At Parish Digital, we recently acquired our new baby - the Red Komodo. It’s a powerful yet petite Cinema Camera that shoots 6k RAW video, and the images it produces can be so incredible that it sometimes surprises even us. But despite its proficiency in capturing stunning images, we often find ourselves leaving it behind in favor of “lesser” cameras for many of our shoots, and it may seem a bit counterintuitive, but this decision to leave our most powerful, highest quality piece of equipment at the studio can actually yield a better finished product.

Parish Digital deals with a broad range of clients and projects that call for a variety of tactics, and equipment to accomplish successfully. If money, time, and crew size were no object, our new Red camera might be the best fit for most of our projects, but unfortunately we don’t all live in that dream world, so camera selection continues to be a consideration on every project we take on. For pre-planned shoots in controllable environments, choosing the Komodo is a no-brainer, but when we need to be a bit more “run-n-gun”, our 1Dx mark ii DSLR cameras with their impressive autofocus and impeccable straight-out-of-camera image quality may be a better choice. If we have a tight turnaround on an interview shoot, our C300 mark ii with its professional audio inputs delivers not only high quality images, but great audio without the need to sync in post, allowing for expedited delivery to the client. There’s also the consideration of file sizes and post production processing time. Both of the tools I mentioned above produce relatively small files that can be quickly finished and delivered, as opposed to the Komodo, who’s files average about 6.5GB per minute, all of which need to be processed and color graded before delivery.

So as you can see, there are many considerations to address with equipment selection for any given project, and while we at Parish Digital may not always bring our “best” camera onto your project, we will certainly bring the camera that will produce the best result for the job, and to the end viewer of all our videos, that’s the most important thing.