I was simply floored by the amount which our colorist Hector could push the colors in our sunset. If there’s the slightest chance we’ll need to tweak colors in post, my options have been to move the shoot indoors, or send the biggest, heaviest camera for my crew to lug around…until now. Although some newer cameras can produce a reasonably smooth orange-to-blue gradient in-camera, compressed codecs prohibit any manipulation beyond the sensor’s settings at the moment of capture. As a producer, I’m consistently cautious when a shoot takes us to an outdoor evening location. It would be interesting to see how much value the fp could provide to scientific studies in need of rich, accurate color depth., but I’ll leave that to the experts.Īs we were sneakily placing/cutting the sunset footage at the beginning of the piece, (sorry for the tricks!) we discovered two more exhilarating aspects of the fp’s CinemaDNG files.įirstly, the sunset had no banding. This is an insane level of detail to capture in such a small form-factor device, and precisely illustrates the kind of nuanced imagery simply unachievable through compressed formats. Knowing the scientific principles at play inside the balloon, I logically understand that heat waves would produce this effect, but it’s not something I’ve seen through my own eyes, and definitely never from a camera sensor. In the same balloon shot that surprised me with its client-friendly color rendition, we found that the heat ripple affecting the inside of the balloon was also captured. Once our colorist, Hector started digging into settings we discovered just how much detail the fp captures and retains. Once we moved into the edit’s color phase, however, we found the content to be extraordinary. Our editing experience could be summarized as normal, exactly as we would desire with footage from any camera. For content destined to appear in already-compressed formats these losses were often acceptable for the selfsame reasons of convenience, and like many teams we adapted to these limitations because cameras which could provide rich color detail were too complicated, out of reach financially, or both. If you nailed it in-camera you were good to go, but any extensive changes would lead to a grainy, blocky mess. The same compression that made file sizes convenient lead to shots that couldn’t be pushed very far beyond how they were originally captured. While footage was easily to rearrange and play back, it generally fell apart in color grading. This overnight adoption of small, affordable cameras was amazing for production and the initial phases of post-production, but carried a heavy cost in post. (For the younger readers: look up “miniDV.”) Like many, we shifted our focus to cost-effective, easy-to-use hardware without a deep consideration of what we were missing. These cameras had features that made the leap away from “traditional” cameras a no-brainer: convenient size, established pedigrees of lenses and accessories, and faster-than-realtime footage capture. Like many in our generation of creatives, we were swept up in the hype surrounding the first HD DSLRs in the late ‘00s and early ‘10s. Like many media companies born this side of the millennium, Blueline has made lots of videos with cameras not initially designed for video. To fully understand why this camera excites me so much, bear with me for a little backstory.
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