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Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •Lighting •Production •

Cine Gear Expo 2008 - Day 2

Lighting and Lighting Control

Bron Kobold had a number of HMIs, including the weatherproof 800W unit demoed in a pool of water, with a sprayer above it, and the overwhelming, 7.2 foot diameter Para reflector system.

Bron Kobold HMI, standing in a pool with water dripping on it.

Bron’s big Para reflector.

Rololight‘s flexible fluorescent system uses Kinoflo tubes, but puts each one on its own fixture. Fixtures can be linked with piano-hinge pins, and rolled up, spread out, or wrapped around things as needed.

Rololights: flexible fluorescents.

I don’t recall who had this ringlight, but it’s a self-contained unit (note the power supply under the EX1). It was designed for the HVX200, but fits most cameras of a similar size.

This LED ringlight fits most small cameras.

Rosco VIEW combines sheet polarizers on windows with a rotatable polarizer on-camera. By rotating the camera’s polarizer, you can dim the windows to match your interior lighting.

Rosco VIEW demonstrated (polarizing film, plus an on-camera polarizer).

If it’s reflections you need to worry about, Motion Light Design‘s POLA-DISC goes between light and subject. You can spin it with a handheld controller, and kill reflections on the subject without rotating the polarizer on the lens: handy if you have multiple lights, but need to vary the reflections caused by only one. In the image, note the camcorder’s screen, and the appearance of the Pola-Disc as seen by the camera.

Pola-Disc: motorized, rotating lighting polarizer.

Camera Support

P+S Technik’s Skater dolly can be fitted with a tilt module, so you can vary the camera’s tilt with fluid-head smoothness even as you skate around your subject.

The Skater Dolly now has a tilt head option

Servo mounts for motorcycles? If there’s somewhere you need a camera put, rest assured that someone in Hollywood has a rig to do it.

Motorcycle mount..

We saw this contraption at NAB, but here it’s flying a RED ONE camera. Note the use of the RED battery/drive cages as counterweights.

It’s the Steadicam-on-a-Segway, flying a RED ONE.

REDs were all over the place. Here, one’s in a gyro mount (e.g., for helicopter use).

A RED in a gyro mount. Note the counterweights.

Cranes like the Techno and this Super Scorpio (here at Service Vision‘s booth [Flash website]) let the camera fly free in three dimensions—but require moving counterbalance systems to keep from toppling over as the crane arm extends.

Sliding counterweights on this Super Scorpio crane keep it balanced as the head extends.

If that’s too high-end, and you just want something smooth, or at least not jarringly rough, how about a dolly with only 2.4 psi in the tires?

Squishy-tired dolly.

It’s like riding a pillow: don’t count on repeatability or precision (the tires are too soft and wobbly for that), but there’s no cushier ride for a camera operator.

Even More RED Stuff

Toys4RED.com is the combination of Air Sea Land Gear, Inc. and Tribor Design, Inc., coming together to fix RED’s inadequacies.

Toys4Red’s fix for RED’s oddball connectors.

Their first product is a side panel adapter to give the RED ONE industry-standard I/O connectors (albeit with only three of the four audio channels converted to XLRs on the side panel), and to provide the RED ONE with a level-controllable headphone jack: use the menus to set the monitor level to maximum, then use the Toys4RED panel’s rotary control, just like on any self-respecting bit of real audio gear.

Toys4Red offers a remote connector panel (up to 50 feet away).

They also offer a remote breakout box (this time, there’s room for all four audio channels to have XLRs), which puts standard I/O spigots up to 15 meters away: great for use on camera cranes and jib arms. Yes, it even includes the headphone jack and volume control. 

The Toys4Red T-shirt explains it all.

Toys4RED joins Element Technica and Sim Video in fixing what’s broken with RED’s mechanical design, and in extending the camera’s usefulness and flexibility. We now have three different side-panel adapters to choose from; one remote breakout box, two EVF holders, cheese plates, and more; it’s almost as if the RED ONE were an iPod, when you look at how many third parties are putting serious resources into supplying accessories.

Etc.

The record-breaking heat was a problem; it’s hard to focus on equipment when you’re busy just surviving an oven-like environment. Several vendors had slushie machines that stubbornly refused to make slushies, while others had stocks of water bottles that were rapidly depleted.

Band Pro had a water cooler, and if you allowed them to scan your card, they gave you a nice, quart-sized refillable bottle filled with cold water.

Water by BandPro.

When one cooler bottle was emptied, it was replaced with another, and a “powered by BandPro” label was applied to it.

Band Pro and Abel Cine shared a single prototype Sony EX3, which they passed back and forth, each having ownership for half a day at a time.  Band Pro said (and Sony later confirmed) that the EX3’s MSRP will be under US$10,000, with a street price in the mid-$8000 range. It should ship in about a month (and I hope to have a “first look” review of a prototype in the next couple of weeks).

There were lots more weird, wonderful, and wacky things to see: a spring-loaded, servo-stabilized camera head, mounted on a Fisher dolly (and a poor grip, whose job it was to push that dolly back and forth repeatedly over some cable guards to demonstrate the effectiveness of the stabilization—in open sunlight, in 100-degree-plus weather!); Fisher and Panther and Matthews dollies in every size, shape, and price range; car rigs; R/C camera copters; lighting booms; even cable-driven extensible microphone booms with, um, two operators?

Boom operator with assistant.

There’s really nothing quite like Cine Gear Expo if you’re into this sort of thing; NAB and IBC are too big and too diverse, and don’t manage to get as many of the quirky, one-off creations that the Hollywood environment encourages. It’s worth the trip if you’re anywhere near L.A. or can find an excuse to make the journey.

But, Cine Gear folks, you might consider having the next one in a climate-controlled area…

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