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Understanding the
New Breed of Digital
Cinema Cameras for
Your Business
By Patrick Hughes

Produced by 1
Understanding the New Breed of Digital
Cinema Cameras for Your Business

Workflows for Digital Cinema Cameras............................................................. 3

Video Formats............................................................................................................. 5

What Does The Digital Cinema Workflow Mean For Your Business?....7

Other Gear You Need to Consider........................................................................8

Choosing a Digital Cinema Camera That Best Fits Your Business.......... 9

The Digital Cinema Camera Secret.................................................................... 10

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital
Cinema Cameras for Your Business

Digital Cinema Cameras

The new breed of digital cinema camera is incredibly exciting. If you’re in the market
to buy one, they can also be brain scrambling. Unless you’re a big production studio
with a large budget , you’re probably weighing your costs against the features you need
most.

If you want to know how the new breed of digital cinema cameras will impact your
business, seeing one as part of a larger eco-system will help you make that purchase
decision. The workflow involved when using a digital cinema camera may be different
than what you’re accustomed to, so let’s start there.

Workflows for Digital Cinema Cameras

What does workflow mean?

The word workflow gets tossed around in video production but often goes undefined.

Workflows are the steps you take to get the footage from your camera into a digital
editing system (on your computer). Workflows detail the way you back up your video
files and also how you process them once they are on your machine.

For example, if you’re familiar with using mini DV tapes, then you’ve used a tape-
based workflow.

Tape-Based Workflow
You’re probably familiar with the tape-based workflow.

If you have video footage on a mini DV cassette, the process involves a mini DV tape
deck that ingests the footage and is controlled by your editing system.

As you’re playing back the video, the computer creates digital video files from tape.
The trouble here is that the video is played and recorded in real time. So if you have
six hours of video footage to transfer, you’ll be waiting six hours for those files.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital
Cinema Cameras for Your Business

Once the waiting game is over, you might then backup your footage, convert it to an-
other format for editing or take any other series of steps.

Nowadays the majority of all digital cinema cameras have a file-based workflow. It’s
often referred to as a tapeless workflow.

Tapeless Workflow
A tapeless workflow was developed to increase your efficiency in post-production and
also to secure the video files on your storage device.

On tapeless cameras, files are stored on the camera’s internal hard drive or memory
devices like SD & CF cards.

It has also become popular to capture video to solid-state hard drives (SSD). These
hard drives do not have moving parts and have super-fast read and write speeds which
means you can record longer in higher quality. When these hard drives are an acces-
sory to a digital cinema camera, they’re called digital magazines, or mags.

In the new tapeless workflow, the computer ingests video through a memory card
reader. Some hard drives plug directly into your computer and will show up as an ex-
ternal hard drive.

From here, you’d simply drag and drop your video files onto the computer. Next, your
video file may need to be converted for editing and you should always backup your
footage to an external source like a hard drive anyway.

While there’s an abundance of digital cameras that use a tapeless based recording
system, it’s good to note that there are a few cameras out there that still use tapes.

You’ll want to take tapes into consideration when buying a digital cinema camera be-
cause the editing time is significantly longer and tape decks are costly, which can add
thousands of dollars to the final purchase price. Not to mention, your own precious
time spent waiting around for files to digitize.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

Video Formats
Having a firm grasp on the various video formats will give you a better idea of how
they will fit into your business.

Most digital cinema cameras shoot in the 720p, 1080p video formats and some higher
end ones can shoot in 2k, 3k, 4k and even 5k. 720p and 1080p are high-definition
broadcast standards, the format used in most television commercials.

2k, 4k and 5k are even higher resolutions than HD. There are maybe a few hundred
people in the world that have a television in their homes that can view 2k or higher.

With 2k, you have a superior image quality that could be played in any movie theater
in the world. It can also be converted down to web quality.

4k is superior to 2k in the way that it’s even easier to work with when using green
screens and special effects because the quality is that much better.

Below is a comparison chart to show you the resolution of standard HD formats

(720p,1080p) compared to the much larger 2k and 4k formats. Look how big 4k is. 720p
looks tiny compared to the resolution of a 4k image.

(Image source: GFDL http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Digital_cinema_formats.svg)

Before you get caught up in resolution though, know that with larger formats come
larger file sizes and more arduous workflows.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

File Size
The file sizes for 2k and 4k clips are huge! One hour of uncompressed 4k footage can
eat up 1.7 terabytes of hard disk space.

Video codecs save a large portion of this storage burden for us. Video codecs are soft-
ware tools (and hardware tools) that allow us to compress video files to a smaller file
size while still retaining high video quality. With video codecs, our 1.7 terabytes of 4k
video becomes a somewhat manageable 84 gigabytes.

Having workflows in place when using these new digital cinema cameras makes han-
dling such large files or your precious client video files safely. Think of workflows as
a set of plans that help you navigate from point ‘A’ to ‘B’. These plans can be written
down or something you memorize in your head.

New tools (both hardware and software based) will always come along and change
your workflows and these plans or steps can help you do your job faster. As video
professionals, our time is money.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital
Cinema Cameras for Your Business

What Does The Digital

Cinema Workflow Mean
For Your Business?
It means that you need to think about more than just a camera. There is an entire
system of products that accompany the purchase of any digital cinema camera. Before
you buy into one of these systems, you need to address the production needs you have,
and the ones you hope to have.

Start by asking yourself these two important questions:

How many simultaneous productions do I anticipate shooting in a month?

If you’ll be shooting more than one production at once, you need to add more storage
on your computer, or editing station as it’s often called.

How long do I plan to archive footage?

If you plan to store video data long-term, this requires a long-term strategy. You
don’t need to break the bank on data storage initially, but as time goes on you’ll need
to include more storage space. This will become an expense that you should plan on
incurring for the life of your business.

It can be a delicate balance between purchasing too much storage space and not hav-
ing enough. What a lot of professional do is add the cost for new storage devices into
every production they quote. This way you’ll have enough storage for each client and
you won’t have to sacrifice space from your archive.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

Other Gear You Need

to Consider
Editing stations (aka your computer)
Your computer must be fast. If you’re purchasing a new digital cinema camera with a
tapeless workflow, you might want to add a new computer to your budget.

A computer capable of loading and editing such high-quality video should have a
bare minimum of eight gigabytes of RAM and as much hard drive space as you can af-
ford.

You will want to utilize external storage devices that have high-speed connections like
USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, Firewire 800 and fiber channel so that you can import video faster.

If you already have a high-end machine that is four or more years old, you may want
to consider upgrading to a new system or doing a complete rebuild.

Camera Accessories
Don’t forget that when buying a new camera you’ll want to buy at least a few accesso-
ries to protect the camera and optimize it’s quality and efficiency.
These important, although often forgotten accessories include:

• Compatible, recommended lenses.

• Other camera support systems to mount monitors, follow focus units, and external
camera hard drives.
• Camera bag or case.
• Tripod mount.
• Lens Filters.
• Extra tapeless storage like CF and SD cards.
• Camera insurance (this is essential.)

These things shouldn’t discourage you from buying a digital cinema camera. Some
items aren’t vitally necessary but still good to think about when creating a budget for a
new camera.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

Choosing a Digital
Cinema Camera That
Best Fits Your Business
You should always make an informed buying decision with the options you have avail-
able to you at the present time. Don’t worry about what cameras will be released in six
months because there will always be new cameras coming out.

When buying a digital cinema camera, consider the following:

What do I really need?

A 4k camera may be justified only if you shoot a lot of video meant for visual effects.
The more resolution, the easier it can be for visual effects artists to work their magic.
This also applies to videographers who shoot a lot of green screen footage.

Shooting 4k would be overkill for shooting local TV commercials where 720 and
1080p are the standard.

If you’re shooting documentaries, you may want the versatility that 2k and 4k offer. It
provides you more export options so that if you have a theatrical release you’ll have a
beautiful theater print.

Think about form factor of the camera. Do you need a lightweight rig? If you do a lot
of run and gun shooting, this will play a huge part in your buying decision. If you’re
doing a lot of stationary or staged shooting, the weight and size may not be a big deal.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

The Digital Cinema

Camera Secret
There is a secret that isn’t talked about in the video community. It’s one secret that is
so profound that some video professionals wouldn’t want you to hear.

Digital cinema cameras are a catalyst. They have essentially leveled the playing field
between small video production companies and large ones, so everyone can afford the
same stunning image quality.

You can capture true cinema quality images for a fraction of what it would have cost
you ten years ago. This is what makes digital cinema cameras so special. Once you
purchase your first digital cinema camera, all you’ll need is your imagination, a solid
workflow and, of course, a bigger hard drive.

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Understanding the New Breed of Digital Cinema
Cameras for Your Business

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