Authors — David Leitner
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2014: The Next Chapter
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 […]
by David Leitner on Apr 6, 2014 -
Further Thoughts on Panasonic 4K GH4 – Updated
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 […]
by David Leitner on Feb 7, 2014 -
Autodesk Smoke 2013 – Super NLE?
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 […]
by David Leitner on Oct 22, 2013 -
A Fresh Look at Apple’s Final Cut Pro X
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 […]
by David Leitner on Oct 21, 2013 -
Sony Announces PXW-Z100, Ushers Era of 4K Camcorder
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 […]
by David Leitner on Sep 5, 2013 -
Back to the Future with 4K: Large-Sensor Motion Picture Cameras in 2013
A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder? Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole. This is my third annual overview of digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker, and it is being written in the run-up to NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, the world’s largest trade show devoted to digital video […]
by David Leitner on Apr 5, 2013 -
Festival Cinematography Notes – At Berlin, Back to Black
Back in February, I had the privilege of giving two workshops, “Intro to Large-sensor Digital Cinema Cameras” and “Large-sensor Digital Cinema Cameras in Detail” at the 11th edition of the Berlinale Talent Campus. For those not acquainted with this Berlin Film Festival initiative: the Talent Campus each year invites 300 directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers – “talented emerging filmmakers in the first years of their career” – each with a film or two under their belts. Most seem to be in their late 20s. This year over 4,400 applied from 137 countries. Clearly a hot ticket. The 300 lucky ones […]
by David Leitner on Mar 27, 2013 -
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
