate in minutes what once took months. There are different markets and different ways to serve them. And these markets are letting the manufacturers know this, and the manufacturers are responding. And sometimes a manufacturer just might know something and drop a product that makes everyone stop and take notice.

…continue reading So, What Lies Ahead?

This is the first part of the ENG Essentials – Camera Matching series, and the first step to matching two cameras. White Shading is an in-camera process where a lens is matched with a camera’s sensor. Every lens and every sensor have unique characteristics, and the combination will often produce uneven color across your image. White shading corrects for this uneven color by adjusting individual color channels (R,G,B) from top and bottom and from left to right. This is done with a Leader waveform monitor and a white sphere that is designed to produce even white light.

Another important step after white shading a camera is to match white balance values. All pro cameras have preset and user defined white balance values – the P,A,B switch. If you run a white balance on two cameras looking at the same white card, in the same lighting environment, you will get very similar results. But if you plan to use the preset values (3200K,5600K) we need to be sure that both camera actually produce the same color white. Different lenses produce different white values, so even though the camera thinks you are at 3200K, it may be completely wrong. This can be corrected for by adjusting offset values in the camera, and making sure that both cameras have matching white values.

Watch my video below to see how these two steps are done.

(Photo credit: Evin Grant)

Did you ever wonder what creates permanently lit, or what we often refer to as “blown”, pixels in your CCD camera’s imager? Here’s the reason:

Charged-Coupled Devices (CCD’s) are made up of an array of millions of photodiodes, which turn light into voltage. Photodiodes have two leads coming from the bottom, a cathode and an anode. When a photon of energy strikes the diode, it excites an electron, creating a mobile electron and a positively charged electron hole. Holes move toward the anode, and electrons toward the cathode, producing a photocurrent. Because photodiodes use voltage to convey information, they can be susceptible to high-energy particles such as cosmic rays.

…continue reading Lit Pixels: Why Do They Happen?

Doug Percher from International Supplies was nice enough to bring by the Nexto Video Storage Pro unit the other day and let us try it out. In the past, Nexto had shown us their eXtreme ND 2700 and other models that provided a OTG (on-the-go) way of downloading CF, SDHC cards, Memory sticks, and a variety of other flash memory. It’s basically a portable hard drive unit with some memory slots. The card goes in, and with a few clicks, the card is downloaded to the internal drive. This was a great unit for the DSLR market, Red One users, and AVCHD camera owners. But the Video Storage Pro brings this idea to a whole new level. It’s a must have for any tapeless camera owner, P2 & SxS included!

…continue reading Nexto Video Storage Pro

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Setting the correct depth on the lens mount of Digital Cinema cameras is a critical and precise task. The new Red Null tool makes the process quick and easy. Everybody should have one in their kit. Watch the video to see how it works and how simple it is to use.

For more information, visit ibe-optics.com.

For pretty much any film or video project you might work on these days, you’ll spend at least part of the time dealing with compressed material. In order to decide which codec to use, you need to keep in mind what purpose you are using it for and how a particular codec fulfills that purpose. In this entry, I’ll explain some of the techniques I use for evaluating codecs. In later entries I’ll cover some more specific results.

…continue reading Image Evaluation Series: Compression (Pt. 1)

Remember way back when, or well just a couple years ago really, when we only had that one standard video connector? To most people in the US, it was the yellow RCA plug that matched up to a yellow jack on our television. Video professionals had it pretty easy too. Just hook up a single BNC cable from the Video Out port to the Video In port on a monitor. Oh, those were the good old days. Now we have a whole collection of different connectors and video formats, not to mention about a dozen variations of each. So, in what promises to be a lengthy article, I will try to break down all the confusion and describe many of the video connectors that are in use today.

…continue reading All Those Video Connectors