The Indie Auteur Musings on filmmaking by Stephan Vladimir Bugaj.

NoLo Shooters’ Holiday Wishlist

Here are some last-minute Holiday shopping ideas for the No Budget / Low Budget (NoLo) filmmaker in your life. Glancing at the prices, one thing you’ll notice is that even at the low end, quality filmmaking isn’t really a “no-budget” proposition.

Most “no-budget” filmmakers are able to work “no-budget” because they have access to equipment through a school, work, or local film/video coalition that loans out gear. True “no-budget” shooters can work with an under $1000 consumer camcorder that has paltry imaging control settings and use only available light. But once you grow tired of just how awful ninety percent of your footage looks when shooting that way, then it’s time to invest in some decent gear. Renting, of course, is also an option. It depends on how much you shoot.

So if the filmmaker in your life is active enough to use their equipment so often it’d be cheaper to buy than rent, here’s some gear to consider:

(read more “below the fold”)

Cameras

HD video cameras under $5000 are pretty good these days. Though I am still a Canon XL-1 owner, I have a hard time recommending its HD successors because of the lack of 24/1080p (it does 24F/1080i instead). I wish I could heartily recommend the XH-A1S, as all my other camera gear is Canon, but I can’t. Instead, any of these three cameras are good options.

The Panasonic HVX200 has become something of a standard among NoLo filmmakers, mainly because it arrived on the scene first. It does true 24/1080p, and accessories for it are very common. I’ve been involved with three or four shorts shot using this camera, and it looks pretty good (but gets a bit noisy in low light situations). My main complaint is that the P2 storage is very expensive.

I have also shot with the Sony FX1, the non-24p brother of the Z7U (which can do 24/1080p). Image quality is great, and you can get Sony brand HDV tape for as little as $6 for a 63 minute tape. Another good thing about the Z7U is that it has XLR audio inputs, though squeezing your audio signal onto mini-DV tape isn’t necessarily optimal.

The only camera on the list I haven’t used (or used its predecessor) is the JVC, but I’ve read a couple of articles praising its low light capabilities and am sufficiently excited that I intend to rent and test one. Also, 32GB SDHC cards are about $100 as opposed to about $1000 for a 32GB P2 card.

HDSLRs are also gaining popularity with NoLo filmmakers. Though Nikon was first out the gate with a viable option, I am a Canon owner and am more impressed with Canon’s offerings in this area.

The $1700 Canon EOS 7D is an amazing value for 24p with interchangeable lenses, but it’s not a full-frame sensor (which means a 1.6x multiplier on standard lenses, among other things).

Though it doesn’t have 24p yet (a firmware upgrade has been promised for the first half of 2010), the Canon EOS 5D Mark II is a full-frame sensor camera, available body-only or with an excellent 24-105mm L-series lens. If the filmmaker in your life can tolerate shooting 30p until mid-2010, then this may be the camera for them (especially if they already have a lot of Canon glass).

Lenses

Quality lenses are the foundation of a shooting kit. I’d rather have a collection of lenses than cameras, because HDSLR and HDV camera technology is changing rapidly enough that three year old cameras may seem obsolescent, but if you know what you’re doing you can still make good use of even 50 year old lenses.

Primes

Primes are lenses that have only one focal length. They tend to also be “faster” (which means they have a lower f-stop number, which means their aperture is larger), which means the lens is capable of both shallower depth of field and capturing an image with less light.

All the primes listed above in the 14mm-100mm range constitute a standard kit of primes (the most likely to get left off a list of “standard” primes is the 14mm). Those six lenses will cover the vast majority of shooting situations.

The two exotic and rather expensive primes, the 200mm and 400mm, are mainly for specialty situations such as shooting sports or wildlife footage.

Zooms

Zooms are lenses that have a range of focal lengths (and sometimes a range of largest apertures). What they lack in depth of field and low-light capability they make up for in versatility. One zoom lens can cover the focal length range of as many as five common primes. Zoom lenses tend to be slightly less crisp than primes, but these days, only slightly so.

The most versatile of the zooms listed is the 24-105mm. That covers the entire range of common primes, albeit at f4 (rather than f1.2 – 2.8 range the primes all fall in). For longer focal lengths, 70-200mm at f2.8 is also quite an appealing lens. I have the 16-35mm (actually the 17-35mm predecessor) and 100-400mm, and they are quite good for the specialty situations they cover. All these Canon L-series lenses are optically excellent, so it’s just a matter of picking what’s right for a given shooter’s needs.

Redrock: Lens Adapters, Rails & Matte Boxes

Rails and Matte Boxes are common camera accessories that provide support for the camera body, lens, and accessories (rail systems) and facilitate blocking stray light and housing filters (matte boxes). A common accessory to mount to a rail system is a follow-focus rig, which allows one to more easily rack focus under the moving camera conditions found in cinematography.

Lens Adapters allow lenses for one kind of camera to be used for another. Mount adapters are very common in the world of SLRs, but what is presented here is a system in which the lens mounts onto a backplane that is subsequently rephotographed by the video camera’s taking lens. With such a system, SLR (or Arri PL, given the right system) lenses can be used with video cameras, even with ones that don’t have interchangeable lenses (which is most of the inexpensive ones).

Many companies make such systems, but fellow Bay Area residents Redrock Micro are a favorite of many Bay Area NoLo shooters.

The “Encore Indie Bundle” systems above are lens adapters for HDV cameras, providing either Canon or Nikon lens mounts. The “Field Cinema” and “Captain Stubling” kits are rail systems for DSLR cameras, whereas the matte box works with both kits, and the support rails work with the matte box if you don’t have one of the other kits. A lot more info, and many more kit options, are available at the Redrock Micro site.

Lighting Instruments

Cinema lighting comes in three main types: tungsten, HMI, and flourescent. Tungsten is still both the most common and least expensive. You may think that available light is sufficient for filmmaking, but it rarely is. It’s generally either too dim or too bright, and almost always either too evenly distributed or falling in the wrong place. Color balancing with available light can also be tricky (especially household and industrial flourescents).

The two main types of lighting instruments are floodlights (wide beam) and spotlights (narrow beam). Fresnels are a common type of cinema spotlight that is focusable (the beam can be made narrower or wider), while open-face lights are a common type of spotlight. Some fresnels also allow you to swing aside the fresnel lens and use the light open-faced.

Even a single lighting instrument in a dark room can give you more control, and a more interesting lighting result, than available light. Arri and Lowel are two makers of tungsten (and HMI) lighting whose gear is frequently found on NoLo sets.

The Arri kits listed are both open face and fresnel (the first kit, which includes a “softbox” diffuser), only fresnel (the second kit), or only open face (the third kit). All include barndoors for the lights. The Lowel kits do not include any fresnel lights, but the Omnis are somewhat focusable, and they do include more diffusion. Most of the Lowel lights are lower wattage than the Arris listed here, which can be a good thing when shooting DV.

Either of the first two Arri kits are, in my opinion, the best basic kits, and adding one of the Lowel kits would give some lower wattage, small footprint lights to use for fills and other “light sculpting” purposes.

Support and Monitoring

As boring as it may seem, a good tripod, tripod head, and offboard monitor can make all the difference in the world between a good shoot and a miserable one. I’ve shot a bunch of stuff with the Manfrotto tripod and head listed here, and love it. Add a matching tripod dolly to it and life is even better.

Monitoring is also essential. This particular Marshall monitor comes recommended from several sites, and I intend to get one soon. Shooting without an offboard monitor, especially considering how mediocre so many on-camera viewfinders are these days, is no longer a sensible option.

A Steadicam system is used for stabilizing the camera while walking around with it. If your shooter does a lot of “handheld” then a Steadicam can make their lives a lot easier (note, though, the low end model listed here only carries up to 10 pounds of camera and lens — maybe ok for an HDSLR, but not a HDV camera with a Redrock rig). You can build a pseudo-Steadicam for next to nothing, but the real thing is better balanced and includes a built-in video monitor.

Any one of these items would make the NoLo shooter in your life very happy (though, of course, if you’re going to buy SLR lenses or camera bodies, make sure they match the camera bodies or lenses your shooter already has).