ABSTRACT
Large sensor cinema snuck up on us all. My fi rst short movies were shot on the Canon L2 Hi8 mm video camera. When I was doing doctoral work at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in the mid-to late 1990s, I enrolled in the NYU boot camp one summer, and we shot on 16 mm black and white fi lm with no sync sound-Arrifl exes that had three fi xed lenses that you could rotate into position. After that, I purchased the fi rst generation Panasonic DVX100 24p miniDV camera and shot two fi ction shorts and several documentary projects. When I consulted with reporters in Spring 2008 at The Christian Science Monitor , our budget allowed only for consumer HD cameras (a mix of Panasonic and JVC tapeless cameras), and they cost around $1,200. Before shifting to DSLRs, I shot my latest festival documentary on a Sony A1U HDV miniDV camera, a $2,200 camera, nearly the price of a Canon 5D Mark II body! And none of those cameras matched the image quality of the Canon Rebel T2i for $600!
