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Behind the Scenes on Lucasfilm’s Red Tails with the Canon DSLRs from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

For those that participated on the crew of the feature film – “At the Top of the Pyramid”, the pace and set sounds in the video will bring back memories… The cameras they  used were the Canon 5DmkII, the modified for PL mount lenses, Canon  7D from Hot Rod Cameras and the Canon 1DmkIV.

Excerpt from the article:

The major issue we had with the Canons was the monitoring issue. These cameras are still cameras first and foremost and that causes many issues, one of the biggest is they all use a mini HDMI as it primary video out, which also causes the camera LCD to shut off.  We experimented with using powered HDMI splitters to feed both the Marshall monitors for my focus puller and myself but also for video village. This was not very successful at all for our purposes. For a small crew using the excellent Jag35 splitter we used would have been fine but we had to go a different more pro route. So what we ended up doing was using a Blackmagic HDMI to HD-SDI convertor. This required different monitors as our Marshalls were HDMI only but it did mean it slipped into the video village feed so much easier than before.

This I have to say is essential in any serious production. Dump the HDMI and go HD-SDI, HDMI is a not a pro connection systems and suffers because of it. It just is not robust enough. The big issue we had with the 5DmkII (the 7D and 1DmkiV were unaffected) was that when you hit record then the image drops from 1080i to 480p making using the monitor for focus a major issue and also caused about a 7 second black image for the director in video village. Not great. The new firmware for the 5DmkII has not rectified this issue.

I have to agree with Phillip as we found on the set of “At the Top of the Pyramid”, HD-SDI was the way to go for the video village setup.

Video Village for the LucasFilm – RED TAILS project!

LucasFilm - Red Tails feature film: Video Village

Enjoy Phillip Bloom’s experiences on the set of RED TAILS.
Full story on Phillip’s site…