Beware Of Decorated Cameras

Cameras playing dress up. I first got into making videos around 2001 or 2002. During this time the days of tape based camcorders ruled the world. News stations had high end cameras like betacams that were so large that you could basically wear the camera on your sholder. From the perspective of us who were starting out in this journey these cameras made it seem like you were a profresionall and knew what you were doing. With the advent of mini DV based camcorders and especially the prosumer versions that used the same sort of imageing sensor technology where you had a seperate sensor to capture the red green and blue color channels we coud aproach capturing the same image quality that new stations were able to gather for around $2000 vs $20,000 for an ENG camera. The internet was a far smaller place in the early 2000’s. Youtube didn’t exist and the only real ways to learn about camera technology was by going to school for it (expensie) working in the industry(imposible unless you moved to a bigger city and somehow had a way in) or buying a camera and spending time each day browsing forums like dvinfo.net and seeing what others in the industry said. This brings us to the part of the title of the blog. “Cameras Playing Dress Up” which is probably more about human nature more than anything else an remains the same today. We encounter this same concept today in our everyday lives. When you see someone in an exotic sports car on a road downtown or a person wearing an incredibly fancy suit you’re generally seeing someone who’s trying to look a certain part so they are respected. A sports car is incredibly impractical for driving around most anywhere other than on a track and if you’ve wearing a suit outside in the summer you’re probably at least slightly invious of that person walking by wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Most of these incredibly expensive items are in gerneral impractial but people still by and use them so they can look a certain part. In this case they want to portray wealth, success and authority. Basically these people are playing dress up and are peacocking. Peacocking deffiniton. This same concept is probably the same in most industries but deffinitly holds true in the video world. Back in the days when I was learning about cameras people on the message boards would talk about how they thought no client would take them seriously becuase they were using these mini DV cameras so they talked about how they would make there cameras look larger by putting matte boxes on them, external microphones and even lights. Sure this may make the cameras look more like what you’d expect a news camera to look like but all the things they were adding to the camera surved no purpose other than to try and give the camera operator more confidnce because they were unsure of themselves. Nothing says “profresional” more than a mattbox. You see these on the front of the lenses with hollywood camears. While they do serve some purpose on extremely high budget shoots where time is money and adding what’s essentially a $5000 sunshade and filter holder makes since when you’ve got 50 plus people working on set and if you can get an extra 30 minutes worth of shooting in a day by using this you’ll save a ton of money over the course of a movie. In reality for 99% of the time you see one of these they don’t serve much of a purpose other than to either increase a camrea operators confidence or because the camera operator thinks it will help them but in reality it’ll just slow them down. If you see one of these matteboxes indoors it’s almost strictly for looks. The main reason to use a mattebox is twofold. In no particular order a mattebox is designed to keep a directonal light source from hitting the lens and causing a glare, and the second is to add filters that effect the look of an image. If someone is shooting indoors a mattebox isn’t really needed for either of these uses. Modern lenses use many coatings on them to reduce glare and lens flares, it’s actually pretty difficult to get cool looking lens flares with modern lenses and if you’re in the rare situatin where you are getting a flare there’s a 5 cent solution I like to use. I’ll tear off a peice of gaffe tape and make my own lens hood. It’s certainly not fancy but it ets the job done and I’m not having to mess with an ackward box protuding off the front of my camera. The second reason which used to make a difference indoors is with filters. If someone wanted to soften an image or make a light source bloom out in the background you could use something like a pro mist filter but not there’s software solutions like Video village’s scatter that give you access to moore than $10,000 of filters you can apply in post so you aren’t forced to stay with a look through the entire video. The only real filters that can’t be simulated in post are ND filters and polarizing filters, neither of whih are really needed indoors. ND filters are basially sunglasses for your camera that knocks down your exposure. It’s generally never bright enough indoors to need an ND filter and a polarizer is used to knock down certain reflections you might see on things like glass, water or haze in the sky. Again none of these are really an issue when recording indoors. As I mentioned earlier in the aritcle that inexpereinced videographers would dress up cameras in the early 2000’s to hide their lack of confidence the same holds true now. While online message boards have largely been replaced by reddit we see the same things over on the videography subreddit. People “rigging” or “kitting” out their camera so it looks more profesional. The same tricks still ohld true, people add mattboxes, lights, and microphones to these camera but now we have people adding follow focus systems along with monitors. I’ve certainly been guilty of using a follow focus. One time a company gave me a free follow focus in exchange for creating a youtube video that incorporated it. While the follow focus did help out it maybe made what I was doing 10% easier, the extra time it took to setup and the extra bulk it created was a net negative to my workflow and I never used it again after the tutorial video I created. Now sometimes a follow focus does actually help if you’ve got a really comoplex shoot but in these cases you’ve got someone who’s main job is to hold up a heavy camrea and keep a subject in frame and then you’ll have an “AC” or camera assistant who is watching a wireless video feed from the camrea and is controlling the cameras focus remotely with a wireless motor attached to the camreas focus ring. In the vast majority of shoots and almost anything you’d see in a coporate or factory setting there’s one person operating a camera and with the help of an on camera monitor it’s pretty easy to pull focus yourself just twisting the focus ring with your hand. I won’t get into depth in this post but autofocus is starting to eliminate the need for manually focusing in the first place in some situations….this is something I couldn’t have concieved of even 5 years ago. This is a somewhat abrupt conclusion but there’s not really a whole lot more I can add. To sumarize if you see someone with a camera that looks like it belongs on a hollywood set when there’s just a crew of 1 or 2 people recording in an office that camera setup is probably more for show and you’ve going to end with a lower quality product. Much like the peacock has a bright bouquet of feathers designed to attract a mate at the expense of mobility and energery, much is the same of the camera with fancy accessories.