How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Cheap Cameras

By Jason Goldstein — Oct. 20, 2009

This is the story of two movies. A little prequel about conspiracy and religion entitled Angels & Demons, and a dry documentary-style indie flick about a high-class call girl: The Girlfriend Experience.

They have absolutely nothing to do with each other, except they were both shot on the RED.

The RED is a $17,000 camera, plus another $1000 for the base set, plus no less than $5000 for the lens. It shoots a resolution four times that of HD, and is the nicest goddamn video camera on the market.

Of course, those films do have one more thing in common: nobody in the audience knew they were shot on such a nice camera, nor did they care.

Good feedback and bad advice

We shot American Gothic on $200 DV camcorders. They didn't support external microphones, they couldn't deal with poor lighting, and the image was grainy.

Yet, despite all the technical shortcomings, people were really impressed with our film's cinematography. At the end of the day, camera-work and editing were much more important than all the grain you couldn't even see on the silver screen.

Still, we knew we needed an upgrade. The old cameras were exceptionally crappy, and they were starting to fall apart.

By this point we'd met a lot of other "movie people," and we were starting to see a trend. Your typical local filmmaker adheres to the following procedure:

• Rush out and buy professional gear. Spend lot's of money you don't have.
• Shoot movie.
• Send movie to festivals.
• Realize you just dumped your life savings into a project that will never turn a profit and you still can't pay your credit card bills.

There's an unspoken myth that great cameras make great movies, which will win awards at Sundance and find national distribution. They'll make the crew millions and the director will spend the rest of his life playing around in LA, Entourage-style.

So I guess it shouldn't've been surprised that people kept telling us to get the Canon GL-2. And if we didn't want to drop $3000 per camera? Well, we could rent one!

Why I never get enough sleep

While it doesn't help that I drink coffee at 10pm, the real cause of my late nights is that Be The Shoe spends a lot of time on research. Jake and I looked into the technical details of how cameras worked, and what would could give us the best results on the cheap.

Our conclusions:

We wanted separate audio input and output jacks, so we could listen to the audio as we recorded it. I'm still amazed how many HD prosumer cameras don't have this.

We wanted color separation. See, camera sensors don't know what color light is - they just measure brightness. So to get color information, they use color filters on top of the sensor.

In cheap cameras, there's one chip, and every pixel on it is either green, red, or blue. That means if a pixel is green, the filter blocks the red and blue light, and the brightness of the green light is recorded. The problem is when you're pointing the camera at your lead actress's face, and her face isn't green, well, you still get a dull green dot on that pixel. So this technique creates a lot of color grain.

Good cameras record every pixel's brightness three times: once for red light, once for blue light, and again for green light. They combine all that information, making every pixel a blend of blue, red and green, and it looks really good. (This is what 3CCD means.)

So we settled on the Canon HV30 ($800)

The technical details are here, if you're interested.

The day we got the camera, we hooked it up to Jake's 100" HDTV to see exactly how good this looked.

You could say we were impressed.

At our premiere, people who work in video production were complimenting us on the image quality. And I agree, the HV30 takes great video.

But the version of the movie we showed in the theater was nowhere near as high quality as the raw footage. We shot in HD, but we presented the final cut in SD, with a 42% drop in quality in order to fit the whole film on a DVD-R.

But guess what? On the silver screen, it looked just as good as The Girlfriend Experience.