One of the many advanced tools built into every Odyssey / Apollo is the Spot Meter. The Spot Meter is a very advanced, yet very easy to use tool for checking levels within video images using the Odyssey or Apollo OLED panel. Spot Meter can be set to display IRE values, 8 Bit or 10 bit values, as desired.
These tools give the operator the ability to precisely verify colors in a given image, check shadow and highlight areas, and even match cameras for multi-camera shoots. This is a very precise tool that allows you to meter down to one specific pixel, or average an area of 64 or 256 pixels. Most importantly, you can quickly check any area of the image, without leaving the Odyssey or Apollo. There is no longer a need to walk into the scene to take a reading.
You can easily set up to 8 points of reference and ensure each subject's face is lit appropriately. Any spot, in any video image can be checked, as it only takes a finger to move a spot to anywhere in the scene.
The “Compare Two” mode is especially helpful. In this mode, you have two spots to use, and a chart with details for each spot, as well as two Color Swatches. These allow you to instantly check to see if the two spots are evenly lit, and if the colors are precisely the same, which is very important for commercial production.
One of the greatest advantages of the spot meter is the ability to check luminance across an entire image, which enables checking a chroma-key image very easy. Another very important use for Spot Meter is for camera matching. With Odyssey or Apollo, you can check up to four cameras while in Multi-Stream Monitoring mode, or in Multi-Stream Recording mode using the Apollo or Apollo Option. The Odyssey allows you to view two camera sources simultaneously in many recording modes. Spot meter is a great tool and a hidden gem within every Odyssey / Apollo Product.
Filmmaker Philip Grossman has been dazzling us with haunting and revealing images and video from the Chernobyl disaster site, recently adding aerial videography to his repertoire. Videomaker was fortunate enough to sit down (at least virtually) with Philip to learn a bit more about this intriguing multi-year project and what drives him to capture this stunning imagery.
Philip Grossman: I grew up near Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and lived through that event when I was 9 years old. I believe this started my fascination with Nuclear Energy. Fast forward 32 years or so and I was working at Intercontinental Hotel group as the Director of Global Enterprise Solutions Architecture for about 7 years and just decided to take a break from “corporate America.” My then girlfriend (Update 6/1/15: now wife :-). We got married in a 300 year old abandoned church in the Chernobyl exclusion zone), Elizabeth Hanson, told me to focus on my fine art photography for a year. At that point, I had a few small gallery shows and met with the curator of the High Museum in Atlanta who said they all liked my work but there wasn’t a cohesive body. So I put on my Engineer hat (I am a graduate of the university of Colorado, Boulder with degrees in Architectural Engineering and Illumination Engineering) and tried to figure out why someone like Annie Leibovitz is more famous than Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, both great photographers and it really boiled to down to content. It's (in their case) who they photographed.
I set out to figure out what I could photograph that would be different, that few people had photographed or could photograph. And I kept coming back to Chernobyl (my family is from the Ukraine originally), so I decided that is where I would go photograph. I took my first trip in November 2011, thinking it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity and went mainly to photograph, but took a small Panasonic TM700 handicam for personal video. Three months after returning to the States, my partner Arek from Poland, who helped arrange my first visit, asked if I wanted to go back and of course I said yes, but only if we spend more then 4 days in the zone. I have now made 4 trips and spent 32 days in the zone with a 5th trip leaving on May 24 for another 12 days. I have also moved from shooting 90% stills/10% video to 98% video/2% stills. I now have a collection of 3,000 photos (I have shot well over 15,000) and about 30 hours of video with 50% being 4K. I was also the first person to fly a drone in the the Chernobyl Region almost 4 years ago.
RF: It seems that your photography and videography has not been limited to traditional means, and you've embraced technology whole-heartedly. How do you think the advancements over the last few years have influenced your artwork, and in particular, how have the changed and morphed the Chernobyl project?
PG: My father is a surgeon and my mother is an artist and I am the middle child, so I have always been pulled both by technology and art. I love how the various technologies allow me to be creative in telling a story whether it be with photos or video. The technology has allowed me to be more flexible in telling the story of Chernobyl. I switched to shooting 4K two years ago with a Sony FS700 and a Convergent Designs Odyssey 7Q. The addition of 4K has added so much detail and texture to the story telling and allowed me great flexibility when posting in HD to do pushes/pulls etc and still maintain the HD detail.