robotsound
Well-known member
So, I went to the event. It was pretty cool. It was at a pretty nice photography department and there were several hundred people in attendance.
As others have said, most everyone here knows the details of the cameras themselves by now. However, it was kind of interesting to hear some of the details about Saturday Night Live.
For the SNL intro and handheld work, he was using the Zacuto Target Shooter with a Z-Finder on the 5D and 7D.
He showed shots and camera settings from the SNL intro. He used Canon L prime lenses (50mm and 85mm in the examples shown) at up to f/1.4, 1/50, ISO 1600. The examples shown were from NYC at night, including the Brooklyn bridge. The decision to use the Canon DSLR cameras originally came from the fact that SNL's portrait photographer uses a 5D and that's how he found out about the camera. After seeing what it could do, he went online and saw what Vincent Lafloret and Philip Bloom were doing with them, and sold the station on using them.
On SNL, the writers basically write the whole show on Tuesday and Wednesday. Alex Buono lives in LA, but if they need to do a digital short that week he'll hop on a red eye flight to NYC. They'll do all the location scouting, pre-production, and everything on Thursday, and then on Friday they'll shoot starting at 6 AM. He gets the actors for about 6 hours. Then they'll edit until around 2 AM or so, and it airs on Saturday night. Very quick turnaround.
SNL is using the 7D-PL with cinema lenses for more controlled studio work on the shorts, primarily "so the focus pullers will have a chance". He personally owns a 5D mkII, and will use that when he's going out by himself to capture quick footage without a crew.
For broadcast, he says he feels comfortable going up to 1600 ISO on the 5D, and 800 ISO on the 7D. He might go higher in a pinch (like the Brooklyn bridge at night), but thinks those ISO settings still deliver a clean product. The ISO 800 example he gave was for a Broadview security ad spoof, which closely mirrored the style of a real Broadview security ad. It was projected on a big screen and it looked good to me. That web clip of course doesn't do it justice.
I learned that SNL uses Source-4 lights a lot. He showed a lighting plot for the Broadview security ad spoof, and it used about 6 Source-4's along with a couple of other lights. I also saw other BTS stills where they were using them as a bounce light source.
He says SNL is using the Canon FCP plug-in for transcoding. They're editing on Final Cut, and using PluralEyes to sync sound. As for sound recording, they have a separate sound department that takes care of that. So, dual system (no surprise there).
He did recommend to the film students that if they wanted a really cheap audio solution that they could use the Rode VideoMic, but stressed that it was only adequate for a documentary / cinema verite / you are here kind of sound and would not produce professional results for narrative work.
He said that he has never used any video noise reduction on the 5D/7D footage on the show.
He said that he will use Highlight Tone Priority outdoors sometimes to retain shadow detail and make highlights clip more naturally, but never indoors as it will add noise. Picture style Neutral, sharpness all the way down, contrast at -4, saturation at -2 or so.
As others have said, most everyone here knows the details of the cameras themselves by now. However, it was kind of interesting to hear some of the details about Saturday Night Live.
For the SNL intro and handheld work, he was using the Zacuto Target Shooter with a Z-Finder on the 5D and 7D.
He showed shots and camera settings from the SNL intro. He used Canon L prime lenses (50mm and 85mm in the examples shown) at up to f/1.4, 1/50, ISO 1600. The examples shown were from NYC at night, including the Brooklyn bridge. The decision to use the Canon DSLR cameras originally came from the fact that SNL's portrait photographer uses a 5D and that's how he found out about the camera. After seeing what it could do, he went online and saw what Vincent Lafloret and Philip Bloom were doing with them, and sold the station on using them.
On SNL, the writers basically write the whole show on Tuesday and Wednesday. Alex Buono lives in LA, but if they need to do a digital short that week he'll hop on a red eye flight to NYC. They'll do all the location scouting, pre-production, and everything on Thursday, and then on Friday they'll shoot starting at 6 AM. He gets the actors for about 6 hours. Then they'll edit until around 2 AM or so, and it airs on Saturday night. Very quick turnaround.
SNL is using the 7D-PL with cinema lenses for more controlled studio work on the shorts, primarily "so the focus pullers will have a chance". He personally owns a 5D mkII, and will use that when he's going out by himself to capture quick footage without a crew.
For broadcast, he says he feels comfortable going up to 1600 ISO on the 5D, and 800 ISO on the 7D. He might go higher in a pinch (like the Brooklyn bridge at night), but thinks those ISO settings still deliver a clean product. The ISO 800 example he gave was for a Broadview security ad spoof, which closely mirrored the style of a real Broadview security ad. It was projected on a big screen and it looked good to me. That web clip of course doesn't do it justice.
I learned that SNL uses Source-4 lights a lot. He showed a lighting plot for the Broadview security ad spoof, and it used about 6 Source-4's along with a couple of other lights. I also saw other BTS stills where they were using them as a bounce light source.
He says SNL is using the Canon FCP plug-in for transcoding. They're editing on Final Cut, and using PluralEyes to sync sound. As for sound recording, they have a separate sound department that takes care of that. So, dual system (no surprise there).
He did recommend to the film students that if they wanted a really cheap audio solution that they could use the Rode VideoMic, but stressed that it was only adequate for a documentary / cinema verite / you are here kind of sound and would not produce professional results for narrative work.
He said that he has never used any video noise reduction on the 5D/7D footage on the show.
He said that he will use Highlight Tone Priority outdoors sometimes to retain shadow detail and make highlights clip more naturally, but never indoors as it will add noise. Picture style Neutral, sharpness all the way down, contrast at -4, saturation at -2 or so.
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