Robert Sanders
Well-known member
We just wrapped our feature film "The Blackout" last week. It was an intense 27 day shoot (6 day weeks) in and around downtown Los Angeles. We shot in loft apartments, dank and dirty basements, rooftops with cranes and finished with stage work in Hollywood.
Wow, what an experience.
We shot with a fully outfitted XLH1. We bypassed HDV tape altogether and tapped into the camera's HD-SDI output and ran the feed directly to a Kona LHe card in a quad-core MacPro running Final Cut Studio 2. We captured everything using ProRes 422 HQ. The capture station was setup and configured by Promax in Irvine and performed flawlessly throughout the entire shoot. We never dropped one frame or crashed once.
From the Kona card we ran a loop-through feed to a Blackmagic HDLink converter which fed the 1080P picture to a 23" Cinema Display with a Vesa mount attached to a c-stand. We setup the HDLink with a custom LUT. Plus we used a modified version of the Disjecta custom camera preset.
We did not use any DoF adapters. We used primarily the Canon 6x HD lens and the 20x lens. Because of the nature of our film (taking place primarily during a power blackout at night) we knew we'd always be pushing the exposure envelope. So keeping the iris fully open and using longer focal lengths when applicable kept our depth of field relatively shallow. Additionally we couldn't really afford to lose an additional 1-1.5 stops with an adapter. Also our shooting schedule was so aggressive we couldn't afford any additional time futzing with back-focus and spinning ground glass.
We did have one critical camera failure half-way through the shoot. The mounting sleeve was accidentally ripped out of the base of the camera. Thanks to our friends at the Canon repair center we had a replacement camera within two hours and were shooting the same morning. Thank you Canon!
All of our behind-the-scenes video was shot with a Canon XH-A1 camera in 60i, HDV, and a custom preset applied. We also used Canon's wide-angle lens adapter, which surprised us to it's picture quality. We shot 30-hours of BTS! All photography was shot with a 5D, 30D and RebelXT (nearly 2000 photos).
So this was a pretty big Canon show. That was not our intention, but it ended up that way. Both XLH1 cameras performed very well. Both exhibited the same strange Viewfinder issues. Canon's replacement camera displayed slightly better low-noise performance than our camera, but both cameras inter-cut flawlessly.
Also, the A1 is a remarkable little gem of a camera. I often found myself using the A1 as a director's finder. It's so small and so light weight that it was very easy to use the flip out LCD, find my shot, show it to the DP and AC and they'd setup the H1 accordingly. And now I'm thinking about picking up an HV20 for this exact purpose.
Frame grabs and BTS photos to follow.
Wow, what an experience.
We shot with a fully outfitted XLH1. We bypassed HDV tape altogether and tapped into the camera's HD-SDI output and ran the feed directly to a Kona LHe card in a quad-core MacPro running Final Cut Studio 2. We captured everything using ProRes 422 HQ. The capture station was setup and configured by Promax in Irvine and performed flawlessly throughout the entire shoot. We never dropped one frame or crashed once.
From the Kona card we ran a loop-through feed to a Blackmagic HDLink converter which fed the 1080P picture to a 23" Cinema Display with a Vesa mount attached to a c-stand. We setup the HDLink with a custom LUT. Plus we used a modified version of the Disjecta custom camera preset.
We did not use any DoF adapters. We used primarily the Canon 6x HD lens and the 20x lens. Because of the nature of our film (taking place primarily during a power blackout at night) we knew we'd always be pushing the exposure envelope. So keeping the iris fully open and using longer focal lengths when applicable kept our depth of field relatively shallow. Additionally we couldn't really afford to lose an additional 1-1.5 stops with an adapter. Also our shooting schedule was so aggressive we couldn't afford any additional time futzing with back-focus and spinning ground glass.
We did have one critical camera failure half-way through the shoot. The mounting sleeve was accidentally ripped out of the base of the camera. Thanks to our friends at the Canon repair center we had a replacement camera within two hours and were shooting the same morning. Thank you Canon!
All of our behind-the-scenes video was shot with a Canon XH-A1 camera in 60i, HDV, and a custom preset applied. We also used Canon's wide-angle lens adapter, which surprised us to it's picture quality. We shot 30-hours of BTS! All photography was shot with a 5D, 30D and RebelXT (nearly 2000 photos).
So this was a pretty big Canon show. That was not our intention, but it ended up that way. Both XLH1 cameras performed very well. Both exhibited the same strange Viewfinder issues. Canon's replacement camera displayed slightly better low-noise performance than our camera, but both cameras inter-cut flawlessly.
Also, the A1 is a remarkable little gem of a camera. I often found myself using the A1 as a director's finder. It's so small and so light weight that it was very easy to use the flip out LCD, find my shot, show it to the DP and AC and they'd setup the H1 accordingly. And now I'm thinking about picking up an HV20 for this exact purpose.
Frame grabs and BTS photos to follow.
