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Reader SurveyGenesis Hits TV
Nov 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
BC's Night Stalker is distinguished as the first television series to rely on Panavision's Genesis digital imaging camera. Robert Primes, ASC, currently shares DP duties with Rick Maguire, and is a longtime HD veteran. He emphasizes that Genesis required financial and emotional leaps of faith by producers, considering Panavision has aimed the camera primarily at the feature film crowd. But, he says, it was the right decision, given the show's dark and mysterious subject matter.
Panavison’s Genesis digital imaging camera allowed the Night Stalker crew to shoot the show’s dark subject matter in natural light and still retain fine image detail.
“It probably would be cheaper to shoot this show using film,” Primes says. “And the camera certainly poses challenges in terms of its size, working handheld or Steadicam, and it requires a bigger lens kit. Plus, we still need a film camera for our high-speed work at this point. But having said all that, since this is a show that roams the night and shadows, dealing with horror and mystery, it was the best possible choice. We can shoot in entirely natural light at night and see everything. I believe that to be unprecedented with any previous digital or film camera. It's simply the best low-light cinematography instrument I have ever encountered.”
Primes says the camera was built for those working film-style, and therefore, it does without many image manipulation controls. For Night Stalker, however, filmmakers restored many of those features using Panavision's new gamma correction software — a tool that permits Primes to alter curves on the monitor via a laptop, capture those alterations on flash memory drives, and color-correct dailies on set.
Mat Beck, the show's visual effects supervisor from Entity FX, Santa Monica, Calif., adds Genesis has fit in seamlessly with the show's digital effects pipeline.
“We ended up working 4:2:2, and we found we can get good mattes with either green or bluescreen,” Beck says. “We still need the film camera for high-speed elements, but for everything else, this format works great. It gives an amazing amount of detail if you need it for the plates. When we shoot a plate, we know for a fact we are getting what we see on our calibrated monitor.”
