Reverie: The Future

DSLRs with video. I’m in love.Published September 22, 2008

Written by Joey

Photography introduced me to the 'new media' evolution. I currently do community management at Meraki in San Francisco, but this blog is about journalism, some UX design, and the occasional rant. more →

@joeybaker | joey@byjoeybaker.com

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no time for words – let’s let the moving images do the talking

-Without further ado: Reverie « Vincent Laforet’s Blog

Click here to see the video.This is the future. It’s astounding. Amazing. Phenomenal. [Insert your adjectives here.]Things that stand out to me:

Wide angle glass (the car scene) distorts in a funky way on video. I’m sure Laforet used a 16-35mm lens to shoot from the hood of the car – it gives a really cool perspective, and the distortion (pretty significant on that lens to begin with) is something else.
The low light capabilities of this camera are amazing.
The dynamic range on this camera is just astounding. See: the rearview mirror shot, the shot from the hood of the car.
The camera can shoot high-speed no problem. See: the tunnel shot.

I probably missed a thing or too, but I’ll end with this: I’m really glad it’s DSLRs are merging still photography and video instead of video camera companies tackling the problem. It’s true that I’m just more used to the DSLR workflow than video camera workflow, but I really think that video cameras have developed some bad practices that I don’t like to deal with. Some of these:

Poor low light performance, the solution has been just to add a light to the top of the camera.
Using tapes. Video went digital but brought analog tapes along with it. This means slow import times, no-reusability of recording media, the need to use tape, etc
Video camera lenses tend to do telephoto better than DSLR lens do (they’re smaller and lighter), but still camera lenses have much more creative flexibility (eg. fisheyes, wide-angles, lower f-stops, etc). I know some indie videographers that have setup systems to use still camera lenses on their video cameras.

Cheers, to Canon, it looks like you’ve got a real winner here – let’s hope Nikon can replicate the performance.