We’ve been shooting a lot with the new Contour cameras – much like the Go Pro though with a more sports-friendly form factor – and this image gets to the heart of the matter. We mounted, or rather Joe Case our Second Unit DP actually mounted the camera onto the bat itself. Cool imagery, but the compression artifacts are from the footage – not jpeg compression in the posted image. My response to the shot is, “Great, now let’s reshoot it with a real camera.” Ok, but how?
A DSLR might look better, but attaching it to the end of a baseball bat is probably not feasible – I’d be very worried that anemic 1/4 20 thread on the bottom of the camera would just rip out when the bat swings (and yes, we shot that). You could use an SI-2K, but then you’d be tethered. And frankly if you take a look at an SI-2K rig Guy Ritchie used for a recent Nike spot, it isn’t exactly a comparable solution to the Contour. More on that here: Guy Ritchie NIke Spot
The answer might be this new industrial camera from Allied Vision Technologies
It uses the same Kodak KAI-02150 CCD chip as the Ikonoskop ACam dII and because it is a CDD – that means no jello wobble – which is completely terrible on these little sports cameras.
It’s on my to shoot list.
