Over the years I've held a lot of one-on-one camera training sessions with owner-operators of varying skill sets - some who had been working with a particular camera for years and were finally buying their own, all the way to people who had never worked in the industry and were just getting started. I can tell you that the vast majority of them did not know how to load or copy scene files. You can all breathe a sigh of relief, knowing you're not alone in this world. However, I do have a visual that should help those of you too afraid to ask for help: a simple ladle, some soup and a bowl. Hopefully, this analogy will help you the next time you try to load or copy a scene file from one camera to another, and it applies to both Panasonic & Sony cameras.

A couple of weeks ago we tested a pre-production model of the Sony FS100 camera for both ISO ratings and dynamic range. We came up with some impressive results, but decided to do some more tests with the full production version of the camera.

Sony's new NEX-FS100 camera is a Compact HD camcorder that shares the same Super-35 sized sensor and image characteristics as the PMW-F3. Because of it's relative diminutiveness, the FS100 is suitable for many situations where larger cameras may not be. In this article, we present the many different lenses and accessories that can be used with the camera.

If you've been following my HD Formats series (Video Formats, Bit Depth & Bit Rate), this blog should help clarify a couple more of those words and numbers we see associated with HD video formats.

It occurred to us when creating the Camera Mounted Recorders comparison chart that there is often confusion around different HD formats. In 2009, I wrote up a blog titled Making Sense of HD Formats that covered the different HD formats used today. But what I didn't go into was those other words and numbers that we often see associated with a video compression format: bit rate and bit depth.

In 1975, Stanley Kubrick famously lit scenes in Barry Lyndon only by candlelight. To do it, he had to use triple-wicked candles for a bright flame, push the only filmstock at the time to 250 ISO and acquire a super-fast T0.7 Zeiss designed for NASA (he had an old Mitchell camera chopped up just to work with this lens). This allowed Kubrick to shoot under a keylight of just three footcandles.

In the second part of our three-part series on the Sony PMW-F3, I look into the camera's dynamic range and the various gamma modes that it offers. The test results were quite impressive, and I learned more about the different Cine Gamma modes built into the camera.

We've done a lot of testing with the Sony PMW-F3 camera and had great results. Our tests included sensitivity, dynamic range and low light performance. In a three part series, Mitch and I will cover all of these topics with the hopes of shedding light on what this camera can do.

A few weeks ago, Jesse Rosen wrote an article explaining the technical definition of LOG-encoded video and how it differs from a viewing gamma such as REC709. To better understand how you might use LOG capture in production, I shot this video illustrating the differences.