Archive for the ‘Video Shooter (Book)’ Category

First day of the first month of the new decade. Time to think a little bit more perhaps about our priorities in life, our relationships with the important people in our lives, and to a lesser extent with our craft and careers.

Regardless of the current state of the economy, which is dismal for many of us, the changes in technology in cameras and image acquisition are rattling more than a few of our collective cages. Last Monday night on December 28 I presented my heretical thoughts to a ribald group of 110 shooters and presumably interested attendees at Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood CA. Sure we talked about the new gear and lenses as Doug Leighton from Panasonic and Joe Patton from Canon described their respective wares.

The real issue that seemed to dominate the collective discussion, however, had little to do with the physical tools of the trade but the reality of necessarily adapting to the transforming workplace. Many comments from the group expressed support for all things 3D, a notion apparently shaped by the current studios’ increased demand for 3D content. The crowd suggested that 3D capture could become the norm for many shooters in the coming year.

For general live-action titles I’m not sure 3D will ever become more than a minor niche player. One reason is the current requirement that audiences don specialized headgear which interferes with the immersive quality of the cinema.  In the future, halographic technology may very well obviate the need for intrusive glasses. But we’re not there yet.

Some members of the Hollywood group took exception with what they perceived as my anti-super high resolution bias; the feeling no doubt fueled by the less than flattering comments for higher and higher resolution capture devices like the RED One and Epic. My contention was and continues to be that the current Resolution Religion permeating our ranks is fundamentally flawed, when in fact what shooters ought to be demanding is Performance, Performance, Performance, and not Resolution, Resolution, Resolution, which is after all but one measure of a camera’s performance.

Low-light sensitivity, dynamic range, ergonomics, ruggedness of hardware, optics, and appropriateness for the story at hand, should be at the forefront of every shooter’s consciousness, and not merely the number of pixels that can be jammed into a poorly performing albeit cheap CMOS imager the size of a battleship.

Let’s continue in the new year to seek gear with superior performance that can help us garner greater employment and plum assignments. I don’t deny that very high resolution image capture can be advantageous in some applications. Just let us not make it the only point of discussion because it doesn’t serve us well either economically or in terms of our craft, which after all requires maximum versatility and performance in the current highly constrained business environment.

One should never base a camera purchase decision on imager native resolution alone. The resolution perceived by an audience is influenced by many factors beyond a camera’s imager size and native pixel count. High compression, choice of codec, quality of optics, dynamic range, even the use or non-use of a matte box, can seriously impact contrast, which in turn can negatively affect the perceived resolution of an image. A more relevant measure when considering a new camera is performance, that is, how well the camera behaves under the most difficult conditions you’re likely to encounter in the course of your shooting day. A  camera able to perform well in a wide range of conditions  is going to be far more useful to most users than a camera system with merely more pixels jammed into the face of an imager. In fact those cameras with very high resolution imagers should in general be avoided in order to preserve the best low light sensibility and dynamic range.

After months of work the second edition of Video Shooter is now a reality. With photos from recent projects in India and Africa and updated references to the latest cameras and tapeless workflows, Video Shooter 2 will provide if nothing else hours of entertaining reading. I tried to make my lessons and insights fun, as video storytelling and life in general should be. It’s not a technical book although it can be technical at times. It’s really a book about framing the world and communicating with a camera. Ultimately it’s about  telling compelling stories – which is all your audience cares about anyway.

In a way you could say I’m an anti-nerd nerd. I despise technical discussions in general, although I understand and can fully appreciate the video artist with technical proficiency and mastery of his tools. That’s one of the major lessons in Video Shooter: from a technical perspective the video storyteller only needs to know what he needs to know. Anything beyond what the audience requires to experience a good story is pure geekiness.

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