Getting wrapped up in the toys

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit of a geek. I love technology, and the more it bleeds, the more excited I am.

However, in this day of bells and whistles one-upmanship between Canon, Panasonic, and Sony, the role of the artist is being lost in the dustcloud. Many of us struggle just to get that one project completed so that we can show it in our living rooms on our 32" 720p TVs. Being tempted and distracted by the latest and greatest chunks of technology does not help us as artists. Frequently, it's enough of a distraction that we are paralyzed into inaction. We hear through the blogosphere and through the myriad video forums that what we have just isn't good enough, and we believe it.

A while back, Stu Maschwitz, a guy who is a lot smarter than me where the technical side of film is concerned, and someone whom I respect tremendously, posted a mellow rant against Canon about their approach to the market. You can read his comments here (and I suggest that you follow his blog).

While I do agree that the 4k solution is ill-conceived, I disagree with what I perceive to be the spirit of his sentiment regarding the 7D and 5DmkII cameras. The gist is that Canon hasn't properly handled the job of combining the technologies required to pull a usable picture stream out of the camera. While I agree that they could have done a better job, I think that this blog post might panic and immobilize recent buyers of one of these cameras. "Oh, my God, what did I just buy?"

To be fair, the unmodified Panasonic GH1 has a problematic image processing stream as well, resulting in muddy shadows and moire effects.

This is just part of the deal with a hybrid camera like this. We want sensor size, high sensor resolution, and a pristine 1080p image. Someplace in there, something's gotta give. You see, in order to keep the shallow focal depth of a full-frame sensor, the manufacture needs to use the full sensor to capture the image. This image then needs to be downsampled to fit the HD format. Data must necessarily be tossed for that to work. It's just the nature of the beast.


Blah, blah, blah. My eyes glaze over. The cameras serve their purposes.

Could it have been handled better? Probably. But it's important to take a step back and realize that the image looks really good for a $2000 camera with so much operational flexibility. Is it up to Hollywood standards? Probably not, but the image quality is good enough that George Lucas is using Canon DSLRs on his new film... Point being, the image quality is good enough for us.

As is the image off my old Panasonic PV-DV953 miniDV camcorder. The picture is a tad small, but it can be gorgeous!

It is a tool that captures the image and sound that corresponds to all that stuff we wrote between Fade In: and Fade Out:

Don't get wrapped up in the tech. Use what you have, and tell your story.