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Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •Lighting •Production •

Cine Gear Expo 2009

MK-V’s RED stereo rig.

Yes, another 3D rig, this one from Britain’s MK-V. All I can say is that it must be an AC’s full-employment guarantee just building and striking this monster. Handheld, anyone?

MK-V’s always-upright head on a boom on a Steadicam.

If handheld isn’t your cup ‘o tea, MK-V probably has some sort of modular camera support system that will be.

Fun with LEDs.

That’s a Gekko ringlight on the left, a couple of Nila LED bricks on the table, and PRG‘s work in the background. (The fellow on the right isn’t really badly composited into the picture; he just looks that way due to the lighting!)

Preston lens controller.

Here’s a close-up of one variant of a three-channel Preston Focus, Iris, & Zoom controller, using a focus & iris box bolted to a Micro Force zoom controller.

Preston lens controller.

Preston rigs are a bit cheaper than the cmotion systems but, according to BandPro, there’s a 4-5 month wait for a Preston, whereas cmotions are deliverable in less than 30 days.

Street scene at night (ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/125 sec).

Here’s that street scene later that night (9:15 pm). Between the lighting balloon and the strategically located instruments atop the buildings, there’s plenty of light to shoot by.

ISO 250, f/3.5, 1/30 sec.

I haven’t fiddled with these pix much in post; I wanted to show what some well-placed lighting can do for overall levels. Here the illumination is provided primarily by the two brutes (?) you see here, plus a similar instrument behind the POV on a similar building.

 

ISO 720, f/3.5, 1/30 sec.

OK, so this one’s a little bit darker, but with a proper T2 prime instead of my f/3.5 zoom, you could still shoot this scene with a RED, an SI-2K, an F35, or the like.

ISO 200, f/4, 1/60 sec

Sorry, no, I don’t know the wattage of those balloons. But it looked a lot darker to the eye that it did to the lens.

ISO 200, f/4.8, 1/90 sec.

You can use a ground-based instrument to blast light up into this helium-filled reflector and have a nice, soft overhead source.

Projection on a backdrop wall.

This huge outdoor wall, painted with a cloudscape (and evilly lit by the streetlights), sits beside a parking lot on Melrose that appears to double as a wave tank for seafaring model work. The parking lot has a sloping entrance ramp and a three-foot high surrounding wall with mooring points. Sadly, it was dry when we were there.

JVC tinycam standing in for a 35mm film camera.

Easyrig 3 flying a RED ONE.

Several folks I spoke to recommended the Easyrig 3 Cinema for making the RED ONE handholdable.

Mo-Sys 3-axis control system.

Scott Billups told me to go see Mo-Sys, a British supplier of motion control systems. This 3-axis rig runs pan, tilt, and roll on a Lambda head…

Mo-Sys Lambda head with roll axis on a “British Stick”

...like this one fitted to a “British Stick”, a six-foot-tall motorized leadscrew really called the “Car Pole” and used to fly the camera up and down while the lambda head is aiming it in any gryostabilized direction you choose.

It’s like a pop filter for your Steadicam!

California Sunbounce, makers of large but handholdable reflectors and diffusers, offers this wind killer to keep your Steadicam or other finely balanced rig from being blown off-axis by the breeze. Clever idea, and it really seemed to work, too.

GripTech: it’s Australian for grips kit, mate.

Elegant support gear from GripTech.

Heavy-duty electrical distribution kit from ProPower and AC Power.

When you get to 3-phase, 400-amp distribution panels like these, with separate line / ground / neutral feeds, I really take what it says on the front panel to heart:

THIS DEVICE TO BE USED BY QUALIFIED PERSONNEL ONLY

FOR USE IN AREAS NOT READILY ACCESSIBLE BY THE GENERAL PUBLIC

I stay as far away as possible and let someone braver and better qualified hook it up.

Parts bin at Zacuto’s booth.

If you ever want to assemble a customized Zacuto kit, or just want to see how the parts really fit together, you have to get ‘em at a show. They have all the bits ‘n’ bobs lined up in little bins for you to pick and choose from. Zacuto did great business; as of early Saturday afternoon when I took this picture, many of the bins were already emptied out.

The Digital Cinema Society held a seminar on new PL-mount lenses. I’ll leave it up to DCS to document the seminar in full; I just have a couple of interesting images I’ll show.

Zeiss Compact Prime, and the CF lens it was derived from.

Richard Schleuning from Carl Zeiss explains how the new Compact Primes are derived from the CF series of still-camera lenses, with all-new cine-quality mounts, gearing, and irises.

ZGC / Cooke’s Les Zellan explains resolution issues.

Les Zellan from ZGC discussed how most lenses built in the past 30 years exceed the resolving power of a 4K S35-size sensor. He said that the new Panchro series of lower-cost Cooke lenses can be thought of as regular Cookes scaled down to a maximum aperture of T2.8, with corresponding reductions in weight and cost.

Panavision discusses lenses with built-in encoders.

Panavision‘s Dominick Aiello showed a Panavision zoom for the Genesis with lens encoders built in, to enable metadata capture for post. The encoder for aperture is also a motor; the iris ring is small and close to the flange, making it difficult to get a separate motor wedged in next to it.

Special bonus for getting this far: check out the Zylight IS3, a 220 watt LED fixture using red/green/blue/amber LEDs, settable anywhere from 2500K to 15000K, as well as +/-green.

I don’t have any good pix (Mike Curtis got some; maybe he’ll share).

Fully DMX controllable, as well as wirelessly controllable: any Zylight can be a master or a slave, or any/all can be a slave to a compact little remote, complete with color temperature readout.

Shipping in July, $3500. I want ten of ‘em.

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That was the only Seggicam rig I saw, and it matches the descriptions or Mr. Kneece’s rig on CML, so I would have to presume it was.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  06/12  at  06:22 PM

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So what’s the opportunity for extra-visible light recording with the “extended gamut” cameras yu mentioned? Shooting IR? Shooting ultraviolet?

Posted by IEBA  on  06/19  at  07:46 PM

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