Re: Screen shots from JAG

No. A production will choose equipment before filming starts. If there is money involved you can guarantee all the tests with scopes and serious subjective tests were performed beforehand. Rarely will a serious production start shooting with unknown equipment. In the case of JAG they almost certainly didn't just pick up the camera and start shooting with it. They chose it because they would have seen footage from it previously, or someone performed proper tests to make sure there was a high chance, or even guaranteed chance, that the HDCAM and Z1 footage would cut together.

I was reading a very interesting post elswhere on the web from a guy who has made his living out of setting up cameras, and specifically defining all the settings for most cameras for the BBC to use to obtain a film look. He rightly pointed out that he could make a HDW700 look worse than an FX1 and vice versa, purely on the settings. He made the point that comparing high end professional cameras is pointless because they are so adjustable and have so many parameters to set them up with that you can make any one of them sing or to look better than the other.

All of this setting up is done before production begins by experts using waveform monitors and vectorscopes. You are correct that at the end of the day it is a subjective judegment, but this judegment certainly wasn't made in the case of JAG when production began. It was done before.

As I said, these comparisons are silly. Okay, JAG used a Z1, and the Z1 is available to all of us. There's no point in dwelling on it because if any one of us needs to use one it is within reach. it's within most peoples reach with a bit of saving to make a short movie with a 700 actually. Use the equipment you need at the time. If someoneasks you do to a wedding in high def, either hire out the camera, or if the job is so priced and you are doing well, buy the camera and let it pay for itself in one job.

There is nobody to get left behind here. There's no first person into this market, no last person either. Nobody will lose out because the equipment is there to be used if it is needed.

I think there is a lot of feeling, although not so much said, the people are hoping to be the first ones to make a wide release indy no budget feature using an FX1 or Z1. This is the only reason I can see for these 'my equipment is better than yours' arguments. As if to say 'I'll be making money from my feature while your DVX100 film will never sell to anyone because it's not HD'. Because the people who make money from video will, as I mentioned, hire or buy depending on requirement. They don't buy and then create a requirement afterwards.

At the end of the day only test equipment and the cameras tested under exacting controlled conditions using fully calibrated charts can show the real abilities of each camera. And even then in the case of the 900 series Cinealta do you compare the cameras after it has been calibrated? And then what has it been calibrated to? Some people might want the detail circuits turned off for a filmout, in which case resolution charts won't show as well. Some may prefer a sharper picture, in which case edge sharpening will be more visible and therefore the camera might be rated worse.

So each camera would have to be calibrated as much as possible with the adjustments avaialble to match the colours of both cameras, to match the sharpness levels of both cameras etc, etc. All this has to be done under properly controlled conditions. A subjective judegement is one thing, but making subjective judgements does not show which camera can do what. It just creates these confusing arguments that nobody can win. If someone did a test under highly controlled conditions everything would be black and white. Anything else after that is an artistic or budgetary requirement.