Sony SxS Pro card, 32GB of eggs in one basket, meant to be emptied sooner or later.

Since this is Cinematography Corner #13, I thought I’d share a cautionary tale bristling with misadventure and dunder-headed mistakes.

I had the privilege of touring Canon headquarters in Tokyo in November 2008, and one take-away from this visit was that solid-state flash recording is not only here to stay but positioned in product road maps to replace tape, sooner than later. And not just in consumer and low-end professional camcorders—as past months have demonstrated. more

Leitner and Coyula on the set of Memories of Overdevelopment, the cover photo from the May 2006 debut issue of Digital Content Producer.

The May 2006 debut issue of millimeter’s sister publication Digital Content Producer featured a cover story entitled “First-hand HDV: A Year in the Life of an HDV Producer/DP,� written by yours truly.

I still don’t know what an “HDV Producer/DPâ€? is—I’ve directed, produced, and photographed in 35mm, 16mm, and nearly every video format—but it is true that by 2006 I had grown terribly impressed by professional HDV camcorders starting with Sony’s original HVR-Z1U.

They were far better than they had any right to be at their price point; they were strikingly compact; and, hand-in-hand with Apple’s popular Final Cut Pro, they were toppling barriers to low-budget production in high definition.

HDV, you’ll recall, is a marketing brand for HD captured as either 1440×1080 at 25Mbps or 1280×720 at 19.7Mbps using MPEG-2 long-GOP compression. Recording media is the same 1/4in. metal evaporated MiniDV tape cassette used by consumer DV. more

Sony’s 21st Century Erector Set—the SRW-9000.

In Cinematography Corner #8, “NX = Next Leap in Low-Cost Flash Recording”, I marveled at 11-plus hours of 1920×1080 AVCHD recorded to a Sony flash device the size of a MiniDV cassette.

Setting aside for the moment the image-capture anxiety of all-your-eggs-in-one-basket (it was never before possible to have 11 hours of footage slip from your pants pocket into the fold of a taxi seat), I continue to find this development jaw-dropping. I well remember lugging boxes of 16mm negative around the world. Eleven hours would have required 66 taped 400ft. cans in 14 cardboard boxes … a veritable trunk’s worth.

Last week I encountered another flash memory milestone, this time at a technical presentation at Abel Cine Tech in New York. Front and center was Sony’s SRW-9000, first seen in April at NAB. more

Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg in the black and white prologue of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

If names like Truffaut, Godard, Fassbinder, Scorsese, or Almodóvar mean anything to you—directors whom the annual New York Film Festival helped introduce and promote—you’ll realize what riches await at Lincoln Center every September for those lucky enough to attend.
Unlike other film festivals, the NYFF doesn’t hawk premieres. Instead, it skims the cream off the best festivals in the world, particularly Berlin and Cannes, and assembles a premium slate of about 30 features, mostly dramas, with a few documentaries thrown in for good measure. Which is why, for me, NYFF selections are essential viewing each year. more

11+ hours of 1920×1080 recording in my hand.
Photo by D.W. Leitner

Last week Sony announced its first professional AVCHD camcorder line, NXCAM, at InterBEE in Japan. It’s not Sony’s first brush with AVCHD.

In 2006 Sony and Panasonic jointly announced the Advanced Video Codec High Definition standard for consumer camcorders recording 8 cm MiniDVD discs. Remember them? So three years ago!

Then, in late 2008, Sony introduced a professional POV camera system, HXR-MC1, adapted from a consumer AVCHD camcorder. (Read my review. My experiments mounting an MC1 camera head at the end of a K-Tek audio boom pole led to K-Tek’s design of an adapter for the MC1, demonstrated at NAB 2009.)

Before we go further, what exactly is AVCHD? Why another low-end HD format? more

Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride (2005) was “filmedâ€? with Canon EOS 1D Mark II DSLRs adapted to Nikon lenses, and edited on Final Cut Pro.

If you’re anywhere near New York City between November 22 and April 26, 2010, you’ll want to drop by the Museum of Modern Art and visit the marvelous Tim Burton exhibition opening next week. I attended the press preview, with Burton in attendance, in advance of the madding crowds.

It’s rare, if ever, that MoMA hosts a potential blockbuster of a show about a filmmaker, but Burton’s 27-year career spans fourteen live-action and animated films as director/producer and concept artist—and often illustrator, writer, and photographer too. more

Rear of new Sony PMW-EX1R with orange-highlighted switches, HDMI port, and flatter handgrip.

You may have already heard the announcements.

No, not Canon’s announcement this week of the new 1D Mark IV EOS HDSLR with 1080p/24 and an eyebrow-raising ISO of 12,800. Not the announcement of an upcoming firmware upgrade to enable 1080p/24 in current Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs. Nor Carl Zeiss’ first T* Distagons for Canon’s EOS EF bayonet mount, shipping by the time you read this. Not even Apple’s new 21.5in. iMac with a full 1920×1080 LED backlit display and better specs than MacBook Pro, now a lean, mean one-piece HD editing machine.

These are all true. But I’m talking about Monday’s announcements from Sony—which you might have missed—one of which shuts me up. more

To a WWII combat cameraman with a 35mm Bell & Howell Eyemo, reflex viewing meant a captured German Arriflex 35mm. To today’s young camera operators, reflex viewing means a flip-out LCD.

Just as there are two camps when it comes to designing and using a handheld camcorder—compact, wrist-supported vs. elongated, shoulder-supported—there are now two camps when it comes to viewing while shooting.

The older viewing method, of course, involves putting an eye to the viewfinder cup.

Viewing a through-the-lens image, identical to that captured on motion-picture film itself, was an immense breakthrough in its day. Called "reflex" viewing, it enabled for the first time precise framing and focusing by eye at time of exposure.

The reflex viewing system commonly found in today’s motion-picture cameras dates back to the Arriflex 35 of 1937 (a battlefield acquisition prized by Allied cameramen, whose nonreflex Bell & Howells could not verify focus or exact framing). The Arriflex 35 introduced a semicircular mirrored shutter that spun around at a 45-degree angle to the film plane. As the shutter rotated into an open position, a frame of film was exposed. As it rotated to cap off further exposure, its tilted mirror bounced the image into a viewing screen. more