As you read this, news of some very exciting camera releases from Panasonic, Sony and RED Digital Camera, among others, will be hitting the online airwaves. NAB will be in full swing, and you’ll be able to read all about it or just sit back and watch the video from the show at www.studiodaily.com.
Cameras are now essentially just computer-based sensors and chips wedded to some very sophisticated optics that generate IP-addressable files. I love this stuff. Having grown up in a house where lines of code, computer hardware and early-adopter gadgets were as common as vinyl records, art books, novels, playbills, concert programs and magazines, I’ve long accepted my own digital/analog homogeny. It’s wonderful to watch the film and video industry finally- albeit grudgingly- accept its own.
Let me set the scene: It’s Christmas in the late 1960s. Bach plays from the stereo and a cluster of standing floodlights blast into my eyes as I try, blinking and squinting, to find the faces of my parents behind the wall of light. My father’s own childhood Christmases and many other family events were recorded with similar setups but on his father’s circa 1930s Keystone 16mm spring-loaded camera. Working on the same principle as Ford’s Model T, you had to wind and crank it to make it run. This oddly shaped ovoid camera- which, in photos, resembles a Brownie Box camera impregnated by film reels- came with a rotating turret for its three lenses: wide angle, standard and telephoto. According to my father, my grandfather wouldn’t settle for the more popular 8mm on the market at the time, even though the Keystone was much bulkier by comparison. But it had its obvious charms, such as seven f-stop settings that included slow-motion. A fast-motion effect was built in: My father fondly remembers watching himself and his siblings burst across the screen at breakneck speeds, a result of those final seconds of shooting when the crank wound down to a halt.
The Keystone was all casing and hardly any lens. These days, those parameters have essentially flipped, especially in the case of RED ONE, which is more about the lens and less about the camera body. If my grandfather were alive today, I know he’d be utterly amazed by and interested in what could be coming from RED. For those of you waiting for the RED ONE camera, Steve Gibby, an Emmy-winning producer, director and cinematographer, shares all the latest news as well as some great ideas for target apps on page 6.
One more digital/analog composite: When 35 mm film is at one end of the pipeline, file-based workflows can be a thing of beauty. Our cover story on page 30 makes this point brilliantly. The director of an upcoming indie feature, working with an idea from one very forward-thinking (and experienced) student, found an easy way, via the iPod, to share captured footage during production. At www.studiomonthly.com, you can also read more about how the folks at PIX System pioneered a QuickTime-centric workflow to connect editor Walter Murch with director Sam Mendes on Jarhead and David Fincher and his editor on Zodiac. In fact, Fincher loved the system so much the first time around that he is working with PIX on his current production, a retelling of the F. Scott Fitzgerald tale, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
– Beth Marchant, Editor-in-Chief
bmarchant@accessintel.com