The B I G Q.

Quoting everyone's post with your quick replies is so 5 years ago.

That said, dude you need to lighten up, or you're in for a world of hurt. Things will go wrong during the production of your film, and you're going to have to roll with the punches. This no-nonsense attitude is going to give you gray hair, and high blood pressure. If you meet anyone who's worked in the film business for more than 10 years you'll quickly see that most have a dry, calm sense of humor. This business is very stressful, so lighten up.

Now for your question:
Your money will be best spent on a great DP, grip and electric, and over all good cast and crew. It's amazing how good sound, or great acting will make your cinematography shine. Your production as a whole needs to be awesome. If you are working on a "low" budget spend your money on good food, and get a good crew. Make sure your crew is happy and excited to be there.

I've seen RED footage and even 35mm look like crap compared to a competent DP on an HVX. Granted the transfer for the 35mm was crap, and the RED was under exposed, but still. Point being it's a fine balance of the artist and the tool.

Don't be a tool.

- Greg
 
Reading these posts, I think I understand the problem with getting the answer you want. You asked the wrong question. You essentially asked us, "what's the best camera that isn't 35 mm film?"

That's a doozie of a question as you can imagine, personal preferences aside. The almost simplistic question with a very complicated answer would lead your average reader to assume that you don't know what you are doing.

If that is the case (not making a judgment here) and you are comfortable in looking at your own abilities and admitting that you don't know what you are doing, then your money should first go to a good DP, then cast and crew. Equipment isn't as important as an experienced cinematographer. Sound equipment is more important than the camera though.

The camera is a tool used by a good cinematographer. One hammer may be better than another, but a carpenter will use it to assemble a sturdy table and joe shmoe will end up with a rickety one, even if joe used the better hammer.

Now, if you do know what you are doing, then all the stuff I just said is common knowledge. Based on the scope of what you have detailed about your film, your "low budget" probably won't cover it, and you might want to save your epic for when you have a bigger one.

One of the driving forces to filmmaking and any decision within is money. Money will be why you shot in your kitchen instead of the bar you wanted, why the big fight scene in a field full of robots was turned into an alley with a hobo, and why you shot on the camera you shot on. You would get better answers with a dollar amount listed. If you said $100,000 you would get a much different answer than $50,000 which would be different from $10,000 etc. and all of these amounts can be thought of as "low budget" depending on the person you are asking.

So you are making an epic and want the highest quality picture you can get and you don't want to do film. You have an unspecified low budget, but you can afford a high quality camera, cg effects work, grand expansive locations, and an epic tale. It is a little unreasonable. That doesn't seem low budget at all to me, others may disagree. With all of this stuff, a few extra thousand on film doesn't seem all that bad. Shoot film.

When you are low budget, it really is all about the money. The answers you are getting I think reflect that. My earlier post about vague bang for buck still stands, but hardley a rule to go by when choosing a camera. An amazing DP will work wonders with an HVX or even a DVX, so find a good DP first. What you have leftover will make your decision on the camera.
 
welcome to the monkey house

welcome to the monkey house

Obviously I'm not the cinematographer and will need one. That should have been pretty obvious, and not worth multiple comments.

If you can get past that, and all the wide open opportunities to lob inane putdowns and prop up those few fragile egos, this is a highly pertinent question about digital filmmaking approaching 35mm quality (of interest even to the know-it-alls, I would suspect).

I do not expect to be able to afford 35mm, but do expect to afford a digital production. That's not all that relevant to the discussion I had hoped to initiate which has nothing to do with me or my film at all, and concerns the state of the art digital production systems and the price points associated with them.

Hard to tell from the comments if I'm too serious or just not serious at all. Quite a broad spectrum of irrelevant observations.

The Red One seems to have quite a few drawbacks from what I've seen at reduser.net. Not least of which is the rolling shutter, which will skew fast motion that crosses the image horizontally. This will make special effects more difficult, but can be planned for.

Next, apparently Steven Soderberg's new film shot on the Red One has some "blown out skies" that reflect another serious limitation of the camera. Additional lighting and/or reflectors will be needed during all daytime shooting, apparently. It also doesn't handle strobe / quick bursts of light at all.

Anyway, I'm still looking and learning (which I wasn't aware was some sort of affront to the highly anal).

But, again thanks for the helpful responses.

And -- Spare me the psychobabble venting. I'm not your analyst, or your mama.
 
Alright then. If my post offended you, I apologize. I see only one or two posts in the thread that are irrelevant, the rest can and should be learned from. Even the comment on Imax 3d is relevant and worth pondering. But onwards and upwards.

I don't really have much else to say about this topic. I don't think digital is at film level YET, but its only a matter of time. RED shows great promise, and a lot of community spirit through reduser and the like. I don't know much about other super high quality camera's though. I work with my DVX100b and do just fine.
 
The Sony F23 is said to have an amazing dynamic range, even better than the Red One's at the moment. Couldn't you also wait until you have a really good pro DP and have him/her help decide? The best cheapest solution in my mind is the Red. And how do you know that those blown high lights on Soderbergh's footage were due to a camera limitation and not his choice? He could very well have wanted to go for a blown sky look.

Remember that dynamic range isn't the key to getting amazing epic exterior shots. If it were then landscape photographers wouldn't have used slide film as their professional choice for the better part of a century. Color Negatives get far more DR than slide which has fewer stops than even the Red One, but photographers were still able to capture beautiful landscapes with it.

davide
 
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Problems like "blown out skies" are an issue with the DP (or the DP's communication with the Director). The different limitations in current technology are all surmountable with a modest budget and a good DP.

I think davide has it right, let the DP pick the camera. If you need to squeeze a budget together now, figure out a per diem for the camera department. The cameras you seem most interested in are about $700-$1500 a day. You'll also need support equipment which will probably be almost as much. You can get rental price breaks if you can rent for the week instead of daily, but that will depend on your schedule.
 
Ease up on this guy. There is nothing wrong with a producer asking noob questions in order to better understand the options before him. The fact that he asked such a vague question only illustrates where he is in pre-production: He is scouting out possibilities. If someone doesn't know weather the budget will be 30k or 300k or even 3mil is not so crazy in this industry. At least he is trying to figure out what the options are.
 
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