Daniel Christie

I was involved in camera tests of the 450 for a film I focus pulled on recently. Both myself and the DOP, who came from an extensive film background, agreed that the motion in the 450's '25PsF' mode was not smooth. It almost looked like out of phase fields do when shooting interlaced. I have a feeling it is not true progressive at at all. The reason video uses shutter speed in fractions of a second is because, unlike film, video does not use a physical shutter. Shutter speed in video relates to the electronic timing of the CCDs, which is always physically 'exposed', so it would not be correct to refer to video shutter speed in degrees. Some of the new Panasonics have a menu option that will display data such as shutter speed in cine equivalents though. Daniel

I just bought th L-758C through ebay, $AU635 from Hong Kong. The same supplier now sells the 558 about $200 cheaper. I emailed Sekonic USA and they are expecting a US release in coming weeks. Basic functions are comparable to the 558. I haven't got my head around it's exposure profiling system yet, but it seems it might be useful to calibrate the meter to a video camera or telecine. The Sekonic software is limited to working with 8bit luma values, based on the green channel. It would also be kind of cool if the software could analise a greyscale directly from an image. At the moment you have to get the values in Photoshop (or similar) and enter them manually into a table. Daniel

Thanks for the replys. Me either, when I'm operating but when you are focus pulling, especially with an operator who comes from a film background who wouldn't usually ever take focus themselves, you don't always have the opportunity to get your eye to the viewfinder . I've also found some operators just feel more comfortable seeing a tape measure being taken. The functional advantage is that you can measure up while the operator is still finding his or her frame. Daniel

Hi everybody. First post on this site. Can anyone tell me where you would measure focus from if you are shooting video? Someone told me that they were taught at filmschool to measure from the front element of the lens as apposed to the image plane, so I ran some focus tests on a DSR-450 with a fujinon ENG lens and sure enough the barrel markings seemed to be from the front element. Is this just a nuance of ENG lenses, or is it the same with other video lenses. For someone who had, until recently, only ever focus pulled with cine lenses it just doesn't seem intuative to me or any of the DoPs and other ACs I have talked to about it. Thanks Daniel