Sony have released an interim firmware update for the F5 and F55. This release is a maintenance release to address a number of bugs and stability issues reported by end users. As such it is probably a good idea for users upgrade to this release as soon as possible. In particular it addresses some of the issues cause by updating the camera to V1.2 and then not performing an “all reset” immediately after the update.

PMW-F5_V121_1.21_9_2013-08-02_06-45-47_firmware.zip ?60062 KB

PMW-F55_V121_1.21_8_2013-08-02_06-35-47_firmware.zip ?60049 KB

Release note_F55_F5_V1_21.pdf ?67 KB

Please make sure you read the release notes and if at all unsure perform an “all reset” immediately after updating your firmware.

I haven’t posted much recently as I have been on a lovely family vacation. However my mind never stops ticking over and I decided to have a go at making a plastic protector for the vulnerable microphone connector on the PMW-F5 and F55. This is the end result. Not only does it protect the connector but it also acts as a microphone mount, simply attach a low cost off-the-shelf mic mount using either of the two holes on the end of the bracket.

The bracket was made using a 3D printer and I shall be producing a slightly more refined version for sale in the next week. The production versions will be 3D printed in black ABS plastic and then chemically toughened. The ABS is very strong anyway and one of the great things about 3D printed parts is that they can be made hollow, so they are extremely light.The target price is $45. USD. I have a version for a bare bones F5 as well as an F5 with the Element Technica top plate. Send me a message if your interested in one using the contact form.

So I finally managed to find 5 buyers for the lovely Zunow 16-28mm FZ lens. This means that XDCAM-USER readers can get them for the bargain price of 3,800 Euros. That’s less than half of the list price (7650 Euro). Full details of the lens is here: https://www.xdcam-user.com/2013/05/zunow-16-28mm-f2-8-fz-mount-group-buy-details/

If your interested please use the Contact Form to send me a message and I’ll pass on the direct contact details of the distributor. You will be able to buy the lens direct from the distributor and will get all the usual warranties and guarantees that you would normally get with a normal purchase. The distributor is a well known and well established company that you will most likely already know.

So I got an official email this morning confirming something I knew already. The Black Magic Production 4K camera has been delayed. Apparently they have only just received the first batch of sensors for the cameras and need to do finish the software for the camera so it’s been delayed. Sadly this is not all that unusual from Black Magic.

The good news is that the pocket camera is shipping. I’m not convinced about this camera. Small super 16mm sized sensor with a Micro 4/3 lens mount so very hard to get decent wide angle lenses. It looks like the sensor might only actually have 1920 x 1080 pixels, so the resolution after de-bayer will be around 1.4K. So your giving up a lot just to have raw and ProRes. It is cheap, the price cannot be argued with, but in reality will it be a better camera than say a Sony NEX-5 or Panasonic GH3? Time will tell.

The other good news is that the Blackmagic Cinema Camera EF and MFT models will be reduced in price to US$1,995. These cameras are a bit of an ergonomic disaster in my opinion. But, for $1,995 the quality of the images you can get are very good. It’s a great way to learn about raw and raw workflows and in the right hands a very capable (if awkward) camera to use. If you looking at getting one do take a look around the web at those already using them. A lot of people are spending a lot of money on rigs, viewfinders, external batteries etc. You don’t have to buy all of this stuff, but to make the camera really useable you are going to have to spend a bit of extra cash over and above the camera only price.

XDCAM-USER.com has hit another visitor milestone this month. Despite a couple of hacking attempts (one of which resulted in the forum being down for a while and the need to do some database cleaning) the amount of traffic on the site has reached new levels.

So far this month, and the month isn’t over yet, the site has received over 2 million hits form over 55,000 visitors making 130,000 visits to the site which has served up 400,000 pages.

I’m really flattered that you all find the site so useful and I will aim to keep growing the knowledge base contained here. However it is starting to become a real chore to keep it running. As the site has become more and more popular it has become a bigger and bigger target for spammers and hackers. The site receives no external income other than a few occasional PayPal donations (for which I am thankful).  Going forwards I am going to have to investigate sponsorship and advertising on the site to help cover the running costs. This will be a shame as it will take away some of the sites independence, but it may be a necessary move just to keep it tenable.

So now the PMW-F5 and F55 have the HDCAM SR codec, also called SStP how do you work with it?

There is a plug-in for FCP-X

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/srpm-10

And plugins for Avid (PC and Mac)

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/srpa-10

Plus the SR viewer for Mac and PC:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/srviewer

The latest versions of DaVinci Resolve support SStP, so you can transcode and grade with Resolve Lite.

No support in Premiere at the moment. If you want to get the 444 SStP mode in the F5 or F55 in the camera base settings you have to set “Main Operation” to “RGB”.

First let me just remind you that the opinions posted here are mine and mine alone………….

I came across this via Facebook. Genero. The people talking about it were excited about possibly having the opportunity to produce a video for a known music artist or a TV commercial for a household brand. It’s described as a competition. You chose the artist or product, make a video and enter the contest. The winning production becomes an official video for the song or gets used as a commercial for the product. The reward is… “amazing opportunities to advance their careers and work alongside top artists and brands” plus a cash “prize” of up to $4k.

OK, at first glance this looks like a good thing, but is it? I’m not at all convinced. So you go off and put a lot of time, effort and creativity into your video and enter it in to the contest. Some of the contests get in excess of 500 entries, so your chance of winning may be small. Take a look at some of the previous winners, these have taken massive amounts of time and effort. Lets say you win. You get $4K in your pocket and can list a video for a major brand or music artist in your resume. Meanwhile, the artist or brand walks away with 100% of the rights to a cherry picked video that will become a vehicle for selling and promoting that song or product, basically it will (or at least should) make them money either directly or indirectly. There are several quotes from some of the companies involved, like this one from Adam Starr of Universal Music: “I still marvel at the quality of the winning video, that wildly exceeded expectations, and provided Universal with a valuable marketing and revenue generating asset”. I think that just about sums up this “competition”

Typically the starting price for even a basic commercial production is $15K and the sky is the limit. The winners in this competition are not the aspiring producers but the bands and multi-national companies. They get novel, creative, beautifully executed videos for a fraction of what they would normally have to pay. Looking at some of the previous winners, these video would have normally cost a company like Universal $50K+.

So what about the producers, will it lead to fame and fortune? For a start, in producing your film you don’t get to “work alongside artists and brands”. You submit a video that you make, the band or artist does not know who you are and you can’t ring them up to discuss you ideas. Maybe for a few winners it will open some doors, but doors to what? An industry that now only wants to pay $4K for commercials because if you won’t do it for that they can just run another competition. How will anyone make any money let alone fame and fortune. If it takes you a couple of weeks to make the video and remember you have to include the time it takes to come up with the concept, plan the shoot, shoot, edit and post produce (and they want broadcast quality deliverables). By the time you’ve taken out the costs of any equipment and the costs of any talent, locations or premises (even if you edit at home, that space still has a cost) the amount of money you’ll make is next to nothing.

I think this “competition” is insulting to film makers. I understand the film festival movie making industry. You make the film you want to make, to show off your skills and abilities. You (or your sponsors) own that film, any profits made come back to you. But in my opinion this is closer to a scam than a real competition because the real winners are not the entrants but Genero along with the artists and multi-nationals that get great video’s (that will make them money) for almost nothing. The principle is great, but the prize does not reflect what it costs to produce a commercial. The prize money isn’t actually a prize at all. In fact it is payment for 100% of the rights in the production. In my view the prize should be either a lot, lot bigger or also include a share of the proceeds from the profits the video makes. I urge anyone considering entering this competition to read the terms and conditions very, very carefully. If you win, you have to give up all rights in the video you produce, you won’t get anything beyond the prize money. And as for the Genero market place? Well with people giving away some very high quality productions for as little as $400 you would be better of taking your project to a conventional stock footage library. This is nothing more than a thinly disguised tender process for a commercial video production with a budget of $3K-$5K.

This is a major firmware update for the PMW-F5 and F55 cameras as well as the R5 raw recorder. It adds lots of new and exciting features including 1.3x Anamorphic de-squeeze, the HDCAM SR SStP codec, true 24p, camera and reel ID numbers. For me the most exciting inclusion is WiFi remote control of the camera. Follow the link below to go and grab your update but please please follow the instal instructions very carefully. It is essential that the R5 is updated first and this should be updated to V1.2 first, then the latest release which is V1.21

http://community.sony.com/t5/F5-F55/NEW-firmware-update-v1-2-Major-release/m-p/153943#U153943

A useful feature in many cameras is the ability to shoot time-lapse sequences without any additional equipment. Sony’s EX cameras and many of the newer shoulder mount broadcast cameras have the ability to do this using the “Interval Record” function. However the F5, F55, FS100 and FS700 don’t have this feature and at first glance it appears there is no way to shoot Time Lapse. However all is not lost as these cameras have a function called S&Q Motion. S&Q stands for Slow & Quick, so as the name implies it gives you the ability to shoot both slowly and quickly. In fact you can shoot at different frame rates between 1 frame per second and 60 frames per second. Shooting at 60fps results in slow motion when the clip plays back at the cameras base rate (normally 24p or 30p). Shooting a 1fps results in a significant speed up of between 24 and 30x depending on your playback rate. In this article I’m going to use the NTSC area rates of 24(23.98), 30(29.97) and 60(59.94)fps, but the PAL area rates of 25 and 50fps can also be used.

So you can shoot at 1fps using S&Q, this is the same as using interval record to shoot 1 frame every second… well almost, there are some subtle differences. With interval record your 1 frame is a single frame lasting 1/24th or 1/30th of a second with a pause before the next frame is taken. With S&Q, 1fps means 1 frame PER second, so that frame (and exposure) may actually last for up to a whole second depending on how your shutter is set.

If your using a shutter speed set in fractions of a second, say 1/60 then that is how long your exposure will be, 1/60th of a second, not all that dissimilar to using interval record, a 1/60th of a second exposure followed by a gap 0f 59/60ths before the next exposure. However, if your shutter is set using degrees and is set to 180 degrees then your shutter would be open for half of that 1 second frame rate or half of a second. Then there would be a half second gap before the next frame is taken. Using a 360 degree shutter or with the shutter OFF you can get a full 1 second exposure with no gap between each exposure.

There are Pro’s and Con’s to this. This might be useful for adding motion blur to whatever your shooting, say cars at night where you want those nice long trails of light from the head and tail lights. But for a daylight shot trying to get a sensible exposure with a one second shutter is very difficult and will require a lot of ND filtering. The good news of course is that by playing with the shutter speed, either in fractions of a second or degrees we can achieve different effects. 1/1000 will give very sharp staccato action, 180 or 360 degrees will give blurry dream like motion. Generally degrees will work best for longer exposures and fractions for more normal exposure duration’s. If you are unsure it’s probably better to just stick with 1/30th or 1/60th. I like the little bit of extra blur that 1/30th gives.

But what if a one second interval is shorter than you would ideally like? Well you can always speed up the clip further in the edit suite. Speeding up a 1fps S&Q clip by 200% results in the direct equivalent of a 2 second interval, 400% = 4 seconds, 800% = 8 seconds and so on. If your using a PMW-F5 or F55 a single 64GB SxS card will allow you to shoot 1fps HD for around 30 hours, plenty long enough for most time-laspe applications. The FS100 and FS700 will go for even longer, several days with a 64GB card.

For very long time-lapse sequences I think you are probably better off using a DSLR. DSLR’s will give a larger frame size giving you more pan and scan capability in post production. You can put them on small motion control heads or tracks more easily. But the S&Q function gives you a very nice way to do simple time-lapse sequences with these cameras.