Tutorial

Naim Audio

Naim Audio came to us in need of a Setup Guide video for their soon to be released CD / Media Server, called Uniti Core.

Naim as a brand has a strong, minimalist look, making the viewer focus on the beauty of the unit, and not the surroundings. Even though this video is a setup guide, we felt that visually the video shouldn’t differ from this principle, we had to develop a concept where form and function were both equal.

To achieve the look, we used a solid piece of glass suspended above a black material background. We then closed our lighting down so that only the unit was exposed, and mounted our camera to a Combo stand which allowed us to achieve the front on, 45 degree, and birdseye shots.

We set up our lighting so that it was only exposing the different objects placed on the glass – we were aiming for little to no light drop off onto the material. Using histograms we confirmed that the surrounds had dropped into a black > super black range. We used our Canon C100 MKii as our camera body for the shoot. With a base ISO of 850, it gave us a lot of light to play with, allowing us to stop down further and get greater sharpness out of the lenses without having to introduce too much image noise.

We paired the C100 Mkii to Schnieder tilt-shift optics which gave us incredible reproduction accuracy, making the Uniti Core look perfectly square. It also gave us the benefits of shifting our focus plane so that we could have everything in focus when looking at the Uniti from an angle.