A DAY ON a No-Budget Feature

I recently spent a day on the set of a terrific no-budget feature film, shooting on a Nikon Z8 as well as a Canon R5C and Fujifilm X-H2. We were capturing RAW on all cameras apart from the Fujifilm (ProRes). From a cameraman's / filmmaker's point of view, my takeaways were the following:

Storage: we shot between 4-5TB/day across two cameras, which considering we were using RAW is not as bad as I'd expected. This did mean we had to carry around around 10x CFExpress Type B cards, which was expensive compared to, for instance, SSDs for an external recorder.

Power: luckily, we were shooting interiors with a mains supply, however we would have saved time with a huge power bank / adapter rather than messing around with individual plugs and adapters for each device. We were mostly USB-C reliant so this would not have been hard to do.

Gear: overall the chosen kit worked well, however there were small issues that were annoying such as the Fujifilm X-H2 cage made by Neewer that didn't allow for the battery compartment to be opened up while rigged. We fixed this eventually by buying a modular cage (Manfrotto MVCSS) rather than a fixed one. This highlights the importance of testing out your rig beforehand, even if you are confident it will work.

Codecs: the ProRes HQ LOG on the X-H2 looked great, and at first we couldn't see much difference with the RAW coming out of the Nikon & Canon, although it didn't withstand as much colour grading in post. This was indeed a very heavy grade.

DIT solution: our chosen DIT fell through at the last minute, and we should have brought along a backup solution such as a powerful laptop with card station and hard drives to allow for immediate ingest, even if to have an extra copy of the footage.

Flickering: as we were shooting inside, there were some issues with light flicker although easily fixed once brought into DaVinci Resolve - the Deflicker tool in Resolve can be found at **OpenFX > Filters > Deflicker (Resolve Revival section)**

Lighting: due to moving fast, we didn't seem to use the soft box-based lights very much, relying on some portable Neewer tubes and large GlareOne panel instead to provide large, diffused light.

Kit tags: it might have been good to have coloured stickers or similar technique on some of the lenses/batteries as it all got mixed up very quickly, this was not a huge issue but slow us down a little when mixing kit across camera systems.