Cinematographer Notes

I managed to align the camera to the mattebox baseplate.    When I was at B&H and no one could find anything that would help me center the camera without adding 3/4 of an inch of height,  I gave a call to Jan Crittenden over at Panasonic and asked if she had any ideas.  Panasonic usually deals with Vocas however and she said their baseplates are side to side adjustable.  Apparently Panasonic couldn’t center the tripod mount on the HPX because there’s a circuit board in the way.  B&Hemployees helped me look through every single part on all the baseplates on the website and no one had anything that was designed just for this purpose.  It seems a simple enough task but finally in the end, the fellow at B&H told me I should go to Home Depot and make it myself.

That’s when I got really frustrated and started to examine the Chrosziel baseplate. I own a Chrosziel 450-10 setup for the HVX200.  For it to work with the HPX I had to remove riser plates within the baseplate.  It’s not an obvious adjustment nor is it something I could do without going to home depot.  I had to replace the screws inside it with shorter ones.  It worked and with the addition of a bogen photo tripod slider plate, the height and centering is just right.  Now the camera and those 2 plates sit on the redrock dovetail but can come off and have the mattebox added right to it if I shoot without the adaptor.

So it’s pretty efficient.  I’ve also picked up a 2975Storm case and plucked it so that the camera rides fully built in the case.  This will save at least a half hour of camera setup time and free me up to do other things rather than hang around explaining to the 1st A.C. where everything is and how it fits together.

Friday’s shoot just got cancelled because of impending weather.  I had the day off but now I just got called to go scout for a different shoot.   We role for Until the End of the World on Saturday.  I’ll be sure to take some pics and give a full report.