From the course: Cinematic Video Lighting

Choosing a camera

From the course: Cinematic Video Lighting

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Choosing a camera

- All right, before we get into lighting, all this stuff behind me, I want to talk to you a little bit about cameras, and camera choice for a project. So we're here at Topa Topa, relatively small spaces, and we're going to have to move fast over a three-day period to get all these interviews, B-roll, and everything else. So, we had to decide what cameras we were gonna use, and also what kind of camera support. And for this particular project, I have a lot of history using Cinema EOS cameras, I like how fast they are to operate, the menu system is great, they render skin tones well, I can shoot log, and they're pretty easy to rig. So we've got C100 Mark IIs here, and we actually have two of them, because on most projects nowadays, both corporate and documentary, it's rare not to have an A and a B camera. And, secondly, what we want to do is we want to talk about how we're going to move these cameras. Now, we're going to have standard interviews, where we're going to put a camera up on sticks, we might put two cameras up on sticks, so we have that A, B. But this was the key decision on this project. While it's great to set up jibs and sliders, and all of that stuff, what we wanted to do was we wanted to be able to move fast, we wanted to get out of the way of people who were brewing, people who were serving, people who were coming here to this space, and we still wanted to get those dolly shots, we still wanted to get those jib shots, so, in this particular situation, we decided it was worth renting the MōVI M5. And that's what we have this C100 Mark II basically built on, we'll pull this off and put it on sticks or something else if we need to, but it's here, we've got a seven-inch monitor that's actually a monitor recorder, so we can actually bypass the internal recording of the camera if we want to, and go to something like ProRes. This is the Shogun from Atomos, and we also have a specialty camera, this is an a7 Series camera from Sony, this is a great camera, the rig, it's really small, so it also like these cameras, shoots log, we've got a chart here for reference, if you're doing anything with more than one camera, it's great to shoot on a chart, because it helps the editor, when they get into post, to make sure that the picture is where it needs to be on a vectorscope, and all of that stuff, and also, in a situation where, if we bring in another camera from another manufacturer, these cameras, Cinema EOS camera and a7 Series camera, are from two different companies, two different sensors, we may shoot log on both but it's a different version of log, this chart's going to make a big difference in production. Couple of other things, lenses, we're going to shoot with zoom lenses, probably, for interviews a lot, because we can recompose our shots in between questions, but we also have a series of prime lenses here, so when we're shooting stuff in and around this space for B-roll, we can get a beautiful bokeh, also in low light, we can have a lot of opportunities. I think that's pretty much it, I mean, I've got a grey card here that I use for reference, especially because all of these cameras work differently when you're shooting in log, and just a few other things, you've got to have your drives. One of the things that I tell people all of the time is when you're in production, every single dollar that's being spent on pre-production and production is sitting on some sort of card or drive. That's where all of the money is. So you've got to get those cards out of your cameras, and backed up to at least two places. We're actually using cameras on this particular shoot that use SD cards. SD cards are cheaper than tape. So we don't even record over those cards in the production anymore, but we also always have it backed up to at least two drives on set. iPad, fantastic, you can use it for a slate, you can use it to take notes. I've always just personally got a lighting book with me when I travel so I can continue to learn, and then, of course, some sort of computer, so that you can ingest, do tests, anytime that we shoot stuff, we bring stuff in and make sure that everything's okay before we really get into the production. So that's really the overview, you're going to see all of this stuff in play during the video. I want to get to this stuff, the lighting, so let's go ahead and do that.

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