Nick Hiltgen

Tim you've got a couple of good points. 1) asking the rental house to set up your camera's is usually a waste of breath, and 2) we may have different definitions of what "matched" is. For example I worked with one company where the editors were so happy to have the two camera's white balanced the same that any other matching was just icing on the cake. On the other hand, there are times when even the most accurate spot on matching isn't "matched" because the camera's are at two different angles and people complain. I'm sure others can address this issue better then me. For the most part you could probably get camera's reasonably close by matching the scene and reference files, but if you rely on that you're going to inevitably end up with two camera's that are shaded at the base level so differently that no matter how many times you clear reference you're going to end up with different images. IMHO.

Tim, this hasn't been my experience with camera's and a scope. Usually some amount of compensation is required, you can go in to the maintenance menu and get two camera's to be the same through optical head block shading, and white and black shading, but often most camera's I get are not matched (even if they're from the same rental house) Also a fun trick (that I've seen in action but never used) is dialing down your blacks, or leave them at factory settings and then make everything but true black "milky" in information in the y-gamma setting. But test out I guess and see if that works for you.