Leaderboard

One of the main things that’s kept me using SmallHDs as my primary monitors (though I will soon be picking up a couple of the off-brand new super bright monitors as backups) has been the ability to zoom and scale the picture, along with the addition of custom, easily changeable guides. I have found that in the past couple years, there has been a proliferation of DPs wanting to use old anamorphic lenses, sometimes producing odd aspect ratios, and then cropping down the sensor to fit the proscribed aspect ratio. On one particular show last year, we were using a 2x anamorphic lens on an Alexa Mini, cropping for 16x9, but not in the center - from the side of the frame! It was truly bizarre (horizons always were oddly bent, no straight lines existed on one side of the frame, and you had to be cognizant of where you put the actor’s face to make it not get too bendy... but that’s another story), but the biggest thing for me was that after you go to anamorphic, then crop down, you end up with a tiny box of picture in the middle of a giant black area. SmallHD’s cropping and scaling tools meant that I easily had available a crop which I could toggle on and off that gave me the picture area we were using, with only a little look around on the edges. No text, no giant black bars, just my frame blown up to full screen. I don’t see how I could commit to using a primary monitor at this point that didn’t give me at least that flexible of an option, and so far, the SmallHD has seemed to be the most intuitive, easy to use version of that.

I haven't looked at the Cine7 for a Steadicam monitor yet. Looks brighter than a lot of options (and not as bright as others, both more expensive and cheaper). For a pure Steadicam monitor, it's probably feature overkill, but if you want a Steadicam monitor that you can set up to pull off the sled and use as an operator's monitor, it's probably perfect.