Sony Fs5 - Wow!!

OK so I got a demo Fs5 from my good friends at VMI Video in Southern California.  Well in short - Very cool!!!

I've got it for about 6 days to test out and put though it's paces in my typical work flows.  Yesterday I shot a group of sit down interviews with it in 4K.  Today I used it as a B camera to our F5 for a green screen segment.  The director is going to do the final edit with both cameras but I looked at my footage in 2160@ 24p and it looks really nice.  I was able to pull a key very quickly in PPro.  

Tomorrow we are getting together at a local production company's stage and testing it against an F5 and an A7s.  The plan is to use every lens, recorder and format we can with each camera and then compare to footage.  So this will be an on-going series of posts for the next few weeks as I develop my impressions further.

Part 1:

The interviews went very well.  I used the Fs5 as the A camera and my EX3 as the B camera.  The EX3 was mostly to give me a backup as the Fs5 was new and I was new to it.  I sent the same audio feed to both cameras and kept matched framing.  I used the EX3 last year on this project and was sure it would work if I got pickled.  The Fs5 did a fine job.  I wanted to to be in 4K for re-framing in post.  I got a little scare when I looked at the footage this morning; there was one interview where a short had a tight blue and white pattern that created a moire pattern and I didn't see it while we were shooting...  The I thought about it, I am down resing the footage to 1080 on the fly and hadn't rendered it.  I hit the big R button and then everything was fine.  So one for OE....

That's it for now.  I'll post some more info this weekend after the big camera day.

Part 2:

So we did the shoot out with the other cameras and it turned out pretty well.  We set all three cameras up with the green screen.  We tried Sony lenses and Canon L series lenses along with a pair of B4 ENG lenses - one SD and one HD.  As for the B4 glass, we found very little difference to the eye when viewing on a 20" JVC broadcast LCD monitor.

The Sony lenses, a 24-70 ƒ4, a 16-35 ƒ4 and a 70-200 ƒ4 worked very nicely.  Auto focus worked as expected and face tracking on the wider lenses was remarkably accurate.  The Canon glass looked very sharp as well.  The iris control through a Metbones Mk IV adapter was quite good.  I was having a little trouble (probably OE again) getting the camera to use auto focus with the canon glass.

The kit 18-105 lens from the Fs5 worked on the A7s which was fun.  But the zoom function was a little lacking with the  A7s' remote.  We tried a LANC remote via and adapter and it was still a little on the unhappy side.

More info soon... Stay tuned 
  

Until next time, good shooting and editing and grading,

TDTrey 

Davinci Resolve 12 - Flippin' Fantastic Again

Well. Blackmagic Design has done it again - Davinci Resolve 12 is awesome!!!  I've been working with it for about 2 months now and I love all the new features.  Here a quick example:

This week I worked with a long time client who used a new high speed camera from Fastec to shoot an art project.  They were capturing all the footage at 600 fps in DNG raw files and then aiming for a 24p output.  Since this method leaves all the footage in image sequence folders it sometimes makes it a little tricky to review the files and work with them.   

Enter Resolve 12...

Resolve has long been able to read image sequences as clips automatically and then pop them into the media pool as needed.  In this project I simply double clicked each clip folder to load the clip into the source view and then reviewed the clip.  When we found a take we liked I'd pull it from the source viewer into the media pool.  After we found the hero shots I was able to throw them on a timeline and start editing.  BTW this is all in Resolve 12... All in RAW dng - no conversions or proxies.

Once the timelines were built, I went into grading mode and did a little cleanup shot by shot.  The client needed the clips mainly as proof of concept at this point so H264's were fine.  I simply went to the delivery page, chose 264 and entire sequence, added the job to the render Q and was on my way.

The client had done an After Effects session with the footage to look at it earlier in the week but found that difficult to keep a creative focus as there we many steps to get to the end product.  This was so fast, from ingest to output, he now has great confidence about the project moving forward. 

I think the folks at Blackmagic Design have done it again.  This is a terrific step forward for all departments in the video world.

***UPDATE***

So the day after I posted this blog they released Resolve 12.1
Here's the official feature scoop:  

Remote rendering on DaVinci Resolve Studio

Support for native display color profiles on OS X

Preferences option to enable 10-bit precision on viewers on OS X 10.11 El Capitan

Ability to select clips when in blade mode

Support for faders on generators and titles

Ability to extend freeze frames from the start of the edit  

Ability to media manage selected clips on a timeline

Ability to perform negative timecode offset in clip attributes

Improved support for sub-clips from FCP7 XML

Improved rendering of audio transitions (cross-fades) and audio faders

Auto scroll during timeline item resize

Improved sorting in media storage and media pool

Support for smart bin filtering based on clip type

Ability to move clips and timelines from a smart bin view

Support for moving files to the trash instead of deleting them permanently when using the media manager on both Mac and Windows systems

Ability to delete multiple projects and folders in project manager

Ability to decompose a compound node

Ability to grade nested timelines  

Ability to filter clips based on whether they have keyframes

Ability to manually keyframe power windows in frame mode even without tracking

Ability to freeze the current frame on an external matte

User option to copy flags and markers when performing ColorTrace

Improved ACEScc support

Support for stereo decision list (SDL) v0.25

Support for RED SDK v6.0.4

Support for embedding timecode in audio output

 

Until next time, good shooting and editing and grading,

TDTrey 

Premiere Pro CC 2014 Possable Smooth Playback Solution

Hi All,

Happy holidays.  So I just updated my PPro to the lasted version as I saw a news blast they had released an update this week to build 8.2.0.  I tried an earlier v8.1 pre build 65 version and it had really bad playback - very choppy.  All excited, I launched the new version... and....... CRAP!!!!!  same thing.  However, I did catch something that I maybe didn't see before:  Once you have updated to the latest version it appears the playback engine defaults to OpenCL instead of CUDA for accelerated playback and rendering.

I created a new project and switched the settings at startup and voila... the new project was playing back perfectly.  I then closed that new project and re-opened my older project that was stuttering and now it was playing back nicely too.  

I also did a quick export with matching sequence settings and it went about 3x speed.  Conversion to H264 was pretty slow taking roughly 16 minutes for a 2 minute piece.  1920 x 1080 30p  5D/GoPro mixed footage.

Well, I hope this helps a little.  I was searching for a while for this and got close but never saw anything about the playback engine.  I did the rollback to 8.0.1 once last time but now I'll stick with the newest version as it seems to be working =)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

TDTrey

My New Sigma 50mm ƒ1.4 DG HSM Lens

I just picked up my new Sigma 50mm ƒ1.4 DG HSM Lens from Samy's Cameras on Monday - Wow!!!  I've been waiting for it to come on now for about 2 months and it was worth the wait.  All the research I've done says this is one of the sharpest lenses to come along in a while and they are right. 

I'm using this lens on my 5D3 rig.  This is one in a new line of lenses from Sigma.  They also offer a 35mm ƒ1.4  Full Frame and a 18-35mm ƒ1.8 zoom for an APS-C size sensor.  

The skinny:

• Very sharp - all the way to ƒ1.4
• Great contrast
• Great color rendition
• Smooth focus ring
• Fast auto focus
• Nice ergonomics

So of course I wanted to shoot an image as soon as I got it and had 2 choices; the cats or the bird feeders ( man!! I'm getting old =).  So forgive the not so scientific photos... I will post some real shots and video as soon as I get a chance.

Along with the lens I added a cool little focus gear from DLC called a DL-V/Band.

It went on really easy and is nice and snug. Not too much extra hanging over to catch on the camera rig.  Smooth feel with my Chrosziel follow focus.  $15 USD.

All in all a nice ad to my kit.  I was holding out for a Rokinon 50mm Cine lens but as they seem to never want to make that lens (rumors be damned!!!!) I thought it's time to make a move.  Stay tuned and I'll post some more info as I discover it though use.

Until next time, Good shooting

TDTrey

CineGear 2014

Well it's that time of year again - CineGear!!!

Seems like 2014 is the year of the copter and the gimbal.  

There were more copter offerings and camera support systems then I could shake a Steadicam at.  When you first walked in there was a copter & gimbal booth just waiting for new folks to have a peek.

 

All the usual suspect were there and many new ones.  This year I had a short list of items I was interested in.  I'm mostly looking at camera support and control.  Things like wireless video, wireless follow focus, a basic copter solution and I'm paying close attention to the race for the winning handheld gimbal kit. The camera race is definitely heating up but I don't think I'm ready to jump into 4K yet and since that race is just getting started at the consumer and prosumer level, I'm hoping more time will lead to better product and pricing.

Here are some of the cooler rigs

But the best one of all (Yes.. the USS Enterprise.  We are at Paramount after all =)

For me, I found something I was looking for on every street.  Teradek had a nice offering with their updated Bolt Pro line of wireless video.  Noe it can work up to 2000 feet line of sight.  I also checked out IDX and Paralinx.  I think, for now, I might lean towards the Paralinx Arrow solution as I mostly need a multicast function with near zero latency.

I stopped by the Redrock Micro booth and took another look at their wireless follow focus the MicroRemote.  Still looks nice.  I wish they would come out with the iPhone controller they showed in 2012.  Zacuto has a really cool lens control system that works in a grip form factor called the Control Grip.  It's a 2 motor system that can control either Zoom and Iris or Focus and Iris.  It's still in the testing stage and should be out later this year.  I wish I had known about the new TitlaMax focus system from Tilta.  I just saw this yesterday and would have loved to check it out in person.  It is a 3 motor system (FIZ) with brushless German motors and a nice IPS touch screen for easy configuration and display.

One of the best things I found is from Woodencamera.  It's their multi connector breakout box: the C-Box.  It can take HD-SDI and/or HDMI in and then send the signal out 3 HD-SDI BNCs and 2 HDMIs all at the same time.  Wait, it get's better...  You can put a battery mount on one or both sides so it can function as your power distro with 2 D-Taps or clip on to an existing battery mount as an add on to extend a system. Nice!!!

It was a nice show this year.  I ran into a lot of friends there and saw a bunch of great new gear.  Can't wait till next year!!!

Until next time, Good shooting

TDTrey

12G... What's on the horizon I wonder???

So at last year's NAB the big announcement from Black Magic Design was the Production 4K camera and it's ability to use 6G SDI to get the signal down one pipe.  This year it's the introduction of the URSA and a 12G pipe.  Along with BMD, Atomos introduced a new external recorder, the Shogun, which also is sporting a 12G connection...

So I'm wondering what's coming down the pipe??  If 6G is able to handle 4K UHD no problem...  What can 12G handle?  Are we aiming for an 8K world in the near future??  It would be interesting.  If you think about it, the new URSA has a great architecture for  future proofing - replaceable lens turret with the sensor inside.  As sensors increase in both spacial and temporal resolution they just have to release an update for a moderate price and have it "plug into" the URSA body... Not a bad idea. 

Enter the Shogun...  If a 12G feed is the new goal then this is the recorder that can keep up with it.  Atomos seems to be on the leading edge.  Also the Shogun is the new planned companion recorder for the Sony A7s and it's 4K features.  I just like that it's a 7" screen and now has XLR I/O with Mic/Line/Phantom settings.  I have the Samurai Blade and like it a lot.

No big revelations here.  Just me pontificating on a Saturday morning =)

Until next time, Good shooting

TDTrey

The Big Small Rigs...

So here is a cool version of my 5D3 rig with my iPad Prompter on it.  It's pretty tight.  The prompter is driven by my Macbook Pro using a display mirroring software over WiFi.  The system is pretty light weight all things considered and I can take it handheld if needed.  I am using an ATOMOS Samurai Blade to record in ProRes straight out of the camera's HDMI. It also records the final audio in sync with the picture.

Here is another version of the rig using a SmallHD AC-7 monitor for the field.  I like the size of the AC-7 and how bright it is.  This is the rig when clients want to record right to CF and not deal with the ATOMOS. 

With the focus on new cameras looking toward 4K this year it will be interesting to see how the world of the 5D fairs.  I am intrigued by the GH4...  I have clients still asking for the 5D3 and the 5D2.  they like the look of the full frame sensor and want to go with a known camera.  I think I'll get another year or two out of this rig. 

Until next time, Good shooting

TDTrey