New toys = new creativity

Have you ever heard of B&H Photo up in New York City?  They are a filmmaker, video producer, photographer, videographer, design enthusiast’s candy shop.  It is a huge land of technology in the realm of video, film, still photography and post-production.  Tons and tons and tons of equipment…or affectionately known as “toys”.  Why does every creative person in the above mentioned fields get so excited about all these toys?  Well, basically these gadgets and whatnot inspire the creative type to create bigger, better and more efficiently.  Better toys allow us to bring more to the game in the Atlanta video production industry for our clients.  10 years ago, the costs of video production were significantly than where they are now.  There was no iMovie, High Definition video was just starting to roll out  but was outrageously expensive, cameras were a lot more expensive and so was hard drive space.  A lot has changed in 10 years, 5 years and even 2 years!  You can do things now that were only dreamed up because of budget or technology restrictions.

Example of Depth of Field

One of the biggest wants/desires by video producers (and our clients) was achieving that “film look”.  If I had a nickel every time someone asked me why their home video camera footage looked so drastically different from a movie or TV, I….you get the picture.  Basically a million things – image sensors, frame rates, optics, etc.  Everyone wants this look, including us.  We’d love nothing more than to bring this incredible video quality to our atlanta video production clients.  Over the years, the new toys have started creeping closer and closer to achieving that look and feel.  After many many years, guess what happened?   It finally arrived!

We recently purchased a Canon 7D which is actually a still camera used for photography.  Strangely enough, Canon and Nikon started adding video features to their cameras several years ago.  In 2008 the Canon 5D Mark ii came out that had amazing quality, with very crisp video images.  It wasn’t until last year that they came up with the final element to truly give it the hollywood touch.  They gave it the ability to shoot 24 frames per second.  In lay man’s terms – that is what was missing in the camera to make the footage look like that of a movie.  Since then the Canon 7D came out that does pretty much the same thing – make video look incredible.  It has been so wildly successful that it has been used to film shows like House, Saturday Night Live, some major motion pictures, commercials, music videos and other things.  It truly is amazing.  So, not wanting to miss out, we bought one back in November and have been tinkering around with it and using for some of our projects.

There are a few limitations to it – as it still is primarily a still camera but overall, it really is an incredible tool.  It has been a fun toy used to help take some great photographs to be used in motion graphic compositions, amazing time-lapse photography and then really stunning video.  After years and years of wishing/wanting/hoping and praying for an affordable camera like this…it is here…and there’s a lot more to come!

Below you can see a video that we shot entirely on our Canon 7D demonstrating the amazing image quality and beauty that it harnesses as we up the ante in terms of the production value for our videos that we produce.  We are excited about it as our atlanta video production clients’ projects will look even more amazing than before.  Leave a comment and let us know what you think about the video?  Are you ready to bring this kinda of creativity to your business or organization?

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