What kind of video equipment do you use to film your gear and make gifs/vids of it? And what post-production, if any, do you do to it afterwards? Thanks!
Hey, thank you for your question! For most of my filmed work in recent years, I worked with the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K EF. The lens, I most often use on it is an old Carl Zeiss Planar 1,4/50mm. There are some downsides to this camera: the internal battery is abysmally bad (basically useless) and the sensor is pretty noisy and only goes up to ISO800. It also can’t shoot anything above 30fps. There are two HUGE benefits to this camera though, when it comes to filming CRT screens: the sensor is configured to scan as global shutter, which means it scans all the pixels of the image at the same time, compared to scanning line-by-line (rolling shutter) as most CMOS cameras these days do (even some extremely expensive cinema cameras). The other benefit is, that the camera can scan at a 360° degree shutter mode, which means the sensor is scanning for very close to 1/25th of a second when filming 25fps (for 50Hz, 75Hz, 100 Hz screens), or 1/30rd when filming 30fps. The BMPC4k will also experience a huge price drop, now as the new Pocket4K hit the market, which is cheap, smaller, has better low-light capabilities, exchangeable batteries etc. (but no global shutter).
Another alternative would be to get one of the last few CCD cameras which could film HD (actually usually HDV2 1080i which is 1440*1080 with PAR stretched to 1920*1080 for playback) like the Sony HVR-Z1U, as all CCD video cameras like these usually had global shutter.
In my experience it is very hard to film a CRT screen at this level of quality with a rolling-shutter camera (most DSLRs, phones etc) even if properly synced. There are some tricks though. What I often did was film at 12,5 fps with a third party firmware like magic lantern, and played back the signal on the screen with half the frame rate and later played it back at double the speed. This way the rolling shutter is open for multiple cycles of the CRT beam which helps even things out. This GIF was filmed that way back in the day (AUG 2015), using a EOS 550D with Magic Lantern:
For post-production I go though the usual steps as most video productions. Happily the BMPC4k records in different quality levels of ProRes (RAW is overkill for my editing setup), so you can directly start working in an intermediate format. I usually film in ProRes422 or ProRes422(HQ). Sometimes I film in 4K, even when delivering in HD so I can denoise at the sensor’s native resolution and then interpolate down to 1080p. For denoising I use NEAT (at a temporal filter radius of 2 to 5), which in most cases gives me much better results than anything else I tested. For color I mostly work with AE CS6′ internal stuff, and very rarely go through the rather time consuming DaVinci Resolve workflow. I also sometimes make use of Filmconvert Pro to stylize my color in a film stock way, after basic color grading. I rarely use grain though, as bit rates of most online platforms still simply can’t handle the detail properly and you end up with additional compression artifacts instead of grain.
When working with my phone, I use apps like Filmic Pro, Pro HDR X, Camera+ etc. There are also some other cameras I use from time to time. I try to build up a wide variety of different cameras for different applications and aesthetics. Sadly missing in this image, is my favorite snapshot camera, a glitchy noname USB stick camera my father bought maybe 10 years ago in Shanghai. Images of that camera can be found here: fornaxvoid.com/voidnet/usbcam/
