HDSLR Video Rig

Many years ago I invested in a nice video camera, the Canon XH-A1 HD video camera, which I still own and it has about the best built in glass of any video equipment I have used or owned.  With powered dual XLR inputs in addition to an amazing array of professional video control features, it has been quiet fun to own. 

After having owned it for a while I started observing what people call the "filmic effect" and more specifically how my video camera was unable to achieve that look.  Filters and color grading asside, the one key "effect" I was not able to pull off except in extremely bright light ( and this is a very low light camera ) was a true Depth of Field (DoF) view which pulls your subject into focus while making content in front or behind your subject quickly fall out of focus. The next time you watch TV or movies, make note of this effect and notice that it works much the way your eyes work which helps to increase the value of realism.  

Now, just about every camcorder on the market has this problem ( it is not a special problem for the XH-A1 ). At the same time I noticed that my digital SLR camera ( at the time an early Digital Rebel )  was able to get this look in its still images.  The thing is, movie film cameras and photography cameras have this in common: in combination with interchangeable lens "f" stop capabilities and the recording surface built into the camera, DoF is completely possible. This is when I read about the Letus lens adapter for Camcorders.

The letus lens adapter allowed me to basically put photographic camera lens onto the front of my camcorder.  While it did make the images a bit darker, in additional to nearly doubling the weight of the camera, I was now able to record Hi-Def video with that classic DoF "Filmic" look. Check out my film short "Everyday Super Heros" to see what the Letus can do to add a filmic look to a video camera.

Soon after all of that I learned that the new Digital SLR cameras would not only allow me to record video ( so we are talking about getting DoF directly from an SLR photocamera, but it will render a video instead of a static photographic image ) but record full 1080 progressive Hi-Def video.  This made my HX-A1 almost immediately obsolete except for in a few situations where I may want to film long form video ( these new HDSLR photo video cameras only record for 15 consecutive minutes at a pop and then you have to start recording again manually, which is fine in most cases but not always, say, if you are recording a long meeting ).

So now I could focus on getting better style into my shots and not just shots, and just invest in better lens that can handle very low light and I would be rocking some lightweight and portable filmic video capture solutions. And that all worked out fine, when suddenly I started noticing a few issues with a new element of the filmic look that seemed to be missing from recording using an HDSLR camera.

Most professional film camera are kind of long.  Consider the following.  From the back of a traditional camcorder like the XH-A1 to the front of the lens you might be looking at 18 inches of length.  Now, on a 35mm movie film camera, that length could be 3 feet long.  And an HDSLR photo camera shooting video is about 6 to 10 inches long from the back of the camera to the front of the lens. Like in my drawing here, the dotted vertical lines depict where the device might be attached to a tripod or stabalization device. This means that when the camera is rotated on the tripod to "pan" a shot, the speed of the pan as the lens moves on a Photo camera will seem a whole lot faster than a pan on a longer camera like a video camera, and even quicker than the pan speed on a very large film or movie camera.

In the case of Movie cameras and video cameras, many of them are also large enough to sit on a persons shoulder and when the camera operator pans the shot, rather than being attached to a tripod, the tripod is replaced with the persons shoulder and the camera is supported by the camera operators arms as the pan shot is made basically forcing the camera operator to turn at the waste to pan the shot.  This is a big slow movement! On an HDSLR photo camera, the camera pan can happen at the flick of ones wrist since the device is very small! One doesn't often think about this when one is filming, but later on in the edit those quick pans make the shot and the environment feel very small and unballanced.

This is where an HDSLR rig comes into play.  Back in the day when I bought the Letus lens adapter for the XH-A1 vieo camera, it came with a bunch of 15mm rails that helps the lens adapter attach to the front of the XH-A1.  Thankfully, today, most HDSLR rigs all use 15mm standard rails.  I decided to take apart the Letus rig and see if I could adapt it to work as a stabalization unit for the HDSLR camera.  My goal was to create a shoulder rig that would help me support the HDSLR camera out in front of me the way larger movie cameras sit on a camera operators shoulder. No more quick pan wrist snaps for me!

After a short shopping spree on Amazon for a few extra parts I was able to assemble this nice monster shoulder rig for my Canon HDSLR camera. And just like the pan shot speed problem, photo camera lens often have smaller diameters than say a video camera lens or a film camera lens.  This means that focusing shots in DoF can often snap much faster on a HDSLR than in a film camera. 

Hey, I am going for the filmic look here, so how to I slow down and smooth out that focus change?  There is a special piece of equipment that often get attached to large film cameras called a "follow focus".  The follow focus is a big white dial that through a series of gears reached back to the lens and lets you change the focus of the lens by spinning the dial ( it is a large manual focus nob about the size of  a stereo volume nob on a large component stereo system ). Adding a "follow focus" to my rig allowed me to sole the speed of focus, matching the kind of focus pull speed one would expect from a larger film camera.

This now solves a lot of the movement, lighting issues, focus pulling and Depth of Field effects often characterized as big elements in the "filmic" look.

I am obviously not the first person to notice this stuff. And these solutions are widely accepted now to the degree that in the recent film "Red Tails" a couple Canon HDSLR Cameras were attached to rigs much like what I now have and their footage matched well the footage of 1st unit film cameras such that the footage recorded by the Canon 5D mark II and 7D were able to be editing directly into the movie you can see in theaters across the US today.

I am pretty happy with the Rig so far. It feels good. But now it is time to get out there and do some filming with it.