Fri Apr 12, 2013 9:28 pm
I just returned from my storage with a heavy box of 16mm stuff, have a Micro 4/3 to C-Mount adapter shipping, and can't wait to test the lot on my B&H pre-ordered Pocket Cinema Camera. So glad having not chucked all that gear. I have some good, old superspeeds, Zeiss/Angenieux zooms, and some exotic oddballs from the days of my filmmaking, flatbed and Model 20 editing yesteryear. I beat the offerings on Ebay, which I gazed upon earlier today. Super 16 lenses will deliver the pantheon of wide angle to telephoto so many whine about concerning this new camera. You just have to be olde enough to have them in stock. Olde? The potential of this camera makes you feel young again. I'm even dusting off my jibs and sliders, as a hankering to produce has returned.
From B&H I also ordered the rather expensive MTF Services Ltd. Nikkor (all types, aperture ring or not) to Micro 4/3 adapter, and cannot wait to check the enhanced telephoto effects my fast supertelephotos will offer. Big fluid head for the stability. Finally, I will have a decent source for the HyperDeck Shuttle, now there's a Crucial 960GB SSD for under $600. That's quite a few hundreds of minutes of ProRes HQ 422 10 bit at film log color space. My olde Panavision 12 volt battery boxes will have a new life too, feeding this stuff.
I just have to finish my DIT box, which will have Davinci Running to a Sony High Color OLED Production Monitor, massive Thunderbolt storage and replication, and offline editorial. All in a big old Panavision camera box on wheels. We plan on having a digital equivalent of a lab's adjusted, so called "one light" via stored setups, and will likely send editable stuff to my edit bays from the field.
As to ProRes HQ 1080p, I have had the occasion to use it for 3D and did make a 3D DCP of it and had it projected in a digital 3D theater. It was stunning without any "sparkly" bit error issues, which was the problem with RED's codec in the past, though I think they've worked that out by now. 1080p digitally projected has been seriously tested against 35mm release print. Digital won in overall quality. Lab generations to the point of standard wide release printing just can't match the near to master quality of projected digital in terms of useful resolution and quality.
As to DNxHD, I can live without it with ProRes HQ and compressed RAW (when it's available) to ProRes 4444 (provided by DaVinci.) Avid standards are too closed minded, like the company, which proved less than agile once Final Cut arrived. Final Cut X muddied the waters, but is finally getting close to being a good solution these days, if only for the independents. For some things, it shaves DAYS off a Final Cut 7 schedule, as in, a once tough, 4 day edit in 7 is a breezy one day edit in X.
All Things Behind the Camera are my Art,
Baking and Making Dessert, my Passion.