Right now we’re spending a lot of our free time experimenting and testing with our DSLR – putting it through its paces. We’re convinced this camera could hold it’s own against some of the big boys like the “Red” camera and be a great feature film camera, but we’d need to be 100 percent sure before making the decision to use one on a big project, where quality and reliability under all kinds of conditions are paramount and of course we need to be 100 percent comfortable shooting with it. So far it’s all looking extremely positive…
One thing, well ok, one MORE thing, that really excites us about the Canon DSLR is the use of customisable picture styles that can be edited in Photoshop (or other software that accepts photographs in RAW format) to create your own unique look “in camera”.
Of course this requires a lot of testing, but the possibilities are exciting! This could be really useful on projects where we want to create a unique look but keep the post-production grading/colouring process to a minimum, say on a documentary for example.
More importantly for us, it’s also a great way to prime the picture for more creative colour/grading work in post-production, as it’s always much better to work with images that are pretty flat in terms of contrast levels, with as much detail in the shadows and highlight areas as possible. The more detail you can capture on film, the more control you have when manipulating the tonal rage of an image (levels and curves are the best tools for manipulating both the shadows and the highlights).
Its features such as this, that makes DSLR cinematography really appealing, and yes, very exciting.
