Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]

I fall into that category of independent filmmaker who, as the need exists, writes, produces, directs, shoots, records sound, edits, even grades their own footage. (What we used to call color correction.) Then again, often times I’m “just” the DP. 2014 was my busiest year ever, and at some point I found myself taking on each of these basic roles. As a result, the scope of my “kit” is necessarily broad, encompassing both production and post. (Kit is a Britishism for one’s working collection of gear, a name I intend to lend to a series of brief tech reviews in […]

David Lean once called editing the soul of filmmaking. Today it’s more like the Mission Control. You’ve got to understand pixel counts, bit rates, bit depth, color sampling, sampling frequencies, frame rates, codecs, RAW files, deBayering, audio channels, waveform displays, vectorscopes, audio levels, LUTs, proxies, file-wrappers, Log gammas, XML, titling, effects — need I go on? Arcane stuff that used to be the domain of video engineers with EE degrees. To ensure a smooth and efficient postproduction “workflow” (term borrowed from I.T.), you must know about cameras too: which frame sizes they capture, which codecs they employ, which gammas they […]

Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas If you’re anywhere near North Adams in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, close by the New York and Vermont borders, anytime between now and February 1, 2015, do yourself a favor and drop by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to contemplate their exhibition marking the last days of photochemical motion pictures: The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor. With the contraction of film manufacturing and virtual demise of laboratory services in the face of near-universal digital imaging, the medium of […]

On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]

Welcome to Filmmaker Magazine’s fourth annual digital cinema camera round-up. Each year for reasons of publishing schedule, this overview is written on the brink of the big NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time some of you read this, journalists and bloggers will have breathlessly uploaded each and every scrap of breaking news from the frenzied show floor, saving you the airfare, sore feet, and those Vegas cab fares calibrated to expense accounts. But what do these splashy product introductions mean? Do we need to trade up our cameras? How soon? Are more resolution, bit depth, frame rates, color […]

Tetraphobia is the east Asian practice of avoiding the number 4 because it sounds like the word for death. But to ignore 4K would be certain death for any manufacturer serious about digital motion imaging. It was only a matter of time before Panasonic dropped the other shoe. Overcoming their fear of 4, Panasonic on February 6 announced the GH4, their first 4K/Ultra HD camera and portent of Panasonic 4K cameras to come. Formally known as LUMIX DMC-GH4, it arrived mere weeks after CES in Las Vegas, where Panasonic unveiled a prototype 4K “GH Next.” Of course 4 can also […]

Once life was simple. NLEs were NLEs. They did offline editing of conspicuously compressed picture with unmixed audio tracks and limited titling. Maybe it started with the MiniDV revolution 15 years ago, but over time low-end NLEs competed with high-end NLEs in tools and feature sets, becoming today’s desktop online systems and sealing the fate of many midlevel post facilities. Along the way several NLEs became suites of applications called “studios.” Back in 2005, for instance, Final Cut Studio arrived as FCP bundled with DVD Studio Pro, Motion, LiveType, SoundTrack Pro, Cinema Tools and Compressor. Two years later, Color, for […]

Hard to believe, but FCP X is well over two years old and already into its ninth iteration. Its popular multicam tool arrived with version three in January of last year. In the past 12 months alone, no less than four new versions have been released, bringing dual viewers, a unified import window, support for native REDCODE RAW, MXF, Sony XAVC (up to 4K) and optional Rec. 709 display of ARRI ALEXA ProRes captured in Log C. Recent improvements also include a handy freeze-frame tool, chapter markers for QuickTimes and DVDs, better audio channel editing tools, and FCPXML 1.2 to […]

Sony announced today at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin a new line of 4K camcorders, available this fall. The pro version will be called PXW-Z100, while the “consumer” version will be called FDR-AX1. Bucking the large-sensor trend I described recently in Filmmaker, the PXW-Z100 (from this point, I’ll detail the pro version only) contains a single 1/2.3-in. Exmor R CMOS sensor, a smidgen less than full half-inch. At first glance above, the PXW-Z100 would seem to do for 4K what Sony’s epochal HVR-Z1 did for HD almost a decade ago: introduce affordable capture of the latest high-res format […]