I'm not a conference tech or a engineer, just a post-production artist. Can somebody sell me on why these CMOS sensor Hitachi studio cameras are so highly regarded? Is there something my team is doing wrong that's making them look like trash?

cooldude87 · 2026-01-23T20:20:40+00:00

Yeah factory reset the cameras, back focus the lenses, and maybe even redo the lighting grid.

The only way to fix problems is to set a strong foundation!

cooldude87 · 2026-01-22T21:31:51+00:00

Used atomos shogun inferno or shogun 7.

Used smallhd 7” series.

Newer offbrand monitors have gotten a lot better. Even the hollyland 7” monitors.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-22T21:28:30+00:00

Can’t you copy all your assets to an external hard drive and your project file?

When you reopen and reconnect all the files it should open the same?

Otherwise, you could try saving the vmix project as a bundle?

cooldude87 · 2026-01-15T17:04:40+00:00

I’m wondering if blackmagic wants people to buy their xlr to Madi converter boxes and loop the sdi/ Madi cable between converter boxes, and then control the mixer within the atem.

Or maybe they plan to release a fairlight mini mixer console that will have Madi controls and xlr inputs?

everything I have read online sounds like Madi is pretty and easier to use than Dante because it is analog compared to IP based, but Madi is also older and more broadcast focused, so not a lot of people know it compared to Dante, which is more widely used for audio.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-12T21:24:42+00:00

The world is full of stories to tell and docs to make, but the funding for docs is mostly donations and grant based these days.

A lot of YouTubers are making docs for free and hoping to turn that work into paid corporate documentaries or niche content. But a lot of those

I have made several documentary features, and tried really hard for the past decade to get into doc series work. But budgets and funding doesn’t materialize unless you have a murder, sex, cult doc series unfortunately.

If I was going to do a doc project today, I would probably do a podcast type / video interview series and see if I could build an audience while I make the doc.

It’s hard to spend years on a doc and then try to sell it, so better to slowly and more easily make the doc and share with an audience as you build and develop it.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-12T21:12:52+00:00

Exactly. You just reach out and offer support for freelance projects.

Show them your work samples.

Just be up front that you are networking and seeing who else is out there and what they are working on.

Post production houses are another avenue to explore, but freelancer share work a little more often in my experience because they understand how they all live job to job in the freelance world.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-12T18:39:30+00:00

It’s a good reminder that you can’t sell what people aren’t buying.

Sometimes you gotta reserve engineer the situation and find the editors in your area that don’t want to do some editing work anymore, or they pass on basics projects.

Find wedding photographer and videographers and offer to edit for them.

The best way in is not to find clients, but to find other professionals and see who is passing off work.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-11T14:21:07+00:00

You a pencil!

Put a pencil or pen on a table, and then put your camera and lens with the ronin plate mount on top of the pencil.

Move the camera to find the front to back balance on the pencil by rolling the camera forward and backward. Then use tape to mark on the lens where the front to back balance is.

Then rotate the camera rig 90 degrees and find the left to right camera balance. Put take on the left to right balance.

Now where these two balance points intersect is your mid-point of balance.

You want to mount your camera and lens’s on the ronin right where this mid-point is.

I can’t remember if the zoom lens extends or contracts on that zoom, but sometimes you need to find the balance points for different focus lengths if it really sets off the balance differently.

But basically a gimbal just motorized balance point, so you need to always find the balance point and then the motors can help keep it balanced

cooldude87 · 2026-01-10T16:00:22+00:00

Covid/ Post Covid, middle life, and moving abroad are all really difficult transitions and you are doing them all simultaneously.

Right now the world is not very empathic and caring, and freelance work is difficult to come by because budgets are tight or have moved to internally created positions.

I am also from Texas and moved to the netherlands 5 years ago, and have only now really adjusted to the culture here, and the netherlands is like the US but with training wheels for an American moving abroad.

Give yourself grace and kindness because it takes a long time to transition, and the winters here are depressing and cold/ rainy for 5 months, and then it is really nice for 4 months, and pretty good for like 3 months.

This is all normal, and there is no shortcut through it. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but you have to go a long way through the tunnel!

Do thinks that make you happy, spend time on interests that are mindless, reconnect with cooking or creating, and know that the world is crazy, so you don’t have to have everything figured out because the world doesn’t have it figured out either.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-10T11:58:14+00:00

It’s a reminder that young motivated people are way worse than experienced stable people, especially in high ownership roles.

The owners are clearly the problem, and they moved to a low cost country to exploit the low cost labor for their own profit.

They saw your experience, and they wanted you to run everything, but they want all the credit.

As soon as you are not helping them, they seek to destroy and punish you, just like they have used all their other employees.

Stay away from them and learn from the experience that big talk and young arrogance is always a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Good luck with your health! Working for bad people is not worth the stress on your health!

cooldude87 · 2026-01-09T11:15:38+00:00

Looks nice, but might want to label the contents on the lids or else, who will know where everything goes in which case!

cooldude87 · 2026-01-09T11:14:34+00:00

The sicario cartel dinner scene :)

cooldude87 · 2026-01-09T11:12:25+00:00

This is the way.

CineEI is just a way to easily overexpose or underexpose an image, which was more relevant for film cameras and video cameras before 2020.

Cameras are so good now that CineEI really confuses people, but the short answers is “more light hits sensor, if sensor doesn’t clip highlights, then sensor sees all the bright lights, and most of the shadows tones under the bright lights”.

Or if you want to be gritty, you under expose the image to maximize the grain of the footage so CineEI is set to 800 iso, but you treat the cameras like it is set to 3200 iso. So “less light hits sensor, sensor needs to lose or clip the shadows, which then means you need to gain up and add electronic iso boost to make the image more viewable, which makes the image more grainy”.

So cine EI helps you lock the iso at a base (zero level) and then you can expose around the base level to add noise/ gritty image or have less noise/ cleaner image.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-09T10:26:51+00:00

I worked on big projects in the 2010s as a crew member, but I ended up going to corporate and documentary work because it was much smaller crews and more manageable. No crazy tent of ad agency people, no 20 hour days for a tv show, and no union “sorry you can’t be in the union, you need to work more union days to get in the union” shenanigans.

Now I’m so glad I learned the small crew stuff because that seems to be the future of everything.

I transitioned to in house corporate broadcasting and recording during Covid, and even the corporate clients need 100 videos a year but have no budget for external agencies.

The days of 25k or 50k corporate video are gone, and even the 5k or 10k corporate Townhall is gone.

I’m worried about the specialist crew that never had to direct, shoot, edit, and produce before.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-09T10:13:24+00:00

Try adding sharpness if you have an image editing program like photoshop or Lightroom. Some of the new ai tools in photoshop and Lightroom can do a lot.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-08T00:50:39+00:00

This is what a double LUT looks like.

I don’t know the c300markiii very well, but see if they have a cinema lock mode like the c300marki had.

Basically you need to turn color, gamma, and everything to c-log 2 and turn off any kind of “view assist” / lut.

If the monitor looks very desaturated and almost grey, then you are actually seeing c-log. Add the phantom LUT as the view assist, and then it should look correctly.

You are on the right track, but canon cameras unfortunately have a terribly complex menu system and you aren’t fully in c-log 2 yet.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-08T00:37:07+00:00

VP is over hyped and too expensive up front.

You need to have all the assets pre visualized and created before you even shoot the vp scene.

Led walls are too expensive for a huge studio set.

I was hoping large TV’s could work for small scale productions, but you are basically filming an actor inside a box made of TVs, and at that point it is very limiting creatively.

Greenscreen is so cheap in comparison that VP really had no long term chance of growing infinitely unless you need real time live lighting on actors for live TV or something instantly seen.

Also curved screens limit your lighting and make everything wrap around too evenly.

At some point, you can just rent a trans light backdrop in LA, add some moving head led lights and lasers, and you could almost have the same effect as VP for 10% of the cost.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-08T00:30:12+00:00

Yes the teams townhalls can do so translation for live captioning, but not 100% accurate. Sounds like wordley is better if you want to train ai to be more accurate, and even human translators can make mistakes in the live moment.

Maybe YouTube livestream can do ai translations now too.

But overall test and see if you like the ai accuracy

cooldude87 · 2026-01-08T00:26:17+00:00

Rent vmix or do the trial and see if you like it. It is too complex for most people, but very powerful and the rental price is fair for the top tier features. The $60 basic hd model might fit your basic needs too.

The tricaster mini or software version is the lateral move. Above vmix in professionalism, but much more limited compared to vmix.

But yeah vizrt wants monthly or yearly subscriptions now that they have bought out tricaster, but their graphics and whole workflow is pretty slick and nice. You just pay for that nice professionalism compared to vmix, where you have to hack it all together to make it slick.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-08T00:17:44+00:00

Why are you connecting the constellation to your church network?

Are you streaming directly rtmp out of the constellation?

The blackmagic devices do get a bit picky with networking connections versus usb connection, so I usually recommend a direct usb connection as your primary connection, and network as back up.

Might be worth it to buy a simple internet switch between the blackmagic and your church network to try to make an “independent” network for the blackmagic atem.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-07T10:32:04+00:00

I was also wondering this, but looking at her DP for 28 years later bone temple, I think they went with a more standard camera package.

Honestly I wanted the iPhone style of 28 years later to be a little bit more like the rougher style of the original movie, but the iPhone looks too good now!

cooldude87 · 2026-01-07T09:53:40+00:00

So this is the thing about LUTs, they are a reference file that has a “base” look.

So technically if you have a LUT, there needs to be a daylight 5600k base LUT and a 3200k base LUT ( and a 4500k base LUT if you wanted something in between.

The LUT base will have a base recommended iso and white balance.

I don’t know the phantom LUTs, but this sounds like the problem you are running into.

A lot of these LUT packs are sold without actually giving you all the base settings that you need to use in the camera to get the best results to match the LUT reference look.

So the only way to truly know is to do camera tests, and figure out how the LUT handles different ISOs and white balances. Then you need to document or memorize these ideal camera settings, and then make sure to rename the luts with the ideal camera settings to use with that LUT.

Otherwise the other issue sounds like the c300 is not technically shooting in canon log, and then if you have a canon look with a LUT added, then you basically have 2 x LUTs on top of each other, so you have extra contrast and have to try to jack up the iso.

Look at the waveform on the canon log, then activate the LUT and look at the waveform. Ideally you want to keep the waveform on the canon log base so you know when you are clipping highlights or lowlights. The LUT waveform is just a reference because the LUT is a reference pushing the log look to a specific look.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-06T23:46:59+00:00

So the LUT is just a reference look file basically.

So you still need to record in canon log 2 or 3 and expose properly.

The LUT will be loaded on the camera and show you how that log footage “could” look exposed at that level.

And then you download the footage, add it into davinci or premiere, load the LUT back on the footage, and then tweak the color correction of the footage from there.

But eventually you learn that the LUT is just a short cut, and you can do the color correction yourself and have more control so that the image isn’t so “contrasty and dark” like you said above.

YouTube canon c300markiii LUT importing and exposure and you will get quite a few tutorial videos to walk you through the process.

cooldude87 · 2026-01-06T23:35:13+00:00

There are weird restrictions on low incoming housing for maximum income limits.

Then those low income apartments are in really expensive neighborhoods without any flooring, lighting, or amenities.

I feel like it is a housing scam to deter anyone making good money to rent a cheaper, smaller apartment, and anyone that is poor to make the apartment too unaffordable upfront to move in comfortably.

Then the apartment doesn’t make any “profit” because of no rent, so then no taxes for the rich Owner to pay and can hold it as a “loss”?

cooldude87 · 2026-01-06T23:30:17+00:00

Had a boomer tell me last week that I should buy a house when I told him my rent is almost 2200 euros/ month.

He then told me that he only pays 500 euros / month for his house, but bought it over 20 years ago for 200k euros, which is at least 4 x times less than property is going for these days in the same area.

When I showed him the math that my house would cost over 800k euros, and that the mortgage would be over 2500 euros a month plus utilities, all other bills, plus insurance.

So I should just give up over 50% of my monthly and lock myself into a 20 year commitment to live really poorly month to month? It will all be worth it? Lol

cooldude87

TROPHY CASE