Authors — David Leitner
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Festival Cinematography Notes – At Sundance, Alexa Rising
The day Sundance began, Daily Variety’s lead article kicked off with: “In this brave new indie world of VOD, shifting release windows, RED cameras [italics mine] and social media marketing…” I was struck by how little any of this has to do with indie filmmaking alone. As a token of digital revolution, RED cameras are so five years ago. It’s hard to storm the ramparts when last year’s #5 and #7 box office hits were shot with RED Epics (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Amazing Spider-Man). In fact, not only were last year’s #1 and #4 hits filmed with […]
by David Leitner on Feb 5, 2013 -
FCP X and the Future of Editing
Editing is older than motion pictures. The ordering and pacing of dialogues, scenes, entrances and exits to build conflict and resolution have long defined Western theater, from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung [Der Ring Des Nibelungen]. It was the insertion of first-person thoughts into dialogue and plot that modernized 18th- and 19th-century novels and clever sequencing of mechanically animated magic lantern glass slides that thrilled Victorian audiences to popular epics like Ben-Hur.
by David Leitner on Nov 19, 2012 -
Checking Out Sony’s New NEX-EA50H at Abel Cine Tech: Ergonomics and Low Cost Too
October 30 has come and gone, and with it Sony’s splashy announcement of two 4K additions to their CineAlta “F” series of Super35 cameras — F3, F35, F65 — namely, the F5 and F55. At a moment when Sony’s FS700 uses a Super35 4K sensor to capture low-cost AVCHD, it should have startled no one that Sony’s October surprise would be all about expanding their 4K line-up. But lost in the social media buildup to the F5/F55 announcement has been the recent introduction of another large-sensor Sony HD camcorder, the NEX-EA50H, a design that tackles, at last, the issue of […]
by David Leitner on Nov 2, 2012 -
Good Things in Smaller Packages
For those of us excited by the advent of large-sensor motion picture cameras, this past year has been the Great Leap Forward. Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp for the November launch of its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still-budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and […]
by David Leitner on Apr 17, 2012 -
Good Things Come in Smaller Packages: Large-Sensor Cameras, One Year Later
Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp to launch its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and described the industry’s growing embrace of the 120-year-old Super 35 format. Not only were existing cine and SLR lenses given a new lease on […]
by David Leitner on Apr 11, 2012 -
Festival Cinematography Notes: Of Sundance, Berlin and the Canon 5D
Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.” That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg. Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red […]
by David Leitner on Feb 29, 2012 -
The ARRI Alexa: Bridging Past and Future
Originally published in the Fall 2010 issue. The time frame needed to produce an independent feature these days can seem longer than the lifespan of its underlying technology. Cheap HDSLRs challenge high-end camcorders that cost 50 times more. Even RED One, whose revolutionary bona fides were golden two years ago, suddenly feels status quo. And lurking around the corner — due at year’s end — is a vanguard of new, inexpensive large-sensor camcorders from all the usual suspects. It’s been said that the geek shall inherit the earth, but this is getting ridiculous. How’s a producer to make sense of […]
by David Leitner on Dec 4, 2011 -
Leitner’s Mondo NAB, Part 5: Roundup
Originally posted April 2011. This fifth and last NAB 2011 blog is really about churn. Churn, to my way of thinking, is the degree of agitation and upheaval in the industry at a given point in time, such as this NAB. Apple’s sneak peek of FCP X at the Final Cut Pro Users Group 10th anniversary SuperMeet reminded me that even a decade ago, indie filmmakers were still coming to grips with the desktop revolution. I remember producers transferring MiniDV cassettes of my footage to Betacam for digitizing back to Avid, oblivious to FireWire or FCP 1.0. How professional could […]
by David Leitner on Nov 27, 2011 -
Leitner’s Mondo NAB, Part 4: 3D
Originally posted April 2011. NAB’s ubiquitous buzzwords this year were 3D and 4K. Or should that be, buzz-acronyms? James Cameron and camera design partner Vince Pace kicked off NAB with a keynote in which they announced founding a new company, Cameron-Pace Group, to spur the industry, particularly television, into rapid adoption of 3D technologies. Cameron, who knows a thing or two about being on top of the world, may have it right again. He and Pace think that TV is fertile soil for 3D, that in a space of five years TV viewers will expect 3D. By then, they contend, […]
by David Leitner on Nov 27, 2011 -
Leitner’s Mondo NAB, Part 3: SSD, Tapes and Storage
Originally posted April 2011. At back-to-back press conferences prior to the opening of NAB’s show floor, both Panasonic and Sony acknowledged the still-unfolding natural disaster in Japan and asked that our thoughts be with the Japanese people. Sony added that despite critical damage to its media plant in Sendai, supplies of HDCAM-SR tape would return to normal by June. Sony’s Sendai Technology Center (which I’ve visited) practically invented the high-performance tapes necessary to DV and HDV (metal evaporated) and HDCAM-SR (metal particle), and still manufactures a preponderance of them. Having persuaded both film and television industries to adopt HDCAM-SR as […]
by David Leitner on Nov 27, 2011
