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RyanDThomas88

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About to start up a feature with two DVX100's and felt like if there was anywhere I was going to post about it, it had to be here!! Used to frequent these forums when the DVX was the camera of choice for many of us, very fun to come back to this camera later in my career. It's a low budget horror movie using MiniDV and video glitching as a strong stylistic choice. Shooting on 2 of the DVX100's and have a bit of camera support to turn them into more modern cameras. Recording both to tape and the Atomos Ninja V and have wireless video on both as well. Also have dummy batteries to power the camera and all AKS off of gold mount. Using the nucleus as well so we can do a little bit of steadicam in the film.




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Cool! Looking forward to seeing what you share here.

Clearly you've done some testing to arrive at the very specific look from the DVX100 as the right fit for your film. Was any other camera in the running?
 
The director originally planned to shoot this film himself with a much lower budget, but managed to raise more money than he was expecting and was able to bring me on. He did his own bit of testing and arrived to this camera on his own. I'm pretty happy with it because it does have a good mix of professional features while still having that very specific look.

The kickstarter campaign is over, but he made a pretty great pitch video that shows the style more indepth. Hopefully posting this is kosher.

 
Did some tests the other day with various lens attachments. Loved the lens flare we got from the Century Optics Wide Angle adapter. Not sure where we'll use this yet, but its definitely gonna make it in the film somewhere!


And yeah, this was the test that convinced me to clean all the lenses.
 
RyanDThomas88 said:
About to start up a feature with two DVX100's and felt like if there was anywhere I was going to post about it, it had to be here!! Used to frequent these forums when the DVX was the camera of choice for many of us, very fun to come back to this camera later in my career. It's a low budget horror movie using MiniDV and video glitching as a strong stylistic choice. Shooting on 2 of the DVX100's and have a bit of camera support to turn them into more modern cameras. Recording both to tape and the Atomos Ninja V and have wireless video on both as well. Also have dummy batteries to power the camera and all AKS off of gold mount. Using the nucleus as well so we can do a little bit of steadicam in the film.




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Amazing to see this camera out being used in 2025. I sold a DVX100B for $50 just a few years ago just to get rid of it. In hindsight, maybe I should have kept it, but it would've been purely a novelty.
 
The film has a pretty dream like feeling to it, so I looked at a wide variety of filtration that we could add. Ultimately I ended up liking what the director had found originally, which were some softening filters from Prism Lens FX. I think we'll do the 1/4 Lucid Dream + Dream filter for our interiors, and just go to the 1/4 Lucid Dream only for the exteriors, there was a bit too much halation for my tastes with both of those filters stacked.

vimeo.com

Night Interior Filter Test

This is "Night Interior Filter Test" by Ryan Thomas on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.
vimeo.com

The only issue is the Lucid Dream filter has these sparkly glass coatings, so when the lens flares they become visible...Not something I like very much. Plan on keeping the Black Pro Mists if that ever becomes an issue. I had experimented with doing softening in post with my colorist, but just felt too time consuming and didn't love that I couldn't see it on set.

0U3A5070.jpg


Also this test helped me to realize there was something wrong with the S-Video cables I bought. It was introducing scan lines and some sort of fixed pattern noise into the footage. Luckily I noticed and was able to swap the cables which cleaned up the footage nicely. Now that I know what to look for, I think I should be able to catch this problem in the future. Not to mention I ordered 6 additional S-Video cables, plenty of spares!!

Bad S-Video Cable

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New S-Video
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Ryan: did some more research today into a DV to SDI/HDMI converter box, reached out to a number of companies that used to make versions of this and to some engineers. We'll see what emerges.
 
Well we just finished our first week of production and the DVX is really putting out some great stuff. Its so interesting working with it alongside all these modern amenities like wireless video and RGB LED lights. We have had a number of scenes with red light so I worked with my colorist beforehand to figure out how to best make that work for the DVX. Basically I shot a test with an Aputure 600C that we planned to use during production and I did a primary red color with 25% - 50% - 75% and 100% saturation and tried to match this reference.


We ultimately landed on doing 50% saturation and then he built a LUT that brought it to a less crazy place. I think with some haze added this will get us pretty close.

vimeo.com

Red Light LUT

LUT Built for using all red light with the DVX100B
vimeo.com

We also looked at building a show LUT and adding film grain to show the director what that might look like when we get to final color. I really liked the addition of 16mm film grain, I think between that and the softening filters it got us an interesting image. Our show LUT is pretty basic, honestly it really just brought some colors down as some of the more saturated colors would get really punchy. I'm just applying this LUT on the Ninja for viewing purposes and outputting it to our production monitor.

vimeo.com

DVX100B LUT + Film Grain

DVX100B LUT + Film Grain test
vimeo.com

I also did some gain tests that we looked at, I wanted to know if the high or medium gain was usable for the look of the film, or if it was something better done in post.

vimeo.com

DVX100B Gain Test

This is "DVX100B Gain Test" by Ryan Thomas on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.
vimeo.com

Ultimately we tried to bring the low gain version up to the brightness level of the high gain and couldn't do it without introducing significantly more noise. Realized it was better done in camera. Both myself and the director were actually into the high gain version as well as it feels like it fits the look.

I bought a remote zoom control off of Adorama and that came in pretty handy for some overhead shots we did to be able to do some slow zooms.

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My other operator was also a DVX owner, so has been loving the chance to use it again!

Thats it for now! Might update with more later.
 
Cool stuff! Thanks for sharing. Funny how the original DVX100A was 4:3 only and 16:9 of the 'B' was a big selling point. But now everyone is obsessed with open gate 4:3 again.

I noticed that the city lights were pulsing pretty rapidly in your gain test (it's also happening with the lamp in the Night Interior test). Any idea what's causing that? I didn't have extensive experience with this camera, maybe only 2-3 shoots. But I didn't remember seeing anything like that.
 
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Thats interesting and honestly something I should test a little bit more. I have noticed that being in AF will cause high contrast areas to pulse rapidly, I wonder if I was in auto focus. We haven't shot any night exteriors with high gain yet, so haven't had a chance to see it yet.

About aspect ratio, I honestly tried to convince the director to shoot 2.39! We would have lost a ton of resolution, but nothing says movie faster than a widescreen format like that. He ultimately wanted to stay true to the format which I can understand.
 
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