Upcoming Masterclasses + Open Days

There are several Masterclasses and Open Days on offer this month from various UK dealers.

One of our local west London dealers, Prokit, is holding a free Sony PMW-200 Camcorder Masterclass with cinematographer Alister Chapman at its Chiswick showroom on Thursday 21st March.

The Sony PMW-200, which records at 50Mbps, has proved to be a popular camera, and Christina regularly does training with it. It benefits from having half-inch sensors, whereas its competitors in the compact camcorder market, like the Canon XF305 and Panasonic HPX250, have 1/3-inch sensors.

The seminar will cover various aspects of shooting on the PMW-200, including:

- Overview of the features and workflow of Sony's XDCAM format

- Advanced shooting modes such as slow motion and 50P recording, interval recording (timelapse) and the PMW-200's cache record function, plus various shutter functions.

- How to get the best from the sensor and format: Understanding Picture profiles, detail and gain levels, gammas, matrix settings

- Advice on archiving workflow

Next week Chapman is doing a Sony PMW-200 Masterclass at Visual Impact in Bristol on Wednesday 27th March, where he’ll also be discussing the PMW-100 and PMW-150.

On the same day, Visual Impact will also have a Sony PMW-F5 Hands-on Day in London, at its offices in Teddington.

Chapman is also doing daily, one-hour overviews of the F5/F55 looking at 4K, colour space, raw and workflow at NAB in Las Vegas, 8th – 11th April, and is holding workshops in Helsinki, Vilnius, Riga in March and April.

CVP (Creative Video) is also holding a Sony PMW-F5 and PMW-F55 Open Day at its Glasgow offices, with two Informal Drop-in Sessions: one in the afternoon (12pm to 5pm); and one in the evening (5pm to 7pm) on Wednesday 27th.

Incidentally, Alister also conducts expeditions to film the Northern Lights in Norway, and to chase storms and tornados in the US (New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and other states in the tornado belt), with the next one coming up from April 13th to April 20th. These include tuition on how to get the best shots of these natural phenomena.

Have a look at his beautiful timelapse footage of the Northern Lights embedded below:

By David Fox