Monthly Archives: November 2012

Ultimate still lenses choices for DSLR FILM-MAKERS

stanley kubric

 

Sorry for not writing any sooner, been busy, lots happening in my life! I will update you folks with some major news pretty soon, hopefully. In any case I am always experimenting, testing, story boarding, creating, learning and sharing experiences. Cinematography is a never-ending story, a master art and you will never master it all. So intriguing.

I believe that lenses are important in any production, but definitely lighting has the edge. It sets a mood, it creates your cinematography, better still it’s the eternal fight between the shadows and the light that rules the world out…. as the Chinese would say, by drawing a Tao logo. So lenses are no more than boys’ toys? No, they are not. They are meaningful, but do not get too crazy about them, try to focus more on directing or DP-ing… lenses are just tools.

My Rode Rockumentary entry, part 2

 

This part will focus on post production, usual step for any kind of video work you would like to present to your audience.

The very first bit of the whole chain is to have allĀ  your clips matched in terms of luminance. In the IRE scale the blackest point has to be set to 0, while the whitest to 100.
This way you know that anything below 0 will be totally black and anything above 100 will be pure white; both 0 and 100 are the threshold to get any detail in your picture. You have to do this work for all the cuts in your final editing, plus balancing out the RGB channels. It’s quite a tedious work, but once it’s done, you’ll know that the whole piece will be like one.
The next step would be to fix any issues, like under or over exposed areas of your footage… hopefully you will not have to deal with it, but chances are that it might happen if you are shooting solo or on a very small production. Especially doing exteriors, it’s difficult to control the action and the tech part as well. Never mind if you are shooting manual as well, we film-makers mostly do.