Throughout May and June Lemac was proud to supply and support the hugely successful and educational Geoff Boyle (FBKS) RAW Workshops - an ACS special event presented in six 6 cities across Australia.
We always welcome the opportunity to support ACS events and give the society’s members access to the latest equipment and information in the ACS’ very well organized and inclusive environments. These particular workshops made the most of Lemac’s great range of cameras – the largest in Australia – displaying and shooting comparison tests on our Sony F65, Sony F55, RED Epic Production Kit, Blackmagic 2K Cinema Camera, as well as Canon’s C500 and the Arri Alexa.
At the core of these workshops was an understanding of what it means to shoot RAW as opposed to shooting any kind of compressed video format; the advantages that come from doing so; how to make the most of the advantages, and how a DOP can ensure their intentions are clear and maintained throughout grading and mastering of a production. At the Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane workshops, careful time was spent in grading sessions with the expert and much appreciated assistance of Warren Eagles and Fergus Hally.
As leaders in the industry, Lemac strives to bring the latest and greatest technologies to it’s customers, and so we were very proud to be able to tick so many boxes for Geoff and the ACS in supplying the range of cameras required for these workshops – as well as a lot of the infrastructure required during shoot / back-up and grade - bringing the grading sessions to live monitors in front of the session audiences.
Attendees of the sessions were encouraged to be hands-on at every opportunity and to take part during the shooting section of the workshops – where Geoff would construct and light a scene with skin tones and reference charts & materials to create a wide exposure range. He was concentrating on an under-exposure range of 4 stops, up to correct exposure, as the general focus for these tests was the low light performance and noise level of the various cameras’ RAW images. Being involved in the shooting of the tests helped everyone best understand the on-screen comparison that followed as Geoff drew conclusions from the differences between cameras. Some of these tests will be on-show in full 4K at the Lemac SMPTE exhibition stand in Sydney and will be posted online on our Vimeo channel vimeo.com/lemac page shortly after. In the meantime here is a quick comparison of some of the cameras put together by Colourist Warren Eagles, on his Vimeo page: https://vimeo.com/69530462