CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
Back in the nascent 5DMKII days of 2009/10 I fashioned a viewfinder system out of a loupe and coroplast over a Marshall monitor. At NAB that year I took a much cleaned up version of my DSLR setup to NAB and had it on demo in a booth, I can't remember whose now. I showed it to the SmallHD guys, and they were intrigued. Later that year they sent me an early version of the the DP4 with integrated loupe (still have it, poor old thing), and Zacuto got into that game around that time. One can never really claim to have invented something unless you know for sure nobody else did it first. But I know I influenced at least one company into the fray!Didn't people use those lcd loupes for c100? Zacuto and other brands make those loupe for many other cameras. I find the view finder only useful in bright sun light even then an Atomos with a hood is pretty good.
Below is a music video, Mar. 2010. This was after a few tough days of shooting and things had fallen apart on my rig and needed a lot of jerry-rigging. I cannot tell you what is going on inside all that red tape and velcro, it's a bizarre mess, but I can definitively say that rig got a lot of improvements over the next few months.