Cinematography

hi everyone thanks for joining us so my name is jason newton thank you pascal for leading us in and so uh yeah you're

you're stuck with me here for a little bit so in this seminar we're going to be going over a lot of the common questions i know that extension's been getting for a

while and i assume you as students or people interested in cameras have been thinking about as well of how can i or

what should i get how much should i spend is it smart to buy a camera should i rent all this all the different questions that go with

the idea of getting a camera to start your career now to start your film career might be a little misleading so if you're coming to this seminar

expecting to hear a lot about kodak and fuji and 35 millimeter and 16 millimeter film sorry you're about 20 years too late uh

so what we're focusing on mostly today is all digital because this is where we really are in the industry right now especially for cinematographers

especially for young cinematographers understanding the concepts of digital and digital cinematography is crucial so

what we're going to be going over today is yeah we'll talk about what the current cameras are what's new what's interesting what might be a good buy

what might be the different levels can you really get an area alexa maybe probably not so we'll go over what all those

different things are but the first portion of the class what i really want to do is go over some of the more creative and technical aspects of what

really makes a camera a camera because that for me is the most important part rather than just thinking of it like oh

i need a red i hear the red's a really great camera it shoots 8k 12k 24k who knows that is that really important so we'll

talk about what the k's really mean when it comes to cameras i know if you go on like a website like b h or best buy or

some of these other places that sell cameras they have that spec sheet the spec sheet that goes over the different aspects of the camera and i know for a lot of

people that can be really daunting so we'll go over what some of those concepts are that you might see on a spec sheet so if you're trying to compare a couple different cameras at

least it kind of gives you a good jumping off point to know what those different aspects are so we'll go over all that and then some

and i'll try not to get too technical but you know we'll kind of keep a nice balance here so uh pascal gave me a little intro of stuff so you know i'm a

cinematographer shot a handful of features color corrected a lot more features so part of my day-to-day stuff working in color correction is that i'm

getting footage coming in all the time from different cameras shot by different cinematographers so the big cool aspect of that is i'm

working with this footage all the time so for me that's really one of the most important parts of a camera is how that footage is ultimately being worked with

in post in color correction so we'll talk a little bit about that as we get into the seminar itself

okay so without further ado let's kind of start to jump into it so i have my slides here that'll kind of like guide me along uh when i do my classes for

ucla it's very common that i get stuck down these deep dark rabbit holes that we just start going on different concepts so the powerpoints for me are

really kind of a great way to refocus what we're supposed to be talking about so those will help keep me on point and then we'll also put them up full screen for you as well in case you want to take

notes or follow along on your own okay so when we're talking about investing in a camera and what the camera actually is this comes down to

the core of cinematography so i know most of this we're kind of be approaching from the idea of cinematography which is the person on

set the cinematographer who is in charge of camera and lighting and one of the best uh collaborators

with a director for visual storytelling so i know some of you might not be in the film industry per se or want to

eventually be in the film industry so i'm going to try to broach both sides of the equation so there's cinematographers

which is for more you know your film tv production more of the professional side of filmmaking and then there's also videographers videographers can be

cinematographers but videographers or people who are more just shooting video for the sake of generating content and there's nothing wrong with that at

all i know probably a half a good number of you consider yourselves videographers people who maybe have a camera have shot some stuff before

so that con that side of it is equally as important because there's so much content being created right now even if

you look at stuff like social media all of that requires a camera so what camera might factor into that side

of things as well so all of that we'll try to we'll try to approach uh here in this here in the seminar and leave plenty of time for

questions because a big thing i can think of is that everyone's kind of approaching this from different aspects so if i don't touch on something that's

directly relevant to you feel free to use the questions to type a question like hey this is what i do can you recommend a camera for this or that

and then if we have time there at the end i will do my best to try and answer these questions and help you as best as possible in your specific case

so back to what we're supposed to be talking about see rabbit holes i told you we just start we start going down down down down where it ends who knows

um but camera choice like cinematography a blend of art and craft so the art of cinematography this is what ultimately

makes film an art form right at the end of the day filmmakers are artists so how you express your art right a

screenwriter through a script a director through working with actors a cinematographer through creating expressive visuals that all tell a story

everyone is working towards this greater goal of visual storytelling so because of that the camera is the essential tool

of visual storytelling so that's what's most important to keep in mind when you're thinking about what camera is right for me

which camera is best suited to help you tell your story it's easy to get sucked into the tech the craft

side of camera choice it does it is it 4k 8k well you know what no one's ever watched a great movie and thought wow

i wonder how many caves that movie is right it doesn't doesn't happen so beyond just thinking of the caves and

the tech you have to think of the camera as a creative tool of visual storytelling okay so as we start to transition into

this idea of do i need to buy a camera or should i buy a camera all of that this is kind of a good question because owning a camera and i mean i just talked

about all the beauty and the art of cinematography and visual storytelling now we got to buckle down and talk a little bit about business because buying

a camera is a major investment so you are investing in your career as a filmmaker now everyone's especially in

the times we currently are everyone's financial situation especially in the artistic field varies quite dramatically especially over the last challenging

year so i know the idea of potentially investing in a camera right now might be challenging for some people

but if you are looking to make that investment you need to approach it as much of a business decision as possible especially with the higher end cameras

we'll get into talking about those and we're looking at price ranges in the you know five to six figures for some of these cameras so this is not just like a

quick easy purchase type of thing so when you're looking to buy a camera also ask yourself the question does it make sense

to write uh to rent a camera so if we're looking to rent a camera instead of buy uh how can you start to go about that

because renting a camera is a great possibility when it comes down to uh evaluating which camera is the best for

you i've actually done that myself in looking at buying a camera that i went and rented from a couple different places try it out a couple different

systems to see what the best possible solution is so when you're looking to rent there are

a couple different options out there depending on where you're located so the actual camera

rental itself there are sites like lensrentals.com that can be great options uh there's other options like

sami's camera if you're here in los angeles different camera rental places depending on where you live are all potentials for renting

so when you're looking to invest in a camera something like that renting might be a great option to try out a different camera to see if that's the right uh

question for you for the right camera for yourself so some rental options one that distributes around the entire

united states is lensrentals.com now i've gone through them before for different projects especially if i'm traveling to go shoot they can actually

ship you camera gear to your location you use it you put it back in a box they ship it back to you it's a pretty great little setup

but there are other rental options probably around you i know in los angeles at least sami's camera some photography shops i think in new

york as well b h has some rentals film tools here in los angeles as well so all of these are potential options

for renting and trying out cameras now there might be professional cinema rental houses around where you where you are so in that case you could look into

options there as well the only thing i would caution with these professional rental houses is that most of them require high-end insurance production

insurance to help protect their equipment and things like that so for you to get that insurance it's a pretty expensive endeavor so that

might be something to keep in mind if you're trying to go through a professional rental house but some of these camera places like lensrentals.com and others are really

great options for trying out a couple different formats on smaller shoots and then if it's something you really enjoy and love and want to invest in you

certainly have that option to buy later on so renting buying trying all these are good options but when you think

about buying a camera it's a lot more than just the camera body itself because a camera body also needs this kind of

crucial element a lens so with a lens right lenses are really for me the best place to invest money

right away because lenses will stand for a much longer period of time the question with cameras themselves is that

they do have sort of a shelf life if you've been following some of the news and announcements from some of the major camera manufacturers you'll realize that

things change over pretty quickly when it comes to new cameras new camera announcements new camera bodies now we're cutting the price of this we're

introducing that so it can be quite a race to try and keep up with what's current and what's new so

for me the way i think about is if i'm investing in a camera the best case scenario for that camera to really be kind of state of the art is maybe two to

three years really so it's a little scary when you're looking at five to six figure investments on something that has that

amount of shelf life so we'll talk more about that as we get into the later cameras but something that lasts much longer than two to three

years lenses so the lens you put on your camera that isn't as almost as equally as important

an area of visual aesthetics visual optics and something i go into in some of my extension classes where we actually test different lenses and kind

of break down what the visual characteristics are of those lenses that's really cool and interesting but that's certainly an area you can look to

invest in as well and then all the other stuff that comes with a camera we're talking about batteries memory cards tripods different accessories monitors

all this stuff that adds up quickly now the good news with batteries and cards and all this other stuff is it will last beyond just that one camera in most in

most instances you'll be able to use that camera use those accessories on future cameras as well so it could be an investment that

lasts a bit longer but you're going to need a lot of those types of things to make your camera work to begin with now another concept to think about these

different circumstances for different filmmakers so how are you approaching the use of this camera in your own career right if you're a narrative

filmmaker you probably want something that could have the high resolution that's great for post-production work as well for color correction potential visual

effects all the different aspects that go into narrative storytelling if you're in documentary you're going to want something that probably has very

long record times most documentaries shoot tons and tons hours and upon hours of footage

so compression and memory card space and internal record settings all of those are going to be really important for a

documentary filmmaker and then other sides of it like just beyond narrative and documentary if you just like making videos right on the weekend with your

friends you're going out just filming cool stuff i know i have a couple friends who like to skateboard and they make skateboard videos so that's a completely different aspect of

filmmaking so what camera is right for them is it something that's you know a five six figure investment no they're looking for something that's small

portable can get great moving and tracking shots so how you approach a camera you have to kind of think about how you're going to

use it and start to kind of make your wish list of what you want that camera to do for you okay so what is really the perfect

camera right perfect camera is all about how you plan to use it like i was just talking about cameras for play versus cameras for work

so if this is a professional investment you got to think of that too of this is an investment right how are you going to

start to potentially make money on this investment if you're a cinematographer i know a lot of cinematographers in narrative work invest in cameras and

include that with their personal kind of uh rental fee so or their day rate so if you're getting hired as a cinematographer they're hiring you plus

your camera in most instances so that could be a great way to kind of make a little bit of return on investment and figure out how you can really justify

the cost of something that big and something that expensive so working into the business side of it another website i should

mention when it comes to like rentals and things like that which kind of ties into what we're talking about now is called share grid so share grid is a

website that's set up locally in different cities especially around the us where owner operators people who own cameras can put them up for rental so

you could rent my camera you come over to my house and you pick up the camera you use it you bring it back it's all insured through

uh through length through a share grid they have their own kind of insurance built in so there's a little fee with that but it's a great way to

kind of connect people who need to rent and people who own gear so that is share grid so that could be another option if you invest in a camera you want to try

and make a little return on investment and you're not using it as much maybe as you thought you would or you have some down time where the camera is not in use

that could be a great option to try and make a little bit of money a little bit of payoff on that initial investment of yours so what i mean between cameras for

play versus cameras for work you'll find if you just search digital a video camera online you're going to find

a whole bunch of options and a majority of those are probably what i would consider camcorders so a camcorder is a

non-professional video camera right this is something that you'd probably have to you know you'll film your kids opening presents on

christmas day so something like that that's not necessarily a professional tool per se but has the possibility to

just capture a nice looking image something if you're looking to capture memories so all of that is certainly has its place just maybe not in the lecture

and the stuff we're talking about right now in terms of professional digital cinema cameras so that's really the the delineation a camcorder versus a digital

cinema camera so these digital cinema cameras that's what we're using for narrative documentary more of your traditional filmmaking so with these uh digital

cinema cameras what we have seen it's kind of an interesting thing to talk about is the rise of the multi-purpose camera so this started roughly about 10

plus years ago with the rise of dslrs so dslrs you're probably used to seeing those as the big photography cameras

like what's pictured here at the bottom left of the slide that's a canon 5d that would be considered a dslr

what's what makes it a dslr is it has an actual mirror inside so the light enters the lens

hits that mirror and then is reflected back up into the viewfinder so you're able to in a way see exactly what is coming through that lens

now that's helpful but then when you take the picture that mirror has to flip out of the way so that the light coming through hits the sensor itself

instead of that mirror so it's an actual mirror that flips up flips down whenever you're taking a picture if you're shooting video that mirror flips up and

stays up so the light is constantly going straight through the lens onto the sensor itself so with the dslrs we started to about 10

years ago get the ability to record hd video at around 24 frames per second so it worked very similar to how a video

camera would work so from there we've seen a proliferation of these cameras that were originally designed for still photography

having video options so dslrs were really kind of the first salvo in this and now we're in the realm of mirrorless

cameras so that mirror i was talking about that flips up and down well that's gone now it's just straight through to the sensor itself

you've probably had a mirrorless camera at well actually i would all but guarantee you have a mirrorless camera uh some way shape or form because even

in the early days the point-and-shoot cameras right the ones that you would keep in your pocket and take with you on family vacations and snap photos of you

know all the cool stuff you're seeing on your v on your trip congratulations you're using a mirrorless camera it may have had a video option maybe not

who knows but nowadays they pretty much all have pretty good video options which is exciting because it's a smaller

camera less noise and you can really get a good looking image out of it another aspect of mirrorless cameras the phone

you have if your phone has a camera on it which nowadays i don't know if i've ever seen a cell phone that doesn't have a camera on it

now it seems like you know how far we've come that again is a mirrorless option because that is a camera where light is

passing through a lens onto the sensor itself working very much the same way so with these rides of different camera formats

it's created a lot of interesting options for us as filmmakers about what might actually be the best camera so let's talk a little bit about the visual

element of what you're actually looking to record so quality images versus image quality

what does that really mean i just mix around some words not really so quality images so what is a quality image that is for me and this

is incredibly personal everyone's definition of a quality image might be different for me it's an image that tells a story right that's the whole

goal of a career as a filmmaker as a cinematographer you want to tell you want to create images that tell visual stories so for me that is always going

to be quality has nothing to do with resolution or bitrate or compression or any of this technical side that is the

creative aspect of being a cinematographer of owning a camera utilizing that tool to better tell visual stories

so what image quality is that's the tech side right i'd much rather have a quality image than an image that is considered

image quality wise high specs and all that stuff you know they're movies that are shot not in 4k

i guarantee it you've seen movies in the theater that were shot in hd you know years ago potentially in sd

standard definition there's been movies that have won sundance that were shot on smartphones

all options are there your audience doesn't care what camera you shot on your audience cares are they watching a

movie that is engaging that they can connect with that is utilizing the image making aspect to tell impressive and uh

endearing visual stories that's what we should all ultimately be striving for the camera is just the tool and a

means to an end when it comes to things like that so with each camera itself this is where it starts to get into some

differences between the manufacturers now every camera has its own distinct look now a lot of you probably grown up with

one camera or another maybe favored canon or nikon or maybe had sony or pentax olympus all these different

camera brands and everyone's kind of drawn to one or another for some reason it's it's it's funny i when i talk to people who shoot

stills one of the like easy questions kind of icebreakers is well are you a canon person or a nikon person and it tells me so much it tells me so

much about that photographer and and i can start to get into their inner psyche just based on canon versus nikon alone uh now for film you could say are you an

airy alexa person are you a red person i know for some of you who are cinematographers you're like i don't trust red people it's it's all it's all good it's all

just a tool so uh with all these they have specific looks to them so where these looks of the camera come

from is from the manufacturers and ultimately the sensor itself now some camera companies like canon and

air reflex have long histories of creating digital sensors the quality of this digital sensor is

what's making your image look nicer better looking skin tones better looking great gradient fall offs better looking

backgrounds the way they're mixing resolution to make things look more cinematic so that is one of the big reasons why if

you look at the cameras that are being used on hollywood movies today it's pretty one-sided a lot of people go in

the direction of the arie alexa and aries cameras now arie has a long history of making cinema cameras dating

all the way back to the days of film where they were one of the main forerunners of film cameras as well so because of that trust in arie as an

institution and aries ability to manage color science and color management a lot of cinematographers today have continued

that trust into selecting their cameras for their movies and the results are undeniable uh cinematographers some of

you may have heard of roger deakins kind of a kind of a big deal in the uh cinematography realm he owns a couple area lexus so all the movies he shoots

are on those at least in the last you know seven eight years are shot on those area alexa cameras he's someone who his whole career based

in the uk was very much in film in film cameras 35 millimeter negative all of that and it wasn't until he started

shooting on the airy cameras then he switched over to digital another famous cinematographer vimo siegmund who i worked with at the global cinematography

institute was the same way would swear by film it has to be 35 it has to be negative all this stuff and his very

heavy hungarian accent uh but it wasn't until he started shooting on the sony f65 but then he realized oh

this digital stuff maybe maybe this is good after all so we've gotten to the point where the film versus digital debate doesn't

really exist anymore because digital has caught up so far now part of that is the look of these particular cameras so what i'm trying to

get at here is that the best camera for you is the one you like the look of if you like the look of canon canon has

some great digital cinema cameras that go right down that line airy as well has some great looking cameras red has come

a long ways red as a company has only been around maybe 15 20 years something like that so they're way behind compared

to some of these other cam manufacturers but in the time where they released the red one all the way up to now they've come a long ways in terms of image

quality and then sony as well one of the other major manufacturers they've been making cameras forever really so sony also has a long

history of visual aesthetics and all that that goes into it so let's transition into breaking down some

of these ideas of tech specs so what goes into the actual technology behind some of these cameras when you're looking at that spec sheet

you're trying to compare should i get this camera or that camera one way or the other so i have six main categories that we're going to

dive into a little bit sensor size bit depth dynamic range resolution log and

raw and compression now this might seem a little daunting especially for some of you it's maybe a little early on a saturday morning

to be getting into some of this tech stuff but i'm going to try and like sugar coat it as much as possible try to make it as simple to understand as we can

now stuff like this in my regular ucla extension classes are what we spend a lot of time discussing because i feel like for training a cinematographer

especially a cinematographer who's going to be working a lot in digital these are crucial concepts to understand

as it starts to transition into later on in their career a lot of this stuff is considered you know given knowledge for

a lot of cinematographers so that's what film school for me was really in informational for was learning all this stuff

so that as you can then go out into the real world you're ready to make decisions you can evaluate camera a versus camera b to pick which one is the

best for your particular project all right so let's start to dive into it one of the most important concepts to think about when evaluating different

cameras sensor size so what is the physical size of the chip we're talking about the sensor itself so

if you have one of those mirrorless cameras you can take the lens off and look at it you're looking right at the digital sensor itself

that sensor light is falling on it that's getting converted into ones and zeros a bunch of digital stuff that goes into the computer inside your camera and

that's how the image is born so with the sensor itself the physical size of it makes a big difference

a bigger sensor is more sensitive to light has less depth of field you get that shallow depth of field look so by

depth of field i'm talking about range of focus so that for me is what kind of separates a cinematic image versus something that's a little less cinematic is that

range of focus so when you have shallower depth of field or selective depth of field most importantly that's

what can really help elevate your images so a bigger sensor is going to help you do that so a way we can kind of connect this in real world terms is remember

those camcorders i was talking about the ones you hold up and you know film your kids running around those generally have very small sensors

so those very small sensors allow for everything to be in focus we're talking about like citizen kane levels of deep

depth of field so by having everything in focus from the perspective of somebody filming their kids running around the last thing i want to do is

miss a shot because it's out of focus right so by having everything in focus that's actually a nice perk for those

cameras depending on how you intend to use it so that's a big reason i mean the camcorder is different than a digital

cinema camera digital cinema i want that shallow depth of field that cinematic look a bigger sensor is going to help me do that

with a smaller sensor as well that's going to also impact your choice of lenses because the smaller the chip is the smaller that sensor is the more

zoomed in your lenses feel so like a dslr right if you're putting a lens on the front of a camera taking a picture things like that you have

interchangeable lenses now if i was to put one of those on let's say a panasonic gh5 a lumix camera those have

slightly smaller sensors than let's say a sony a7s that has a large full-frame

size sensor so you'll be able to see in the camera specs what size sensor we're talking about if it's something smaller

you can you can google the sensor and it'll tell you how big or small it is bigger sensors always better so where we are currently

is that they're actually in terms of digital cinema cameras very few small sensor cameras out there everything is

more or less the 35 millimeter chip 35 millimeter sensor so that's the same size as you would have if you're

shooting 35 millimeter film so you can get very cinematic images off of that 35

millimeter chip easy to do uh smaller not so much so this is maybe 10 15 years ago where it was really hard to get that

shallow depth of field look but nowadays almost every camera professional camera is at least 35 millimeter or bigger

which is really cool okay so let's move into the concept of bit depth so bit depth and i know

you're looking at this graph now you're like gosh darn it it's a saturday and this guy is making me do math what the heck so

i'll try to take it easy on you as much as i can i know people are here to be filmmakers not mathematicians i get that all the time

so with bit depth a way to simplify this concept is as the light is falling onto the chip onto the sensor itself it's

going into the computer every digital camera has a computer right these are essentially computers with a lens port

that's what we're that's what we're looking at here with digital cameras so all of them have a small computer built in what bit depth is doing is kind

of figuring out how much sampling how much measurement of the light that's falling on the chip is happening

now this varies from camera to camera so the computer is actually registering the light levels falling on the sensor so

how often it measures those light levels is indicative of bit depth so here's a good way to think

about the concept of sampling so with sampling as we start to measure information coming off of the sensor itself so let's

say you have the original shape there on the left and then the second column the shape is then sampled on our top one it's only been sampled five times and

it's double that on the bottom one now third column all our camera actually is recording are those blue vertical

lines we have no idea what the original image actually looks like all we know is what's being sampled at

the camera sensor itself and then you can see in the last column the resulting shape now which of these is more realistic to

the original image the one that did more sampling so that is a clear indicator that we

want a camera that samples more not less now this is what bit depth is so you'll see cameras

uh put out there as 8-bit or 10-bit 12-bit 16-bit those are kind of the big

four options now a 10-bit camera is going to sample more than an 8-bit camera

so with bit depth the more samples more colors less color aliasing higher bits higher bit depth so the more bits in the

image the more realistic it's going to become just like we saw in that last slide so what this really means in terms of 8-bit 10-bit 12-bit so in 8-bit

cameras you only have 256 shades of red green and blue and most importantly gray

so this is where exposure is coming from as well so think about think of it like a box of crayons right you got maybe it would

take everyone back to their childhood maybe you only had the eight pack of crayons and you could you know draw pictures and color and things like that but at the end of the day you only had

eight colors to choose from well there might be that other kid in school that had you know the really nice

set right the big like 250 pack of crayons you know who i'm talking about it's all burned into our heads ah that

that guy that guy so you get the big pack of crayons and that's what enables you to do more realistic looking images

you have more colors more options that is bit depth all right the more shades of gray the more reds green and blues you have to work with the more

realistic your image is going to become so here's a little quick quick example so this is what the benefit of bit depth

really is so in this graphic this is an 8-bit 256 shades of color so now i'm going to go the reverse way and make it

worse so this is our 8-bit let me downgrade now to 6-bit 64 shades of each color channel so i'll

toggle back and forth here is 8-bit compared to 6-bit and i know this is a maybe a little tricky depending on the quality of your

streaming connection right now all the things you see online might look like 6-bit which in that case sorry can't help you out too much

here's five so we'll toggle again six to five oh now we're getting gross three bit

only eight shades of red green and blue and you have to create all your images from just that amount of crayons in your crayon box

not good not good at all so that is the advantage of bit depth so here's where all of our different kind of professional digital

cinema cameras fall in terms of bit depth so when 8-bit these are going to be most of your dslrs in video mode a lot of your

lesser expensive cameras are ones that were geared towards stills still photography that are being repurposed for video are going to be in that 8-bit

world some canon some sony as well once you get into 10-bit this is where a lot of modern cameras are living

even in the kind of entry level more cameras are falling into the 10-bit world which for me that's kind of my minimum is i want a camera that shoots at

minimum 10-bit 8-bit forget about it maybe if you just need a couple shots here and there like a gopro right if you have a couple gopro shots in your movie

you can ultimately get away with it but i try to have everything especially my main camera going into a shoot to be at least 10-bit

and once we get into 12-bit 16-bit now we're into raw and some of the more higher-end cameras higher-end recording specs

we'll talk about log and raw coming up but once you get into raw it's pretty seldom that ones are still 10 bit most of the time if you're

shooting in raw it's going to be more which is great okay so let's move on to our next concept here dynamic range so with

dynamic range this is the measurement of the latitude of the camera so if any of you have kind of like a

film background you might be aware of like film latitude and things like that so what latitude actually is is the amount of contrast that you can

hold in a camera system your difference between the brightest white and the blackest black and everywhere in between

so we've probably seen a lot of early video stuff right those little flip out camcorders shooting mini dv tapes i know some of

you like the ptsd just kicked in of tape i know you have shoe boxes of mini dv tapes lying around i guarantee you do

almost everybody does good luck in those digitized now um so with that era of tape and sd one of the

big visual components of that was this kind of like high contrast the whites really clipped very quickly the blacks

crushed very quickly it's a very high contrast image that was because the camera itself didn't have very good dynamic range so

what we're looking for in dynamic range how we're measuring that is in stops so a stop is a common term in photography

and exposure determining exposure with light so a stop is either double or half the amount of light that is passing

through a lens and falling on the sensor itself think of it as the light that's being transmitted from real life

to your camera and by setting a stop this is most commonly called like an f-stop or a t-stop on the lens itself or

in your camera settings you can set your exposure at something like you know f 5.6 or f 4 or 2 8. these are all

exposure numbers that dictate the opening the iris of the lens and how that light is coming through and

ultimately falling on the sensor itself so we want to have the range to capture as many of these stops as possible in

our camera the more stops we have the more realistic the image is going to become when you think about it we all are

walking around with essentially imaging devices in our head at all times so what is the bit rate of our eyesight what is

the sensor size right what is the dynamic range all of these far exceed what any digital camera can do

right i i would hope so now with all this stuff what our main goal in the tech is to create images

that are most realistic to our actual eyesight the more bits the better the more dynamic range the better all of

this stuff is factoring into our ultimate goal of creating realistic lifelike images and we've come a long ways over a short period of time from

the early days of video to where we are now with digital cinema cameras so with dynamic range this latitude

we're looking at the number of potential stops of visible dynamic range how many stops of information can we see now if

your image is rightly exposed if you know how to make it you know good-looking proper exposed not too bright not too dark

dynamic range might not be of all that interest to you right if you're able to control your exposure but think of it from the perspective of a

documentary filmmaker right you're going on a location you have a camera on your shoulder you don't really have any lighting gear you don't have much

equipment to control exposure it's just what you see by eye so how can you manipulate the camera the lens the

settings to try and create that realistic lifelike image just using your technical knowledge and your skills as a

cinematographer so that's where controlling dynamic range and deciding do i need to expose for the highlights do i need to expose

for the shadows where do i place my exposure in order to capture the most stops of range

in terms of cameras a high dynamic range camera is what's going to help you the most when it comes to

capturing that wide range of image so like an example here on the slide the top versus the bottom the top image is what i would consider low dynamic range

deeper blacks those whites back in the in the background are completely white and blown out you look at the bottom image and we have

detail now we can see the clouds we can see the blue sky we can see a lot more detail into those shadows so dynamic

range is actually a really important aspect of choosing a camera and this is something you're going to find when you're looking at the spec sheets on

these different cameras it's going to say you know the sony a7s has 15 or more stops of dynamic range the canon c300 is

going to have 17 stops of dynamic range the area alexa might have 29 stops of dynamic range it doesn't no no camera

really does so that's something to keep in mind when you're looking at evaluating comparing camera a to camera b uh keeping that in mind now the thing

with dynamic range and those spec sheets manufacturers they're not lying it'd be wrong for me to say they're

lying on their spec sheets but there might be exaggerating the truth a little bit on some of this stuff so as one of

the things i actually do in the camera savvy class at ucla extension we bring in cameras and set them up and shoot color charts and test dynamic

range so that we can find out what is that real range what is that number what is the manufacturer saying it is

compared to what it actually is so that's the visible versus extractable dynamic range so all of that is things i dive into in my class and well it is

saturday morning and you're all probably still working through your first cup of coffee so we won't do that right now okay so moving on to resolution

okay so this is probably the sexiest topic when it comes to choosing cameras this is the one a lot of people like to talk about this is one

of the things that the producers also tend to obsess over for some reason probably because it's one of the one the easier concepts to wrap your head around

when it comes to the tech side so the k wars how many k's 4k 5k 6k 8k

all of these options so when we're talking about resolution this is the actual pixel size of your captured image

all the way down from standard def which is the smallest box here in the window up to 8k ultra hd which is the largest box so you can see how all those

different formats compare if you're shooting just hd what are the advantages of jumping up to 4k or 8k or

beyond all of those options are available to you now with resolution it's great that our cameras can capture

excessive numbers of k's and that's something we've seen for sure over the last three four years is that the k counts are rising used to be a big deal

if you had a 4k camera now 8k is a very real thing blackmagic has a camera out there that shoots 6k for

under 2 000 it's incredible it's incredible to think that that's where we are now considering where resolution was where a 4k camera

well that was going to set you back at least 10 grand this is only about four or five years ago so resolution has become much more accessible in uh in

smaller modeled cameras now the big thing to keep in mind with all this is display resolution

so how are we actually seeing these images what are the advantages of capturing 4k 6k 8k and beyond now our

tvs at home our displays computer displays things like that that's how we're viewing these images so maybe you have an 8k tv they're starting

to come out people are starting to make them now do you have any content that's 8k no no way

no way we're in post production especially the work i'm doing now it's still about 50 50 whether we finish a project in 4k

or hd we're not even talking 8k at this point 4k is pretty much still the limit now 4k

tvs the price is going down and down and i'd say it's a maybe about a two-thirds market saturation at this point two two out of three people have something

that's capable of showing that image in true 4k and the 4k content is increasing which is also great netflix can stream

4k amazon's streaming 4k disney disney plus is streaming 4k as well so the content the streaming sites are

pushing you 4k content so that's always something to keep in mind now on the camera side well based

on that logic right i should be fine just having 4k right why would i have a 6k camera or an 8k camera or any of this stuff

now with that the real advantage is where you're going to get to in post-production so onset and in post having that

slightly larger image knowing your final is only going to be 4k but going out to 6k gives you the advantage of potentially

doing more stabilization stuff in post because when you think about it when you have a 4k image and you're delivering 4k

as soon as you scale that up even one percent you're losing quality you're losing visual quality your images

aren't going to look as good you just did a 1k scale up not great but if you shoot 6k

and you're delivering 4k well yeah you could scale that up 20 25 and not lose any quality so the ability

to reframe to do stabilizations to do little digital uh zoom moves or things like that all of those are great advantages of

shooting higher resolutions knowing that ultimately you're going to be delivering 4k or if you're delivering hd even better right so many more

possibilities when you're just trying to deliver an hd final video so resolution yeah it matters it opens

up more creative possibilities uh but is it ultimately that important to the quality of the image

not really right for me i think dynamic range is much more important to looking at an image then resolution

the number of stops i can see the more that for me it's much more realistic than resolution because resolution you're dependent upon your display right

and if you're looking at stuff on your phone i bet that 8k image looks beautiful on an iphone

so keep that in mind when when you're thinking about resolution okay next concept log versus raw now

with log and raw these are very dense technical concepts that we won't get too deep down that rabbit hole but it's important that we bring it up now so

with log versus raw a baked in capture versus a raw capture so with raw it's easier to talk about raw first that is

essentially bypassing that computer in the camera that i was talking about where we're coming off the sensor it's hitting the the computer the the sensor

that's going into the analog digital converter bitrate all that stuff's getting applied so within that computer well the computer itself is pretty much

garbage right think about how small the camera is so we're putting a lens on it a sensor all this stuff and fitting a computer in it

now you're used to like your laptop or something like that like that amount of processing power to shrink it down to the point where we can put it in a

camera body that is some pretty significant engineering which hasn't really happened yet so the computer inside your camera

is a load of hot garbage welcome welcome to real life so the what the camera manufacturers thought of and particularly red we got to give red

their due when it comes to camera raw because they were the first ones to think about this and be like you know why should we

make super expensive cameras with super expensive computers inside when the people buying our cameras have laptops they have desktops they

have personal pcs that are able to do processing at such a high level compared to the cost it would put on us to put

that inside a camera so let's instead record raw so this raw

bypasses that and gives you all that data on the memory card that then you put into your computer at home and your home computer finishes that

processing really smart concept and because of that red was able to introduce 4k raw

way before they were talking five six years before it became a very common concept so red was first by far and the cost of

their cameras was low enough that a lot of people just straight up bought them so the people who owned red cameras were

early adopters of this new raw technology that has now completely taken over hollywood and camera manufacturing

we're getting to the point very very soon where your smartphone is going to be able to record raw video and we have red to ultimately thank for

that so that's been the acceleration of all that in the stills world raw has existed for a while because they had the same concept in a dslr let's not put a

good computer in it let's give people the option in post-production to be able to manipulate and control that image much more readily

so raw has a huge advantage when it comes to post-production processing now log on the other hand log has to do with

this image curve that's being applied to the uh to the captured image so that's what i consider bacon versus raw log can

be baked in so in this case it's not raw but it has log so log stands for a

logarithmic curve which again see here i am saturday saturday trying to teach you math not going to happen so an easy way to

think about log contrast right by lowering the contrast of the captured image we're able to elevate the black

point by lifting up that black point we can see more into the shadows by rolling off the highlights we're able

to see more into the brightest parts of our image more dynamic range so by introducing a

log curve to our image we're getting more stops more dynamic range higher quality images a plus all around so log

huge has a huge advantage now when you shoot raw more than likely log is already included in that process so if you have a camera

that can record video in raw log is probably one of those things you don't have to worry about as much but if you don't have raw

definitely make sure you have log because that's really going to increase the technical capabilities of your particular camera system so what

constitutes logs so you might see this on a spec sheet like you know it uses canon log or sony log

or black magic film or something like that these are all names of log curves and how you're

able to get more stops utilizing those log curves now it's completely optional you can turn those off and then you have a normal uh you

know a proper looking image turning on a log curve will make your image very low contrast and therefore it's going to

require a little bit of processing in post-production to restore that contrast so that's where this concept of lookup

tables comes into play some of you may have heard of a lut before or look up tables we won't get too deep into that now but

if you are interested in doing the deep deep dive on luts with me i have a class coming up in spring quarter role of the dit and

cinematography i feel like the subtitle for that class should be lutson stuff because we talk a lot about luts and stuff so that would be a great

opportunity for you coming up too if you really want to do deep dive and talk a lot more about look up tables what they are how you create them what they do how

you manage them on set all those different aspects is stuff that we can go we can go deep on for sure um

so log and raw very uh important in the equation last concept we'll talk about here compression

so compression now we've gone through the entire process light coming through falling on the sensor going into that computer now what's happening on the

back end that's compression the necessary evil so what compression is doing is throwing away non-essential

what they deem non-essential data and how that's being limited in human vision discarding what they feel like is not

necessary reducing that data rate the actual amount of information being recorded and then put onto the little memory card

that's in the back of your camera so every camera more or less shoots with some form of compression

nicer digital cinema cameras allow you to change the amount of compression that you're recording to even some like dslrs and mirrorless

cameras have different compression recording options now all of this what compression is best for you really depends on your shooting

situation are you looking to shoot a documentary and you want to have really long record times well then shoot more compressed

if you're looking for shooting a narrative single camera movie and you know there's going to be visual effects green screen explosions cgi monsters all

this fun fun stuff that we can expect to see on our screens these days then i'm going to need as little compression as possible

for images that are going to be used a lot in post-production less compression is by far and away preferable so it's important really for the cinematographer

going into a project to understand the bigger picture of what this project where it's going what's what the different aspects are in choosing a

compression so when it comes down to compression itself some cameras have the option of bypassing the

internal compression so the internal compression if you're stuck with it most cameras have actually really bad internal compression because

they're taking these big images and crunching it down into small files that fit on a like an sd card that requires a lot of compression just

to make that possible when you think about raw right we have huge amounts of data an immense data stream so that's

going to require shrinking down the image as well compressing that raw to get it into something that can actually be recorded so

internal recording usually not very good some cameras actually have options to upgrade your compression by going to

external compression so with an external recorder this would be a separate box attached to your

camera that's connected through a video cable that allows you to record your image away from the computer away from the camera itself

and record at different compressions potentially different bit depths different resolutions maybe introducing raw

potential for raw recording through x through an external box all these options are possible so for external compression external recorders

some companies though really the big one right now is atomos they make the atomos like ninja sumo they have great names

for all this stuff if you're looking for great product names inspiration just look at what red names their cameras and look what atmos names their recorders

it's it's just chef's kiss just totally out there um so atmos recorders are great for external compression external

recording uh there's several other companies blackmagic makes one as well so there are a bunch of different options out there and it all depends on

your camera system whether there is an advantage of pairing it with an external recorder or not or just going internal

there's really no reason why let's say if you're shooting on an area alexa or a red camera you would ever need to

use an external recorder so it all depends okay so let's talk about the two different types of compression

so within compression there's inter frame versus intra frame i know it's like you couldn't have picked two names

that are more alike really so inter frame emphasis on the er compares one frame with successive or

previous frames to determine differences and motion prediction okay so what that means look at my beautiful red bouncing ball

here in the here in the slide that is a red ball on the ground right a beautiful artwork as that red ball bounces up and

down the camera is only recording the differences in motion so as that red ball moves up you can see in the second

little uh frame of film the only thing that's being recorded is the ball going up and then the ground underneath that's being replaced with

white so as we move through those different film strips you'll see that's the only stuff that's being recorded

everything else is exactly the same like the white background from the camera's perspective it's like why should i record that

we can just copy paste so they'll just copy paste the background across a span of frames because they determine ah nothing's

really happening well when they compress when they copy paste it like that that helps get you small data rates that help shrink down

the file that is compression okay so what happens if all of a sudden you're panning the camera or tilting or

you're a handheld shot or a dolly or there's a lot of movement well in that case the camera is going to have a hard time because the

background's changing constantly so then you might start to get more of what we call compression artifacts so blocky looking things

it looks like your image is kind of breaking apart digitally that's because of bad compression so what falls in this bad compression category

oh our old friend you know them you love them if you've worked with videos on a computer you probably know it all too well h.264

your h.264 is this bad compression but hey the advantage is it's super easy

to play back you can upload a video to youtube and it processes and plays back really easily you can put a phone on or put a video on someone's phone or ipad

it plays back super easily h.264 is super versatile but the compression is complete and

total garbage something for me as a colorist i have to deal with all the time that the work we're doing in the color suite

putting the final touches on a cinematic feature film especially now within the last year and the rise of virtual film festivals all that hard work we're

putting into the image is ultimately getting packaged in an h.264 and streamed online to somebody's

smartphone as they're sitting on the toilet you know this is hollywood hollywood in 2020 and 2021 so hooray uh so other

compressions like that xavc things like that if you're unsure if uh what what category your compression falls under you can always google it and it will

tell if it's an inter frame or intra frame so let's talk about the other category intraframe compression r a not

er so intra frame compression this will be your prores dnx and raw

so what interframe is doing is treating it like film where each frame is its own self-contained image so like a film

camera you have film running through and it's essentially capturing every 24th of a second a new image on the film strip

same thing same idea that's happening in digital just without the film strip so every frame is its own self-contained picture there's no copy paste going on

so it's a much preferable way of compressing and recording images so with this whole intra frame

compression and the lossless form so the way we're able to actually add compression is through an algorithm so

it's very high in tech a lot of computer processing going into this where you can control your compression ratio and be

able to get more record time or higher quality images but still keep it in this intra frame where each frame is its own

self-contained image so the advantages of intra-frame versus intra-frame is really when it comes down to recording so when you're recording

when you're selecting a camera and it will still tell you what the internal compression is if it's h.264 or xavc or something that

falls in that bad column be very concerned because that artifacting i was telling you about that could happen with high motion or things

like that when it's happening in camera that means you're recording that image

and if you're recording that image there's no going back if all that junk is baked into it

you're literally up a creek without a paddle there's there's no way to go back so that is really concerning for me as a cinematographer i'd have to be very very

mindful of what i'm recording and oh does that work with the compression and all this stuff which is the last thing you want to be worrying about when you're on set

but this good column the intra-frame stuff this is the things i want to record so i want to be able to record into prores or dnx which is the avid

codec or raw or dpx or there's a bunch of other intra frame codecs as well

and these are most ideal for capture the area alexa shoots the prores in raw the red shoots to raw high-end sony

cameras shoot to raw so all the big heavy hitters out there record into this setting the only cameras you're really going to find that

are in the bad column those are going to be some of your like dslr's mirrorless cameras the ones that aren't really designed for

video that are utilizing different compressions to try and put stuff down to the little sd cards so those are the ones you just have to be a little bit

more hesitant with now a good way to get around this like we mentioned before pairing it with an external recorder so that external recorder will allow you to

bypass that crummy internal compression and record to something like pro res or raw or dnx so that is a great way if you

have a camera like let's say a sony a7s little mirrorless camera big sensor the internal recording garbage

but you can connect it over hdmi back into an external recorder and then immediately get prores out of it

so you're upping the value of your camera just by pairing it with an external recorder so pretty cool okay so that's our big uh

kind of set of tech specs we talked about sensor size bit depth resolution dynamic range

log and raw compression holy you've gotten like a little uh you know the 45 minute rundown of all the crucial concepts of digital cinematography and

hopefully how all of these fit into our different digital cameras so what's the best camera for me easy answer so just

like at the very beginning the class they were talking about how students ask all the time like what camera should i get this that that that for me it's an easy answer it's the best

camera you can afford so obviously a little more goes into it than that as you just saw talking about the creative and technical aspects of choosing a

camera so now let's start to talk about what cameras are actually available so first and foremost let's talk about the

little uh the the elephant in the room well or the elephant in your pocket in a way pocket cinematography so this is uh

if you'd asked me this a couple years ago like oh yeah i just you know i got got an iphone can i can i use that for my class or for my project or whatever i

would have kind of given you kind of an odd look but now that's a legitimate solution for shooting a lot of video a

lot of movies there was a movie that won uh at sundance several years ago called tangerine that was actually shot kind of right around the corner of the studio

i'm filming in right now uh and that movie was shot entirely on an iphone and it won sundance so if that's not an

indicator of the quality versus image quality uh debate i don't know what is so with pocket cinematography

smartphones this is uh almost like starting to exceed some digital cinema cameras so when we talk about resolution

lens choice lens choice used to be a big uh big issue as related to smartphone cinematography because you are limited to just that one kind of cheapest

possible camera that they plugged in the back of your uh phone but nowadays you know with iphones with three lens systems google android all these other

options that are adding more and more cameras different lens options that's huge used to be on smartphones when you zoomed in you were actually doing a

digital zoom and that's when you immediately lose quality like we were talking about with resolution not great but now when you have multiple

lens options in the back of your smartphone you're able to toggle through different optical options these are not digital zooms these are actual lenses so

that's really exciting so other things like compression slo-mo recording manual exposure manual white balance all that stuff the

innovations have really kind of come along for smartphone videography now what separates just the you know just flipping open your your

camera app switching over to video mode and then just hitting the red button right does that make me a cinematographer

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well it's about intention of choice so what i really separate someone from just like a point and shoot hit the red

button and hope for the best and a cinematographer is a cinematographer is making creative decisions making

technical decisions to help better tell a visual story if your tool doesn't allow you to make those decisions

well then you're extremely limited artistically about how you can utilize that tool to tell a visual story so what

i kind of get around a lot of that and through apps so there's one particular app called filmic pro that's actually

the app they use to film the movie tangerine on uh and an app like that kind of allows up for a lot more manual

control over what your smartphone's camera can actually do so now i want to do a brief little demo and uh granted this is like the first

time i'm putting my phone up on zoom so let's see how let's see how this goes um but with this filmic pro app i'm gonna go ahead and connect my uh i'm running

like an iphone 11 so i'll connect that up and we'll be able to do a quick little demo here of of the filmic pro app

so let me get that patched in there we go hey there we are so now you get a

there we are okay so this is the filmic pro app and now i have my lovely talent stand-ins here all i have to do is you know credit copy

meals just the standard uh compensation here for my on-camera talent so what we're looking at here is filmic pro so

this is an app for ios and android about a 15 app which is you know a little expensive as far as apps go

but it has a lot of cool functionality built in so as you can see kind of right away on the right it's giving me vu

meters so i can actually monitor my audio and i can designate which microphone on the phone i want to use for this particular application i have

my record button right down there in the bottom right and i know you can't actually see where i'm tapping so i'm going to try and be as descriptive as possible

now in the middle of the interface you have a circle and a square the circle is what's controlling exposure so if i was to tilt up to my lights

right now and tap that you can see the image getting darker because i'm exposing for that fluorescent light up there now

if i want to keep that exposure i can then tap that circle goes red pan back down to my talent and now i

have a manual exposure control i'm able to dictate the brightness if i want to release that i just tap that circle again and then the exposure

goes right back then the other one is focus so for that we're going to have our lovely uh cat stand in here so the white square dictates where i want to

focus so if i take that over to the uh back up a little bit here yep you can see now we're kind of pulling focus

a little bit back towards the other model so i can tap that box to lock focus as well so with focus and exposure

if i swipe here on the left now that's opened up a dial where i can manually go up and down

to control my exposure now a thing with smartphone cameras they don't have mechanical irises in them so

this is very different than we're used to on a traditional lens where it will have a real iris a real f-stop on it so the way smartphone

cameras work is the iris is always wide open right the fewer mechanical things they can put in a phone the better because the mechanical stuff is what

breaks not ideal so the way the smartphone's controlling it is through brightness uh well controlling it through shutter and iso

or camera sensitivity so as i go up and down those numbers on the left so like 44 i can lock my iso at 44

i can lock my shutter at one over 48. so shutter and iso are two common aspects of photography so i have manual control

over those and that's how i'm ultimately dictating exposure pretty cool so if i swipe here on the

left now i can also do manual focus so here we go let's set up our cinematic

focus poll well you can't say at least you're not not amused in this

ucla extension seminar you never thought you were signing up for a camera class to see me rack focus from a plastic cat

to a ship's wheel but here we are pretty cool innovation though for smartphone cinematography because focus is again

one of the creative aspects of visual storytelling same thing here on zoom i can do manual zoom zoom in zoom out

and dictate all of that directly here in the app so other aspects of manual control we'll get rid of that let's pull focus there

color temperature so in i just tap the little three color wheels down here and i can set a manual

white balance so i can white bounce my camera to the different presets so right now i'm under daylight conditions so i can choose a little sun

icon i have a slider where i can go up and down to change my white balance and tint as well or just do an auto white balance

and it'll dial that in and then next option this is something that's part of their cinematographer

app cinematographer add-on within this filmic pro app so as part of their add-on you can

choose a log curve you have natural dynamic flat and log so this is a good example of

what we were talking about earlier toggling between natural which would be a proper looking image and log lower

contrast more dynamic range natural versus log pretty cool and then you can also do a little bit of

color correction as well so here in the rgb little histogram sliders i can do a little bit of color adjustments as well

change the look and mood of my image that way as well pretty cool now there's also some exposure tools built in if i tap on the

so this little circle with the lines around it that just enabled those manual controls we saw earlier tap on that little a icon i have stuff

like uh zebras for exposure false color there's the false color focus peaking

so these are common tools you would find in a professional digital cinema camera it's pretty amazing that we're seeing it

here in an app so also if i tap on where that time code clock is running i can see a histogram

i can see a waveform monitor all of some of the tools that cinematographers are accustomed to using now if i go to settings here this is

where i can control my resolution so we can go 4k 3k i can set what type of resolution i

want to record in i can also set my compression so i can go economy apple standard or higher quality as well so this will be

extremely helpful if i'm needing to use images like this for actual cinematic production

so i can control that i can do frame rate i can do slow motion there in frame rate audio can set different audio compression as well you could connect

this to a bluetooth microphone so you can have external audio little higher quality as well pretty cool as well as built-in image stabilization you can

work with and a lot of other fun little settings a guide for framing things like that so this app is filmic pro 15

application gives you all those type of manual controls for working with video on a smartphone so i'd like to thank my talent

my cat and the wheel thank you for coming to play we'll give him a big hand here in the end all right i'll have to call her agent

all right here we are back well that was that was a little you know a little something different at least so talking about

pocket cinematography you know those options okay so now moving on to the next level of cameras

so stills camera with video so this these are some of the cameras we've been talking about before with

dslrs moving into mirrorless as well so with those dslrs one of the big limitations was obviously resolution a

lot of them were only going to be hd um 35 but the sensors were nice and big so about 10 years ago the idea of

digital video was usually those really small chip cameras not ideal but with dslrs now we have much bigger sensors sensor size really

important so with those larger sensors around 24 to 30 frames per second these were the canon 5d and 70 were the two

big players back then so that was a big indicator and those were really popular cameras back then so

the 5d and the 7d and nowadays canon still makes those cameras they've elevated them i think we're on canon 5d mark iv at this point uh we're at a

higher uh mark for the 70 as well and now they can record higher than you know around 4k or beyond

so once those canon dslrs became extremely popular everyone else kind of dived in and started highlighting the video capabilities of their stills

cameras nikon had an option sony had an option with their alpha line fuji even leica had video options with

some of their mirrorless and dslr cameras as well so that was a really big kind of swelling of things in the

in the camera industry and i'd say if you went to nab or cinegear any of these big cinematography filmmaking trade

shows you know about five six seven years ago everything was dslr and mirrorless it was a really amazing how

all these different manufacturers were doubling down because of this big reason the cameras were affordable

before it had been only the big guys right the ares the panavisions all these other big manufacturers

who were making these cameras that no one could really afford people could rent or go through rental houses to get but the idea of a dslr was much more

palatable for a lot of users because it's probably something they already had or something that they could easily uh

afford or easily invest in and not to mention it shoots really awesome stills so if you love photography you love uh

you know capturing images this was a great option because you could have a great stills camera and a great

video camera all in one but the video side did have its limitations you know the resolution wasn't great and

these cameras weren't really designed for shooting video that was one of the big problems as well um overheating

was a big thing because with these dslrs they're used to when you think about it only taking you know a photo here a photo there all that time the mirror was

down for the most part but when you're shooting video that mirror we were talking about earlier flipped up light on the sensor it is actively recording

over long periods of time so because of that there would usually be a record timeout so after like four and a half or five minutes it would just

stop recording video which is you know great other things that could happen is it would just start to overheat and the camera would just start shutting down

which is also great i've been on shoots where we were shooting on a canon 5d or a 7d and we had to have like a little ice chest with us at all times so if the

camera started to overheat we just stick it in the ice chest and then as soon as we're ready to shoot pull it out all right all right guys the camera's cold let's go let's go

fortunately those days are past us you know hope hopefully so with those dslr videos they weren't ideal by any stretch of the imagination

the audio also complete garbage and there was no way to get audio into the camera either it also didn't have time

code which timecodes one of those like it's important uh to have timecode in your camera that's the running clock of

when it's being when you hit record it kind of keeps a timer of that video now all of them have like a hit record it starts at zero one two three so on so

forth but having running time code where it will tell you at what time so like at 11 hours and 33 seconds we hit record at

36 seconds we've stopped recording that's important because we can use that time code to later sync with audio

so syncing dslrs and mirrorless video not ideal not ideal and that adds a lot of time onto post-production so those

were some of the major disadvantages but nowadays we're in the dawn of the mirrorless cameras we've now gotten rid of the mirrors for the most part and

it's just light falling directly on the sensor these cameras still overheat to a certain extent um they still will timeout recording so those issues

haven't necessarily gone away they've been lessened certainly but they're still they're still around as well but all of the

video options have really been amped up with these mirrorless cameras the potential of pairing them with external recorders that we talked about earlier

uh especially like with the sony a7s you get better bit depth you get better uh compression as well so all those advantages working with

external recorders uh really makes a difference now with uh actually actual video capabilities right now one manufacturer has kind of stood out so

far and that's sony i'd say for all my students probably the most common camera i see them investing

in is the sony a7s so the sony a7s is a mirrorless camera a pretty small form factor about that almost the size of

your cell phone and that will record 4k video internal with log no raw but with log

in 8-bit less than ideal but you're able to get very cinematic looking images also sensor size that sony a7s has a larger

than 35 millimeter size sensor which is really exciting more cinematic shallower depth of field better light sensitivity all those great

things that go hand in hand with that so that's been a very popular option i know for a lot of people and sony has

many other models as well that all kind of build upon that foundation that they laid with the sony a7s so let's take a

look here at some of the options as it relates to mirrorless uh dslrs kind of our entry level of stills cameras with

video so some of these are brand new that just came out of just been announced particularly the sony alpha a1 that first one there look at that 8k

video internal pretty great now on these graphics where i'm talking about the cameras themselves keep in mind that i'm just putting the

k's on there even though we just had the whole lecture before this where i was making fun of how k's are not that important but i'm putting the k's on

here just because it's a quick easy way to compare these different cameras directly on a slide like this so the

sony alpha one out sony just came out with this camera as their new flagship stills camera which is a big revelation

because they're completely moving away from that mirror flipped dslr their flagship camera is now a mirrorless

camera that shows you how much uh energy sony is putting into their mirrorless camera line

so that alpha one 8k video internal with a lot of compression but you can get 4.3 k raw external

pretty awesome uh and then you're looking at 6 500 just for the body only so cost wise that definitely puts it at

the higher end of these mirrorless cameras but for the resolution and a lot of the video features it's uh pretty pretty high up there

canon's option is the canon 5r or excuse me r5 that can do 8k raw with an external recorder 4k internal 3900 for

the body uh then here's the sony a7s this is the one i was just talking about that's probably one of the most popular options out there you can get raw

externally now this is a new feature because sony's had several versions of the a7s so the a7s mark 3 adds that raw option

which is really exciting 4k internal looking at 3500 of an initial investment just for the body now with all these i

put the price just for the body but keep in the back of your mind this is without any lenses this is without any batteries this is without any memory cards

monitors external recorders tripods crew potentially right if you need crew right people need crew uh so all that

type of stuff you need to factor into is this really going to be the right investment for me now with a lot of

these cameras the lens mount might vary canon has their proprietary lens mount which works great with canon lenses sony

has their mount which works with sony lenses and so on uh some of the other manufacturers will talk about like black magic and red they can have various lens

mounts which is pretty cool but if you're looking at any of these particular options keep in mind if you already own lenses what type of mount

are they and are they compatible with this camera now there are ways around that because you can use

you can use the camera lens adapters that convert one mount to the next most of the time they should have some type of mount that

works for you but be sure you research that beforehand because like i'm a nikon person for stills right we went back to the whole canon versus nikon i'm a nikon

guy sorry guilty as charged uh so i own a bunch of nikon lenses so i'm able to put nikon lenses on a red on a sony a7s

on even a canon 5d through lens adapters so that's a that's a good option if you already own glass

so the a7s looking at panasonic gh5 the lumix line now this is again one that i see a lot of students investing in a lot

of people really love the look of the panasonic cameras i love their video cameras i haven't used the lumix line much

but what really set it apart is it was one of the first mirrorless cameras to integrate log so the high dynamic range this was the highest dynamic range

option available in this type of camera for a very long time now the drawback is the smaller sensor i have it listed here as the m4 over three that stands for

micro four thirds so instead of a 35 millimeter chip this one's going to be slightly smaller which means all your lenses are going to be slightly more

telephoto something to keep in mind a little less cinematic so but cost wise

1300 for the body not too shabby and you get the 4k video internal fuji has an option as well fuji hasn't really been a

major player in the cinematic video market but they have an option here in a mirrorless 4k video internal six grand for the body

seems like uh the cost to specs isn't quite adding up but if you're a fuji person you love the look of fuji

then maybe that is the best camera for you all depends uh and then at the bottom i have two of the uh kind of older formats or well not older but

formats you're probably a little familiar with like the canon 5d mark iv this is the latest version of the canon 5d we're looking at 4k internal

2600 for that body which is not a bad way and you can pair it with an external recorder to get that prores you can't get prores inside you have to use

external for that and then the last option the canon rebel t7 so this is kind of the more eco-friendly dslr lines so you're

looking at 550 for the body and it comes with two lenses i researched all this a couple days ago on b h so there might be some good deals out there

but again that's limited to hd only so something to keep in mind uh for that all right so let's move on to out of the

stills camera that happened to shoot video into actual video cameras so the big difference between a stills camera

and a video camera is it's ergonomics audio exposure tools all that type of stuff we saw in the filmic pro app

these cameras more or less have them built in except for the ones i'm picturing here please please don't buy those cameras but i put those cameras up there as a way to kind of symbolize

where we've come from right the old days of vhs and tape and all these terrible terrible things i'm

so glad we're past the days of videotape and are into a completely digital file based recording it's just so much easier

it's less things you have to purchase less things you need to uh go go around with so moving to fully digital is great we've

already talked a little bit about the lifespan of these digital cameras because something to keep in mind they get upgraded rapidly so an important concept we haven't actually touched on

so far is since all of these cameras are essentially computers with lens ports computers get updates all the time right

i know if you're like a windows pc user you've always had that like windows software update pop up at the least opportune time i'm glad our cameras don't do that but

who knows they might in the future so one of the things we really need to keep in mind with is all these cameras have what's called firmware so firmware

is essentially the operating system in a way kind of like your windows 10 of the computer system or your mac

os mojave of the computer system so that firmware can get updated over time

and when that up when that uh firmware gets updated then it's comes can become an entirely different kind of

camera it's changing a lot of the way the camera works it can add features it can change features all of that to keep in mind so when you

buy one of these cameras and this is something i've seen happen in the last couple of years which is kind of a i would say almost a troubling

phenomenon where cameras are getting released with the intention of future firmware updates

so you can buy a camera and one one the camera that's out right now is uh some of canon's newer uh you know see the

c300 c500 line so they have right now they've in that the cameras are out people own them and it shoots to a very compressed raw codec

they've said in the future what's coming is a less compressed raw codec but people are still buying the cameras they're shooting on the cameras they're

using the cameras so we're buying cameras with the intention of oh well it's only going to get better over time trust

us my trust is uh kind of varies with things like that so keep in mind firmware future updates things like that

it's much more apparent in these video cameras uh the digital cinema cameras than you probably have in the dslr and mirrorless line but one firmware update

can completely change the game it can take a cheaper camera and all of a sudden elevate it because they've turned on some new features so it's a really

kind of tricky thing to manage when it comes to picking these digital cameras okay so i have now these digital cinema cameras broken down into three different

levels our entry-level mid-level and high-end for digital cinema cameras so let's look at some of the entry-level

options that are available here now one that was just announced fairly recently is the sony fx3

so the sony fx3 looks a lot like one of their mirrorless cameras a sony a7s or think something of that nature but it's

designed as really more of a camera that's video first stills second so that's a really interesting option uh

4k internal 4k external 3 900 for the body on that one and then black magic so we haven't talked too much about black magic i know

there's been a lot of chat in the uh a lot of talking in the chat area about black magic cameras and i'm a i own a

black magic camera right i'm i'm very much in that in that camp i own the blackmagic pocket 6k camera now we'll i'll get into the end of what

how i ultimately went behind my decision in that but to look at some of the models that are available blackmagic's been making cameras for

about the last 10 years or so much like red when red was first started out their early cameras had a lot of

issues right the skin tone color space wasn't great a lot of the specs were a bit suspect blackmagic as a company had been making

hardware switches and dit-based software for a long time and then started to get more into

the actual cinematography filmmaking world they acquired the software program davinci resolve which you probably are

familiar with in some in some aspect and so they've made all these plays to build out software to build out hardware and move into cameras

so where we are now the two of their uh pocket cameras as they were and these are about the size a little

bit bigger than maybe a dslr but in a similar form factor the blackmagic pocket 6k pocket 4k you can see the

price there 2500 for 6k raw 1300 for 4k raw this is an incredible deal

considering the other cameras we've been discussing now when all this like it just triggers something inside of me

that's always skeptical of oh really 6k raw for 2500 what's the catch there's there should always be a catch

well the catch here is it's still 6k it is full raw you are getting the high bit depth you're getting the resolution you're getting the better compression

it's checking off all those boxes it's a super 35 size sensor all of that is working

the thing that is kind of the drawback a little bit is the color science on the sensor it's maybe not as pretty of a camera as

like a canon or an airy or red or sony at this point they're still kind of getting their feet wet about making digital sensors now for some people that

might not be a big issue if you're just looking to get a high resolution raw capture that's the best bang for your buck by far end of story now where you

can actually elevate these cameras and this is what went into my decision making behind these cameras is yeah it's hitting all these check marks but

artistically i can take the skills i have in color correction and post production and apply it to this camera to get really amazing cinematic images

out of it put a little canon to nikon adapter because the lens mount is naturally canon on a lot of these and i'm able to

put my nikon lenses on the blackmagic camera and then i'm ready to go it can record two compact flashcards or

external hard drive external ssd drives which are uh you know fairly cheap all things considered

so really it was the best option for me for the type of shooting the type of production i was getting ready to do and it's a very versatile camera small can

fit in a backpack for documentary things like that so it was for me a pretty good option and might be for you two or might not be

it all depends um so with blackmagic they have the pocket 4k also one i should mention is this studio uh the

micro camera it's so cute it's like it's so small it's the blackmagic micro camera it's uh maybe

about the size of a milk carton it's just the darndest cutest little thing you could ever imagine the actual lecture you're looking at

right now is shot on blackmagic micro cameras so i have them at that studio that's great for live and things like that

internal recording not so much we're looking at hd raw but hey for raw under a thousand dollars for the body

that's not a bad deal all things considered now something you have to keep in mind is to keep the cost low it actually doesn't have a screen

so you have to connect it to an external monitor to actually see what you're shooting you know just small minor details so black magic micro is an option for

panasonic panasonic's option and this tier is the eva one 5.7 k video internal the compression is pretty good looking

at 6 500 on the body for that panasonic has a long history of making prosumer level cameras and the eva one

is kind of their entry level into digital cinema and then on canon canon has a couple models down here that might be of

interest the canon c200 which is a 4k raw internal recording uh raw light

with the bigger raw coming potentially later via firmware update 5500 for the body on that then the canon

c100 mark ii you're looking at hd internal video this is their entry level into their c whatever line canon's eos

cinema cameras so you're looking at 2700 just for the body on that but it's native canon lens mount so if you have canon lenses it's a really quick and

easy way of being able to uh bring that in as well okay so let's move on to the next level mid-level digital cinema so what we're

looking at here are is kind of this mid-tier so it can things are going to jump up in price before we were looking at you know around let's see where were we back here

about 6500 was our most expensive camera in the entry level which very well could be mid-level but here we are looking at our cheapest

camera body we're starting around 6 000 so red within the last year came out with the red komodo which is their

entry-level red camera so if you really love the look of red cameras red's very popular in hollywood a lot of major movies have been shot on it

david fincher shoots almost exclusively on the red camera so if you saw mank that's a big awards movie this year that was shot on red

not on the komodo however komodo came out fairly recently but you get 6k raw internal for 6 000.

but keep in mind all you get is that little box right you need the lens you need the monitor you need the batteries you need all that stuff to go along with

it when you're trying to build out a red package now red also introduces new cameras all the time so the amount of

time your red will remain uh state of the art it's probably a little less than some of these other cameras we're going to be discussing

uh blackmagic's option in this price bracket is the ursa mini pro the ursa mini pro is really designed for

actual single camera narrative shooting so you can it's great if you are doing eng style so this is where you have the camera on your shoulder with the handles

you're walking around shooting uh you know documentary interviews uh kind of man on the street type of stuff so it's a kind of a full functioning studio type

camera so this ursa mini pro you're looking at 4.6 k raw internal 6 000 for the body moving on up sony has a couple options

here as well the sony fs7 has been a very popular camera for a number of years a lot of your news programs um you know

a lot of documentaries are shot on the sony a7 or sony fs7 4k raw and excuse me 4k video internal

looking at 8 000 for the body on that fx 9 an upgraded version of the fs7 now you're up into the 6k range no raw but

6k video 11 000 panasonic uh varicam lt this is again a great documentary camera uh this you're

looking at 10 grand for just 4k internal now what i love about panasonic why i say it's a great documentary camera it

has that form factor you want for being able to throw a camera on your shoulder go out into the field and also the color science color management i would put

panasonic up there with canon with airy in terms of beautiful skin tones beautiful color rendition in their captured images when i get panasonic

footage coming in as a colorist very little work i need to do to make things look beautiful so that's that's a great option as well

and then canon a couple more options from canon down here the c300 mark iii uh we're now up to 4k raw internal so

the mark 3 came out not too long ago but you're looking at about 11k on the price range there and then the c500 mark ii

which came out about a year and a half ago now 6k raw internal so something to kind of put into consideration here

consider where we were back on the entry level cameras the blackmagic pocket 6k with 6k raw internal then we jump up to this mid level

and what is our best resolution in raw well the c500 mark ii a 16 000 camera six 6k raw or the red

kimono a 6k raw for six grand so in terms of bang for your buck that just kind of reinforces that whole idea behind the black magic pocket cameras 6k

raw for 2500 not too shabby all right let's talk about the big guys

now this is if you're if you're in the range where something like this you consider just like pocket change then uh you know just just give me a call and uh

i'm sure we can work out a we can work out a deal i'll come shoot your movie for you no sweat so a lot of these cameras these are these are the good ones these are really

nice this is what a lot of the hollywood level movies or tv shows are being shot on these days a lot of these also are probably going

to be rental at this point the idea of owning and running one of these camera systems as an individual is

a significant investment you'd have to kind of be on the roger deakins type level or a cinematographer who's working

regularly with a regular client who's always renting the cameras from the cinematographer to really kind of justify this as a business decision

but for red we got a couple options here the red ranger helium an 8k raw internal 30 grand on the body for that and then

the dragon x which has been around a little bit longer this has been on the market for a couple years now 6k raw

internal 15 000 on the body there so why would all of a sudden you pay double compared to the komodo the dragon x has

much nicer sensor than the komodo the komodo is actually a much different camera sensor so you're going to get better image quality out of the dragon x

as you would with the komodo at a much cheaper price point sony venice this is kind of sony's flagship digital cinema camera looking

at 6k raw internal 62 000 on the body for that so it's not for the faint of heart but a lot of commercials

especially are shot on this camera i've got to work with it in color correction a couple times the quality of these images are phenomenal it is by far and

away the prettiest looking image sony has ever put out and that's just really has to do with the color science within

the camera itself all the specs hit the check marks it's a really beautiful camera but that price point is a little uh a

little tricky for a lot of owner operators canon c700 this is the flagship of canon canon cinema line 4k internal 6k raw

external so that kind of seems like a step back considering we were getting 6k raw internal on the c500 mark ii down

there in the bottom right so the c700 i would suspect is probably going to be due for an upgrade fairly

soon so we should be seeing a c700 mark ii i would imagine in the near future now company we haven't talked too much about thus far

panavision so panavision uh you've probably if you're familiar with the history of hollywood history of movie making you know the company panavision

they've been providing cameras and technicolor and all that stuff for years and years and years and then their foray into digital was

this camera called the genesis that maybe some of you are familiar with came out about 10 15 years ago it was revolutionary at its time in terms of

digital but it was only hd didn't really last very long wasn't incredibly popular with the old school

film cinematographers who were wanting to switch into digital so it was fairly short-lived so about four or five years

ago panavision introduced their dxl camera which was a collaboration they're doing with red so red is providing the

sensor red is providing a lot of the computer behind the sensor as well but panavision is putting it into a body

designed for cinematographers designed for narrative filmmaking now with everything panavision keep in mind you

can't buy anything panavision they are solely a rental company so you can only rent their cameras but a big benefit to

renting a panavision camera is you have the ability then to rent panavision lenses panavision lenses only work on cameras

that are provided by panavision they have their own very specific lens mount called a pv lens mount that is only on

panavision branded cameras that work with panavision lenses i would say by far and away the best lenses in the

entire realm of cinematography and narrative filmmaking are panavision lenses anamorphic sphericals you name it

beautiful a lot of probably your most beautiful you think of them some of the most beautiful movies of all time were shot on panavision lenses

so that's a big uh benefit as well to rent a panovision camera as you get access to those lenses uh but again it's

a cost and availability so panovision has centers obviously in la i believe also in chicago and new orleans atlanta

new york so it's in various places around the states and they will send and ship gear to you as well so if you're looking at a larger budget style

production panavision also has programs for students and emerging filmmakers with grants where you can apply for a

grant and if accepted they will deck out your your shoot with the latest and greatest gear and awesome lenses so

panavision is a really great company and something as you further your career into film should be a great relationship that you should look to uh to build on

so last two formats another company we haven't talked about for a while airy so this is probably the quintessential

hollywood camera right now is the area alexa so the alexa mini very small form factor i would say it's about the size

of a small toaster uh maybe even a little smaller uh so an alexa mini 4k raw internal 36 000

on that on the body for that and that's not counting any lenses uh lens lens options you can get a canon mount on one

of these you can also use a pl mount they also make adapters but the image quality the color management the skin tones all that

amazing beautiful and then the alexa large format here we go here's here's the big heavy hitter uh of this entire lecture the large format so what makes

it large format that has to do with sensor size a much bigger than 35 millimeter so the alexa large format is what a lot of uh

especially the latest marvel movies are all being shot on i know a lot of you probably uh watched the season finale of

wandavision lately uh no spoilers but i think it's shot on the alexa large format so that kind of puts you at the

level of uh of what you should be expecting there 4.5 k raw internal i mean the resolution is not amazing

it's not 8k 10k 12k so the specs aren't something that's totally gonna blow you away but it's about the quality of the image

that's what really blows people away when it comes to these area cameras so that's what helps just justify the cost point on a lot of this stuff and it's a

tried and true tool it's you it's used on the largest and the biggest and most demanding hollywood productions happening right now so that's what kind

of makes it the kind of i would say the king of digital cinema cameras at this point but all of these are great options

red sony canon panavision okay so we've gone through the different tiers now starting with our uh mirror starting with our smartphones going up

to the mirrorless dslrs entry mid-level high-end now here we are so with

just kind of bring us back to the central uh topic of this whole lecture of choosing the best camera to start your film

career if you can afford an alexa large format i would say that is a great camera to start your film career

but that's probably not really where a lot of people are at right now so yeah it's the best camera you can afford all this stuff but my hope is in what you've

learned here over the last couple hours it should be a balance between art and technology just like cinematography as a whole

choosing the best camera isn't necessarily the one that has the most caves isn't necessarily has the one that's the biggest size sensor or shoots to the

best compression because at the end of the day when you're sitting on your couch watching a movie or hopefully someday in a theater sitting there watching a movie

you're not thinking about any of that you're thinking about the story you're thinking about the visuals you're thinking about how this whole aspect is

coming together to transport you to somewhere else the camera is a tool to transport you to

somewhere else so always approach it that way first and then fill in the gaps with the technical

stuff a cinematographer's job is to balance the art and craft is to balance the look with the tech

now for directors producers you should be mostly focused on the art on the look so when you're looking to figure out okay what's the best camera for my

production start by looking at aesthetics start by looking at other movies that were shot

on a camera like that there's projects out there shot on all different kinds of cameras so if you're interested in okay what does a blackmagic camera really

look like well you can find uh movies that were shot on blackmagic there's a great website i think if you google it's called like shot on what

that will list what the camera types were for a lot of movie and tv productions that are in hollywood today

so so that's another great tool to kind of go back and look at camera aesthetics so

beyond just thinking about the camera as a whole optics lenses and all this stuff the optics are a huge

part of visual storytelling the quality of your lenses now dslrs uh canon lenses nikon lenses have a particular look to them

panavision lenses have a particular look zeiss lenses have a look to them so this is another area i strongly recommend

looking to invest time and resources in because as i said in the very beginning lenses last way beyond whatever the

current camera system is i've been using my nikon lenses for close to 10 to 15 years now and they've gone on four or five different kinds of

cameras and i know that look and i know what i can achieve with those particular lenses so investing in lenses of your own whether they be zoom lenses prime

lenses i think that's a great starting off point as well and then also lighting the other thing we haven't really touched on that much

in in this lecture but it's obviously a crucial part of cinematography because for me you can have the area lexa large

format with the best looking lenses possible but if you just have broad basic hard lighting and it's not

interesting it doesn't further advance the story and it just doesn't look very nice no one cares what camera you shot on

so lighting is as well a crucial element of visual storytelling and something that should be very very much thought of

if you're looking to build out your kit it's nice to have a couple lights you can take with you on location that can be hard lights or soft lights being used

for keys or backgrounds or edge lights all of these different aspects of lighting and they're great classes here at ucla extension that go over

ways to achieve cinematic lighting even at the very basic level our intro to cinematography class is a great way to kind of get your feet wet with cinematic

lighting and then beyond that there's a class called lighting for emotional impact which is exactly as the title uh title leads on ways to utilize lighting

for that portion of visual storytelling camera is a portion of it obviously but lighting and camera together with the

final act of post-production and color correction that's how our final images are being created that's ultimately the ingredients that are going into the

final soup another good aspect right we're talking about big investments here we're talking about spending a lot of money you saw there was only one camera on this list

that was under a thousand dollars that's that's can be steep for a lot of people especially now so a way to think about cameras is

yeah with all that business stuff aside this is still a hobby it's a passion you're investing in something that at

the end of the day should make you happy right is it not to go all like marie condo like find joy and objects and things like that

does the sony a7s bring you joy um so beyond just that like you're investing in something that's going to help

further your career something that's going to be the starting off point to what is hopefully a very successful and productive career of telling visual

storytelling telling visual stories that's what's led us all to this point of wanting to be filmmakers is having stories to tell and being passionate

about the medium being passionate about the art that's why i'm here talking to you right now i mean i'm not just you're the guy who knows a bunch of numbers and

making you do math on a saturday we're doing it because we love what we do we love being filmmakers we love telling

these stories and the camera is a crucial part of that but at the end of the day this is going to be a tool that you need to really have that deep

connection with so pick something that you know is going to bring you joy alexa large format brings me a lot of joy just just saying

case there's anyone you know or looking for an early christmas present just send them my way more important specs how you use it creatively

because that's like what we've been talking about those are the aspects of visual storytelling and the end goal in a lot of this the tech is important the

art is more important so i hope that's through one big takeaway with a lot of this is to examine the creative aspects

of the camera first then start to dive into those tech specs i see it with students all the time where people get so caught up in the

tech specs right they're going through the spec sheet and they just want to know okay tell me about bit death color compression color sub sampling 444

versus 422 all this stuff and that's the stuff i teach in a lot of my extension classes but at the end of the day does it make you a better filmmaker

maybe maybe not what does is how you take those technical concepts and apply them to a creative in result

apply them to the creative end goal and that's what i hope to achieve and a lot of our cinematography classes here at extension hope to achieve as well of

provide you with the tools in this case the tools are knowledge using that knowledge towards your next production whether you're a director or

producer or you work in development or audio or whatever using the tools that you can learn and be taught in a class

once you get on set and you get your hands on some gear you get some hands-on lenses cameras and all that and then let your creativity run wild

that's what we're trying to achieve here to enable your creativity so hopefully through this lecture today talking about some of the best camera options

available and what constitutes a good camera has piqued a lot of your interest of oh i didn't really think about that aspect of camera or that

so hopefully this can be a good starting off point towards investing in a camera and furthering your creative career as a visual storyteller and i'm very pleased

to have played maybe just a small role in that okay so that's the end of my song and dance let's see i know we got a bunch of

questions queued up so i'm going to go ahead and go through here we've kind of broken up some of the questions into more like uh categories about technical and practical and all this stuff so i'll

start to work through some of these questions that we have all queued up so we have a question from inor about what about color grading with images on the

smartphone they record 8-bit in general iphone 12 pro max has 10 bit and it is quite new so great question how bit rate

coordinates with quality and post well like we talked about with bitrate 8-bit is only 256 shades of gray 256

shades of red green and blue that's quite limiting if the camera is only recording that amount of information

once that information moves into color correction that's all i have to work with is just in that little that little bowl of color

if you're able to record 10 bit at 10 000 you know 10 1024 shades of red green and blue and i take that into color a lot more

flexibility about what you can do with it in post now for me the biggest advantage like we did in the demo with filmic pro

is that i can use a log curve so even though 8-bit it is it is what it is 8-bit is what it is putting that log

curve on will give me more dynamic range and really help my ability to work with this image in post-production also the

compression because if you have an 8-bit camera that's highly compressed this is one of my big critiques about gopro

we haven't we haven't talked that much about gopro normally gopro is like a dirty word in a lot of my classes if i need just a camera to make fun of i'll

usually make fun of gopros um but gopros technology highly highly compressed 8-bit uh their

idea of resolution is a little strange um but cameras like that really kind of fall apart quickly in post but having

better compression like through filmic pro having a log curve like through filmic pro i don't actually work for filmic pro even though it might sound like it

all these types of things are going to be really helpful uh when you move on into post okay so we have another question from jen about what is tint on white balance

and why is it better to keep it at zero great question so with white balance in general that's like what i was doing earlier where you set your

you tell your camera what is white light so if white light in this case i'm using daylight balanced lighting to come in to

kind of help color balance the color temperature of the tv itself so i'm using daylight light so that's what i'm setting in white balance now there's a separate element of tint

tint is plus minus green so when you're tinting an image you're either making it more green or less green

under most instances you're going to leave that around zero but where tint can be very helpful is when you're shooting on a practical location and

let's say you don't have the ability to bring in a ton of lighting you're needing to use the available lighting on at the location and it's older

fluorescent tubes or things like that well traditional like regular residential or commercial fluorescents

are very green to cameras so how i can get around that is by adjusting the tint in my camera to dial

out that green by doing a minus tint and that's going to help balance out that natural greenness that i'm getting from

the fluorescence on site so most of the time i like to leave my tint at zero but there are some instances when you go on location where it could be a really

helpful tool to bail you out of a tricky situation okay we got another question here from wesley would you recommend the blackmagic 6k looking to upgrade from a

5d mark ii it would absolutely be an upgrade and i believe uh in my whole little song and dance that maybe i was chilling a little

bit too hard for black magic but as someone who owns a black magic 6k myself i would say absolutely that would be an upgrade over the 5d mark

mark ii you're getting 6k you're getting raw with the blackmagic 6k you can also record prores so you don't necessarily

have to record raw you could just do prores um it has log built in it has audio options built in a lot of uh video

tools as well like um like a histogram zebras false color things like that different exposure tools so i think

it would be a major upgrade because you're really advancing from something that's built for stills into something now built for video and

that's really going to further your career in film rather than trying to fit the square peg into the round hole that is a stills camera that has a video option

okay we got a question here from alexander what would you recommend in this case shooting documentaries lots of field trips with tough or very simple

conditions priorities are affordable price buy instead of rent high mobility shoot on the run compact size battery

life high compression rate all right quite the shopping list let's see so for documentaries yep you're

definitely going to need the long compression you're going to need a battery that lasts a long time affordable price because there are some

really nice options out there that are in that little higher price bracket as we talked about with some of the mid and high end cameras like the varicam lte is

a wonderful camera that does absolutely everything you're wanting to do except for the price um so that's that's

an option as well i would probably stay away from red airy has an option that we didn't talk about here called the amira camera a i

uh a-m-i-r-a camera but again that price point is probably going to be way outside of your uh price range for something like this

so i would say a really good option to consider and now this may or may not be in your price range would be the blackmagic ursa mini pro

so the ursa mini pro is the more studio style black magic camera believe the price point was around like five to

seven k something in that range super 35 size sensor uh can you have ef lenses on it um pretty common lens mount

interchangeable batteries you can actually go to what we didn't talk too much about batteries but anton bauer v-mount these larger capacity batteries

that will last potentially all day with something like this so you can put those on that camera as well you get the 4.6 k

raw as well you could all record prores you can do audio on board as well you can have an onboard camera mic which might be really helpful for your application

you can also run like a like a lavalier mic into it as well so you can have two channels of audio running at all times

has the flip out lcd so you have it has a monitor built in which is nice so it's a really nice form factor for throwing a camera on your shoulder having that flip

out lcd right in front of you or you can rotate it to see around it if you ever need but you have essentially one hand on the lens and you're able to operate

move around get good quality audio so i think that might be a really good option to look at the only drawback is like we talked

about in general with blackmagic their color science is really new so the look of those cameras sometimes

leaves a little bit to be desired so what i would recommend in that case is brush up on some skills of post color editing or ways maybe get some test footage shot

on the blackmagic ursa mini that would be a great camera to do like a little try demo where you can rent it for a small job just so you get some hands-on

experience you start to work with the footage process it on your own in either adobe programs or like davinci resolve for instance

and just get a feel of if you like it or not because it does take especially for documentary on the shoulder you need to be very quick and agile i shoot a lot of

feature documentaries myself and that's one of the main things i look for in a camera is i need to be able to make on the fly quick

exposure decisions lighting decisions changing camera settings with rapidly changing conditions i need to have all those at my fingertips and be able to

quickly translate what i need to do to what is on the camera itself if i ever have to go into a menu to change something that's a negative in my book

because if i'm live on the field i've shot a nature documentary where you know we're on long lenses filming these endangered birds

and the bird might take off at any moment we want to get that epic slow-mo shot of the bird flying off into the horizon and if i'm in a camera menu fits

in around well i'd miss the shot so i need to have everything at my fingertips with a button or a knob or things like that ready to go at a

moment's notice so the ursa mini pro has that on canon that might also be an option as well their c200 or c300 line might be

another alternative to look at okay so we have a question here from carolina what waterproof camera would you recommend to shoot underwater in the

pacific ocean well i actually have a list of cameras only approved for the pacific ocean not the atlantic that's a whole separate list i'm just kidding

so with waterproof cameras this is kind of a tricky situation because all the cameras we've talked about so far except for smartphones are not really

waterproof but the thing you can look into and i highly recommend for underwater photography is an underwater housing

so i've shot in a couple of the feature films i've worked on i've done some underwater work i mean i did underwater work back in film school with a bolex 16

millimeter crank camera where we cranked it up put it in an underwater housing the crank that you could only roll for about 45 seconds at a time with 16

millimeter running through it so we would crank it up hold this like a like a uh spring operated there was no battery you

put it in the housing you go under and you you can hear it on the water go click click click click click click click click click click click click and that that's when it stopped recording

get it up out of the water get a get a breath of air dark ages but nowadays with digital there is underwater housings for pretty

much all of these cameras we've talked about so far that are made specifically for housing these kinds of cameras i've taken area alexa mini's underwater i've

taken red cameras underwater where you put it in the housing and then it has different controls on the outside that are all waterproof so you can zoom you

can control focus you can't really control much in terms of camera settings you have to kind of set that before you go under but there are some that even have waterproof touch

lcds where you could change camera menu settings so i would say first and foremost think about what camera you want to own

based on all the stuff we've talked about so far and then with that said then look at underwater housings because more than likely

there's a housing for that particular camera but you want to have all those things checked off creatively technically first before you start

worrying about oh can i take it under or not get the best possible image you can best you can afford best you want to have and

then there's all these options out there through third-party vendors hydroflex i think is one of those that makes um underwater housings they're

actually based here in el segundo in la uh and then there's another big company i'm forgetting right now i was i was not ready to talk underwater cinematography

but yet here we are uh so i hopefully sounds like a really awesome shoot and wish you best of luck with it okay so we got a question now from chris

can you quickly address the sony option alpha 1 8k versus the fx9 6k full frame body only

good question so the big thing that stands out to me first and foremost with those cameras is you're kind of comparing apples and oranges to a certain extent the alpha 1 is a

mirrorless camera so that is going to be your small form factor kind of designed for stills and and whatnot now the video capabilities are

amazing and then the other larger option the fx model that's going to be something designed for actual video use

so it's going to be a much larger camera body but have all of those options built in for being able to control settings on the fly

do internal audio time code all that fun stuff just like i was talking about with the earlier question of having a camera on your shoulder for documentary all

those options are right there for you there are buttons on the camera body itself where you can use nd filters you can change iso you can change all this

stuff white balance on the fly and it's really a camera designed for video so putting aside resolution and

compression and all that stuff if you're someone who's going to be shooting a lot of video or documentary or working with a primarily video

i would tend to go the direction of the fx line but if you are passionate about stills and you're going to be using it as stills as well or maybe you've had

dslr cameras in the past or mirrorless cameras before the sony alpha might be a easier transition for you into higher

quality video yet still keeping you in the lane of stuff you're already familiar with rather than making that big jump into standalone video

okay another question from jen is the black magic pocket good enough to make a documentary for a streaming service like netflix yes

absolutely now i saw this going around in the chat as well netflix has a list of approved cameras now

a netflix approved camera this for most of us doesn't really apply unless you're being hired by netflix to create

original content for netflix that's where that camera list comes from now when netflix is looking to acquire content so let's say you've made a

feature documentary on your own that's an indie and they're looking to acquire it or you're through a sales agent or something and you're selling your movie

to netflix to host on their service at that point they don't really care what camera you shot on it can be hd it can be 4k if you go through a lot of the

content on netflix there is still a lot of hd content on netflix so as long as the camera can shoot a native 4k

so by native 4k that means coming off the sensor is a true 4k signal then it's on netflix approved camera

list so you don't we don't necessarily need to make a huge deal out of whether it's on the list or not as you're looking to buy something for yourself

but it's a you know something to keep in mind and if you're hired by netflix to shoot their next awesome original content then uh yes you'll be picking off of their

list of native 4k the good news is almost all the cameras with the exception of a couple uh would

qualify as a netflix camera that they all have 4k internal maybe yeah you wouldn't be able to shoot on like a canon rebel t7 that's not going to be on

the list uh the canon c100 not gonna be on the list c200 actually is not on the list but for an odd reason because it

doesn't have internal time code that's another thing that can knock you off of netflix's list so things to keep in mind but yeah i saw the link for that list go through in the

chat so definitely check that out as well blackmagic pocket would definitely be on that list so carolina had a question what's the camera with the best dynamic

range in the entry level selection so for the entry level selection let me jump back here a little bit

into our entry level digital cinema cameras so all of these have log right all these have some type of log curve in them now log like we talked

about earlier that's what's providing all this extended dynamic range for us so the fx3 is going to have sony's s log

built in blackmagic has black what they call blackmagic film which is their log curve panasonic has v log

for like victory v log i have no idea how they got there and then canon has their canon log canon log 2 canon log 3. so all of these are

going to have extended dynamic range in my becoming camera savvy class we actually test the blackmagic pocket 6k

compared to the sony a7s we even throw in an old canon 5d for good measure we're also testing it against the c500 mark ii we have a red

camera in there as well so as part of that i'm testing dynamic range all the time the black magic cameras in raw actually

hold up pretty well the canon cameras it's funny the c200 will have more dynamic range than the c100 it's a

slightly better sensor and you get that raw which is going to increase your dynamic range so for me what i would look for most is yes i need to have raw

and then beyond that you really have to test it so this might be a great opportunity to test and rent maybe some of these other

options just for a day or a weekend take it into you know shoot outside in a park shoot inside at your place and just get a sense of how much range you're really

working with and which one looks most cinematic to you because at the end of the day the resolution of the dynamic range isn't all that different between a lot of

cameras in this class so i think the more indicative category to look at is going to be aesthetics and do you like the

images that it creates so that'll be something to keep in mind with a lot of these in the entry level okay so we got a question now from

michelle for an on-camera journalist creating their own interview series from home good luck who needs to operate their own camera

can you compare the sony 6600 with a sigma 16 lens to the blackmagic pocket 4k need something affordable it can capture

great cinematic b-roll in the field also do you think he's an iphone max with filmic pro for b-cam has a multi-camera remote interview work well there was a

recommendation for became for one of those main camps all great questions okay so i'm not that familiar with the

a6600 i believe that's probably in there like their dslr alpha line so that it's we're again kind of comparing apples and

oranges to a certain extent of a dslr compared to a actual video camera so with the video camera like a black

magic pocket 4k that's going to have a lot of video features exposure tools audio internal things like that that are really going to help elevate the look

and not to mention having that nice large sensor size in this case 35 millimeter size sensor will make it look a little bit more cinematic

that was part of like the way i record videos and and do zoom calls and stuff like that i try to hook up an external camera with a 35 size sensor so it looks

like people are looking at me in a movie for a lot of this stuff right you got to take yourself serious as a filmmaker even if it's still over zoom

so that might be a great option as well but then for a b camera the iphone with filmic pro could work in certain aspects

the problem is going to be matching so even though it has log it has all these different functions it's not going to be a perfect one-to-one match with what you

have as your a cam the only real perfect match is to have an identical camera as your b cam so the good news with the

black magic pocket 4k the cost the price point pretty low so maybe that's an option to just have the same camera to

do a cam b cam i would say if you need to go down a level a little bit then maybe look into the bmd micro because

you can get an external monitor for it that'll probably be you know 100 bucks 100 to 200 bucks for the real low end ones it's just an hdmi out from that

camera into the monitor so you can see what you're recording uh same lens mount so you can take lenses and put them on this micro camera

as well it records internal now since you're going to broadcast 4k really probably isn't that big of a

criteria because a lot of broadcast stuff is still hd um so the hd limitations of this micro might be okay they're also a version of

the micro out there i believe that got released not too long ago that does have the 4k option as well so if you're going blackmagic as your a cam try to keep it

in the blackmagic family in general and that'll just make your life so much easier when it comes to matching later on okay so we've got a question here from

yuri and i guarantee i'm like killing most of your names right now trust me as a ken knutson i am very much used to it and i apologize

so yuri what about an iphone 12 pro with filmic versus a sony a7s would sony really be worth the investment versus

the last iphone with filmic so with those technical categories that we talked about the very first one

sensor size this is the big big difference between the a7s and the iphone what is the

sensor size of the iphone well it's smaller than your pinky thumbnail like significantly smaller it is a tiny

tiny tiny tiny sensor now with those smaller sensors it's really hard to get that cinematic depth of field and also you're going to get a lot of noise in

low light it's not going to be super ideal for extreme exposure instances so the small small sensor even paired

with filmic pro filmic pro is helping kind of take you to that next level of giving you a lot of the video options giving a lot more manual video options

but you can never really get around that sensor issue compared to the sony a7s that has a sensor that's even larger

than super 35 right we talked about the alexa large format as this hundred thousand dollar camera well the sony a7s their sensor

really isn't all that smaller than what you're getting in a hundred thousand dollar camera cinematic depth of field

better light sensitivity pretty good performance in low light the internal compression not super great but again it's not super great on an iphone either

so the a7s i think would still for sure be an upgrade over iphone but you can still get great looking stuff on an

iphone and if cost is a concern then i would say start there and then over time in your career you can maybe advance and

level up to something like an a7s down the road okay question here from shirley what's the biggest difference between

the higher end stills camera with good video like a canon r5 and an entry-level cinema camera blackmagic 6k

that's a great question and brings us into a topic i didn't really talk all that much about megapixels so when you're looking at stills cameras

this is one of those things on that spec sheet are megapixels how many megapixels is the sensor well megapixels doesn't really

equate to much in the digital cinema camera world so that's why we kind of glossed over most of it but where megapixels make a huge

difference is in stills so on like a like a canon r5 the quality of the stills that camera can capture is

amazing it's really really great so if you find yourself as a filmmaker or someone who needs to be

taking stills as well as video then the r5 by all means the blackmagic pocket does not have a stills option it's just

kind of a video only now that's not to prevent you from going into the video and extracting frames as stills you can

certainly do that as well a little less than ideal in some instances but the resolution is going to be wildly different

on an r5 with a still you're looking at things that are you know 16k and beyond or somewhere around there compared to

the blackmagic pocket 4k where you're dealing with 4k resolution now resolution and stills makes a huge difference

think about the images you see on billboards and print advertisement those are extremely those require extreme high

resolution source images in order to blow it up that big or to use it in those different kinds of formats extracting is still from video

not as much it's not going to hold up in a lot of the applications where we would generally be using regular still

photography at a very high megapixel okay question here from jessica can you talk about the external recorder can be used with cameras does it add weight to

the camera or how is it a fix talk more about mounts their differences and functions all right jessica wants to get into the nitty-gritty here talking about

uh recorders and weight yes they add weight for sure for sure right they're not completely weightless that would be i

mean although we are getting to that point with cloud-based recording as part of as like in my dit class for

extension we spend a whole week talking about the future of the industry the future of technology the future of cameras and all that stuff and one thing

to really keep your eye on coming in in the i would say not too near future but it's around the corner

we won't be recording inside our cameras at all there will be no internal compression there will be no internal recording mechanism

the cameras will be able to connect over a 5g 6g a wireless signal to the wireless network we already have established and be able to record

straight to a cloud-based server so instead of having a physical memory card you hit the red button and that is getting streamed to a data site in yuma

arizona in a in a server room and that is where your footage is actually being stored and you can go to your computer you can download it it's immediately backed up because it

was sent up to the cloud so cloud-based recording is something that i would keep an eye on because i think it's going to make a lot

of sense in the filmmaking industry especially for on location and things like that so um with external recorders

in general some of the big brands like the one i mentioned before with atomos atmos or something like that so they have a whole wide array of

external recorders now these recorders connect to the camera either over an hdmi or sdi connection so you got to

make sure your camera has those options available to you other things they all require power so you have to actually power that external

monitor or external recorder so that could be through a repurposed camera battery that could be ac power so that's also something to keep in mind is that's

going to require batteries so you have the cable going in you got the batteries powering it so all of that is going to add some weight and just a general

just kind of bulkiness to your camera rig i prefer not to use an external recorder unless i have a really good reason to do so just

because it adds so much weight to the camera rig in some instances makes it kind of bulky offside and all that stuff

but i'm sure maybe some of you have seen these really funny pictures of like a sony a7s a very small camera in a giant camera rig where the camera

rig's like this big but the camera itself is just that that's what we're in as the cameras get smaller the accessories are not getting smaller along with it so that's

something to keep in mind so when connecting and physically mounting it to your camera rig there's these things called noga arms that are kind of arms that we

use in camera rigs that screw in to something called a cheese plate that's essentially a piece of metal that has a bunch of holes drilled in it so you

would attach the arm to this cheese plate they call it a cheese plate because it looks like a slice of swiss cheese there you go see letting you inside

behind the curtain so it screw screws into that cheese plate connects over the arm to the external monitor so it's physically mounted and you can change the position

of it and within your camera rig okay we got another question from ara our lens mounts on blackmagic 6k

mountable on sony fx3 not really so the lens mount like on a

blackmagic pocket 6k that mount is part of the camera system you can't actually take it off right so that camera mount is going to

be what's called a canon ef mount in most instances that is designed to accept canon lenses so you can't take it

off and put it on a different camera that mount is kind of baked into that whole kind of build of that camera

now there's some that have mounts that you can take off and move around like arie has some sony has some but with a sony camera those most likely

are going to be sony's alpha mount sony's actual kind of specific lens mount so if you want to use canon lenses

on a sony camera you're going to require some type of adapter to make that happen so those adapters uh metabones is the

name of a company that makes some really great adapters uh to help convert from like canon lenses to a sony camera body

uh b h has a bunch of different uh adapters that you can purchase and some of them are fairly inexpensive the more expensive ones are going to

have some type of electronics inside of them because the thing with canon lenses is they require electronic control to

control the aperture and if you want to add autofocus for any reason again that's an electronic process so once you get into electronic

adapters the price is going to go way up that's why i like my nikon lenses everything's manual okay a question from galen would you

ever recommend buying a used camera wow this is that's a really good point i should have put that in there

so with used cameras there are instances where yes maybe a used camera makes a lot of sense so when i'm looking at a camera that is used and

this is the same approach i take when i'm getting ready to shoot a movie and i'm at a rental house because think of it when you're renting a camera even

from a rental house you're essentially working with a used camera so there are certain types of quality checks i'm going to do with that system

before i take it in the field and start shooting a movie with it so first thing i'm going to look at and this is usually buried deep in the menus

is a number of hours it's been used or a number of hours it's been turned on because when we think about the cameras

remember the sensor right light is falling through the lens on this sensor this is a photo sensitive piece of electronics

the more hours that light is falling on that sensor it's going to start to change characteristics right just like if you've

left your car out in the california sun for too long the paint's going to start to fade over time you're going to start to lose some of

that color because of the harsh effects of sunlight so the more hours a camera has been used in the field the more

likely that sensor has started to fade or change characteristics a little bit so i would always go through and make sure it doesn't have a ton of hours on

it and even if it does then really test it shoot a lot of tests on it to make sure you're fully comfortable with uh

the quality of image that's coming out of that camera now another option when it comes to used cameras if you're looking to buy is that there are uh camera places here

in town that will charge you a small fee to do a technical evaluation for you of a used camera where you can take a camera that

someone's trying to sell to you take it to them they'll put it through its paces they'll test it in-house and let you know if anything at all is wrong with it

part of the beauty of living in los angeles panasonic is here red is here area is here all the big uh

all the big camera houses are here and for the most part we'll do tests like that for you so i would recommend reaching out to them as well and that

might be a good resource to make sure you're not getting something that is damaged goods okay a question from chris quick

question on sony an older sony camera that can shoot raw the fs7 fs700 oh the fs700 definitely an

older camera i i have a little bit of experience with that sony fs700 i didn't put it in here because it is a little

bit out of date in terms of its specs but what really advanced it and made it kind of revolutionary for its time is that you could connect it to an

external recorder and get raw it was pretty much one of the first ones that offered raw externally so you're able to

record in raw and shoot extremely high frame rates so the fs700 which is one

you know back this is probably eight nine years ago i would use as a high speed camera when i was shooting a

red or alexa as my a or b camera so i was bringing that one on just because it could shoot raw in 4k at extremely high

frame rates i think if you went down to 2k you could get something something obscene like 900 frames per second or something like that so it was

a really great camera back in its day so where it kind of falls flat now a little bit is in log and quality of raw

sony has improved their log curves and their raw recording specs quite a bit since that camera came out so

it's a little out of date in terms of the creative side of it but some of the features and specs of that camera are really unparalleled still to this day so

um if you can find a great deal on it i would caution it as being a camera you can use for a long time coming up into the future but

any camera is better than no camera and it has a great feature set so i'm a fan of that i'm a fan of the fs700 it takes me down memory lane

okay so a question from elizabeth can you recommend a company in los angeles to have a dslr sensor cleaned

yes canon right if you have a canon dslr canon has a facility in burbank they have a full tech facility as well

where you can bring in your canon camera i think they charge a small fee or whatever and will do a complete clean out of it professional photographers in

town i would say canon probably is the standard when it comes to professional stills photography so canon offers a service to all photographers to bring in

their cameras and canon will do a technical clean out maintenance on them and living in la it's a great possibility because they're just up in

burbank so definitely check out uh cannon center in burbank it's kind of right off of kind of as you're heading to glendale

kind of near warner brothers and that area of burbank so check it out okay so we had a follow-up now from alexander

his question was about shooting documentaries and the documentary rigs so his follow-up is does it also apply to blackmagic pocket 6k

so for black magic pocket 6k you're looking at a very different form factor so with the blackmagic 6k it's going to

be a smaller camera more of a dslr style that is not a full studio camera so to access a lot of the tools and options on

the blackmagic 6k you still need to go into the touch screen menu on the back i think the camera itself only has like four or five buttons on it at all so

everything else is through that touch screen menu so the thing with me and touch screens especially as it relates to documentary and taking a camera on

location i actually hate touch screens with a passion you take them out on location it's windy it's dusty it's bright the sun is

glaring on it it has reflection to it if it starts to rain you gotta immediately cover it up and now or if it's cold you're trying to use gloves and it's a

lcd and the lcd is liquid and it gets colder it doesn't respond quite as well touch screens are

annoying but hey they look cool so i personally hate having touch screens on the field um so that for me would be kind of a

drawback of using the pocket 6k and some of the conditions you're talking about but image sensor wise quality wise yeah

you're getting 6k you're getting raw you'll still be getting raw with the ursa mini pro but um it is a smaller form factor so you might need a little bit more to

build out the camera rig rather than the ursa mini pro that's pretty much ready to go right off the bat but for that cost difference maybe the accessories of

what you need to rig it out might ultimately equal the cost of the ursa mini pro so that's something you can consider

okay so a follow up here of gin is time code recording a must for indie documentary for netflix i don't really need to sync up other audio myself

um so with this for the netflix original stuff uh they require time code also for their archiving

so beyond just delivering the film to them and this is something i get into working in post-production and deliverables and all this stuff that

when you make a movie that's like a netflix original and i've had the opportunity to work on a couple of those once you shoot it you edit it you finish

it and you're delivering the final movie that's just one aspect of the stuff netflix wants they also want all of the raw footage

all that raw footage usually on what's called an lto tape or something kind of like a hard drive and that's getting sent to netflix and that goes into their

vault the reason they're doing that is that if they ever need to go back and pull clips or pull new footage or do a

you know whatever they do like a recap show or who knows i mean yeah you're talking about an indie doc so it's probably not super relevant but

they need to have access to all that raw footage the way they're able to connect what you used in your edit back to that raw footage is through time code so

that's why time code is a important aspect of what they require now if you're fully indie and it's not you're

not doing this like as a netflix original or in partnership with them then shoot timecode doesn't matter right if you can sync audio yourself do

and do any of that because for the stuff that is not netflix owned the only thing they're going to want is the final movie and at that point they're never going

back to the raws they're not caring if the raws have timecode or not so it's kind of irrelevant at that point so if you're making something with the intention of trying to get it on netflix

or amazon or whatever then yeah timecode doesn't really matter the c100 could be a good option c200 could be a good option as well the

blackmagic cameras both have time code as well even if you shoot on a mirror list that doesn't have time code you could use that as well

okay so we had a follow-up again from jessica was talking about external recorders talking about the different kind of

mounts and their differences uh and how they function differently so mounts i would assume we're talking about lens mounts

so with a lens mount uh the lens mount is specific to the type of lens that you're trying to put on that camera

whether it's canon or nikon or sony those have specific types of and i'm talking about the actual layout of the

pins on the back of the lens itself how we're connecting that physically to the camera so canon mounts like i talked about earlier are entirely digital

that's how you control aperture nikon lenses are mechanical so it actually has like a little lever inside the mount that's how you control the

f-stop sony lenses again are entirely digital like canon so those are some of the types of differences you might run into

in terms of the mount itself but for me it's most important to mount or to match the lens you want to use or the lens you own

with the amount of the specific camera you're trying to use and that's where adapters might come into play or things like that just because you have a black magic camera with a canon mount

and you want to put nikon lenses on it there's adapters you can get for less than 100 bucks that enable you to do that

okay so a question here from anna would you consider doing a sequel to this lecture about lenses and external recorders really interesting to know more about how you can elevate it

not so easy to to end up spending on not so ideal options i i hear you so a great and this is again my shameless plug

a great sequel will be becoming camera savvy class being offered in summer quarter 2021 here at ucla extension that's a class i'm actually offering

right now in winter quarter that's a full 11 weeks where we do deep dives into lenses deep dives into external recorders and i think that would be a

perfect option for you as we go much deeper into the specifics of the camera system itself and going into more

specifics about recorders and a whole deep dive on lenses optics all this fun stuff that i geek out on way too much

but i hope this little camera seminar has been really helpful to kind of just get you the basics of the camera and then hopefully interest you and go

moving forward taking the next steps here so for christina has a question here uh the blackmagic 6k is only good depending on lens what lens would you recommend

for shallow depth of field great question so obviously lenses add a lot to the quality of your um

to the image that's being recorded that's why there's cheap lenses and like crazy expensive zeiss and anamorphic lenses all of these have different

visual characteristics that you ultimately need to pair to the visual aesthetics you're trying to achieve in your particular project

so for shallow depth of field a longer lens like more telephoto lens is going to be key for getting that

shallow depth of field look so something like a zoom lens that can go up to you know 100 millimeter or 200 millimeter

type of lens that's what's going to give you a much shallower depth of field to work with typically wider angle lenses

like anything that's let's say a 24 millimeter lens all the way down to like a 16 or 8 millimeter lens those are going to have very deep depth of field

so that might be something to kind of avoid the sensor itself in the blackmagic 6k is super 35 sized so

that's your standard cinematic uh sensor for getting that kind of depth of field but a longer lens is going to help you with that just keep in mind it's

more telephoto so maybe you need to back the camera farther away it's gonna you know create really tight close-ups because it's so telephoto once you get

into the hundred millimeter 200 millimeter style lenses but you'll have that super shallow cinematic depth of field if you really are wanting to

achieve that particular look i would recommend looking at a larger sensor camera something like a

let's see here it would be like a sony like the sony a7s that will help you get a much larger field of view and

therefore more shallow depth of field okay so we're kind of right up on the time here so thank you everyone for your

great questions and i hope to see some of you potentially in some upcoming classes here at ucla extension i hope you've had a great time going through

all of this with me and uh kind of listening to my little song and dance and my silly silly terrible jokes um and thank you to my stand-ins the cat and

the the the wheel so thank you all for coming now if you ever want to follow up with other questions things like that the way

to get in contact with me is you can reach out to me on my website so if you just go to jasonknutson.com so my name should be plastered all over

this thing so i know spelling's a little tricky but if you go to my website there's a contact page and you can go and type your questions and that will find its way to me so that i'll be able

to answer any follow-up questions you might have i know we had a lot of people here maybe not time to get to all the questions so uh but i thank you all for your participation and glad to glad to

help you take that next step in your film career