Chase Oaks Church, in Plano, Texas, has upgraded its A/V equipment in order to improve its capabilities for live production and streaming of weekly worship services. Part of that upgrade includes four VariCam LT cameras, as well as two AU-EVA1 5.7K handheld cameras and two AW-UE150 4K pan/tilt/zoom cameras, which were installed in October, 2019.
DP Nicolaj Bruel and director Matteo Garrone, who first worked together on the award-winning 2018 feature film “Dogman,” repeated their collaboration, and their use of Cooke Optics’ Anamorphic/i SF lenses for the live action Italian-language film “Pinocchio.” The film was released in Italy in December 2019, and recently featured in the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival.
Veteran cinematographers and DOPs have long understood that lenses have a personality with a specific look and feel. In the same way that an actor imparts his or her interpretation on a film’s story, the DOP selects a lens that best supports the program’s emotional stakes. The ideal camera lens is one that contributes its own unique character and flare (literally) in order to produce the most compelling viewer experience possible.
Electronic camera manufacturers have spent – by some measures – something like the last twenty years trying to make digital cameras that shoot pictures that look like real movies. Now, they’re making cameras with larger and larger sensors, the better to simulate the sort of cameras that shot some of the greatest mid-twentieth-century movies, in the days of 70mm and VistaVision.
The increasing use of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and wide color gamut (WCG) acquisition has not only improved signal quality on live sports and other telecasts, it has also helped the bottom line of those that make professional 4K lenses. Both visual and lab tests have shown that the superior quality of a 4K UHD lens helps even HD cameras look better, and that’s helping lens sales in a Broadcast market that—with the emergence of handheld, fixed lens (with 1/3 and ¼-inch sensors) camera models now used extensively in newsgathering—gets harder every day.
The world’s oldest surviving motion picture, often called Roundhay Garden Scene, does not include any camera movement. It’d be tricky to imagine anything approaching a move, since the scene, which was shot in 1888 by Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince on a camera of his own invention, is just a hair over two seconds in length. Better known early movies include the 1895 work of Auguste and Louis Lumière, whose fifty-second short L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (“The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”) famously had people ducking for cover as the train rolls into the station.