Some thoughts on video vs. stills in the 60fps full-frame world

So you've probably seen the RED cameras on the internet now. Their primary goal is to get filmmakers who are so very accustomed to shooting digital video for shorts and low-end products to shoot RED cameras when they work on big Hollywood productions. And, it turns out, many of the equipment needed for a digital video camera of high enough quality for Hollywood is also good enough for photography.

Mind you, this is all vaporware. We haven't reached the point where enough people have messed with these cameras that we can see how good they are in practice.

But, let's play a mind game about what would happen if the RED came out and eventually you could waltz into the store and get one of their combination video-and-still cameras and shoot sports and weddings and models and stuff. I suspect the big advantage for sports shooters is that they'd never miss a shot. When the shutter button becomes more of a "bookmark" to point at where you want to extract a shot, you can shuttle a few frames in either direction to get the decisive moment. The same goes for the wedding photographer.

However, I suspect that you are still going to have one primarily "video" guy and one primarily "stills" guy. Consider that the job of the "video" guy is to provide a completely watchable stable view of things. Sure, a video guy is going to move around (which is why there's always a "B" roll to splice in for when he's setting up) but he can't be constantly monkeying with the zoom and position and composition like the "stills" guy is.

I mean, this is basic video practice. If you want pro video, you almost never zoom while you are taking video that's intended to be used (notable exceptions are the Hitchcock zoom and the interview trick where you suddenly realize that the cameraman has zoomed in to reveal that the subject has just produced a tear and is therefore not a crook). Whereas a photographer is always switching out lenses and jumping around like a rabid chimp after some joker replaced the sedative darts with speed. This does not make for good video.

Now, ever since the earliest days of digital cameras, people have been thinking that everything would be really simple if they could just swap out the "brain" of the camera without having to buy a whole new camera. There were a few companies, all of them little more than ploys to abscound with somebody else's money, that were claiming that they'd make "digital film" that would sit where the film is so you could upgrade an older camera. Except for a few designs that are really amenable to a conversion (mostly medium format cameras and one Leica body) everybody had to keep buying new bodies.

I think the way that RED is separating out the attachments from the "brain" is a good idea for the high-end market. See, during a movie shoot, there's usually a team of people working a camera on a dolly that's far too heavy to be carried around. Some of this is just the weight of film magazines, but a lot of this is all the accessories that let a guy stand to the side and concentrate on focusing, the director see how the shot is going from his chair, a flag to mount along the side so you don't get any lens flare, etc. But you also want to be able to strip a bunch of that gear off the camera and have one guy with a steadycam operate it for some shots. The same "Brain" can be set up so that the stop-motion team can use it for physical effects. So, since all of the features necessary for taking sills that are already needed for stop-motion and other tasks are already built into the "brain", they can make a go at capturing a totally different market by offering enough grips that you can use it like a still camera as well.

Also, remember that there's a need in the film market for shooting stills that match the final product. So directors will try out different movie film emulsions in a 35mm film camera to see how it will represent the scene and match the colors. So RED wants to give directors a digital option that matches the ergonomics of film. So even if they don't intend to go up against Nikon, Canon, and the medium format market, they need to make it modular and flexible.

I suspect that other pro cameras... mostly the 35mm full-frame digital SLRs... could benefit from more modularity as well.

In the end, I sincerely doubt that anybody's going to really save appreciable amounts of money by upgrading the "brain" their camera uses every few years instead of everything. Especially given that for every piece the camera breaks down into, that's another seal that can leak light, fail, or let dust in.

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I spent some time this weekend getting the Christmas lights set up. Not done yet. I didn't want to go to the store and pick up more lights until I had a better idea about how many lights I already had. I want to get some of the LED lights. One batch so that we can use up less power for the same amount of light, one batch to cut up because it's cheaper than buying them from a normal LED merchant.