Hurl Rigs

A friend of mine, NYC based cinematographer Jon Miller, attended the ICG party at Sundance this year and was kind enough to bring back some images and info. Most of note, Shane Hurlbut, ASC was there showing some of his HDSLR solutions and sharing information with colleagues. I hope Mr. Hurlbut doesn't mind if I relay some of it here. If not, I'll be happy to remove this post immediately.

Here's the Hurl Hardware:

Funky Blue Handles, Z-Finder, Baseplate with 15mm Rods, Remote Focus

Custom Machined Aluminum Cage that looks you can mount just about anything to.

Cage with Handheld Rig, On-board Monitor, FIZ, and V-Mount Battery in the back

Other Hurl advice and tricks:

Use Twixtor for 30p to 24p conversions. I haven't tried this but I've heard from several users this is an excellent, though time intensive solution.

Use Cineform Neoscene to open up the Canon codec and turn it into a quality video file. There's some very interesting information about this posted here on the Cineform Insider blog.

Another trick he uses to emulate the quality of a film stock is to shoot some 35mm film of an evenly lit gray card that fills the frame. This picks up the grain characteristics and the gray is easily removed in After Effects. This is then composited on the SLR footage which helps to take the curse off the digital. This is actually a fairly old trick and I remember doing this in college though I shot 16 against a white wall and it didn't work nearly as well. The things we do for that film look! I wonder if once digital has really nailed it if people won't suddenly be nostalgic for that crappy old video look.. Makes you wonder.

In the spirit of sharing information I think this is really fantastic stuff. Mr. Hurlbut seems like a very generous guy and has already contributed a lot to the HDSLR filmmaking community. Looking forward to seeing more of his solutions and inventions.

UPDATE:

Stuart Allman of Illuma Blog sent me this great post that has more information on the rigs and Shane Hurlbut's advice on using them. Thanks Stuart!