Saturday, January 31, 2009

What's In A FIlm Look?





Many of us have been striving to capture a "film look" with digital video cameras. We know that filmic lighting, widescreen framing, 24 frames per second and film gammas help get us there. However, there is one ingredient missing, be it with 1/3"(top image) or even 2/3"(middle image) CCD video cameras, and that's the shallow depth of field that 35mm cine cameras provide(bottom image).

SSV offers an affordable, high quality means to capture the shallow depth of field that video cameras with normal lenses cannot--the Letus Ultimate 35mm Cine adapter. The Letus Ultimate enables 35mm SLR(Nikon, Canon) or Cine(PL mount) lenses to be used with palmcorders or full size 2/3" cameras, yielding the shallow, organic look of 35mm.

The Letus Ultimate 35mm Cine adapter provides the missing link to the elusive film look. Finally, we can utilize shallow depth of field, even in small interior settings, that helps us draw attention to the foreground talent or product while making the background complimentary, instead of a distraction. The Letus Ultimate, when paired with inexpensive 35mm SLR lenses, is a cost effective way to raise the production value of any project, providing for a cinematic look that differentiates your footage from the competiton's typical video imagery.

Going Tapeless

Most of us video types who've been around for awhile are kind of stuck on recording on tape. However, even us oldtimers have to admit that file based recording is upon us. Since 2006, SSV has been offering on-board hard drive recording in parallel with tape.

Our DVCAM cameras have been mated to nNovia Quick Capture on-board hard drive, recording Quicktime .mov files or .avi files. We also offer the FireStore FS-100 DVCPRO 50 or HD hard drives, recording in Quicktime and P2 file modes. We also offer P2 solid state recording, for the ultimate in reliability and convenience. A single 16Gb P2 card can record 43 minutes of 720/24P Native footage.

Our Sony and Panasonic cameras can take advantage of these on-board hard drive file base recording solutions, which yields many advantages, such as; back up recording, long recording capacity(5.5 hours in DVCAM, 6.5 hours in 720/24P Native DVCPRO HD), very fast file transfer to hard drives and non-linear editing systems, thumbnail fast access to multiple clips, no need for an expensive tape deck that requires realtime ingest vs. file transfer in a 1/4 of the time.

These file base recording options yield time and money savings over tape based capture and ingest. Files can be transferred to a client's hard drive in the time it takes to label the days tapes. The clips are easy to log and edit ready.

It is understandable that many of us are most comfortable with tape based acquisition, but after taking advantage of file based acquisition and ingest, it truly is hard to go back to the time consuming, costly workflow of tape ingest. We invite you to try our hard drive or P2 recording solutions on your next project, we think you'll be happy you did.