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.
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
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.
Great news for PMW-F5 owners. The F5 will get the ability to record 2K raw at 240fps (with the R5). In addition it will also get 1.3x Anamorphic De-Sqeeze. Sony have just released an updated firmware timeline. There are no major changes to the timing of the already announced features, but now we can see that in the July release the cameras will get Reel Number and Camera ID for SxS recordings. In the September release as well as 2K raw, the cameras will get waveform and histogram exposure tools as well as rotary knob audio level setting. Then in the December update we’ll see S&Q motion up to 240fps and monitor LUT’s for both the F5 and F55. Great news and good to see things pretty much on schedule. The new ND filter knob for the F5 and F55 should be out later this month as well.
Now I also notice something else on the chart for the F5 in December— Quad HD XAVC and 50Mb/s simultaneous recording!!! Really, is this correct, will the F5 really get the ability to record 4K XAVC???? I hope so, but somehow I think this is a typo. Lets not get too excited just yet. This is an error in the graphics. The F5 will not get QFHD.
A decent tripod is a critical piece of your camera kit. It’s not something you should skimp on as a poor tripod is difficult to work with, will cause frustration and lead to inferior footage. Invest wisely and your tripod should last a decade, far longer than most cameras. I’ve got tripods that are as good today as they were when I purchased them in the 1990’s.
When choosing a tripod the range of models available is confusing and baffling. There are so many different tripod weights, payloads and heights to choose from, so it can be difficult. Also while there is such a thing as a good all round tripod (as we shall se in a bit) there is also no such thing as one tripod that will be perfect for every shoot. The most important thing to consider when choosing a tripod is the payload that it will need to carry. This is the total weight of the camera, lens, batteries as well as any support equipment like rods and rails or monitors attached to the camera. Don’t underestimate how heavy this lot can get. You will want a tripod that can comfortably carry the payload you have, you never want to be right on the upper limit. At the same time you don’t want too big a tripod. The pan and tilt resistance on an excessively big tripod may be too much for a very light camera. Overall I’m a big fan of heavier tripods. The extra mass of a heavy tripod tends to make it more stable, in particular it will help reduce vibration, but this comes at a price, a big tripod is hard to lug around and if you fly a lot will cost a lot in excess baggage fees.
Rainbow under a severe thunderstorm. Miller Tripod.
I travel a lot, so I was looking for a lightweight tripod that could carry my PMW-F5 kit. The main use for this tripod was for my self funded storm chasing and natural extremes stock footage shoots as well as for the many film making workshops I run all over the world. A tripod I have had my eye on for a while is the Miller Solo – Compass 15 tripod package, so I decided to give one a try.
The Solo is unlike most professional video tripods as the legs are of the single tube, telescoping variety as opposed to the more traditional double tube variety.
Miller Solo tripod standing tall. it’s almost 2m to the top of the head.
They are constructed from Carbon Fiber, so they are very light, yet they can extend very heigh (1.87m for the legs alone), which is a great thing to have on news shoots or at an event or conference where you need to get the camera up above the heads of an audience. There is no mid level or floor spreader with this tripod, the spread of the legs is governed by latches at the tops of the legs that have 3 different positions, each one restricting the maximum leg spread by a different amount. At the same time as being able to go very tall by lifting a latch at the top of each tripod leg the legs extend outwards almost flat to the ground and this allows you to get very low down at a height similar to a Hi-Hat yet the tripod remains very stable and solid.
Miller Solo would be a winner in a Limbo dance. Here it is in low mode.Miller Compass 15 head tilt drag and balance controls. The levelling bubble is illuminated.
The Compass 15 head is a middle weight fluid head with a 75mm bowl for levelling. The drag for the pan and tilt is varied using click stop rings, each with 6 settings from zero to 5. The drag range is very good with position 5 giving considerable drag, something useful when you working with a long lens or trying to do very slow pans. For counterbalance there is another click stop ring, this time with 4 different counterbalance settings. The difference between the minimum and maximum counterbalance settings isn’t huge, but adequate provided you camera is within the heads payload range.
My first major project for this tripod was a bit of a baptism by fire. Every year I spend around 6 to 8 weeks shooting severe storms and tornadoes in the USA for stock footage. These shoots are always tough. You have to be extremely mobile. As I’m based in the UK, first of all there is the initial flights across the Atlantic to the USA. Once in the US I will typically drive between 400 to 600 miles a on an active storm day. In a month I’ll clock up around 10,000 miles. I don’t have an assistant on these shoots so have to do all the kit lugging myself. As well as the camera kit there is also 20kg of additional equipment needed to get real time weather data via satellite, two way radios, laptops, hard hats and safety gear. So anything I can do to save weight and bulk else where is welcome and the Solo tripod scores highly for portability.
Me shooting a tornado with the PMW-F5 and AXS-R5 on my Miller Solo tripod.
Filming a tornado is challenging. Very often the only way to get a good view of a tornado is by being in it’s path. Lots of rain and hail falls behind a tornado obscuring it from view and a strong, sometimes deadly wind called the RFD occurs around the back of a tornado, so, you need to be in front of it. A tornado can travel across the ground at speeds of up to 70mph, so if your 2 miles from a fast moving tornado you have only got about 90 seconds to get out of the car, set up your tripod, get a couple of shots, jump back in the car and drive out of it’s way. For this the Miller Solo was fantastic. With no spreader to getting in the way but the leg spread limited by the adjustable stops I found it a very fast tripod to deploy and pack away.
Storm Chasing in the USA with the PMW-F5 on the Miller Solo.
At the same time it was also very stable. It is not as stable as a bigger, heavier tripod but still remarkably solid given it’s light weight. I’ve used bigger tripods in the past and it really helps having that extra bulk when shooting in the often strong winds that surround the storms I shoot. But because these took longer to deploy I wasn’t always able to use them, reverting to handheld when time was short. The Solo’s portability meant I was able to use it much often, so although some shots taken in high winds do suffer from a bit of wobble and buffeting, the more frequent tripod use means that I cam away with a lot more steady and stable shots from this assignment than I would have with a heavier conventional tripod. I guess really for me I will have to consider taking two tripods if I can. Something substantial and heavy for use when the wind is really strong and the Solo for everything else.
Storm chasing with a PMW-F5 and Miller Solo.
Talking of everything else” what about shots done when things are not so frantic? Well a big part of the storm shoot is to document the whole life cycle of the storms. This means shooting a lot of panoramas and landscapes, often with very slow pans. One of the things that really took me by surprise with the Compass 15 head was the smoothness of the pan and tilt drag. This really is one of the best tripod heads that I have ever owned. The pan and tilt drag really is silky smooth and there is no perceptible backlash. It really is a delight to use. It’s so good that I think I’m going to have to take a close look at some of Millers larger tripods for when I want a heavy weight option. Smooth, slow pans were easy to achieve, even at longer focal lengths. One small criticism of the tripod kit is that the single tube Solo legs twist a little more than most traditional double tube tripod legs, but then that’s the price you pay for going light weight.
So overall I thing this combination of Compass 15 head with Miller Solo legs is fantastic. I’ve used a lot of tripods over the years, and this one stands out from the crowd. But, as I said at the start there is no such thing as a tripod that works for every application. I would not recommend the Solo legs for long lens work, they just don’t quite have the stability that can be obtained with a larger set of legs. That said, for portability and great performance in most everyday applications the Miller Solo and Compass 15 is a delight and I highly recommend it.
For information on the Miller Solo System click here.
Disclosure: I approached Miller and requested the loan of the tripod. Miller provided me with a Miller Solo and Compass 15 head on a loan basis for review and use at my workshops etc. The review is my own opinion and Miller did not have any input into the review content. I really like this tripod!
Every time I get to play with a Convergent Design Odyssey I am impressed. It a really nice piece of kit, first off it’s a fantastic OLED monitor with excellent tools such as waveforms and some very sophisticated focus aids. But in addition it’s recording capabilities are second to none. For Sony’s FS700 the Odyssey 7Q is in my opinion a far more elegant and practical solution for 4K and 2K recording than Sony’s IFR5/R5 raw option. In addition I’m excited about being able to record 2K raw at 240fps using the 7Q.
The 7Q has always been competitively priced, but it’s still not what you would regard as a cheap device, at least not compared to the many cheap compressed HD recorders out their now. But don’t forget this is a 4K capable recorder and the monitor is as good as it gets. You are getting some cutting edge technology and that’s never cheap. Convergent Design have been listening to FS700 owners and in an attempt to make the 7Q not only the best, but also the cheapest way to get a 4K recorder they have re-assed their pricing. Previously, you had to have multiple options if you had several different Sony cameras and wanted the Odyssey to work with them all, the separate options for the Sony F3 + FS700 were each $1,495 USD.
Now though there is just one single option for Sony cameras that will support both the F3 and FS700, and it will be only $795 (US)
In addition Convergent Design will be reducing the SSD prices while increasing their capacity.
The 240 GB SSD, was $595, will be priced at $395 and will be 256 GB.
The 480 GB SSD, was $1,195, will be priced at $895, and will be 512 GB.
So this means that the Odyssey7Q ($2,295) + Sony Option ($795) + two 256 GB SSD’s ($395 each) + Thunderbolt Reader ($99) will total $3,979 which is an absolute bargain compared to the cost of a Sony IFR5/R5, 1x AXS card and the Sony CR1 reader which comes to around $9k. It’s also a much tidier device to rig.
I also think that for many FS700 users, compressed 4K will be easier to work with than 4K raw.
Just a reminder to everyone that I am a DoP, DiT and Instructor and that I am available for hire! What’s more my rates are very reasonable, I don’t cost the earth and I can bring 20 years of experience to your project, shoot or workshop. I also have a range of cameras, lights and support equipment that I can provide. So next time your crewing up a project, drop me an email using the contact form and I’d be glad to give you a quote.
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