The thing beginning directors and videographers overlook most often when choosing a digital camera is how easy it is to use. It’s a perfectly understandable phenomena. We get bogged down in all the neat features, the 24p, the high resolution, the interchangeable lenses, and so on. It seems convenience and ergonomics don’t just take a back seat…they aren’t even let into the car. The more I shoot with different cameras the more I’ve come to believe that ease of use is the absolute most important thing to consider when deciding what digital camera to use for your production.
For example, I’ve a short using an out of the box $300 Canon Optura 40 and made it look absolutely beautiful. So why spend 10 times that much on a DVX? Because, getting that beautiful look on the Canon Optura was a huge pain in the ass. If I had to play with the exposure at all I had to dive into the menu using a flimsy button, then I had to set it to lock so that it wouldn’t auto iris (also the iris does not have units, but is instead just +7 to -7 and is probably actually accomplished through electronic gain). Manually focusing involved turning what essentially doubled as the filter ring. This meant that sometimes while trying to focus, I’d start unscrewing my UV filter.
Conversely, with the DVX the iris (exposure) has a dedicated wheel that adjusts exposure in F-stops (the commonly accept photographic unit). Though most people consider the DVX’s focus ring “amateur”, I personally find it a vast improvement on the tiny Optura. You turn it…it focuses…and without unscrewing the filters.
Most of the time, this ease of use is what you are really paying for. But be warned…this isn’t always true. Some very expensive cameras are a huge pain due to very backwards engineering.
My personal favorite is the DVX100a. It has controls in logical places, neutral density filters, and a host of other professional features. The canon XL 1 is another good camera with a more professional focus ring, but that can be equally a curse as much as it is a blessing. When working with an XL1 with a micro35 adaptor the inability for the focus ring to lock had us often accidentally hitting the camera out of focus, and thus no longer focusing on the micro35 ground glass. If all that sounds greek to you, then just know this…every time it happened it took 10 to 15 minutes to fix. I would say it wasted at least two hours each day.
It’s not my intention to delve too deep into the ease of use of all the various cameras on the market. There are simply too many and that sort of info is better left for reviews of individual cameras. However, my main intention in this article is that you understand the important of finding a camera your comfortable with and not just looking for the camera packed full of the most features.
So if you are a director and you are shooting your own film, make sure to rent or borrow as many cameras as possible to try them out. Take into consideration the layout of the controls, the ease of operation, and how comfortable you feel framing up a subject. Also, take note of the weight. Are you going to be shooting handheld? If so then a should mount will do you much better than a HVX200, whose weight centers mostly around the battery in the rear…unless you feel like investing some extra cash into camera rig. Or maybe you’ll be shooting mostly on a tripod with a micro35 adapter. In that case, a front heavy CanonXL1 is likely to get tipped over and broken when the extra weight of a micro35 , 35mm lens, and matte box are added to the front.
It all boils down to this: time really is money when you are shooting a film. Your actors get paid by the day, you rent all your equipment by the day…essentially everything has a time component to its cost. If some particular inconvenience costs you as little as 5 extra minutes every time you set up a new shot, and you are shooting 30 different shots per day (a pretty decent average), then that inconvenience is costing you two and half hours every day! For every four days of your shooting schedule, you lose a whole day to that “minor” inconvenience.
So remember, your camera is just the brush that paints the canvas…it is only a tool. The absolute best camera is the one that gets out of the way of the artist.