Well the gap between video cameras and DSLR’s continues to become more and more blurred. Canon started it all with the 5D Mk2 and it’s rather good video performance. I was never a fan of the 5D as a video camera, it had too many issues for my liking, but it certainly shook the video camera industry up. Nikons latest offering, the D800 offers full 1920×1080 recording at 24, 25 or 30P as well as a clean uncompressed HDMI output so you can use one of the many external recorders available today. It also has proper control over audio levels, audio in and audio out. Now it is a stills camera and it does have a 36 Mega pixel sensor, which is way to high a pixel count to be optimum for HD video, so I would expect there to be some aliasing issues (unless they do some very clever pixel binning). But, it has to be said that the £2399 price tag is extremely attractive compared to the £10k of an F3 or C300. I’d love to try one out and see what it can do. I’m particularly intrigued by the ability to use either FX or DX sensor crops giving you the option to use lower cost DX lenses or get wider FOV which full frame lenses.

I received more details today of the new viewfinder soon to be launched by Alphatron. Made to Alphatrons specifications by TV logic the new EVF-035W sounds like it will be a nice improvement over the current Cineroid and Zacuto EVF’s. More details here: http://www.alphatron.tv/evf/?utm_source=AlphatronTV&utm_medium=brandpage

UPDATE: This does NOT come on an SxS card or include an SxS card. The camera must be sent to a Sony service centre to be upgraded, and I’ve only seen the offer for USA customers.

Hot news is that the S-Log option for the PMW-F3 can now be had for  $899 USD. You can have all the benefits of S-Log and 4:4:4 RGB out. If you paid full whack for the S-Log option then you can get $2500 USD off a Sony SR-R1 or the Sony F3 servo zoom lens.

Here’s a full HD version of my real time Aurora video, shot with the PMW-F3.

2013 Northern Lights Expeditions to Norway, staying in mountain cabins. Including food, ice fishing, snow scooter use and photo/video tuition. You must book your own flights to Tromso or Alta.

Arrive 1st Feb – Depart 7th Feb 2013 £1175 per person, Max 8 persons includes extra snow scooter excursion to second mountain cabin on high plateaux.

Arrive 7th Feb 2013 – Depart 13th Feb 2013 £1125 per person. Max 8 people.

Please use the contact form to hold a place and for more details. Spaces limited.

You have to watch this. It is REAL TIME footage of the Northern Lights. Not the usual time-lapse that I have shot lots of in the past, but real time, as it happened footage. The motion you see in the Aurora is real, this is what I saw watching it. I was able to get this because the F3 with S-Log at +18db gain is 6400 ISO. That combined with a 2 frame slow shutter made it possible to shoot the Solar Storm of the 24th of January in real time. The current on-line clip is quite low quality. I’ll get a higher quality version online when I get home. The camera footage does not have the banding issues that the online versions have (caused by H264).

Also available to view on Vimeo.

Im in my hotel room in Norway editing the real time f3 footage from the Jan 24th Solar Storm. You won’t believe the footage when you see it. I’m stoked with what I have in the can. Almost 2 hours of beautiful real time Aurora footage. Incredible overhead bursts, flashing and waving pillars of light that stretch from horizon to horizon. Please please check back over the next couple of days, as it should be on both Youtube and Vimeo by the weekend. Tomorrow I head back out into the wilderness to try and capture more footage!

Here is a quick taste of whats to come. This is a quick compilation of just a few clips from January 24th. The best stuff, including the real time footage is still to come, I just need to process it all first. So enjoy this clip while you wait for the later (better) ones that I’ll try to get online later in the week.

I’m in the process of putting together my equipment for my annual trip up to Northern Norway to shoot the Northern Lights. This year it looks like it will be particularly cold with -28c to -32c forecast at the weekend. I was hoping to have a Canon C300 to take, but that has not materialised and although deliveries are supposed to start this month it looks like it might just be a few days too late. I wasn’t going to take an EX1 or my F3 as I wanted to concentrate on the C300 and Canon DSLR’s, but as the C300 isn’t ready I decided to check out the sensitivity of the F3 at extremes. By using S-Log plus +18db gain I can get 6400 ISO from the camera, but whats truly remarkable is how little noise there is even at this high gain. It’s sensitive enough to capture the Aurora at this level, if we get a very bright display, but for the more normal type of Aurora that we should get most nights it’s not quite sensitive enough. When I used the EX1 and EX3 to shoot the Aurora in the past I had to use +6db with a 32 or 64 frame slow shutter combined with 1 frame per second time-lapse. But the images start to get quite noisy like this and it’s not real time. Now the F3’s slow shutter only goes up to 8 frames but because the base sensitivity is higher, the F3 with +18db gain and 8 frame slow shutter is as sensitive as the EX1 at +6db with 64 frame slow shutter. The F3 is also dramatically quieter. In fact there appears to be no increase in noise using the slow shutter. So, no real need to use time-lapse so my footage will be real time (although with some 8 frame judder, which I can eliminate in post). I’m really excited about this!

As well as the F3 I’m taking a modified telescope tracking head for some time-lapse star tracking Aurora shots with a DSLR as well as a DSLR equipped with a WiFi card so I can set up a automated upload of photos to the web. You’ll be able to view those near live pictures on this page https://www.xdcam-user.com/northern-lights-live-2012/ along with video clips and expedition updates throughout the 12 days of the trip. So please come back and find out how I get on!