Pictures and Clarity

No milk in the fridge this morning, forcing me to make an Americano rather than my usual cappuccino. In that spirit, here’s an undiluted rant on cameras, DV Rebel priorities, and what we might hope to hear from RED next week.

What are you looking for in a camera? A big sensor? 2K? 4K? Raw? Uncompressed output?

What you should be looking for is a machine that transmits your creative energy into the images it makes.

The least friction between you and your images.

The fastest route to the emotional truth.

I shoot a lot of stills with a 50mm at f/1.4. The shallow depth of field helps me portray what I consider to be the emotional truth of a situation. But this practice is only feasible thanks to a hundred little details about the camera’s ergonomics and electronics. If any of those failed, I’d shallow-DOF myself right into a collection of unusable photos. My Canon 5D is more than just a box with a big sensor and fast glass. It’s a machine designed to create opportunities and then, when they arrive, to make sure I don’t miss them.

Many videographers find their first experience with a 35mm lens adapter to be quite a cold splash of water. The images from these rigs can look amazing—but it just became a whole lot more work to make them even acceptable. Your system got a whole lot less agile, your solution more brittle. The ways to mess up a shot grew in proportion to the potential for greatness.

• As soon as you have manual focus, you need a follow-focus, which means you need a rail system.
• As soon as you have a fast lens, you need a variety of ND filters, which means a matte box.
• As soon as you taste the glory of fast primes, you need more of them. You’ll never have enough. Time to go Pelican Case shopping.
• As soon as you have shallow depth of field, you need a big, sharp monitor and mad focusing skills (possibly provided by a second person). You will blow takes due to bad focus.
• As soon as you have a small camera, you need support gear for something as simple as prolonged handheld work.
• As soon as you have manual control, you need quick, intuitive access to that control.

Video cameras have long had solutions for all these things. Good autofocus and fingertip manual focus with LCD focus assist. Built-in ND filter wheels and well-placed toggle switches for common functions. Zebra overlays, histograms, waveform monitors, professional audio inputs and monitoring. And built-in lenses that zoom like crazy and focus from a millimeter to infinity.

The video camera manufactures aren’t winning any ergonomic battles these days. After the gloriously balanced DVX100, Panasonic gave us the unwieldy HVX200. Not to be outdone, Sony provided the wrist-wrenching EX1. Nevertheless, the video cameras of today are mature, evolved machines not just for making images, but for ensuring that you make exactly the image you want, with a minimum of fuss.

And yet not a single video camera under RED One’s price has a sensor bigger than your fingernail.

Along come these video-shooting DSLRs, with enourmous sensors, the wrong form-factor for video, and none of the features that turn an DVX100 into a battle-ready companion. They make awesome images, but they do so at the expense of the operator. When you only see the images, these cameras seem like they must be the best thing going. But the images are the result of a process, and that process is painful. It’s up to you to decide if sexy DOF is worth giving up control. As you make that decision, here are some things to bear in mind.

• It’s better for a film to have good audio than shallow depth of field.
• It’s better to have control over your camera than to shoot in HD.
• It’s better to have good lighting than raw 4K.
• It’s better to put time into color correction than visual effects.
• It’s not HD if it’s not in focus.
• There’s no such thing as a rough cut with no sound.
• Your story is told using the images you create, not the ones you intended to create.
• You’re not done editing until you’ve watched your film with an audience of people who don’t care about your feelings.
• Your film is still too long.
• Your next film will be better. How’s it coming?

(That last one is more for me than for you.)

The D90 and the 5D MarkII can make compelling moving images. But they are not yet cameras that will support your creative development as a filmmaker, growing with you as your skills develop. Did Vincent Laforet want Reverie to feel like a masterfully-lit soap opera? Did Matthew Bennettt want Subway to feel like the wobbly video from a jailbroken iPhone? We are at times seduced by aspects of these demo reels that are perennially absent in our video viewfinders, but we are not seeing the work of a cinematographer in full control of their craft. We’re seeing accidents—some happy, some not. Images borne of a battle with an uncooperative piece of kit. Mario Andretti doing his best with front-wheel drive and an automatic transmission.

This Thursday, when RED reveals their new cameras, I’ll be looking at features and specs along with everyone else. But I’ll also be evaluating whether these cameras seem to be filmmaking companions that allow me to craft an image intuitively and effortlessly. The camera should disappear, leaving only me and the images that, for better or worse, I created.

SUBWAY

A man struggles to dial a phone and board a heavily skewed train in this D90 test reel that alternately shows off both the best and worst aspects of current DSLR video.

Click the image to watch a Quicktime in your browser. Discussion with filmmaker Matthew Bennett on DVXuser here. Thanks to crashandannie for the heads up.

Three Simple Things

Recently I was asked by a major DLSR manufacturer what features I would like to see in their movie capture mode. I pledged to restrict my reply to things that I presumed (in my ignorance) could be accomplished in firmware. Here’s what I sent:

• Choice of frame rate. Ideally we would be able to choose any frame rate from 1 to 30, with special cases for the NTSC speeds for 30 and 24 (which are 29.97 and 23.976 fps, respectively). But the “most wanted” frame rates are 29.97, 23.976 and 25 fps. 60 fps would be nice to have for slow motion, even if it had to be 720p.
  
  But 23.976 is the most important frame rate to support. It is worth mentioning that Getty Images now only accepts footage shot in 24p!

• Manual control, ideally using familiar camera controls, of aperture, shutter, and ISO.

• There is one additional feature that is probably slightly less accessible, but is nevertheless an important issue to explore. I have no problem with manually focusing while in video mode, but the challenge is that the rear LCD display, glorious though it may be, is not sufficient for gauging focus at 1080p. An edge-enhancement focus assist option of the kind found on many HD video cameras would be ideal. I quite like the one on the Sony EX1—it displays a colored outline on sharp edges.

To recap

• 24p
• Manual exposure
• Focus assist

My Amex awaits!

I hope they’re listening. I keep holding up the boombox, but I don’t see much movement in the window.

I’ve also mentioned to anyone who will listen that it’s time for video cameras to respond to this DSLR excitement. There’s much more than the mere ability to record video that defines a video camera. Some big challenges lurk here though. A Sony EX1, with its amazing, filmmaker-friendly features but miniscule sensor makes a luxurious DSLR like the 5D MkII seem downright affordable, even with its L-series kit lens included. Remember that only Panasonic has shown a video-focussed SLR-esque camera. As a SLR replcement, its predecessor, the Lumix DMC-G1, has been criticised for being too big. As a video camera it borders on being too small, although that is easily fixed. The Micro Four Thirds sensor is almost as big as the RED One’s, and Panasonic knows how to make video cameras for filmmakers. The G1 with lens is cheaper than the Nikon D90. No word on price for the video variant.

A week from tomorrow RED will blow us all away with their latest announcements and the future will seem both closer than ever, and farther away as well.

In the meantime, these video SLRs could be an aweful lot of fun—if they’d just do three simple things.

It's Happening

Let’s get something straight. The video from the Nikon D90 and the Canon 5D MkII is not of good quality. It’s over compressed, over-processed, over-sharpened, and lacks professional control. It skews and shears and shuts off in the middle of a take. It sucks.

So why are we so excited by it?

Because the video from these DSLRs stimulates us emotionally. It’s contrasty, with sexy depth of field. It looks like cinema, if you don’t look to close. Guess who doesn’t look too close. Everyone.

Not to mention the thrill of portability, incognito shooting, and of an infinite assortment and renewable supply of state-of-the-art lenses that serve both our motion and still habits. It all adds up to a thrilling sensation, even if we know deep down that these cameras aren’t quite ready for us yet.

What the D90 and 5D2 have done is show us that it’s no longer OK for video camera manufacturers, whether they be Sony or Canon or RED, to make a video camera that doesn’t excite us emotionally. Buttons and features and resolution charts just had their ass handed to them by sex appeal.

There’s nothing new about this of course. We’ve been trading image fidelity for sex appeal for years now, using 24p modes, on-camera filters, Magic Bullet, and 35mm lens adapters. Especially those lens adapters. We suffer all kinds of pains in our filmmaking asses to cut our cameras’ resolution and light gathering capabilities substantially. All because in cinema, less is so much more.

So it stands to reason that the number one manufacturer of 35mm lens adapters is the first to start taking these video DSLRs seriously.

On August 29th I wrote: Mark my words, you will see rail-mounted D90s with follow-focus rigs and outboard HD displays. On September 27th I played around with some spare Redrock Micro parts in an attempt to imagine what such a rig might look like. Zacuto soon followed with mock-ups of their own. But Redrock Micro is doing more than just mocking up: tomorrow they will announce a new, shipping product, a cinematizing kit for DSLRs with video.

I love Redrock. They make great, affordable rigs with the DV Rebel in mind. The Redrock bundles for video DSLRs are being showcased at Photo Plus in New York, tomorrow through the 25th, in the Canon and Zeiss booths. They ship November 1.

Since Redrock is taking video DSLRs seriously, maybe it’s time the camera manufacturers do too. It’s great that these images are so exciting, but they do need to grow up if we’re to use them for our films.