Stunning Good Looks
Cinematographer Art Adams has worked in the film industry for 25 years. He shoots spots as well...
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It's not so hard, once you know all the secrets...
By Art Adams | January 15, 2009
The RED ONE is cheap and good; the Sony F35 is expensive and utterly amazing.
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They said it couldn't be done. Maybe, but I got close. How close? You judge...
By Art Adams | January 26, 2013
I'm shooting more projects with the Canon C300 but none of the built-in looks greatly appeal to me. While trying to build my own custom C300 look at a local rental house I spied an Arri Alexa in the next stall over... and asked, "Can I put that next to this C300 for a while?" The results are really interesting...
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By Art Adams | June 17, 2008
Equipment doesn't make the image; people do. I proved this on a music video recently where we had more people than equipment.
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We test Hot Mirror filters from three major manufacturers to see which does what on the RED
By Art Adams | February 11, 2009
Not all infrared or Hot Mirror filters are made the same, and not all work the same way on different cameras. In this test we looked at filters from Schneider, Formatt and Tiffen to see how they perform on the RED ONE.
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4K TV is on its way, and it has the potential to change the way we shoot--especially when it comes to composition.
By Art Adams | February 15, 2013
On a recent visit to Sony Studios I saw a 4K monitor for the first time. For the first time ever I thought to myself, "I hope they hold this shot long enough for me to see everything in it!"
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Raw is all the rage, but should it be? Log gives us 99% of the benefit of a raw file in a grade but with much smaller files.
By Art Adams | February 06, 2013
Years ago I wrote an article describing how log encoding works using Sony's S-Log as an example. Sony's S-Log2 is coming down the pike in a big way in their F5 and F55, so it seems like an appropriate time for an update.
First of all, I should warn you that this is a much, much...
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A RED ONE, a small but agile crew, and a 2k 60'-wide screening in an Omnimax theater. This, truly, is a modern day epic.
By Art Adams | February 11, 2010
Rambus is a company of big ideas, and they wanted their 20th anniversary celebration to include a theatrical production that accurately reflected who they are and where they came from. The resulting short film--shown in an Omnimax dome at the San Jose Tech Museum--moved Rambus founders and employees to tears.
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Years in the making, this technique works in almost every situation and makes almost everyone look great. That's about the best you can hope for when shooting talking heads on a tight schedule.
By Art Adams | November 17, 2011
For a long time my primary source of employment was shooting corporate marketing communications videos. As these consist primarily of "talking head" interviews, I tried every lighting setup I could think of to make people look their best quickly, as many of these shoots have tight schedules and not much turnaround time between interviews. This setup is the result of years of experimentation.
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Faster cameras means extreme low level lighting here to stay. Here are some examples from the days of (gasp) 400 ASA film!
By Art Adams | January 17, 2013
There's something amazing about shooting low light images with a wide open lens. Now that the average camera is rated at 800 or faster, we can take advantage of using smaller and smaller lights and even shoot scenes that look brighter on the monitor than they do by eye...
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For a still camera it shoots pretty nice HD
By Art Adams | August 04, 2009
The Canon 5D is a cinematic nightmare. In movie mode it's hard to see focus, difficult to set exposure, and it doesn't show you exactly what you're getting. It records to heavily compressed 8-bit H.264, and the only frame rate available is 30fps. Not 29.97--exactly 30p. It's a complete pain to use.And I love it.
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