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.

I use a lot of different lenses on my large sensor video cameras. Over the years I’ve collected quite a collection of Nikon and Canon mount lenses. I like Nikon mount lenses because they still have an iris that can be controlled manually. I don’t like Nikon lenses because most of them focus back-to-front compared to broadcast, PL and Canon lenses. The exception to this is Sigma lenses. The vast majority of Sigma lenses with Nikon mounts focus the right way – anti clockwise for infinity. If you go back just a few years you’ll find a lot of Sigma, Nikon mount lenses that focus the right way and have a manual iris ring. These are a good choice for use on video cameras. You don’t need any fancy adapters with electronics or extra mechanical devices to use these lenses and you know exactly what your aperture is.

But…. Canon lenses have some advantages too. First is the massive range of lenses out there. Then there is the ability to have working optical image stabilisation if you have an electronic mount and the possibility to remotely control the iris and focus. The down side is you need some kind of electronic mount adapter to make most of them work. But as I do own a couple of Canon DSLR’s it is useful to have a few Canon lenses.

So for my F3, initially I used Nikon lenses. Then along came the FS100 and FS700 cameras plus the Metabones adapter for Canon, so I got some Canon lenses. Then came the MTF Effect control box for Canon lenses on the F5 and now I have my micro Canon controller with integrated speed booster for the F5 and F55. This all came to a head when on an overseas shoot I got out one of my favourite lenses to put on my F5, but, the lens was a Nikon lens and I only had my Canon mounts (shame on me for not taking both mounts). Continually swapping mounts is a pain. So I decided to permanently fit all of my Nikon lenses with Nikon to Canon adapters and then only use Canon mounts on the cameras. You can even get Nikon to Canon adapters that will control the manual iris pin on a lens with no iris ring.

Now a problem with a lot of these adapters is that they are a little bit too thin. This is done to guarantee that the lens will reach infinity focus. If the adapter is too thick you won’t be able to focus on distant objects. This means that the focus marks on the lens and the distances your focussing at don’t line up. Typically you’ll be focussed on something 3m/9ft away but the lens markings will be at 1m/3ft. It can mean that the lens won’t focus on close objects when really it should. If your using a zoom lens this will also mean that as you zoom in and out you will see much bigger focus swings than you should. When the lens flange back (distance from the back of the lens to the sensor) is correctly set any focus shifts will be minimised. If the flange back distance is wrong then the focus shifts can be huge.

So what’s the answer? Well it’s actually quite simple and easy. All you need to do is to split the front and rear halves of the adapter and insert a thin shim or spacer. Most of the lower cost adapters are made from two parts. Removing 4 small screws allows you to separate the two halves. Make sure you don’t loose the little locking tab and it’s tiny spring!

Split the two halves apart. Then use the smaller inner part as a template for a thin card spacer that will go in between the two parts when you put the adapter back together. The thickness of the card you need will depend on the specific adapter you have, but in general I have found card that is about the same thickness as a typical business card or cereal packet to work well. I use a scalpel to cut around the smaller part of the adapter. Note that you will also need to cut a small slot in the card ring to allow for the locking tab. Also note that when you look at the face of the larger half of the adapter you will see a small lip or ridge that the smaller part sits in. Your spacer needs to fit just inside this lip/ridge.

With the spacer in place offer up the two halves of the adapter. Then use a fine scalpel to “drill” out the screw holes in the card, a fine drill bit would also work. Then screw the adapter back together. Don’t forget to put the locking tab back in place before you screw the two halves together.

Before putting the adapter on the lens use a very fine blade screw driver to gently prise apart the lens locating tabs indicated in the picture. This will ensure the adapter is a nice tight fit on the lens. Finally attach the adapter to the lens and then on to your Canon mount and check that you can still reach infinity focus. It might be right at the end of the lenses focus travel, but hopefully it will line up with the infinity focus mark on the lens. If you can’t reach infinity focus then your shim is too thick. If Infinity focus is short of your focus mark then your shim is not thick enough. It’s worth getting this right, especially on zoom lenses as you’ll get much better focus tracking from infinity to close up. Make up one adapter for each lens and keep the adapters on the lenses. You’ll also need to get some Canon end caps to protect you now Canon mount lenses.

….Learn to edit and grade properly!

OK, so if you already shoot and edit then you’ll know this already. But I’m surprised at how many shooters there are that have no idea of how to edit or have never studied the editing and post production process. Very often I’ll hear comments form people like “I shoot this way because it the easiest” or “they can sort it out in post” with clearly little understanding of exactly what the implications for the poor post people are.

Modern post production workflows can be very powerful with the ability to perform many corrections and adjustments, but very often these adjustments only work well when the footage was shot specifically for those kinds of adjustments. Just because you can adjust one type of shot in a particular way, it doesn’t mean that you can do that to any type of shot.  You should shoot in a way that is sympathetic to the post production process that has been chosen for the project.

The other thing that learning to edit brings is an understanding of how a program or film flows. It teaches the camera operator the kinds of shots that are needed to support the main part of an interview or drama scene. Those all important cut-aways that help a scene flow properly. It’s not just a case of shooting a bunch of random shots of the location but thinking about how those shots will interact with the main shots when everything is edited together. If your shooting drama then it is a huge help if you can visualise how cuts between different shots of different characters, scenes or locations will work. How framing and things like camera height can be used to change the tension or intimacy in a scene. I think one of the best way to learn these things is by learning how to edit and I don’t mean just pressing the buttons or randomly dropping stuff in a sequence of clips. Learn how to pace a sequence, how to make a scene flow, understanding these things makes you a better shooter.

But don’t stop at the edit. Follow the post production process through to it’s end. Learn how to grade with a proper grading tool, not just colour corrections in the edit suite (although it’s useful to know the limitations of these) but things like power windows and secondaries. You don’t have to become a colourist, but by understanding the principles and limitations you will be able to adapt the way you shoot to fit within those limits. It is  a good idea to find a friendly colourist that will let you sit in on a session and explain to you how and why he/she is doing the things being done. There is always the Lite version of Resolve which you can download and use for free. If you don’t have anything to edit or grade then go out and shoot something. Find a topic and make a short film about it. Try to include people, interviews or drama. Maybe get in touch with a local drama group and offer to shoot a performance.

Whatever you do, get out there and learn to edit, learn to grade and then experiment and practice. Try a workflow where you create the finished look in-camera, then try shooting a similar project very flat or with log/raw and take that through the post production process and compare the end results. I think the best shooters are normally also competent editors. By full understand the post process you will keep the editor and colourist happy. If you make their lives easy the director and producers will see this when they sit in on the edit or grade and you’ll be more likely to get more work from them in the future.

One final thing. Even if you think you know it all, even if you do know it all you should still speak to the post production people before you shoot whenever possible to make sure everyone is clear about how they want you to deliver your rushes.

This question comes up a lot, which gamma curve will give me the best results on a low key (dark) shoot. A common example would be “Should I use Gamma 2 which is brighter or should I use Gamma 5 which is darker but with a bit of gain”? or “Which is better to use in low light, normal gamma or log gamma”?

Log gamma (SLog, LogC etc) is great for capturing scenes with a large dynamic range, but it comes at the price of compressed highlights and overall less data per stop of exposure. Standard gammas have a lower dynamic range, but as a result the amount of data you are recording per stop of exposure is greater. It’s also vital to remember that if you do shoot in the dark with log you still need to expose correctly keeping middle grey and white at the correct levels in order that you keep mid tones and skin tones out of the heavily compressed part of the curve for the best results, so your images may look very dark and very flat. This can make focussing a big challenge (Top Tip – Use a large waveform monitor to check focus, as you go in and out of focus you should see the fine details in the waveform increase in amplitude as you become more focussed).

If you don’t need 13 or 14 stops of range, then use another gamma, don’t use log. Again with any of the extended range gammas like Cinegamma or Hypergamma watch where you place your skin tones, your exposure levels with these types of gamma curve are normally a little lower than with standard gammas (typically -0.5 to -1 stop).

A basic principle to understand with any video camera is that the actual sensitivity of the camera is purely a function of the sensor. Gain or raising the ISO is simply amplifying the signal off the sensor and results in more noise as the noise gets amplified too. Just like a music amplifier where you can make the music louder by turning up the volume (adding gain) you can make your pictures louder (brighter) by adding gain or raising the ISO. Listen to the music amplifier at high volume levels and what do you hear in the background? More hiss and noise, it’s the same with your video camera, more gain = more noise.

Gamma is also a form of gain providing different amounts of gain for different sensor output (brightness) levels to achieve specific recording and camera output levels, but it’s still gain (it can sometime be negative gain). The nearest you have to a gamma control on an audio amplifier would be an equaliser or bass and treble tone controls. Turn up the treble control on an audio amp and again you will here more hiss and noise, it’s nothing more than a selective gain control that shapes the sound you hear. Video camera gamma is very similar, it shapes the tonal range of the images you see.

So – and this is the bottom line: With any given gamma, combined with any given ISO or gain level, to achieve any particular brightness of output, for the same input level the total system gain (gain + gamma) is the same for that particular point in the scenes brightness range. So the noise level for any given brightness of output will be almost exactly the same whether you mix ISO “A” with Gamma “B”  or ISO “B” with Gamma “A” because the combined gain of A + B is the same as B + A.  At the end of the day the real sensitivity is governed by the sensor and anything else that makes the image brighter is gain, either regular “gain” or gamma gain.

So, choose a gamma curve that can deal with the dynamic range that you need and no more, don’t waste recording data on unused dynamic range. That way when you grade or do any post production noise reduction you have more data per stop to work from and that will help with the final image. If you do use log or a high range gamma (Hypergamma, Cinegamma etc) watch your exposure levels, the same rules apply in the dark as in daylight, you don’t want to over expose any skin tones as they won’t grade nicely.

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.