Editor's View: Learn It, Live It

You know I’m a big proponent of continuing education, from a lecture at a local museum or a screening at a film festival (yes, even the Internet Cat Video Film Festival at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on Aug. 30—mark your calendars!) to webinars and hands-on training. Techniques and technologies develop and evolve pretty much every five minutes, meaning there’s always something new to watch or read or learn. (In the time it took you to read this, for example, someone developed a 4K camera the size of an ice cube.)

Producer/behind the scenes DP Jens Bogehegn looks through the viewfinder to find the third angle for the empirical portion of the “Revenge of the Great Camera Shootout 2012” test. Test administrator Bruce Logan, ASC, stands in the background (in the black coat).

Zacuto continually strives to educate the production community. I just finished watching the second part of the company’s exceptional “Revenge of the Great Camera Shootout 2012” (RGCSO), which compares the capabilities of cameras ranging from the Apple iPhone 4S to the Sony F65.

In these videos, explains Bruce Logan, ASC, who served as the test administrator for the RGCSO, “We’re going to show you what you can do with each of these cameras on the same set by letting expert DPs who’ve mastered these cameras get creative with them. They’ve figured out the best profiles; they know how to light for their camera while keeping color timing in mind. This shootout is about two things: what a camera is capable of, and what a DP can do with his abilities to make it look great with skills, experience and talent.”

Please take some time to watch the videos, download camera documentation and arrive at your own conclusions by visiting www.zacuto.com/shootout-revenge-2012.

And if you’d like some in-person, in-depth, hands-on training, I’d like to invite you to the LA Post | Production Conference , which we’ll be holding Sept. 19-21 in Pasadena, Calif., at Digital Video Expo. Conference attendees can choose from tracks on Apple, Adobe or Avid software, as well as classes on digital video production techniques. Each conference track opens with an in-depth training session on a nonlinear editing system—from there, sessions branch out to an array of topics and disciplines. If you’d like a special Digital Video friends and family discount, just send me an e-mail and I’ll get you the hook-up.