I recently picked up a Sniper from a former 1st AC and I'm still getting the hang of it. It has been great for distance stuff.
I need to get the hang of the smoke iris as I find the laser gets heavily affected by smoke effect/fog and often I don't have the time to play around with it.
I definitely feel for handheld/Close up work, a cinetape/cineRT is still probably the better tool as the laser has such a small area that its reading and as Gabe stated above, you could be pointed to an area that you don't want to be reading.
If you were doing a shot where the actor walked in from a distance to a close up, depending on where the Sniper is positioned and its angle off the lens axis and you lined up the laser on the actor at the distance, by the time they get into the close up, the laser could be pointing way off.
But I did a fashion shoot with the sniper where we had models walking towards camera, on a 24-290zm, operator zooming in and out, models walking different at different speeds. Multiple cameras covering action so no visible marks on the floor, and I had the sniper reading them from 90' away all the way to their end position.
I recently picked up a Sniper from a former 1st AC and I'm still getting the hang of it. It has been great for distance stuff.
I need to get the hang of the smoke iris as I find the laser gets heavily affected by smoke effect/fog and often I don't have the time to play around with it.
I definitely feel for handheld/Close up work, a cinetape/cineRT is still probably the better tool as the laser has such a small area that its reading and as Gabe stated above, you could be pointed to an area that you don't want to be reading.
If you were doing a shot where the actor walked in from a distance to a close up, depending on where the Sniper is positioned and its angle off the lens axis and you lined up the laser on the actor at the distance, by the time they get into the close up, the laser could be pointing way off.
But I did a fashion shoot with the sniper where we had models walking towards camera, on a 24-290zm, operator zooming in and out, models walking different at different speeds. Multiple cameras covering action so no visible marks on the floor, and I had the sniper reading them from 90' away all the way to their end position.
So it definitely has its place in your kit.