What's On The Camera?
LIGHTS. CAMERA. ANSWERS.
What is all that stuff surrounding the camera on your shoot? And what does it do?
Let's break it down.
Video Transcript
Hey, everyone and welcome to another edition of Lights. Camera. Answers. My name is Josh Kuss and I'm the Production Manager here at PEG.
Today we're answering the question "what's all that stuff on your camera," and to show you guys this we have a really good visual example.
So, that's that this camera right here is actually the same body as this camera. You kind of look at this and you're like "oh, that's pretty minimalist" and you look at this and you're like "what's going on there," right? I'm not going to go into like heavy detail on what each and every one of these things does just take my word for it that each thing added to this camera is overall producing value in your shots. It's going to make for an overall better shot and overall better end product.
First thing I want to touch on is that even to start with, you can't get any of this stuff on here without a nice cage for your camera. You'll see that our camera is kind of right here in the center and we have a nice cage around that that a lot of this stuff mounts to.
And I guess to start with, let's talk about the monitor up top here. This is a big thing that adds a ton of value for our shooters. So, this gives them a lot more real estate. When you're talking about this little guy that actually just has this little back LCD, it's just so much smaller. You don't have as much real estate to see that you're clearly in focus. There's also a ton of tools on this that tell you you're exposed correctly and things like that.
Its secondary function is that it's a recording deck and it takes and records to a format that we use much more heavily in post and can use a lot more efficiently in post. So, really just makes for a better post production workflow as well.
Flipping around, actually we'll stay back here, but this is our higher end production battery. And this actually has a much higher capacity than what you can put into the bottom of these guys. So, this will let us run for a lot longer without having to swap and also allows us to power kind of all the other things that are going on here.
Right next to that we have our wireless transmitter. That's extremely important for a Director to be able to see what's going on with the shots without having to be over the camera operator's shoulder. As well as a focus puller. So, if you guys look up front here, on these rails, we have two motors that allow someone with a remote to just control the focus and the iris while we're shooting. That allows the Camera Operator to really focus on the framing of the shot stabilizing the camera and just doing the move that they need to do, while someone else handles some of that other back end work. Really makes for an overall great teamwork experience when we're trying to just come together and create the best shot possible.
One other thing kind of when talking about that same vein of thing, where the camera operator really needs to keep things steady, having two points of contact on the camera is always really, really good for just keeping your shots level and steady. So we have this side handle, as well as this top handle, for our Camera Operators to really be able to do what they're trying to do.
And then I would say the last big important piece of equipment on this guy right now is this front matte box. We use this on any camera that doesn't have internal ND, and that's just something that we would need to use on our cinema lensing. We can adapt it down to any other lensing and this allows us to shoot outdoors pretty easily and kind of put neutral density up front .or even some kind of cool filters up front, if we need to.
So, all of those things combined make for a better shoot overall and that's why we use something that looks like this as opposed to something that looks like this. Not that you couldn't get some cool stuff out of this, but we really take it to the next level here.
If you guys like content like this and you want to see more of it check us out at prittentertainmentgroup.com, as well as over on our socials. Thanks and I'll see you guys next time.
