It is hard to believe, but the HVX200″A” model is only 6dB slower than a late model Sony, full-size, broadcast camera. Even more unbelievable is the fact that at 6dB gain, the HVX is as fast with comparable noise characteristics to the broadcast camera at 0dB. So, add a 35mm adapter to the HVX and you have a device that blows away most cameras on the market today. 

Tags: Equipment, Technical by Glen
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As a free-lance camera person, I’m always looking for new ways to help out traveling producers. Whether it is supplying time coded audio files or wireless video links for hand held b-roll, or accommodating any other special requests. While still shooting a great deal of tape on jobs, especially for out-of-town producers, some producers “walk away” with hard drives at the end of the day. For those traveling producers that still shoot tape - still the majority - it amazes me that they HAVEN’T been asking me to ship a hard drive at the end of the shoot so when they arrive back home they can go straight to edit. When shooting in DV, DVCAM, DVCPro50/HD, a great service I can provide would be digitizing services…a hard drive arriving in the morning FEDEX with Quicktime files ready for import.

Tags: Interesting Assignments, Technical by Glen
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If you are working with talent that has limited time, HD can be a real time saver if you are shooting for an SD out project. You can zoom in post instead of shooting a talking head twice as in shooting a script all the way through wide then tight for editing purposes. You’ll never be able to tell the zooms were done in post. We used to say VHS was “the great equalizer”…now SD is “the great equalizer”.

Tags: Technical by Glen
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Everybody shooting video on location today gets asked to “make the background out of focus”, especially when shooting interviews. Well, sometimes this is easy and sometimes it is difficult…that is NOT what this article is about! This article addresses the little known fact that most professional cameras produced today have 16:9 chips and a lot of what we are still shooting is 4:3. Of course, the smaller the image sensor, the more depth of field. So, ponder this: If we are shooting 4:3 footage with 16:9 chips, whatever size those chips may be, than you are using less than the whole chip and therefore have increased depth of field over the older style 4:3 chip cameras in the same situation! The bottom line is that if you want less depth of field in 4:3, use your old 4:3 camera instead of your 16:9 camera if you have a choice.

Tags: Technical by Glen
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