C-mount CCTV Cam for Filmmaking?

dm24ig · December 15, 2005

I've been playing around with an idea of shooting video with a so called "hi-res" 480 tv lines ccd camera I have that accpets c/cs mounts. Since I have a number of c-mount lenses for 16mm film cameras, I thought I might test these out with the cctv camera and then playing with some film look Premire plugins such as cinemotion to give it a film look. The camera has a BNC connector which I will connect to my mini-dv cam using a very short BNC to S-video cable, and then transfer the recorded footage to pc.

Anyone here played with this idea before?

- DM

Phil Rhodes · December 15, 2005

Hi,

I fail to see what this will get you over just shooting with the miniDV camera.

Phil

Michael Collier · December 15, 2005

Its not worth it. They are single chip cameras, which is ok for HD because there are so many pixels, but with the low res SD cameras the aberations produced would be way too much to call it quality. Also those cameras dont possess the color correction features a normal camera has. This can be a double edge sword, yes you can correct when you get back and it may be better correct when you have time to spend find tuning the look, but only if it was uncompressed 4:4:4 12bit video. any less and the quality loss would be far too much just to white balance the footage.

the only real advantage is the C-mount lenses, which if you get a mini-35 you would be able to use them (though mini-35s are a bit expensive) maybe if the camera is a 2/3" chip you may get some improvement in DOF, but DOF is not a reason to throw quality out the window.

Stick with the mini-DV cam.

Now something I want to do is buy a 2k (HD res x 4) CCD, buy or make the developement board and wire that into a high speed data capture card and some RAID disks and get a home made high quality kinnetta/viper style HD camera. complicated but I have seen footage from people who have done just that and they are amazing.

dm24ig · December 16, 2005

Thanks for the replies. I haven't been using my 16mm camera as of late and thought I could use those 16mm lenses for something other than collecting dust. Theres something I hate about the mini-dv's auto fuctions and manually adusting things as well. I'd rather just adjust the lens to get what I'm looking for - this is the reason for wanting to use the c-mount lenses over the built in mini-dv lens.

-DM

Edited December 16, 2005 by dm24ig

Stephen Williams · December 16, 2005

I've been playing around with an idea of shooting video with a so called "hi-res" 480 tv lines ccd camera I have that accpets c/cs mounts. Since I have a number of c-mount lenses for 16mm film cameras, I thought I might test these out with the cctv camera and then playing with some film look Premire plugins such as cinemotion to give it a film look. The camera has a BNC connector which I will connect to my mini-dv cam using a very short BNC to S-video cable, and then transfer the recorded footage to pc.

Anyone here played with this idea before?

- DM

Hi,

Sounds like you have a poor mans video assist camera. I am using one of those from EBay for 1 of my Ultracams. I agree with Phil Rhodes, a mini DV camera will be MUCH better.

Stephen