By Jon Silberg, December 15, 2008
Videographer Dennis Dillon has been an advocate for the Sony XDCAM system for some time. A shooter for many news magazine shows such as 60 Minutes and 48 Hours on CBS and Dan Rather Reports for HDNet, Dillon has made extensive use of both the 2/3-inch-chip, 4:2:2, 50Mb/s 700 model and the 1/2-inch, 4:2:0, 35Mb/s EX1 in all sorts of situations. He took it through the freezing Northwest Passage for an HDNet show. "Salt water would land on the camera and freeze," he recalls. "No cameras went down."
But XDCAM's real selling point for Dillon wasn't so much the robustness of the camera itself as it was the XDCAM's system of recording directly to optical disc. In the fast-paced world he works in, the time it can take to copy a reusable drive, even with the fastest of computers, can be too long. "It's a chore to sit down and make sure you have a redundant copy of whatever flavor is needed," he says. "Then you have to confirm you have a copy and computer drives go down. Fortunately, I've been able to recover hard drives at $1,000 apiece, but with the optical disc I have as much peace of mind as I had handing over a Betacam tape. More peace of mind than a Betacam tape, actually."
Produced by Michael Rosenbaum, formerly at CBS News, it began as a 60 Minutes idea. Rather had wanted to do a story on the islands once known for their pristine beauty, rare species and remoteness from civilization. The nation of Ecuador has for years now been encouraging a tourist trade on these islands, which has increased the human presence and, as a result, the damage and destruction one would expect.
The shoot, which took place in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund and the Ecuadorian government, was divided in half, with the first half capturing the atypical animals both terrestrial and underwater and the second dealing with the impact the humans have had. "We were completely upfront with the Ecuadorian government," Dillon notes. "They're as concerned about their islands as the rest of the world and they were very open to letting Dan and Michael examine the status of things and where everything's going."
As with most of the ENG-style shoots Dillon's been doing in recent years, this show was shot with absolutely the minimal number of people possible. Dillon was on camera and Edward Jones handled lighting, grip, sound and some producer duties. "It's the reality of what's happening to us," Dillon says. "We have to do a lot more with a lot less. I have no problem as long as they allot the time. CBS now gets the change in the paradigm on the economic side. You can have fewer people but they need more time."
The two generally travel in a van with a number of lightweight dollies and a couple of jibs, some HMI lights, a few Kino Flo units, a few Dedolights and ARRI tungsten lights. On the Galapagos job they traveled lighter, often with just a few lights and then two EX1s (one inside a Gates Underwater Housing) and a 700. "If the 700 was just too much camera," says Dillon, "we'd go with the EX1. If we wanted to go really wide with the EX1, we'd use a Century wide-angle lens in front of the camera's fixed zoom."
Dillon found the smaller footprint of the EX1 particularly useful for some of the wildlife photography. "I used the Cinesaddle from the Australian company Cinekinetic," he says. "It's like a beanbag or a saddle bag you can drop your camera on and it weighs less than a pound. We could set up the camera and capture mating blue-footed boobies and get to within a few feet of marine iguanas. They sneeze the sea salt out of their sinuses. It's quite a scene!"
Dillon would cover Rather's stand-ups generally with two cameras--the 700 for the close-up and the EX1 locked down for the wide shot. While he says the menu matrices enable him to match the two cameras overall looks, the mixture of a 2/3-inch imager and a 1/2-inch imager would normally present something of a problem cutting back and forth between the cameras. "You would go from the close shot where the background is out of focus," Dillon says, "to the wide shot and everything would pop out and you'd be battling the background that's taking attention away from Dan Rather."
To deal with this issue, Dillon turned to the Letus35 adapter. The device allowed the videographer to mount a Zeiss cinema lens in front of the EX1's fixed lens and work with an image that behaves like it was captured for the image area of a 35mm frame of film. The adapter essentially takes the virtual image from the front lens and projects it onto a piece of ground glass that the camera then re-photographs--allowing the 1/2-inch chip to work with optics designed for 35mm film and yielding a more limited depth of field as a result. "We did some shoots on another show with this setup. Dan loved it and the people at HDNet were stunned by the look we got out of the little camera."
One other piece of gear Dillon tries to have with him at all times is a 7-inch LCD field monitor from the South Korean company TVLogic. "If you're doing critical viewing, and you're always doing critical viewing in the field, you can load the picture up so that you see the real picture, pixel for pixel," he says. "It divides the image up into six quadrants, and you select the one you want to see at its actual resolution. It's great for that. And there's also a vectorscope in the TVLogic that is dead-on. It's like having a Leader scope next to your monitor out in the field. That monitor was a godsend."
While he always used the vectorscope to protect for clipping, Dillon says he's found that the latitude on some of the newer cameras is greater than he's seen. "The Sonys, especially the EX series, and some of the Panasonics I've worked with let me expose differently from the way I've been used to," he says. "I used to set my zebras at 70 and expose [skin tones] around there, but now I think we're all starting to round out facial exposures at 50 or 55 percent and really taking that 'video look' out. If keep careful control of your knee settings and are aware of where your highlights are falling, you have more dynamic range [in the highlights] to work with."
Overall, Dillon has been very happy with his collection of XDCAM equipment--700s and EX1s. "I just looked at the meter on one of them," he says, "and it said 2,800 loads. It's been to the Arctic Circle, the Caribbean, under water, inside good and bad helicopters and it's never gone down. I like being able to just hand off the discs to producers, rather than having to copy everything and then reuse [the media] and the cameras themselves are rock solid."
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