When your buying a camera kit it’s all too easy to focus all your attention on the camera itself and forget about all the other bits and pieces that you need to make your camera kit work at it’s best. One of the most important parts of any decent camera kit is the tripod. You can have the best camera in the world, but if your tripod is wobbly then your pictures won’t look good.
However while wobbly pictures are clearly not desirable you also need to consider how practical your tripod is. there is no point in having a substantial, rock solid tripod if it is so heavy and bulky that you don’t use it.
A good tripod is a long term investment. Cameras come and go in a few short years, but a good tripod will last a decade or more if well looked after. I only recently retired a Vinten 5 tripod that I purchased used in 1991. That tripod was still silky smooth even after 14 years of abuse. It may be that you find you need more than one tripod. For example, when I’m travelling on low budget or self funded projects then the weight of the tripod becomes critical, so I use a lightweight system (Vinten 5AS or Miller Solo). However when I’m filming drama or commercials then the camera can end up loaded with lots of extra accessories and a much more substantial tripod is essential (Vinten 100). Then there are the air-shows and aviation related shoots that I do where stability with very long telephoto shots is paramount. Again a very large tripod is needed. For the airshows we tend to hire in the tripods as these are only needed for a couple of weeks a year (O’Connor 2575).

So how do you select the right tripod for you? First of all I would strongly urge you to stick with the main brands: Cartoni, Libec, Manfrotto, Miller, O’Connor, Sachtler, Vinten all make decent tripods. You can get some bargain Chinese made tripods and these can be reasonably good, but don’t expect them to last, think of them as short term “disposable” tripods. Libec and Manfrotto make good ranges of lower cost tripods that are well made and last well, but for me these are just a little bit too budget and don’t have the feel of the more substantial (and more expensive) brands. There are also blatant rip-off copies of some of the reputable brands. My experience of these is that initially they can be very good, performing much like the real thing. But they don’t last, bits break and they wear out due to the use of inferior materials. Again, if your not fussed about the long term, perhaps these are worth a shot, but as I said at the beginning a good tripod can and should last many many years.

It’s all about the payload.

The first thing you should establish is the all up weight of your camera system. You need to include any accessories that you might add to the camera like microphones, lights, monitors, recorders or high capacity batteries. When your calculating the weight you need to support, for anything mounted more than 5″ or 12cm from the base of the camera (for example a monitor on the top of the camera) I would double the weight of that item to allow for the fact that objects a long way from the tripod head raises the centre of gravity of the system and thus requires a bigger tripod or greater damping effort.

For example if you have a 3kg camera with a top mounted 1kg monitor that uses an attached 0.5kg battery I would calculate a load of 3Kg + (1.5kg x2) = 6kg. Do not under estimate the extra load on your tripod that accessories add. Here’s an example:

Sony FS700 (2kg), Battery (0.5kg), Lens (1kg), Lens adapter (0.3kg), 15mm rails and mount (1.2kg), Matte Box (0.8kg), Top mounted Atomos Samurai with batts (1kg x2 to account for high position). This comes in at 7.8kg.

Once you have your weight then I would add a 20% contingency to allow for changes to your rig, for example a heavier lens or bigger batteries. In this case that brings me to a rounded up figure of 9.4kg max with 7.8kg min.

This is the payload my tripod needs to support. So when choosing a tripod it would have to support this as range. At the same time you don’t want to go too heavy on your tripod. If the tripod is designed for loads significantly higher than your payload you may find that you can’t balance it correctly or that there is too much damping for fast pans. Given a payload minimum of 7.8kg and possible 9.4kg you will probably want to look at tripods with a payload range around 6kg – 12kg or thereabouts.

Counterbalance. It is essential that the tripod head you choose has a counterbalance range that fits with the range calculated above. The counterbalance systems stops the tendency of the tripod head to want to tilt up or down when your shooting with the camera pointing up or down. Not only is this important in respect of getting smooth camera tilts but also from a safety point of view as it will help prevent the camera form unexpectedly tilting on it’s own and potentially unbalancing the tripod which can lead to your expensive camera kit crashing to the ground.

Damping and friction. There are several different methods used to damp the movement of a tripod head. Some use friction clutches with “sticky” grease, some use special fluids, valves and pistons. Provided you stay with a reputable brand these all work well. Best if you can try before you buy. Friction clutches and sticky grease may not be quite as silky smooth as a true fluid head but they tend to be cheaper, maintenance free and robust. True fluid heads can develop leaks over time if not serviced adequately, but offer the smoothest action. If you work in environmental extremes check that the greases or fluids will work at the temperatures your likely to encounter. A lot of the greases and fluids used in tripods become very stiff at low temperatures and can freeze solid in arctic conditions.

Play and Slack. Check for play and slack in the head. There should be none. Also check for twist and flex in the head itself. I’ve come across some tripod heads where if you push and pull the pan bar with a high damping setting the actual head assembly can warp and twist slightly.

Pan Bar. This is what you will use to control your tripod. It should have a good adjustment range for angle and lock into place when adjusted with a rosette type mount. Make sure it is good and secure as does not bend when working against a large amount of friction or damping. Extending pan bars are the worst for this, they can sometimes flex at the joint where the extension piece goes.

Legs and Spreaders. Most tripods use some kind of spreader to control the splay of the tripod legs. There is often the choice of a ground spreader or mid-level spreader. For lightweight and medium weight tripods I would almost always choose a mid level spreader. The big advantage of a mid level spreader is that they work just as well on rough or uneven ground (stairs and steps too) as on the flat. For heavy duty applications ground spreaders are the norm. Carbon fibre legs tend to be lighter than aluminium, but if abused the carbon fibre can crack or de-laminate. Getting shards of carbon in your hand from a damaged tripod leg is unpleasant I can assure you. Aluminium legs, while heavier are often more robust. Check for twist in the tripod legs. Lock the pan lock on the head and use the pan bar to twist the tripod. A small amount of flex may be normal in a lightweight tripod but there should be no obvious easy twisting of the tripod, especially with medium and heavyweight legs. Any twist or flex makes starting and ending pans smoothly difficult.

Leg Locks. Make sure these are good and secure. Test them if you can, lock the legs and make sure that the legs don’t flex around the joint or collapse when you put a bit of weight on the tripod. Lets face it, someone at sometime will lean on your tripod for support! Also look for locks that won’t get tangled up in wires or cables. Quick release locks are easier to use than multi-turn locks. Also check to see if the locks can be adjusted by the end user. Over time they will wear and there may come a time when you need to adjust them to keep them tight. Look to see where the locks are. Locks located high on the legs are much easier to operate than locks at ground level or low down on the legs.

Feet. Some tripods have rubber feet, some spikes. Whichever you choose make sure they are stable. Rubber feet are best for solid floors, you don’t want to use steel spikes on someones luxury wood floor! But if your outside on loose ground spikes are best. If the tripod has removable feet make sure you can get them on and off without having to resort to special tools.

Looking after it. Keep your tipod clean, this helps stop dirt and grit building up around any of the seals that protect the damping mechanism. Wipe it down with a damp cloth if you have been using it in a dirty or dusty environment. When your transporting a tripod, particularly if it’s being shipped, remove the pan bars. I’ve seen several tripods ruined by the pan bar mounts getting broken off in transit through impacts on the ends of the pan bars. Also for transportation unlock the head locks. If the tripod isn’t going to be used for a while turn the damping to zero to prevent the grease from being squeezed out from between the friction plates and reduce the counterbalance setting to relieve the pressure on the spring. In use, avoid tilting or panning when the pan or tilt locks are set, this can damage the head and will eventually wear out the locks. With a little bit of care a decent tripod should last for at least 10 years.

26th March, Suomilammi Helsinki. PMW-F5 and PMW-F55 workshop looking at the cameras, workflow, 4K and raw with hands on time and end to end workflow demos.

8th – 11th April, NAB, Las Vegas. Daily one hour overview of the F5/F55 looking at 4K, color space, raw and workflow.

24th April, Tilts Integration, Riga. PMW100/150/200 Masterclass.

25th April, LRT, Vilnius. PMW100/150/200 Masterclass.

I’m also looking into digital imaging workshops in New York, Austin (Texas) and LA in late May. These will cover things like 4K, gamma, log, raw and camera setups as well as general filming and production techniques. If your interested let me know.

These are the events and workshops I will be running or attending in the next couple of weeks in the UK. Note that these are free to attend, please follow the links for more details:

20th March, H.Prestons Open House in Malvern. I’ll have a full F5 kit, FS700 kit plus a large number of options for everyone to take a look at plus there will be free advice and tutorials on any Sony cameras.

21st March. ProKit, Chiswick, London. PMW-200 Masterclass.

27th March. Visual Impact, Bristol. PMW-200 Masterclass.

This was released a couple of weeks ago, but I was away at the time. Sony have released a firmware update package for both the F5/F55 cameras and the R5 recorder. You’ll find all the details and the firmware here: http://community.sony.com/t5/F5-F55/NEW-Firmware-v1-10-with-release-notes/td-p/102111

OK, OK, many of you will know this already, but for those that don’t understand what raw is all about I’m going to try to explain.

First lets consider how conventional video is recorded. When TV was first invented back in the late 1930’s a way was needed to squeeze a signal with a large dynamic range into a sensible sized signal. One important thing to consider and remember (if this article is going to make any sense) is that each additional stop of exposure has double the brightness of the previous stop.  This doubling of brightness translates into a doubling of the bandwidth or data required to transmit or store it. With a limited bandwidth system like TV broadcasting, if nothing was done to reduce the bandwidth required by ever brighter stops then you would only be able to broadcast a very narrow brightness or dynamic range.

Our own visual system is tuned to pay most attention to shadows and mid tones. After all, if anything was going to eat our ancient ancestors it was most likely going to come out of the shadows. In addition the things most important to us tend to be faces, plants and other things that are visually in the mid range. As a result we tend not to notice highlights and brighter parts of the world. So, if you take a picture or a video and reduce the amount of bandwidth or data used for the highlights we don’t tend to notice it in the same way that we would notice a reduction of data in the mid range. In order to keep video transmission and storage bandwidths under control something called a gamma curve is applied to recordings and broadcasts. This gamma curve gradually reduces the amount of bandwidth/data used as the brightness of the image increases. Gamma is a form of video compression and as with almost all types of video compression you are throwing away picture information. For the darker parts of the picture there is almost no compression, while the brighter parts, especially the highlights are highly compressed. For more info on Gamma take a look at Wikipedia.

So that’s gamma and gamma is used by all conventional video cameras. The problem with gamma is that if you overexpose an image, lets say a face, you push that face up into the more compressed part of the exposure range and this starts to get quite noticeable. Even though in post production you can reduce the brightness of the overexposed face it will still often not look right because of the extra compression imparted on the face and subsequent loss of data due to the over exposure.

To make matters worse, when your working with conventional video you have a very limited amount of bandwidth (think of it as a fixed size bucket) within which you must store all you picture information. Try to put too much information into that bucket and it will overflow. As the dynamic range of modern cameras increases we end up trying to squeeze ever greater amounts of picture information into that same sized bucket. The only way we can fit more stops into our fixed size bucket is by compressing the highlights even more. This means that the recording system becomes even less forgiving of over exposure. It’s a bit of a catch 22 situation: A camera with a greater dynamic range will often be less tolerant of incorrect exposure than a camera with a smaller dynamic range (and thus less highlight compression).

But what if we could do away with gamma curves altogether? Well if we could do away with gamma curves then our exposure would be less critical. We could over expose a face and provided it wasn’t actually clipped (exceeding peak white) it could be corrected down to the right brightness in post production and it would look just fine. This would be fantastic, but the amount of data you would need to record without gamma would be massive.

Enter the Bayer Pattern sensor! Raw can work with any type of sensor, but it’s Bayer type sensors that we normally associate with raw. A Bayer sensor is a single sensor with a special array of coloured filters above the pixels that allow it to reproduce a colour image. It’s important to remember that the pixels themselves are just light sensitive devices. They do not care what colour light falls on them. They just output a brightness value depending on how much light falls on them. If we take a pixel with a green filter above it, only green light will fall on the pixel and the pixel will output a brightness value. But the signal is still just a brightness value, it is not a colour signal. It does not become a colour signal until the output from the sensor is “De-Bayered”. De-Bayering is the process of taking all those brightness values from the pixels and converting them into a colour video signal. So again taking green as an example, we read out the first pixel (top left) and as this was behind a green filter we know that it was seeing green light. For the next pixel we know it was under a blue filter, but we still need a green value for our final picture. So we use the green pixels adjacent to the blue one to calculate an estimated green value for that location. This process is repeated for all 3 primary colours for every pixel location on the sensor. This gives us a nice colour image, but also creates a lot of data. If we started off with 4096×2160 pixels (4K sensor) we would initially have 8.8 Million data samples to record or store. However when we convert this brightness only information to RGB colour we get 4096×2160 of green, 4096×2160 of blue and 4096×2160 of red. A whopping 26.5 Million data samples. A traditional video camera does all this De-Bayering prior to recording, but what if we skipped this process and just recorded the original sensor brightness samples? We could save ourselves a huge amount of data.

The other thing that normally happens when we do the De-Bayering etc is that we make adjustments to the De-Bayered signal levels to allow for things like white balance and camera gain. Adjusting the gain or white balance of a camera does not change the way the sensor works. The same amount of light falls on the same pixels and the output of the sensor does not change. What we change is the proportions of Red Green and Blue that we mix together to get the correct white balance or we add additional amplification to the signal (like turning up the volume on an audio amplifier) adding gain, to make the picture brighter.

Raw just records the unprocessed sensor output.

So if we just record the raw data coming off the sensor we dramatically reduce the amount of data we need to record. As the recorded signal won’t be immediately viewable anyway (it will need to be de-Bayered first), we don’t need to use a gamma curve. As the amount of data is lower than it would be for a fully processed colour image we can actually record the data linearly without image compression. The downside is that to view the recorded image we must process and De-Bayer the image while it’s playing back. The plus side is that at the same time as De-Bayering we can add our colour balance adjustment and any gain we need, all of this can be done in the edit suite giving much finer control and the ability to correct it and re-do it if you want. What we are doing is moving the in image processing from in the camera, to in the edit suite. In addition there is the fact that the picture is linear, without gamma compression which makes it incredibly forgiving of overexposure.

If you have never worked with raw then I suggest you give it a try. Many stills cameras can shoot in raw and it’s essentially exactly the same process with a stills camera as a video camera. If you have a camera that will do both Jpeg and raw at the same time have a go at shooting with both modes and then adjusting both in a paint package like photoshop. The difference in post production flexibility is astounding.

Of course as with all these things there is no free lunch. Your still recording a lot of data with linear raw so your recorded files will be much larger than traditional compressed video. In addition De-Bayering and processing the images takes time. Modern computers are getting faster and storage is getting cheaper, working with raw is easier now than it’s ever been. I can work with the 4K raw files from my laptop (Retina MacBook Pro) in real time by using 1/4 resolution playback. The final renders from Resolve do take a little bit of time, but once you’ve taken a bite from the raw apple it will keep tempting you back for more!

Going to NAB? Got a week spare afterwards and fancy something different? Why not join me on a Storm Chasing adventure. I will be taking a very small group tornado chasing between April 13th and April 20th. This is the start of the tornado season in the USA and in recent years this time of year has seen some very big tornado outbreaks. Now unlike the typical thrill seeker tornado trips that try to get as close as possible to the tornadoes my aim is to get into the best positions for beautiful and awe inspiring shots of the storms and tornadoes. This may mean hanging back just a little bit to give ourselves time to get tripods out and get stable properly exposed high quality video and stills. I have absolutely no desire to actually get into a tornado or be so close that you can never stop.

In addition I will be looking for opportunities to capture time-lapse of developing storms, beautiful storm structures and spectacular lightning. It should be noted however that sometimes, in order to get a decent view of a tornado we may need to get quite close, but I will not deliberately enter into poor visibility or any other high risk situation.

As part of the trip I will provide tuition and assistance for anyone that needs it. We can look at camera set-ups, picture profiles, time-lapse techniques and any other aspect of video production. The cost of the trip is $1,900 USD which includes accommodation. We normally stay in mid budget motels. Food and drink is not included and you will need to make your own way to/from Dallas, Texas, arriving in Dallas on the 13th of April and Departing Dallas on the 21st of April.

What can you expect to see? Well, there are no guarantees. We are at the mercy of the weather, but it is tornado season. I would expect to see impressive “Supercell” thunderstorms that twist and turn, towering from a base at 1,500ft all the way up to 70,000 ft. I would expect to see spectacular lightning from these storms both from cloud to ground as well as across the vast spreading anvils of these storms. I would not be at all surprised to encounter large hail, maybe golfball or bigger (although I try to avoid any direct encounters with hail bigger than golf balls). There may be haboob dust storms, damaging straight line winds and if we are lucky tornadoes.

Where will we go? Who knows, the only thing I do know is that we will start and finish in Dallas. I will make a daily weather forecast and we will go to the area that offers the best prospect of seeing storms. In April this usually means travelling around the states of New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, but it would not surprise me if we end up in Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska or Iowa. There is often a lot of driving, but that is part of the adventure, a road trip across the mid-west seeing small western towns, the vast prairies and cattle ranches.

If your interested please use the contact form to send me a message.

For a zoom lens to be Parfocal, that is to stay in focus as you zoom in or out, the distance between the sensor and the rear element of the lens has to be set very accurately. If it is not then the focus will shift as you zoom in or out. This is why on most pro video cameras or lenses there is a back focus or Flange Back adjustment that alters this distance over a very small range, often only around +/- 0.5mm.

With lenses that are electronically controlled, like the one on the PMW-200/EX1 it is more complex. The lens itself is not ParFocal, the lenses natural focus changes as you zoom. This makes the design of the lens simpler and thus cheaper as well as compact and light weight. But because of this the camera/lens must use a Look up table of focal length to desired focus distance to dynamically alter the focus as you zoom to make the non-parfocal lens ( called vari-focal) behave like a parfocal one. This table needs to be calibrated from time to time, especially if the lens has been bumped or knocked (even when not in use) and in the case of the PMW-200, EX1 and EX3 (plus other similar cameras) this is what the Auto FB adjust routine does.

If you find that when zooming in and out your focus is not tracking accurately you may need to run the Auto FB routine to calibrate your lens. Sometimes rough handling of the camera, for example in transit, can throw out the lenses calibration.

Hot of the show floor from CabSat is a great new upgrade for the Alphatron 035W viewfinder. The firmware for the viewfinder has been updated to include a waveform monitor and vectorscope. The size of these can be adjusted so you can have a small inset waveform in the bottom left of the screen or a much larger waveform across the bottom of the screen. This is a great upgrade (especially for anyone think of using it with an F5/F55) and best of all it can be applied to any Alphatron EVF. I believe this is available free of charge to anyone that has an Alphatron EVF which is even better.

There are also some hardware changes which includes a new optic in the monocular that combined with a new filter and protection layer on the LCD screen means that sun damage is now extremely unlikely even if you don’t close the shutter. Lots of good news coming from Alphatron!

In response to Reds attempt to sue Sony over claimed patent infringements Sony have made the following statement:

On February 12, 2013, Red Digital Cinema (“Red”) sued Sony Corporation of America and Sony Electronics Inc. and alleged that the Sony PMW-F5, PMW-F55, and F65 digital cinema cameras infringe two Red patents. The F65 has been commercially available for over a year and the F5 and F55 were announced in October, 2012.

Sony has now had an opportunity to study Red’s complaint and the asserted patents, and categorically denies Red’s allegations. Sony intends to defend itself vigorously in the Red lawsuit. Sony looks forward to prevailing in court, thus vindicating the Sony engineers who developed Sony’s quality digital cinema cameras.

Taken from http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/show-highend/