Writing some truths about shooting on old familar equipment what others have discarded.

[Ted Hoppe]

The truth is, every time I look at a new $50,000 or more camera rig, I look at the pile of cables, the heavy brackets, the boxes of arms and clamps and the massive lenses, and I just think about how much it would slow me down. I think about how many days i will have to work to break even on the project. I think about how my budget will burst if i rent one for the weeks to come. I think of the waste of money that some hotshot cinematographers will undertake to rent one so they can say they did. Don't get me wrong - i love the latest and greatest. - i have over they many years bought some nice, fancy, impressive kits including a Alexa 35 that took a month of working days to cover the cost and my other workhorse the Sony FX6 with numerous cine lenses to match that i use to work the magic for the director or to delight and reassure their clients. 

When I’m out in the field by myself wearing many hats often on my own dime under a fast-changing sky, waiting for the right light to hit a landscape or tracking someone’s story as it unfolds in real time, I don’t want to be a technician troubleshooting a complex machine taking away the moments of why i am there and to be present. I want to be in the moment a thinking filmmaker, the shooter i need to be - a cinematographer that makes images. The brass tacks of it is you and i have to make choices - in this ever frantic world - we need to spend more time our lighting and our subject - not our camera and centainly not fixing crap in post. And that is exactly why I can’t seem to put my 10 year old  DVX200 and field matching/mounted Blackmagic 12g monitor setup down.  

On a recent shoot out in the middle of nowhere working the broken Nevada landscape under challenging light  - i was reminded by the shear ease that this old micro four thirds sensor naturally provided a deeper, more forgiving plane of shaped focus at the equivalent apertures that the fx6 i had waiting to be assembled in the cases in the off-road production vehicle. Over the brief 5 minute I had to get this - it was the fortunate and crucial safety margins with these unpredictable ponies fanning across the dynamic sand and rock- Along with using my old school rifle camera mount that i had left attached just in case i ran up such wondrous wild things, my shots stayed sharp with that attached Leica which makes young guns laugh. What i know is I didn't  have to fight the camera, i turned the rig one, it came to life - i was able to keep the wild life  in focus in seonds rather than minutes . I was with an old friend by myself who over the years never let me down in the hot war zones, rapidly changing fire conditions, toxic waste dumps and corporate board rooms. The footage that came out is so good - i already sold it to folks making a Netflix movie locally.

Feel free to flame away about my faux carbon fiber rig from 2015  - i can take it. I has paid for itself in many more ways than dollars. So good in fact - i am tempted to get another as back up just in case.

Edited July 5 by Ted Hoppe

[Tyler Purcell]

Oh man, yes to all of the above.

I think the market is PRIMED for a small S16mm sized imager, with a lot of pixel density, in a very small body. Maybe something dual stacked. Dual gain. Maybe not even global shutter, could get away with less than 10ms refresh. Slightly over 4k to deal with re-framing in post. Interchangeable lens mounts and a B4 adaptor kit. Variable ND of course, similar to Sony. Small body, maybe even smaller than an FX6. Include lots of raw and pro res capture formats along with proxy capture. Dual CFExpress Gen 2 4.0 card slots. With such a small imager in a bigger chassis, you could easily make it waterproof, not resistant, but actually water proof. With a passive cooling system based on a piece of copper or aluminum. Get the HFR up to 250 ish in full imager capture mode. OLED viewfinder module with a flip out screen similar to what Arri did with the Alexa's. Make the side controls and display independent of the inside chassis, so when you do get it wet, it's not leaking around the buttons into the camera's insides. Build in wireless video AND follow focus controls, with a lidar sensor for running manual lenses with AF. This will keep the size of the kit down when you're doing larger shows that need those things. I can't stand all the external boxes. 

Frankly, this is the reason I still shoot 16mm mostly, because to me, my Aaton XTR Prod works like an ENG camera. It's so familiar to the way I work, that it just WORKS! I wound up buying an URSA Cine 12k as an attempt to replace the Aaton eventually, but it's THE WRONG camera for that work. I argue even super 35mm frame size is just too big. It's fine for dramatic/scripted stuff, but for run and gun, kinda like the Amira, it's too damn heavy. The XTR is lighter, simply because the lenses to cover S16mm are SO MUCH SMALLER compared to covering S35 or FF. Whoops. I also don't like controlling the DOF constantly through the iris as much for run and gun.