When you think of cine lenses then there are several brands that immediately come to mind. Zeiss, Arri, Cooke and Angenieux are probably the most familiar names but there are many others too. One brand I have been looking at more and more recently is Schneider.
Schneider Kreuznach have been making lenses since 1913. Based in Kreuznach in Germany they have long been know for their innovative designs and they won an Oscar in 2001 for Technical Achievement for their Super-Cinelux motion picture lenses.
A few years ago I met one of their lens engineers at NAB. I don’t think I have ever met a man as passionate about a lens design before or since. Every Schneider lens that I have ever used has been brilliant. They always seem to have near zero breathing, are always extremely solidly built and produce great images. So when I got a call from Manfrotto, the UK distributor to see if I would like a chance to play with some of the new Xenon FF (Full Frame) lenses I grabbed the opportunity.
Another view of the 50mm Schneider Xenon FF lens.
The Xenon FF lenses are cine style lenses available with either Canon, Nikon or PL mounts. The mounts can be changed should you need to switch mounts at a later date. They are priced to directly compete with the Zeiss compact primes. At the moment there are only 3 lenses available, a 35mm, 50mm and 75mm, all are T2.1. In the near future there will also be a 25mm and 100mm T2.1 as well as an 18mm T2.4 Yum Yum! I’d love to have one of those for my Northern Lights or Storm Chasing expeditions. They are all the same size, have a 100mm front diameter, all have a 95mm lens thread. This means that swapping lenses during a shoot is straight forward as you don’t have to change Matte Box donuts or re-position the follow focus if you’re using one. Being Full Frame lenses and rated for 4K these should be a great match with the Sony A7s.
I got to play with a 35mm and 50mm with EF mount and decided to try them on my full frame A7s shooting in HD as well as taking a few still photos (which are the equivalent to 4.5K) on a cloudy and rainy day.
14 blade iris and EF mount on the 35mm Xenon FF.
Straight out of the box you cannot help but be impressed by the build quality. These are substantial lenses, weighing in at around 1.25kg each with the EF mount. I could not find any plastic on these lenses, they look built to last.
The focus scale is large and easy to read, each lens being individually calibrated. Focus travel is a full 300 degrees. Even as you get to the far end of the focus ring the distances are still nicely spaced. From 9ft(3m) to infinity is around 100 degrees. Compare that to most DSLR lenses where the same focus range might be compressed into just 5 or 10 degrees and you can see that precise focus is much easier. Although sometimes a very large focus travel can make focus pulls a little harder simply because or the large distance the focus ring has to be turned. But I’ll take a big focus throw lens over small throw any day.
The lenses have 14 curved iris blades giving a very round aperture even when stopped right down. I love peering into these lenses at the aperture blades as they are a work of art (but really hard to take a photo of). You can also see in the photo that the coatings of the lens are a distinct orange colour.
Photo taken with the 50mm Xenon FF. Click on the image to enlarge or view at original resolution.
In practice the lenses did not disappoint. It did seem a bit odd to have such a large and heavy lens on the diminutive A7s, but as image quality starts with the lens a good lens can make all the difference. I shot at various apertures from wide open at T2.1 down to about T8 and didn’t notice any significant change in resolution across the range (I took photos as well as video to check the lens performance).
The lenses do tend to flare a little bit, the 35mm more than the 50mm, but I thought the flares were quite pleasing, others may disagree. Take a look at the video to get an idea of what they are like. There was a bit more flare at T2.1 compared to T2.8 or T4 on both lenses.
I did some big focus pulls to see how much breathing there was and as with all the Schneider lenses I’ve used breathing was very minimal. There is some breathing, these are not like the Cine-Xenars which have virtually zero breathing, but the breathing really is small.
Frame grab, shooting through trees. 35mm Xenon FF and A7s.
Another test shot was to shoot some tree branches silhouetted against the sky to check for CA and colour fringing. Basically I can’t see any. Maybe right out in the very corners of the frame there is the tiniest bit of CA, but you really have to hunt for it.
Shopping basket frame grab. 35mm Xenon FF. I love the smoothness to the highlights.
Colour wise there is no obvious colour shift, if anything perhaps very, very slightly warm. As expected the lenses are very sharp and crisp, from corner to corner, but not excessively so. I found that the images contained a lot of detail but had a pleasing roundness too them that I really like. I shot a chrome shopping basket and the reflections of the bright chrome look really nice. I think this is a combination of a little bit of flare without excessive sharpness. I think it’s a very nice natural look. This can be one of the benefits of a video lens over a stills lens. Stills lenses must be incredibly sharp to work with 24 or 36 mega pixel sensors. Sometimes this results is a super sharp image that lacks character. Arguably if you start with a very sharp image you can always soften it a bit in post, but sometimes it’s nice to start off with a more rounded image. Look at how popular Cooke lenses are, they are well known for their rounded rather than super sharp images.
As expected from a 14 blade iris the bokeh is very creamy and smooth. Both near and far out of focus areas look very good indeed. Out of focus edges are smooth and don’t show any obvious double edges or other distortions.
It’s really easy to get a very shallow DoF with a full frame sensor. Xenon FF 50mm and A7s.
Take a look at the video for a better idea of the lens flares and the overall image quality. I really like the look you get from these lenses and wouldn’t mind a set of them for myself. I feel they have a lot in common with Cooke lenses, but at a much more affordable price. I hope to test them further in the near future and to a wider variety of scenes. I suspect they will be very good on skin tones and faces.
So I have had my A7s for 10 days now. I took it on holiday with me shooting both stills and video, getting a feel for the camera in a wide range of situations from brilliant sunshine to shooting under candlelight.
It has been an absolute delight using it, with one small caveat: No ND filters built in and boy, does this camera need ND filters! I see that there are now some lens adapters with ND faders built in from Fotodiox and HolyManta. I hope to test these soon, but these ND adapters are dumb adapters so only for fully manual lenses. So a set of front of lens ND’s or a good ND fader is essential to get the best from the A7s.
Lens wise I don’t have the greatest range of full frame lenses. I have my Samyang 24, 35 and 85mm full frame primes which work really well with the camera and the Sony 28-70mm f3.5-f5.6 kit lens and some old f1.4 nikkors. Actually the kit lens has really surprised me, for what it is, it does give a nice image. Almost all my lenses are Canon EF mount so I have been using an adapter. The one I have is the Commlite Full frame E to EF smart adapter, which has worked perfectly (it supports a wider range of lenses than my early model metabones adapter). For some longer focal lengths I’ve been playing with the new Tamron 16-300mm APS-C lens. One side note is that if you use an APS-C lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, in most cases the image circle will then fill the full frame sensor. I will be testing this further and posting some sample images soon. This might be handy for 4K video when you really need to use the full sensor.
Anyway, back to the camera. I had forgotten how nice full frame can be to work with. For photo’s the shallow DoF is a delight. For video you have much greater control over your DoF. As the camera is 3200 ISO you can shoot in the dark with ease and get very natural looking images without having to add extra light. SLog2 is great for capturing a huge dynamic range video. Today and tomorrow I am pushing the Slog2 though some torture and exposure tests to find the exposure sweet spot for Slog2 and 8 bit recordings. I’m also developing some LUT’s to use with the camera and I’ll have a full workflow guide to slog2 on the A7s in the next couple of weeks.
I really love that this little camera can shoot video that is of really remarkably good quality. Most people don’t realise your shooting video with it. It’s really quite scary just how good the video is, it’s starts you thinking… do I need an F5 when the video from the A7s is so good? But then when I started to set up the A7s for my Slog2 torture tests and added a monitor, the battery to power the monitor, rods, matte box, external recorder etc it soon turned into a frankenstien monster of a camera rig. The F5 is so much nicer to use in this respect. For casual shooting, covert filming or as a grab camera the A7s is pretty incredible and I will use it for a lot of things, but it’s not a replacement for my F5/R5.
One very nice feature of the A7s is the silent shutter stills mode. In this mode the camera makes use of the sensors electronic shutter rather that the cameras mechanical curtain shutter. This is great for time-lapse as you won’t wear out the mechanical shutter. The only down side is that when I use a DSLR for time-lapse I often make use of the large frame size from a 24MP or more sensor to re-frame or pan and scan the shot in post. The A7s is only 12.2MP or 4,240 x 2,832 pixels so very little room for re-framing in a 4K production, although not too bad for an HD programme. I wish the vanilla A7 had this feature, it would make it a great time-lapse camera. One application I’m very excited about is using the A7s to shoot the northern lights in both time-lapse and real time next year during my Northern Lights expeditions and workshops.
Keep an eye out for my Slog2 guide in the next week or so where I’ll document my findings on how to get the very best from the A7s. It’s an amazing little camera. Can’t wait for the 4K recording options for the camera to become a reality. Maybe we will find out more at IBC.
As the owner of a Sony AX100, which is a really great little 4K and HD camcorder I wasn’t really all that excited when I saw the first prototype of the X70 at Broadcast Asia back in June. You see in the past Sony have done this many times, taken a high end consumer camcorder, updated the firmware, added a handle and then sold it for a higher price as a pro camcorder. In the past, there has in reality been little difference between the cheaper consumer model and the more expensive pro version.
The handgrip on the Sony PXW-X70
The PXW-X70 is different. This is much more than an AX100 with new firmware. For a start the body of the camera is quite different. The right hand side of the X70 is quite different to the AX100. It has a much fatter hand grip. This makes the camera much easier to hold comfortably for long periods. It also makes space for a full size HDSDI output and a full size HDMI output. But the differences don’t stop there.
On the top of the hand grip there is a large assignable button that is normally set to act as a control for the focus magnification function. This button falls immediately under your index finger when your shooting. In front of this is a new larger and easier to use zoom rocker and then in front of that is another assignable button, this one set as a one push auto iris button – very nice!
The back of the handgrip and the small joystick.
At the back of the handle there is a small joystick that ends up under your thumb (just where it needs to be). This joystick can be used to navigate through the cameras menu system. So, without taking your hand out of the hand grip you can check focus, zoom in and out, set your exposure and go through the menu system. If only it was this easy on all of Sony’s cameras! Ergonomically this camera is really good, especially when you consider how small it is.
The camera has a nice 12x stabilised, optical zoom lens, behind which sits a 1 inch 20 megapixel sensor. In video mode about 14 million pixels are used, so even in 4K (there will be a paid 4K upgrade option next year) there are more pixels than needed for full resolution. Rather than let this extra resolution go to waste you can activate Sony’s “clear image zoom” function that works seamlessly with the optical zoom to give you a 24x zoom range in HD.
Frame grab from PXW-X70. Click on the image to see the full size frame.
The clear image zoom really is remarkably transparent. If you look hard enough at the image, on a big screen, when it’s zoomed all the way in you can just about discern a very slight softness to the image, but frankly I don’t think this is any worse than the softness you might see from a compact optical 24x zoom. It certainly doesn’t look electronic and unless you have side by side, with and without test clips I don’t think you would know that the clear image zoom has been used.
If 24x is not enough there is also a further digital extender, controlled by a button on the right side of the lens that doubles the digital zoom. This you can see, the image is a little degraded at 48x, but it’s not terrible, might be handy for a breaking news story where you can’t get close to the subject.
The left side of the PXW-X70
As well as the optical stabiliser in the lens the camera also has a switchable electronic stabiliser. The active steadyshot is very effective at smoothing out even the shakiest of hands. But it does tend to hang on or grab hold of the image a bit. So when you do deliberately move the camera it tends to try to stabilise the scene until it can no longer correct for the cameras movement at which point the scene is suddenly released and starts to move. If your using a tripod you definitely want to just use the standard steadyshot and not the active mode.
Dual SD card slots on the PXw-X70
The pictures are recorded using either XAVC, AVCHD or standard definition DV to SD cards. For XAVC you must use SDXC cards, but these are cheap and readily available these days. There are two card slots and you can choose between relay record where the camera will switch from slot A to slot B once A is full, or you can make two simultaneous recordings on both cards at the same time. This gives an instant backup if you need it.
XAVC HD RECORDING:
The XAVC HD recordings are 10 bit 422 long GoP at 50Mb/s, 35Mb/s or 25Mb/s. The quality of the 50Mb/s recordings is amazing with no compression artefacts that I can see (there must be some, I just can’t see them). Even the 25Mb/s recordings look really good. You can shoot at up to 60fps in 60i mode and 50fps in 50i mode. In 60i mode you also have 24fps.
Frame grab form the PXW-X70, click on the image to see full size.
Considering this is a highly compact, single chip camera the images it produces are really very good. They don’t have that typical small sensor camera look. The pictures are remarkably noise free at 0db and largely free of artefacts. I tend to find that small handycams often suffer from what I would describe as “busy” pictures. Pictures where perhaps there is a lot of added sharpening or where the pixels are read in special ways to make a sharp picture. This makes edges slightly flickery and gives the pictures a tell tale small sensor look. The X70 with it’s big sensor and abundance of pixels just doesn’t have this “busy” look.
Train sitting in station. Frame grab from PXW-X70
The pictures really look like they come from a pro camera. Occasionally very fine, high contrast details like white text on a black background can look a little busy, but this is very minor. Dynamic range is quite respectable, it’s not as good as a PMW-300, but not too bad for a compact handycam (I estimate about 10 to 11 stops of DR).
One thing I did find with this camera is that because there is so little noise and the codec is so good, you could quite comfortably shoot about a stop darker than you would normally and then just bring the image up a bit in post. Shooting a little darker helps the camera handle bright highlights and then in post you can just bring up the shadows and mid tones with a simple colour correction to give a nice exposure. I wish I had realised this when I shot the demo video. I would have exposed a little on the dark side and then tweaked the shots in post. There’s so little noise at 0db and so few artefacts that the image holds up to this really well. If your using auto exposure you can set an exposure offset to allow for this in the menu.
PXW-X70 without the top handle fitted.
The X70 is pretty sensitive and 9db of gain is quite useable, so shooting indoors in a typical home or at a wedding venue without extra lights should be no problem. Ramp it up to +33db and it see’s better in the dark than I do, but there is a fair bit of noise at +33db.
As well as being generally rather sensitive the PXW-X70 also has a nightshot mode that bypasses the cameras IR filter and includes a switchable infra-red light, so you can shoot in total darkness if you want.
To see what you are shooting there is a 3.5″ LCD panel. This panel is higher resolution than the one on the AX100 and gives a sharp and pretty accurate image. On the back of the camera there is a small OLED viewfinder. This little OLED is pretty good. It has great contrast and is pretty sharp for a small finder. It’s a great feature on bright sunny days when the LCD can become harder to see.
CRISP, SHARP IMAGES:
The HD images are crisp and sharp without any obvious sharpening, almost certainly a result of having a 4K ready sensor. The lack of obvious detail correction helps give the pictures a pleasing, more filmic look. The camera has picture profiles so if you want you can soften or sharpen the images if you choose. As well as detail and aperture controls there are also controls for gamma (standard, still, Cinematone1, Cinematone2, ITU709) and color. The color controls are similar to those on the FS700 where you can adjust the saturation as well as R, G, B, C, M, Y and K brightness. In addition there is a choice of 6 different preset color modes plus black and white.
PXW-X70 auto/manual switch.
The camera can be controlled either fully automatically or fully manual as well as various in between modes. There is a switch on the back of the camera to switch between auto and manual. In manual you can control the iris, shutter and gain by pressing one of three buttons along the bottom edge of the camera and the using a small wheel just below the lens to set what you have selected. In practice this actually works quite well. There is another button for white balance control on the side of the camera with the usual presets plus auto white balance. Just under the Manual/Auto switch there is a selector for the built in ND filters. I recently purchased a A7s DSLR type camera and I had forgotten what a fiddle it can be to use a camera that doesn’t have built in ND’s. So it’s really good to see proper ND filters on the PXW-X70 as they really help you manage your depth of field.
On the lens there is a single large control ring that can be used to focus the lens or to act as a manual zoom ring. The focus is responsive and although I don’t normally like round and round servo focus rings this one wasn’t too bad.
The zoom/focus ring on the PXW-X70.
There really is so much to this camera that it would take a small book to go through all the features. For example there’s the touch screen LCD that can be used for touch to focus or touch to expose where you just touch the part of the screen you want to expose or focus on. There’s a full set of exposure and focus aids including peaking, histogram, zebras etc.
On the top of the camera you have Sony’s new MI shoe (Multi-Interface) for connecting accessories like the supplied handle with XLR audio inputs. The supplied detachable handle is really well made and very secure when attached. One small note is that by default when you attach the handle to the MI-shoe the camera switches to XLR audio automatically by default. So if you don’t actually have a mic connected to the handle you won’t have any audio as the internal mic gets shut off. You have to go in to the audio section of the menu to enable the internal mic if you want to use the handle but want to use the built in mic.
If you want to do time-lapse or slow stuff down the camera has S&Q motion that goes from 1fps to 60fps at 1920×1080.
The camera has WiFi and NFC and allows remote control via Content Browser Mobile and simply touching an NFC enabled phone or tablet against the side of the camera will pair the camera with the phone or tablet. In the future following a firmware update you will be able to use the camera to stream your content live via U-stream.
Finally – build quality. It’s really well made. It feels nice and solid, it feels like it will really last. Don’t tell Sony, but I dropped the camera from waist hight while I was using it. It survived, no problem at all.
Sony’s new baby XDCAM camcorder, the PXW-X70.
In conclusion: This is a nice little camera. It’s very easy to operate. The picture quality is very good for such a compact camera, the only thing that lets it down just a bit is the highlight handling. But the camera is so clean that you can afford to expose a little lower to compensate for this. Since shooting the demo video I have been playing with the picture profiles to help with the highlight exposure and I found that bringing up the black gamma really helps as it lifts the mid range allowing you to expose slightly lower.
The large sensor, combined with the switchable built in ND filters gives you much greater control over the depth of field than normally possible with a compact handycam.
I think you have to remember that this is a small camera. It isn’t a PXW-X180 and it never will be, but if your budget is tight and you want an easy to use compact camera this could be the one for you. I think it would be a good fit as a “B” camera or for use in lower budget corporate productions. In addition the PXW-X70 would be a good camera to give to PA’s and producers or to hand off to inexperienced shooters for fly-on-the-wall productions.
I’ve been playing with an SLR Magic Anamorphot. This is a high quality lens adapter that allows you to shoot in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio with a conventional 16:9 camera. The adapter screws on to the front of existing lenses and squashes the scene horizontally by 33% as you shoot. Then in post you squash the image vertically by the same amount and the end result is 2.35:1 aspect ratio footage.
There are some limitations and these are covered in the video, so please watch the video for a full explanation as well as some sample footage. For the money it’s a great way to get low cost anamorphic shots. As well as the aspect ratio change you get really nice horizontal blue lens flares giving you that JJ Abrams look to your productions. Really looking forward to trying it on my A7S once that arrives.
Hard drives are boring! But they are now a very important part of life in the world of TV production. I get through dozens and dozens of hard drives every year and as the drives I am using may hold footage that can never be replaced it’s important that they are as reliable as possible. For a while now I have been using a number of Sony hard drives and SSD’s. These drives are built for portable video applications and my drives have been all over the world from hot, humid Asia to the bitter cold of Arctic Norway. They have never let me down. Each drive comes in a nice case that resembles a video cassette case so that you can stack them neatly on a shelf. No more tatty, crumpling cardboard boxes. In addition the outer case protects the drive in transit, plus each case contains a USB3 lead and a firewire 800 cable, so you don’t need to search around for the cables.
The drives themselves are built in to a tough but very lightweight enclosure with soft rubber bumpers at each end. There are little notches and bumps in the bumpers that interlock if you stack the drives one on top of another, say on the desk of your edit suite. Not only do the rubber bumpers protect the drives from knocks and bumps, but they also incorporate flaps that cover the USB3 and Firewire 800 sockets. The drives meet the MIL-STD-810G standard and when the connector covers are closed are dust proof to IP5X and splash proof to IP4X. The HDD is built to withstand being dropped from 2m and the SSD from 2.3m. I have to say that my 256GB SSD has been dropped a few times now and is still going strong.
Sony are so confident of the quality of their drives that they offer a 3 year warranty and after almost a year on the market, I have been told that so far not one single drive has had to be replaced!
USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2, so if you don’t have USB3 you can just treat the drive as a USB2 drive. If you are a Mac user with an older Mac then you are well catered for with a pair of Firewire 800 ports on the rear of each drive.
The 256GB SSD is extremely fast and this drive has become my go-to drive for on the road use as I can easily edit 4K material stored on this drive and it appears to be really tough. I often ship my SSD along with my hold baggage when I’m flying, it’s been bashed about on snow scooters and used to edit from while bouncing down dirt track roads. I use the 500GB and 1TB Hard drives for general purpose storage and HD editing.
Fed up with carrying large or bulky grey cards that get bent and creased or get dirty and fade? Why not try one of the great Lastolite pop up grey cards? I have the 30cm 18% grey pop-up grey card and it works really well. When folded it’s only about 12cm across so takes no space at all. It comes in a handy zip up case. This is so much easier to carry and transport than traditional ridged cards. The back of the target is 90% white. Both the grey and white targets appear to be very accurate and the matte surface of the grey card helps eliminate hot spots and reflections. There is a cross hair style focussing target in the center of each side if you need to check focus. They come in different sizes, if you want a larger one there are also 50cm and 75cm versions plus there is even an underwater version. Do note that they come in both 18% and 12% shades of grey. Really handy if shooting with SLog or for setting white balance. If you are working with a video camera you want the 18% grey version, but you may need the 12% version if calibrating a light meter etc. Simple, low cost item that works really well. Recommended!
My old Metabones MK1 adapter is not suitable for full frame lenses on the new Sony A7s. So in anticipation of the arrival of my A7s I ordered a cheap CommLite full frame autofocus ready adapter on ebay. This adapter (CN-EF-NEX) was only $90 USD so I thought I would give it a try, much cheaper than the metabones.
To be honest I wasn’t expecting much, but now I have the adapter in my hands I am pleasantly surprised. It appears well made and very solid. It even carries a CE mark. It works just fine on my NEX5N and FS700. On the NEX5N I have working autofocus. If the lens has image stabilisation this works too. I have tried a wide variety of Sigma and Tamron Canon EF lenses with it and they all work. Even my new Tamron 16-300mm works with this adapter, this lens doesn’t work with a number of other adapter.
Autofocus is a little slow, especially if the light is bad. Having not used the MK3 Metabones I don’t know how this compares but certainly this adapter works and is quite useable. It’s said to be compatible with full frame lenses on the A7, but as yet I have not been able to test this. The little mounting post is easily and quickly removable, but a real boon on the NEX5N with bigger lenses. For the price, you can’t go far wrong, really quite impressed considering how little it cost.
I was lucky enough to get to spend some time with a pre-production Sony PXW-X180 here in Singapore. I put it through it’s paces shooting around the botanical gardens, China town and Clarke Quay.
For a 1/3″ camcorder it produces a remarkably good image. Really low noise, very clean images, much better than anything I have seen from any other 1/3″ camcorder. The 25x zoom is impressive, the variable ND filter is very clever and it might seem trivial but the rear viewfinder was very nice. It’s a very high resolution OLED, much, much better than the LCOS EVF’s found on many other models.
The zoom lens has proper manual calibrated controls with end stops, much like a PMW-200. The ability to use a multitude of codecs is fantastic and perhaps better still is the fact that you can use SDXC cards for XDACM or XAVC at up to 50Mb/s, so even XDCAM HD422 can be recorded on this low cost media. This will be great for news or other situations where you need to hand off your media at the end of the shoot.
A more in depth review will follow soon, but for now here’s the video. Un-graded, un touched, straight from the camera footage. Looks very nice if you ask me.
So we all like to dress our cameras up with all kinds of accessories. One of the most common being a Matte Box. So, what’s a matte box for? Well the obvious thing is to hold filters for creating an artistic look, for colour correction or light level reduction. But the other very important role is to block unwanted light. I’ll take a brief look at filters later in the article.
We all know that if you shoot into the sun or a bright light source you might get a lens flare in the shot. You know, those sometimes pretty rings of light that can look cool on a good day or ruin a shot on another. But the other thing you can get is lens flare. So whats the difference between “a lens flare” and “lens flare”.
Well, lens flare is when light bounces around inside the lens between the glass elements in an uncontrolled way, some of this unfocussed light making it’s way to the sensor where it spills and bleeds into darker parts of the image reducing contrast and raising the black level. Whenever you reduce the contrast in an image it will appear softer, so to get the sharpest and highest resolution images, we really want to keep as much unwanted light out of the lens as possible. In addition some cameras can suffer from other image artefacts when off-axis light finds it’s way to the edges of the sensor. So anything we can do to stop this happening is obviously a good thing.
Higher end cameras will often have an electronic flare adjustment that pulls down the cameras black level when the overall scene light level gets high. The idea is that this helps compensate for the almost inevitable flare that will occur in the lens when a lot of light enters the lens. This flare setting is normally adjusted on a lens by lens basis as different lenses will flare by different amounts. As lenses get older, very often vapour from the oils and materials used in the construction of the lens will coat the internal glass surfaces with a very fine haze that increases flare. This can make an older lens more prone to flare and is one reason why getting an older but expensive lenses professionally cleaned is often worth the expense. The other thing you can do is to make be sure to use a good matte box or lens shade to prevent excess light from entering the lens.
A flexible donut or “nun’s Knikers” on the rear of the Matte Box keeps out light from the rear of the Matte Box.
Don’t use a matte box that is excessively large. You want a Matte Box big enough to fit your lenses and hold the size of filters you need. It also needs to be wide enough to allow you to use the aspect ratios you want to shoot in, but no larger. If it’s too big, the shade/hood will be less effective. Make use of an adjustable top flag and side flags to keep out as much light as possible. Looking through the cameras viewfinder bring the flags in close to the lens until they start to creep into the edges of your shot, then back them off just a little bit.
A quick release catch on the Alphatron Matte Box allows you to quickly and easily change the donut or nun’s knickers.
Also make sure your rear donut or other light seal is doing it’s job and keeping out the light. A flexible bellows or “nun’s knickers” can be used to allow you to move the matte box forwards so that the lens sits deeper in the nice dark recess of the matte box. Light entering the Matte box from the rear will cause reflections off the back of any filters used, especially any ND filters or glimmer glass filters and this can easily spoil a shot.
A Matte Box can be attached to the lens directly via a clamp ring that clamps around the end of the lens or more commonly attached to rods or bars connected to the bottom of the camera. If you only ever use one lens then a lens clamp might work well for you, but if you swap and change lenses regularly then a rod or rail mount is often easier as a flexible donut will fit a multitude of lenses. The donut on the Alphatron Matte Box will fit a wide range of lenses and the neoprene insert can easily be exchanged or replaced simply by unscrewing the two halves of the donut holder. The neoprene is sandwiched between the two halves and just drops out once released.
Eyebrows on the Alphatron Matte box keeping the sun out of the lens.
Some Matte Boxes like the Alphatron one shown here have small extra “eyebrows”. These are like mini flags that can be adjusted to provide extra shade for the lens. In the picture you can see how the shadow from the top eyebrow is keeping stray and unwanted light from falling on the lens. This will help minimise flare and preserve contrast in the images. It’s a small thing but it can make a big difference. Eyebrows and flags also keep light out of the matte box itself and help prevent reflections between any filters that you might use and the lens itself.
The Alphatron Matte Box can be fitted with a quick release swing away adapter to make lens changes quick and easy.
If you’re using prime lenses then you will probably need to change lenses regularly. A great time saver is the use of a swing-away adapter. The Alphatron Matte Box that I use has an optional quick release swing away mount option. By twisting a single lever the Matte Box opens up and swings away from the lens. This gives you easy access to the lens for cleaning or for a quick lens change without having to remove the Matte Box. When shooting out on location this is a big deal as there’s never anywhere clean to put your Matte Box when you want to do a lens swap.
The Alphatron Matte Box has one fixed filter tray and one rotating tray.
Matte boxes can have both fixed and rotating filter trays or a combination of the two. Fixed trays are fine for ND filters and most diffusion filters. For graduated filters a rotating tray is preferable and for polarising filters a rotating tray is essential. The Alphatron Matte Box here has one fixed tray and one rotating tray. So I can use the fixed tray for any ND filters and then the rotating tray for grads or polarisers. I very nice feature of the Alphatron is a little recess in the very front of the sun shade and a little locking tab that allows you to put a safety glass in place in front of any filters to protect you filters and lens. This is very handy especially if your shooting something that could possibly splash on your expensive filters and damage the coatings.
So what filters should you get for your nice new Matte Box? First of all do be prepared to spend a little bit of money to get good quality filters. Filters can be plastic, resin or glass. Optical grade plastics and resins can make very good filters, but they tend to be prone to collecting dust through static electricity and they scratch easily. In addition if left in a hot car they can distort and warp. But, plastic and resin filters are light weight and normally a lot cheaper than the glass equivalent. Better quality filters will have anti-reflective coatings. A good quick test of the quality of any filter is to use a long focal length lens or zoomed-in zoom lens to check for distortions or focus issues introduced by the filter. You might not notice this at wide angles or zoomed out. So do check at longer focal lengths.
Good brands include Tiffen, Formatt and Schneider. These won’t be the cheapest on the market, but the quality is consistently good. Filters come in different sizes, the most common is the 4×4 or 4″ by 4″. For longer focal lengths these are fine, but if you want to shoot at wider angles you may find that 4×4’s are not wide enough. The next size up is the 4″x 5″ but the next commonly used size is the 4″ x 5.65″ which is close to the old 4:3 TV aspect ratio. The extra width really helps when shooting wider shots in 16:9.
My most commonly used filters are ND filters. These help manage light when it’s too bright allowing you to use a smaller aperture to gain a shallower depth of field. If your using a CMOS camera you should use IR ND filters that cut not only the visible light but also infra red light that most CMOS cameras are sensitive to.
Next is a polarising filter. A circular polariser is great for reducing or controlling reflections from windows, cars etc, it’s also good for enhancing the contrast in clouds and the sky making the sky a richer, deeper blue. When using a polariser it needs to go in a rotating tray so you can turn it when composing your shot to alter the polarising effect.
Graduated ND filters are also useful to help deal with excessively bright sky. The top of the filter is a ND filter or coloured filter and the bottom is normally clear. By sliding the filter up and down within the matte box you can alter level where the brightness reduction takes place. A tobacco or orange coloured graduated filter can be used to create or enhance a sunset type look. Just watch for the graduation crossing through foreground objects in the scene which can give the game away and look odd.
I’ve been using various shoulder mounts for my F5 over the last year. They have all worked well for me. But at CabSat in Dubai I was lent a Vocas shoulder mount and handles to use with one of the F55’s I was using on the Sony booth.
Now, I’ve come across Vocas many, many times before, they are not new players in this arena and thier products have always looked to be well thought out and well made, but when I put the F55 rig on my shoulder and my hands wrapped around the beautifully carved wooden handles I just fell in love with it. When you use a camera day-in, day-out, how it feels in your hands or on your shoulder is really important and it’s amazing how a great shoulder rig can make using a camera a much more enjoyable experience. A bad rig will make using the camera a miserable chore.
Another view of my Vocas F5 rig.
So what is it about the Vocas rig I like so much? First of all it’s a fully modular system so you can buy just the bits you want or need. Many of the parts will work with other systems. Initially I just got the shoulder mount and hand grips, but after using these for a short while I realised I also wanted to replace the existing top plate and somewhat uncomfortable carry handle that I had been using with the Vocas one, so I added the top cheese plate and carry handle to my rig this week.
One of the delightful to hold Vocas wooden hand grips.
The thing that got my attention when I borrowed the rig back in March was the comfort of the handles. The carved wooden hand grips were developed in association with Cam-A-Lot, one of the larger high end cinematography rental houses in Europe. So they know their stuff and know what camera operators want. The design is simple but beautifully executed, a carefully shaped handgrip with an Arri style rosette. The top of the grip has a notch/extension that your thumb wraps around making your grip really secure, this won’t slip out of your hands by mistake. You don’t have to hang on to these handles, your grip is secure even with very light pressure. Your fingers wrap around smooth grooves in the front of the grip and it’s hard to explain, but it just “feels right” and wood is much nicer to hold than plastic or rubber (Vocas also make leather hand grips).
The hand grips are then attached to some extension arms and these arms then attach to the base plate. Again the design of the arms is really simple, but sometimes simple is really effective and these arms are really really light, yet very, very stiff, the quality and finish of the alloy used is excellent. You can join any Vocas arm to any other Vocas arm to create different angles and lengths and there is a range of different arms of various lengths and offsets to choose from. I’ve ended up with one short straight arm and one longer offset arm. Using these two arms I can configure the rig several ways.
A single Vocas hand grip on a short arm used to create an ENG style rig.
Using just the short arm I can place the right hand grip up alongside the lens for a very secure and very comfortable single handed ENG style shooting rig. There is no need for the strap that you have on the hand grip of an ENG lens. The wooden grips are so easy to grasp and so secure that you just don’t need that extra strap around the back of your hand. I could use the longer offset arm, mounted on the right side and offset to the left to place the hand grip under the lens for an alternative single handed rig.
Two handed configuration with two Vocas grips and arms.
By using the short arm on the right, angled down and the longer offset arm on the right angled down I can create a two handed rig. One thing I did find is that if you mount the single arm sections that I have on the rosettes on the shoulder mount the handles are quite close to your body. If you prefer your hand grips a little further away from your body you have a couple of options. Either double up on the arms joining two together to make a longer articulated arm, or do as I did and add the 15mm rail bracket that has a rosette at each end to mount the handles from the rods (Vocas also do a 19mm system). The rail bracket has a very neat quick release catch, so it’s a breeze to fit.
Underside of the Vocas PMW-F55 base plate.
But what about the shoulder mount that all this is hanging from? The one I have is the Vocas standard PMW-F5 and F55 base plate. Now, this doesn’t look anything special, but looks can be deceiving. This very comfortable base plate weighs only 600g. That’s quite a lot lighter than my previous base plates and lighter than the Sony equivalent. It’s a VCT-14 compatible plate so snaps in and out of the very common Sony quick release plate quickly and easily. If you don’t want VCT-14 compatibility the silver part with the VCT wedge in the picture above can be replaced with a flat plate for mounting directly on to tripods or other mounting systems.
The base plate can be slid forwards and backwards relative to the camera body to help you achieve perfect balance. The mounting screws run in a slot with deep shoulders that make the plate very ridged and secure. The comfortable soft shoulder pad can also be moved forwards and backwards within the base plate giving you further flexibility. On the sides of the base plate are a pair of Arri style rosettes and at both the front and rear there are holes for the usual 15mm rods.
Moving on to the top of the camera….. The comfort of the carry handle is so important, especially when the camera is rigged up with weighty accessories and heavy batteries. The last thing you want is blisters on your hands from a bad handle. So after experiencing the comfort of the hand grips I decided to add the Vocas top cheese plate and handle.
The Vocas handle and top cheese plate for the F5 and F55.
The handle has a very nice wooden grip insert which makes the camera very comfortable to carry. You also get a pair of posts to take a standard Sony shoulder strap. Oh Joy! Sony take note: please include provision for a shoulder strap on all your cameras, they are very useful! The top cheese plate is well… a cheese plate with lots of mounting holes for all your accessories. It’s very slightly raised from the top of the camera body to avoid inhibiting any cooling of the camera. The handle takes a mounting bush for the F5/F55 viewfinder that can be placed either at the front of the handle or on the rear. This is handy for film style shooting from behind the camera rather than to the side. You can also use a pair of 15mm rods attached to the handle that run above your lens if you need to mount a Matte Box from above or add extra items like follow focus motors. Integrated into the handle is a pair of cold shoes for accessories such as a camera light. If you have a very heavy lens, like perhaps the new Canon 17-120mm or a Cabrio then the handle can be mounted facing forwards to get better balance.
Vocas side cheese plate that protects the viewfinder connector.
The last part of the kit is the optional side cheese plate. This serves two purposes. The main one for me is to protect the rather vulnerable viewfinder connector that sticks straight out from the side of the camera body. With a list price of just 95 Euros, this is a really wise investment (if you don’t use a cheese plate etc why not get one of my plastic viewfinder connector protectors that I sell on ebay). The other purpose is to provide yet more 1/4″ threaded mounting points on the side of the camera. I think it also looks cool! A small observation is that the rather flimsy connector still protrudes beyond the cheese plate by about 15mm, so bash it into a door frame walking through the door way and you could still damage the end of the connector. So I’m going to add a 1/4″ bolt to one of the threaded holes in front of the connector. This will stick out a bit and further protect the connector from damage.
So while a shoulder rig might not be the most interesting part of your camera kit, it is one of the most important. It’s what connects you to your camera, or what connects your camera to your tripod. If it isn’t comfortable, your camera will feel awkward. A bad rig might compromise your shots or shooting style, so getting the right rig is important and I can highly recommend Vocas as a supplier of shoulder rigs and associated support equipment. If you get the opportunity, do try the wooden hand grips. They are a bit more expensive than most plastic or rubber based hand grips, but they are just so nice to hold. Using this rig is a delight, I love my PMW-F5 and this rig makes it very easy and comfortable to use.
FYI. The Matte Box is one of the new Alphatron Matte Boxes. A review of which will be on-line very soon. It’s nice! The follow focus is an Alphatron ProPull, a great little compact follow focus with adjustable end stops for fast focus pulls. The lens is a Samyang Cine Prime. Based on a DSLR lens but with pitch gears and smooth aperture adjustment. Great image quality and T1.5.
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