Otsuki Naoki is a part time lecturer in the video department at Tohoku University of Art and Design, and recently served as visual effects supervisor on a student film project called “Fisherman and the Fungus Man ” about a young man and an old man making a discovery together in the woods.  

Naoki and his students used a CION production camera to capture the natural splendor of the landscape in Yamagata, Japan. “ It was a great opportunity for us to work with CION and to capture such beautiful scenery in 4K. Although our project was eventually scaled down to 2K, it still had the look and feel of 4K high resolution.” Naoki shared. “Using the CION, I was able to experience first-hand what a solid and professional cinema camera it is. Based on our experience, CION is equally adept at capturing 4K Raw and 4K ProRes 4444 both at 23.976 fps, I’m amazed with the beautiful images and the cinematic looks!”

Most of the CION footage was captured outdoors, and the amazing expression of greens and realistic sense of each scene far exceeded Naoki’s expectations. “We were able to capture the beautiful detailed tones in the shadows and the ideal color, and the trees in an overcast forest were outstanding. The contrast of the images was remarkable,” He didn’t bring a separate battery pack, but powered CION via a power converter running from his car. The CION was connected to a Macbook Pro using Thunderbolt to capture 4K RAW at 23.976fps and an AJA SSD 512 Pak to record in ProRES 4444 with an external monitor for previewing footage. The post production workflow included Adobe Premiere for editing and Nuke for compositing. 

“I’m so impressed with the performance of CION. It was so obvious that the global shutter with built in IR-Cut filter and low-pass optical filter made the images more accurate and better looking.” Naoki explained “CION performs not only as a high end 4K cinema camera but in a light body form factor makes it very easy to handle. I’m pleased that AJA released such a good camera at such a good price.”

Using CION with AJA CinemaDNG files for a RAW workflow also saved a lot of time traditionally required to export or transcode to other formats. “CION is a great camera to use for film projects. We used to spend lots of time transcoding image sequences into other formats for VFX, but AJA CinemaDNG was natively compatible with our workflow as it is an open format.  That is the workflow we want.”

“I have worked with many AJA products at different post production houses when I was working as a freelancer, mainly with desktop products like KONA and Io and Mini-Converters, but this was the first time I used the CION. I believe I made the right decision as this camera gave us everything we wanted. It was easy to learn and use, and helped us complete the project in a short period successfully with a beautiful cinematic look,”  concluded Naoki.