Films with any budget at all have always found that field monitors make things easier (or possible), but often times, as no/low budget filmmakers, we have not been able to afford these pricey setups. For me, the coolest thing that I love about OnLocation from a monitoring perspective is that it allows you to have a truly high quality field monitor, regardless of location and power (limited only to your battery, of course). It does, so much more, but it sure is nice, as a director, to be able to watch that monitor and know if something is working out or not before you've spent too much time on a take. (And for 35mm lens adapters, it’s absolutely impossible to get a clean shot without a good monitor of some sort, so this is an absolute requirement for the use of these packages.) No more sharing that eye piece with the camera man (awkward) or trying to get a decent idea of shot composition, exposure, color, and lighting from that tiny little LCD screen on the HVX.
OnLocation CS4's easier to find and work with Vectorscope.
As I mentioned earlier, the new redesign of the interface is very different and much simpler. The CS3 version I've used on a PC required that I scroll down the page to get to the different controls with myriads of dials and buttons. This makes sense for folks used to using the analog equipment in most rack-mounted studios, but just didn’t cut the mustard in a modern, digital production workflow. CS4 has greatly simplified and taken much of the guess work out of OnLocation. Everything is readily accessible and all on one screen. No scrolling or searching for tools. (Or trying to figure out asinine keyboard shortcuts which no one can remember and someone forgot to bring the manual!) It's all right there. Even the unenlarged field monitor seems to have been upsized from previous versions. It's sure nice to see what you're shooting, isn't it?
Speaking of streamlining, as an amazingly new feature for CS4, you can actually label “placeholder” shots, so that all of your shots will have the same names as they do on the shot list. Just save an OnLocation file with your takes labeled, then open up the laptop in the field, click on that "take," record your footage, and OnLocation will assign that footage to your label with all the notes attached you've put there. Now the DP and the assistant cameraman will be just as aware of the shots that still need to be acquired as the AD or script supervisor is. (And your editor will sing your praise, because the shoot never got “too busy” for people to label the takes properly!)
As OnLocation has been tightly streamlined in its look, simplicity, and behavior, it makes it an even more powerful tool (and an ace up your sleeve) on shoot day.
Onlocation CS4's Waveform and Histogram tools are also easier to find and work with than in CS3.
This is another place where Adobe’s software separates itself from FCP as the entire FCS package has nothing like OnLocation.
The one thing to watch out for, though, is to make sure you have a port on your laptop that will work with whatever output your camera is using. For example: The Panasonic DVX100B has a firewire output. As such, you would want to make sure that you are installing OnLocation on a machine that has firewire inputs, otherwise OnLocation would be rendered all but impotent. (And Mac users don’t get off the hook on watching out for this. For some fiendish reason, Apple decided that firewire wasn’t really that necessary and shipped out a whole slew of laptops in 2008 that had no firewire port. Gone are the days were Mac people could just assume that their next Mac would have the logical ports like firewire without verifying before purchase.)
