After a little hiatus I would like to resume my filmic series articles.

This time I’ll write about depth of field. Depth of field is yet another of those qualities that really set apart high budget films (which are typically shot with high dollar lenses).

To get started, we need to understand some basic principles regarding depth of field…

Continuing on in my filmic series, I want to talk about proper exposure, and how to acheive the most filmic look using video cameras. After all, yet another hallmark of film is the dynamic range, and the way film stock handles exposure.

Video’s range of exposure is no where near the range of film, and if you over expose something in video, it’s very difficult to recover from. The way video blows out when the exposure reaches over 100 ire is really quite nasty looking. So to get the most filmic look, you don’t want ANYTHING in your frame to be over exposed. This is a little hard to accomplish with…

One of the keys to understanding film and video is to understand frame rates and how they work so in this post I am going to discuss frame rates as it relates to video versus film.

One of the hallmarks of film is that it is typically shot at a frame rate of 24fps progressive, whereas standard def video is shot at 30fps interlaced. Now I don’t know about you, but I hate the look of interlaced video, but it’s something we mostly have to live with. Before I go on, let me describe interlace and progressive. Interlace is the method whereby every other horizontal line is scanned in one frame, and in the next frame alternating to the lines not scanned in the first frame. This means that only half of your image is refreshed on any given…

One of the things most of us hate about video is, well the video look. In video, there is much less dynamic range than on film, usually because of the lens, there is more depth of field, and until recent times, video was all shot at 30fps interlaced (not cool!). When you are working with a very tight production budget however, you can’t really afford…