Down with DSLRs!

That’s it. Time out. I’ve had it with DSLRs.

They may work fine for you. They’re not working for me. I’ve given it a year, at which point I’d promised to trade up, or trade out.

As a videographer (a shooter who edits the material they shoot) in a field where there’s no rehearsals and no take twos (we’re talking corporate events here), I was, perhaps unfairly, looking for a ‘run and gun’ camera. I’ve been shooting with EX1s for a while now, and really appreciate the image quality and the benefits of a bigger chip than most fixed lens camcorders.

But the DSLR Revolution changed and enabled many things.

- Selective focus (shallow depth of field) looks great and really helps your subject pop out of a messy background

- Very good low-light performance, getting video where many camcorders would make a horrible grainy mess

- Special lenses (rather than do-it-all fixed lenses) make higher quality images with less fringing and better contrast and sharpness, and can go ‘wider’ or ‘longer’ too

- The small, neat, unthreatening dimensions of the camera enable you to get candid video where a bigger camera would be out of place (or unwanted)

- There’s something about the way the DSLRs create video that is very flattering for portraiture – and that equates to the hardy perennial ‘talking head’ in video terms

So I’ve dipped my toe into the DSLR waters with a 550D setup, and have loved the results – when the results were good. But DSLRs can also screw up in fairly fundamental ways, and can be a real handful to shoot with due to problems with ergonomics.

What’s tipped me over the edge are not the usual serious issues like aliasing and moire (which are bad enough), but the day to day issues of living with a Video DSLR:

- Overheating: sorry guys, I almost threw the camera in a bin after a shoot where the camera overheated towards the end of a fraught time-pressured interview. No, the talent wasn’t going to wait, and yes – a spare body may be the way to go if I were going 100% DSLR, but even then it would be a pain. It’s bad enough to halt a flow between journo and talent to get over the 12 minutes per take, but to have the camera demand a rest was just beyond the pale.

- White Set: DSLRs just don’t really get this. You’re asked to switch to photo mode, take a still, return to video mode, select Manual WB, then select the photo to base the WB on. However, differences between your picture profiles can really screw it up so badly, one feels safer in Auto WB mode, but then your shots don’t match – or worse, colours drift during a take. I want a White Set Button!

- Battery level: the 550D battery level is not merely coarse, it’s more of a traffic light – and a bad one at that. I purchased a power grip, but then you’re faced with double the batteries to charge overnight, which means setting your alarm for 2-3 hour chunks and getting a really bad night’s sleep. It’s like feeding a baby all over again.

Okay, there’s a slew of other niggles – the Z-Finder fogs up at the most inappropriate times, the start-stop button is in a stupid place, even a 60D style twiddly screen is no match for an EX1 or EX3 panel, and the list goes on. You can spend a hideous amount of money curing these ills, but at some point, one must call Time Out and look at a Red of some sort.

I loved the good times, but I’ve had bad times – probably because I’m using a DSLR in an inappropriate situation (hand held run & gun).

My path is clear – I am moving to Sony’s NEX-FS100 ‘medium format’ video camera, taking all my Canon glass with me and adding some Nikkors to boot. The 550D will still be with me, but relegated to Stills and Timelapse duties, and I think it will really shine in that respect.

So, I’m not selling my DSLR. I’m not giving up my DSLR. I’m not trading up, nor am I trading out. Just putting it to work in the best way for my needs.

An afterthought: one of the ‘benefits’ of my last year with a DSLR is learning and exploiting the value of having good quality stills that match your video – NOT to replace a professional photographer, but just to have nice mug-shots and ‘signature’ stills of your video programme for print, publicity and web.

Just can’t shake the DSLR bug

I have a particular client who wants me to shoot interviews that must NOT look ‘corporate’ and slick. He wants natural, evocative ‘folk 16mm’ or ‘one man and his Bolex’ sort of stuff and is very keen on my DSLR work.

Well, today I finished up with a shoot – CURSING the bloody DSLR. It had overheated and wouldn’t play ball. Right in the last 10% of a slightly tense interview. I had been fighting the focus, I had been nursing the cards (now rare precious things due to use of Magic Lantern), and in the small airless and windowless room we had to film in (on a hot sunny day), I was struggling to see through the steamed up Z-Finder on these long 10 minute handheld takes.

It had started badly with a long trek from car park to venue with heavy kit, the briefest of recces to work out how we were going to film this, and there was very limited time to set up two cameras, lighting, audio, and props. Within 10 minutes, interviewee had arrived, and we were off.

What’s worse is that I was sure that there was something definitely up with the white balance, but I’d ‘done the right thing’ by taking a still and setting it as a custom white balance. I was fighting the urge to ditch the location and go outside to film there. I was fighting with the mental map of how to shoot this ‘casually’, and just let the situation ride whilst I kept the camera moving, the composition still and the subject in focus.

At the end of the shoot, as I walked back to the car, I swore that AS SOON as the FS100 is available with the Birger Mount, my little Canon is going to be retired to Stills duty. I want a proper viewfinder, I want proper white set I can trust, I want NO OVERHEATING. EVER.

Horrible, horrible, horrible nasty DSLRs.

I pounded the steering wheel on the way back. FS100 – the way forward. Birger Mount. I like the lenses, I like the IS, just hate using a Z-Finder (or anything like it), remembering to button on and off before you hit the 12 minute limit, and absolutely hate that ‘sorry guys, need to switch the cameras as the DSLR is on its Lunch Break.’ excuse.

And now I’m home, and I’m looking at the rushes – now that they’re all synchronised with beautiful 24/48 audio and the colour corrector has removed the blue tint. And…

It’s like 16mm film.

The EX1 shot is very competent. It’s technically wonderful, exciting, responds well to light. No problems at all.

But the DSLR image has soul and charm and charisma. It’s like my days with a Moto Guzzi T3 motorcycle. It was infuriating, you could see rust forming whilst waiting at traffic lights. I’m sure it did more miles on an AA rescue truck than under its own steam. One day I hired a VT500 (Guzzi was ill again) – the VT50 was the motorcycle courier’s 500cc standard mount by which all others were judged. It was better, faster, safer, more frugal, smaller engine, and had no bloody soul. It was a simple (but well engineered and leakproof) machine.

The Guzzi was, well, an emotion – a zephyr of memory and sensation encapsulated in aluminium and steel. When it was in a good mood, it transcended metal and became something almost alive. Trouble is, it broke throttle cables, seemed incapable of holding its oil in, and if you did a particularly sharp right turn, the electrics cut out.

But my happiest motorcycling memories come from the Guzzi.

However, I’m not shooting for pleasure, I am shooting for profit. Time to think like a courier rather than a tourer.

I don’t need to make my Canon match my EX1R, I need to make an FS100 or AF101 look like a DSLR.

FCP-X – from ‘the editor’s NLE’ to ‘the content creator’s editor’?

The new version of Final Cut Pro has been announced, but we don’t get to play with it until June. Whilst the wild speculation is over, the Mac editing community still has to sit on the fence for a while whilst we find out just how revolutionary the new FCPX is.

Don’t get me wrong – FCP really needs a full re-write and rethink. FCP has been broken for a long time: nesting sequences can be a hairy experience. Font handling is so bad, I have to use Motion for lower thirds. Some fonts just didn’t even show up! FCP was so single-tasked you’d lose huge chunks of work time just to render out a finished file. Memory was so badly used, projects over 40 minutes in length got wobbly, requiring you to split your programme up. Managing bins became a zen like experience as dragging a finder folder into your bin didn’t make a link to that folder – any changes to the contents had to be done in both the finder and in FCP. FCP is riddled with little inconsistencies like this.

So, FCP needs a change.

However, there are times when the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. Final Cut Pro is a ‘professional’ package – people earn money with it. People build businesses around it. Large amounts of money are at stake based on the way a bit of software works. Muck around with the fundamental way a bit of pro software works, and it will affect the ability of a swathe of people to put food on the table. Okay, that’s a little too melodramatic, but you get the picture.

Another way of classifying ‘Professional’ software – for me at least – is to denote an acceptance that there are many ways of doing something. If I have problematic audio, I can choose the most appropriate combination of application and plug-in, rather than hand over the responsibility to the application.

For example: audio compression is a pretty standard need for voiceovers. FCP has access to a couple of compressors, albeit rather simplistic and built on an interface made of string and clothes pegs. Over time, I switched to the lovely iZotope Ozone 4 which admittedly costs almost the same as FCPX, but replaces many thousands of pounds’ worth of hardware to give the sound I want.

It’s not just that – I’ve invested a LOT of money in plug-ins that are essential to the work I do – colour correction, compression, animation, motion tracking and so on. I’ve invested in them because the raw tools in FCS weren’t up to the job.

Neither do I want Pro software to hide the annoying little details from me – I do need to know if I’m rendering in YUV 10 bit over RGB. I do obsess over little details that differentiate my work from others on both a creative and a technical level.

So, if the new version has some jaw dropping tricks to stabilise video footage and clean audio, can I please use the software I’ve already got to do that rather than rely on Apple’s implementation?

I see an interesting shift: Adobe Premiere used to be the ‘domestic’ editing application whereas FCP seemed squarely set on the Pro market as a serious choice over Avid. Now it looks like FCPX is positioned as ‘the editor for content makers’, rather than ‘the editor for editors’ – a role that Avid has always occupied, and Premiere Pro seems set upon establishing.

It will make a very big ‘ecosystem’ for Final Cut Pro, and will win new users – but at the expense, perhaps, of the higher end who will drift back to Avid or jump over to Premiere’s very comfortable way of working.

Editing is mostly about ‘In’ and ‘Out’ over ‘time’. We have a lot of choice of NLEs, but their interface shouldn’t be dazzling or clever, it should be invisible. I stopped using iMovie when it got all scrubby and trying to help me do the simplest stuff. I fear the new FCP interface is going to try to do the same thing and will interfere with how I do my J and L cuts, and require a whole raft of new plugins… But the really horrible truth may be that in 12 months time, I’ll have jumped to the new version and will love it so much that this little note will sound like the rantings of a ‘stick-in-the-mud’ grouch.

Editors are (and should be) a rather conservative bunch who take things like upgrades VERY seriously. Bumping up a ‘point revision’ can take weeks of agonising, months waiting for a gap in the schedule to allow for a full backup, the creation of a ‘sand pit’ of the new version, testing all the little things that make or break your given workflow, then rolling out the change. Apple are asking editors (EDITORS! for crying out loud…) to perform a leap of faith into what is basically a 1.0 NLE. Whilst my inner-geek is hovering over a virtual ‘buy’ button in the App Store, the editor within me is wagging a warning finger – do I want to bet the farm on this? Now?

So, even though I got up at 0400 in the UK to catch the first morsels of news about FCP X, I’m not in the least excited about it. There’s not much that’s really new, unlike Premiere’s useful approach to metadata. We don’t really know much about FCP-X other than a slick presentation. Hmph. Time to get back to work – editing in FCP of course.

A good summary, and another one. I note that the Apple website hasn’t updated its info, and FCP-X doesn’t even make the ‘Hot News’, though Larry Jordan’s blog has satisfied me that this natural and to be expected.

Achieving ‘that video look’

Throughout the last 9 decades of cinema, Directors have been stuck with the same tired look forced upon them by the constraints of their technology. Cinematographers at the vanguard of their industry, disenchanted with the timelessness of film, are now looking to achieve that elusive ‘live’ look – video!

The world of moving pictures has gone by a number of pet names, one of which describes one of the pitfalls of having to pay for your recording medium by the half-cubit or ‘foot’ as some would say. ‘The Flicks’ were just that – flickering images in a dark room, destined to cause many a strained eye.

Whilst motion could be recorded at or above 20 frames per second, there was a problem in that the human eye’s persistence of vision (that eye-blink time where a ghost of a bright image dances upon your retina) means you can perceive flicker up to about 40 frames per second. So your movie had smooth movement at 24 or 25 frames per second, but it still flashed a bit.

Of course, clever engineers realised that if you showed every frame TWICE, so the lamp illuminated each frame through a revolving bow-tie cunningly pressed into service as a shutter, then hauled the loop of film (due to mass, intertia, etc – tug the whole reel and you’d snap it) down one frame and give that a double flash. Rinse, repeat.

Every student of film will get taught the special panning speed to avoid juddery images – then forget it. Ditto the use of shutter speeds beyond 180 degrees. And so we’re stuck with motion blur and the last vestiges of flicker in the eyes of an audience reared on a visual diet of 75fps video games.

A collection of flim makers, some with their roots in the DV revolution of the 1990s, are looking to their true source of inspiration, trying to mimic the hallowed ‘television look’ by the simple expedient of shooting a higher frame rate. This gives their work a sense of ‘nowness’, an eerie ‘look into the magical mirror’ feel.

As post-production 3D gains traction, Directors are taking a further leaf out of the Great Book Of Video by using a technique known as ‘deep depth of field’ – where the lens sharply records all from the near to the far. An effect very reminiscent of the 1/3” class of DV camcorders. This will, of course, take huge amounts of lighting to achieve pinhole like apertures in their ‘medium format’ cameras such as Epic, Alexa and F65, but as leading lights such as James Cameron and Peter Jackson jump on the bandwagon, the whole industry can now concentrate on achieving ‘That Video Look’.

Thunderbolt or USB3? Daddy or Chips?

Thunderbolt (nee LightPeak) is being hailed as a ‘Paragim Shift’ and if it does what FireWIre did fifteen years ago, the moniker is well deserved.

FireWire was a technology that was at the centre of the low cost Digital Video revolution: it enabled simple connection between cameras, disk drives and computers. Suddenly an Apple PowerBook could suck in ‘broadcast quality’ DV and edit it on easily attachable external hard disks. Video before FireWire was an exotic curiosity. After FireWire, it was a commodity.

Rather than rant on, check this short video out:

And enjoy this informative article.

700 Mbps on old kit. Duplicating a 4.5 Gb file in seconds. Playing 5 streams of 1080 footage off a hard disk. All from a not-new MacBook Pro.It’s good to know that, whilst we’re still getting to grips with the extra data and throughput of HD, the wonderful world of 3D (or ‘Stereo’) HD – which would effectively double your storage needs and halve your throughput – now has some headroom to grow. This iteration is only the first round, and 10x higher speeds are promised.

More to the point, it’s going to help the little things. Make the chore of backing up work a little easier. Cloning a 1 Terabyte drive, even with eSata, can take a long time. When you’re under pressure to get things done, taking time out to clone work drives, back up and archive projects gets shunted down the priority list.

Thinking back to iterations, USB3 is out there too – but definitely NOT on the MacBook Pro. Sure, if you get the 17” you can fit a PCI-Express card, but us SxS based editors consider this slot ‘taken’. Current real-world tests haven’t been particularly stellar either, with only around 10-15% more performance than FW800.

Maybe that’s the reason Apple decided to pass on USB3 – which would be very lame. Yes, USB3 is backward-compatible, so a USB3 thumb drive from your favourite PC-based client will work at USB2 speeds on your shiny new Mac, but to deny Mac users USB3 ‘when they have Thunderbolt’ misses the point about compatibility, interoperability and the fact your clients aren’t going to have a LightPeak thumbdrive any time soon.

Also, Thunderbolt is a daisy chain solution, and if my experience with SCSI is anything to go by, there will come a time when you need to briefly add a device, and you already have two that demand to be at the end of a chain. Or that awful moment when you realise you need to swap out one of the drives…

So it appears that the choice between Thunderbolt and USB3 is pretty irrelevant. You can have USB3. If you want to. If someone bothers to make a USB3 interface for Thunderbolt (which must happen). Thinking selfishly, I’m hoping for a Thunderbolt SxS adaptor, so ‘we get Chips!’ – the PCI-e slot is a lovely little thing, but it’s only on the 17″.

I’d like to use the slot for SxS, and for something to drive a broadcast monitor – like the AJA IO Express, for example – and of course the inevitable USB3 adaptor, and the eSata – but these are all in Thunderbolt territory and conceivably there’s a solution for all these uses at the same time. I just hope that third party video kit manufacturers adopt Thunderbolt rather than stick to a USB3 strategy.

I’m very excited about Thunderbolt, but just waiting on the niceties: just how hot is the hot swap? When will we see anything like a hub? How much of a premium will this add to storage devices? And where’s my new MacBook Pro – of course.

TV Soup – or how video compression really works

A little while ago, I got embroiled in a discussion about editing footage from DSLRs and why it wasn’t always a good idea to desire editing the original camera files. I repeat a condensed version of rant here for some light relief – but please can you imagine it as delivered by the inimitable Samuel L. Jackson…

When your DSLR camera records video, it needs to be space efficient as it has to deal with a lot of frames every second. Merely recording every frame does not leave enough time to actually capture subsequent frames and compress them nicely. It needs to do some Ninja Chops to do video.

Firstly, it does not record each frame as an image. It records a frame, and for every subsequent frame it only records the changes from the first frame. This may go on for, oooh, 15 frames or so. Then it takes a breath and records a full frame, then does the differences from THAT frame onwards.

Now imagine you are an editing application. Scooting around in that framework of real and imaginary frames means you’re spending most of your time adding up on your fingers and toes just to work out which frame you’re supposed to be displaying, let alone uncompressing that frame to display it.

Oh yes. In order to edit, you have to DECOMPRESS frames to show them, and that takes time. It’s like making ‘packet soup’.

Your editing software is trying to snort up packet soup – dried bits of vegetable and stock – it has to add a specific amount of water to that mix, allow the dried bits of aforementioned stuff to absorb the water, then compartmentalise the soup into spoonfuls.

Lesser compressed soup (not H.264 freeze dried but ProRes/DNxHD ‘just add hot water’ concentrate) can do this quicker and better – and some say it tastes better too. If only these newfangled cameras stopped freeze-drying their soup and just stuck to boiling off the excess water like MPEG2 does, dang, that would be nicer.

So, when you take your camera originals in H.264, you have to carefully re-hydrate your freeze-dried movies, and allow them to slowly absorb their moisture in a long process called transcoding. Then gently simmer them to a stock soup concentrate, so your editi system can easily serve them up in 1-frame, 1-spoon servings so you can edit them between the many hundreds of thousands of bowls that maketh the feast of your film.

You can have QuickTime soup. You can have Cineform soup. You can have DNxHD soup. H.264 soup is freeze dried and acquired through a straw. But H.264 soup is the size of a stock cube, and (for want of a better example) R3D is like canned soup – just requires a little reheating and a cup of cream.

Which ever way you capture and store it, we all watch soup.

Take your T2i footage, rehydrate it into the editing format you choose (can be ProRes, DNxHD, Cineform, hell, even XDCAM-EX) and then dish it up by editing and add your secret sauce to make it look/taste even finer. When you try to edit raw footage on most edit systems, you’re making soup into a condiment.

Thank you Mr Jackson.

Okay already, enough of the metaphor (and you’re spared the spatial compression stuff for now). CS5 does the ‘edit native H.264’ trick very well, so can other systems in the future, no doubt. But there is most definitely a time and a place for transcoding before editing. And I don’t think it’s going away.

The ‘Science’ of ‘Awesome’?

What is it about manflu and training DVDs? Once again, I am confined to duvet, lines of lemsip cut with vitamin C ready for snorting, and I am watching the latest instalment of Per Holmes’ Magnum Opus – “Hot Moves – the Science of Awesome”. And once again, it’s an amazing watch.

This 115 minute long DVD/MP4 feature is an ‘addendum’ to the ‘Master Course In High-End Blocking & Staging’ course – a 6 DVD set of mindbending info, but rather than cover the mechanics of telling a story, or covering a scene so it will cut well, this DVD is about getting the trailer shots – as the narrator puts it, ‘awesome for the sake of being awesome’.

In his usual style, Per and his team hose you with information. It comes thick and fast – though I detect a slight slowing of in tempo in this iteration (though that could be the lemsip). You know an iconic shot when you see it, but the team demonstrate how and why these shots work. And variations that don’t.

Funnily enough, the audience for this production is probably a lot wider than previous titles, not only because it’s great for low budget indie movie makers, but because it taps into the virtual world. This is a must-have for 3d animators and motion graphics designers looking for a movie style.

But even if you’re just going to invest in a slider or even tape a GoPro Hero to a broom stick, you’re going to get some great ideas and solid learning from the title.

It’s ‘required reading’ (watching) if you already have the ‘Visual Effects for Directors’ series, and a fun intro to the style of Per Holmes if you’re thinking about jumping in, but remember that this is the fun bit. You’ll still have to learn the footwork with Blocking & Staging. And none of these titles are ‘watch once and file away’. You can absorb and reinforce by a sort of visual osmosis. I still go through the titles as a sort of ‘background hum’ if I’m not actually editing, though my accountant will probably say this is probably why my paperwork skills are so poor.

Any peeves? The download version I purchased was a DVD image, which really wants you to use FireFox extensions, which turned into a bit of a FireFox love-in and a very long download. I much prefer a smaller straightforward MP4, preferably HD for my AppleTV. But that’s such a minor thing and I believe HCW may be going MP4 soon.

In conclusion, this is yet another solid training title from HCW that rewards repeated viewing and pulls no punches in delivering high quality and high quantity learning material.

Driving FCP

A forum topic popped up recently: “is it better to use a tablet, or a mouse and keyboard to edit?” – and the obvious answer is ‘whatever suits you best.’ But it got me thinking.

Over 15 years of mucking around with video on Macs, I’ve tried tablets, mice, trackballs, touchpads, external ‘surfaces’, huge knobs, voice control…

I now exclusively edit on a MacBook Pro, using its built in trackpad, with a combination of keyboard shortcuts and mousing. Much to the horror of my fellow editors, who cannot believe I don’t carry an external keyboard and mouse with me. To be honest, after a while, once you learn the interface, it disappears.

In that contemplative stage of editing, doing your selects, trying out ideas, it’s ctl-V to slice up the long sausage, and mousing to ‘lift’ (literally bump the track up a layer) your good bits, and lift again on your selects.

In that honing mode, I think (I have to watch myself) I’m doing more dragging of cut points.

Last year, a fellow editor was watching me edit and was shocked – almost upset – that I was dragging stuff around. Why didn’t I use the keyboard? Because it’s quicker, I replied. He wasn’t having it and saw mousing as a sign of unprofessionalism – yet he didn’t quite see the multitude of keyboard shortcuts for slipping and rolling that I moved between.

Honestly, it really is what suits you best, and having worked with laptops since the first PowerBooks, it’s genuinely faster for me to do what I do. I love the visualness of dragging stuff around, but I’ll still do a TTTT to select everything to the right and move it over before doing an RR to get the ripple tool out, then a ctrl-V to trim all the tracks together.

The only thing I still miss are the big heavy jog/shuttle wheels on the BVE3000 and BVE5000 – great feedback, hardly any latency, and although the way audio is scrubbed and trimmed nowadays is probably better, I still miss the ‘wibbly wobbly’ sound of jogged audio.

Seriously, though, a mouse (or touchpad!) can be more accurate than a tablet because of its scaled movement and ‘gearing’ (fast movements are big, slow movements are small) and take up little space. Tablets are good for ‘muscle memory’, tapping virtual buttons like the paintbox days. But even then, the keyboard was never far away. A tablet-only interface is hard work.

That’s why, I guess, our two tablets became mouse mats. Sigh.

Besides, I find Harry-style circular scrubbing a bit too much like children’s nursery rhymes and even a little more hard work than dabbing at J K L.

But I stil miss that knob!

Be careful what you wish for… you might get it.

We’ve been wishing for ‘that elusive filmic look’ for a while now, making our videos look less like a security camera, more like a bit of cinema. We wanted progressive scan. We got it. We wanted wider latitude. We got it. We wanted 35mm sized film sensors for Depth of field, and now with the F3 and the AF101, we’ve got it. But it comes at a cost.

First off, big sensors require longer focal lengths to cover them. That’s why a 50mm lens on a DSLR is ‘normal’ but on a compact it would be telephoto. But the longer the focal length, the narrower the depth of field (for a given setup). Lovely blurry backgrounds to your talking heads, rendering a messy background into ‘art’. But suddenly, you have to keep an eye on focus. Your pin sharp subject leans forward, and is out of focus. Twiddle, twiddle, lean back, twiddle, twiddle. And of course, you only have to breathe near a long lens to make the image wobble, so engage Optical Image Stabilisation, or upgrade your tripod to something made of cast iron.

That’s just with a DSLR. The Sony F3 takes PL lenses. It starts off without a lens, at three times the price of an EX1, and then you need to buy glass. Not photographic glass, PL mount glass. You thought L-Series lenses were expensive? You’ll only get a clutch of primes and a couple of zooms. No long zooms like 18x, not even 8x. Sets start at around £20k. The film industry is used to this. Ex-DSLR shooters may have to wait (hopefully) for a Canon adaptor. Maybe.

Meanwhile, over in the Panasonic camp, the good news is that the AF101 will use photo lenses, the bad news (as DSLR shooters have found) is that most of them go from infinity to a foot in 45 degrees of twist, so you’ll need a Follow Focus unit to gear down the effect, plus scaffolding to hold it in place.

The Panasonic differs from the Sony in that it uses a 4/3rds format, smaller still than the 1.6 APS-C crop, which means you’ll need to buy a new wide-angle or two.

This is the joy of removable lens systems. You begin to collect glass. You’ll want a really wide angle lens, a standard ‘walk around’ lens, a portrait to long lens, and a very long lens, just to cover the usual range found on most ‘Corporate’ camcorders. At f2.8, these are neither small nor light.

With this, no doubt, in mind, Panasonic have managed to get a 14mm to 140mm 10x range lens (which is like a 28 to 280 in 35mm terms, so useful and not to be sneezed at), but at f4-f5.6 you’re using up the two extra stops of sensitivity that a big sensor gives you, and the smaller iris steals back the Depth of Field benefits of your lager sensor. No such thing as a free lunch: lenses with very wide ranges that cover large sensors are either the size of a pedal bin and cost more than a truck, or it’s a compromise and it ends up as something that barely works in daylight.

Of course, if you made the sensor smaller… But let’s not go there.

So, your lovely cinematic camera now travels with a bagful of lenses, some scaffolding to clamp a follow focus knob to it. Then there’s a need for a separate recorder for high quality image recording (no, AVCHD and 4:2:0 MPEG2 may not cut it for its intended use), you still may want a focus monitor…

In other words, you’re going to be your very own cinematic film unit, with Assistant Cameraman, Focus Puller, Clapper/Loader/Datawrangler and Gaffer. And a budget.

The F3 looks like an EX1, uses the same codec and the same workflow as an EX1, but it’s not an EX1. I’m sure it’s going to be very popular in the world of cinema where EX1s may have been used before. Would I earn more if I used this camera over current kit? Probably not.

The Panasonic is a whole new beastie – affordable, manageable, with that Panasonic ‘look’, takes any lens (albeit with the 4/3 crop), but it’s AVCHD, which I’m a bit leery of, so it will need an external recorder like a Ninja to do chromakey work with. And it’ll be swapping lenses all day, checking the gate so to speak, not the best run and gun camera in the world…

My point, I think, is that there’s going to be may whoops of joy and dancing and merriment over the release of both the Sony F3 and the Panasonic AF101 (and a Canon some day soon), but these are not for everyone. The recent announcements, far from sowing seeds of discontent, have made me love the EX1 and 550D even more.

But I could still find room for a Scarlet.

Still Motion

The client saw me shooting with a DSLR, and naturally assumed I would have stills of the event. But shooting stills and shooting video are two very different disciplines.

So I’ve spent the morning trawling through my rushes, trying to identify good frames that would make a photograph.

A photograph is, for me, four edges round a moment in time. The framing, or ‘crop’ is the first cut – what do we see? Where are we? Then there’s the composition – what should I look at first? Where does the eye go afterwards? Then there’s the details – what is important to the subject? What has the photographer highlighted? Then there’s a multitude of aspects – mood, lighting, style, rendition, and the gestalt works as a study of a fleeting moment.

Your eye can travel round a photograph for quite a while, feasting upon it.

But I shoot video. I am looking for impact, motion, gesture, cadence, the reveal, the conceal, the trick of the eye, each shot may not be much on its own, but when put together as an edited sequence, their very juxtaposition is the value.

There is no time for the big panorama – we’re looking for lots of little details that cut together with a general view that explains them all. I don’t have the luxury of having the viewer concentrate on a single composition for a few seconds. I need to feed the eyes with a stream of visual soda.

So, basically, searching for ‘photographs’ from ‘video’ is a pretty depressing exercise.

I work with photographers a lot. There’s a lot of synergy between us, and what we’re each looking for is so totally different, but both reaching for the same goal.

The DSLR revolution has come about because big news agencies asked the stills camera manufacturers to enable their photographers to grab a bit of video to add flavour to reports. Photographers get a ‘movie’ button in the same way as HDV camcorders get a ‘stills’ function. It’s a convenience, a little trick that can help some situations.

This has highlighted a source of contention for some: ‘what sort of video are these photographers going to get? How do they think they’re going to compete with us video shooters?’. Well, it’s probably the same kind of photographs that we video shooters can grab from our still frames. It will be competent, technically fine, will fulfil the limited brief we’d have recieved. But somehow lacking in the absolute magic of video for video’s sake or photo for photo’s sake.

My learning point is to really emphasise to clients that if they see me shooting with a DSLR, I am not shooting photographs, I am shooting video. I am not a photographer. The stuff I shoot is for motion and montage and reveal. I can give you stills of video, but never will I really give you a ‘photograph’.

And the funny thing is, that with all the photographers I work with, who can shoot video and sometimes do, they say the same thing about their work: I can shoot some moving photographs, but I am not a videographer. My videos will stand alone, and I don’t know how they’d edit together.

It’s all a bit like cookery: we’re all making food, but there’s entrees and desert. Rather different techniques, rather different goals. But they work great together.

At least I found 68 stills from the rushes, all shot at 1920×1080, so it will do at a pinch, but if you want photos, hire a photograher.