MacBook Air

Those who have been following my blog know I am fed up waiting for a new Mac Pro with Thunderbolt. To some extent this is a block to us mid market video professionals using Thunderbolt but it is frustrating because I can see potential in the technology and I don’t want to invest in iMacs due to the expansion limitations. However I found this demo by Dave Helmly on the Jigsaw24 site and it looks very impressive. Admittedly it is using an expansion chassis and a Red Rocket card but even a stingy Yorkshireman wouldn’t expect a MacBook Air to play back 4K on it’s own! (well on second thoughts…)

I am always on the lookout for fast, cost effective solutions or even portable solutions that can improve workflow from location to post. Given the cascade functionality of Thunderbolt maybe pci expandability isn’t so much of an issue as it once was. Perhaps a quad core iMac solution could be a workstation option.

Watch the video, it is even more impressive when you get to the end but in the interest of suspense and creative storytelling I won’t give the game away.

Exciting init?

HyperDeck Shuttle 2

“Time is our most valuable asset in life and business; the smart money must be on recording to a codec that meets your post requirements right away.”

Well here it is, Black Magic Design seem to have cottoned on to the fact that truly uncompressed footage isn’t really a mainstream requirement these days. I wrote before that when the shuttle first came out that uncompressed was impressive for such a small price but not that practical from a point of view of storage/cost and speed of systems to play it! If you were editing from a mid range laptop you want compressed footage of some sort. I thought it was probably a license issue and after all $335 is really cheap but if it isn’t practical it isn’t a good investment.

Now with the Shuttle 2 you have a choice of uncompressed or Avid DNxHD! I wish they had gone down the route of ProRes because that would have been useful for Avid and Final Cut. Avid must have been more enthusiastic than Apple to help out moving image professionals; what a surprise! I couldn’t see the spec of DNxHD on the Black Magic site but I read elsewhere that it was DNxHD 220x (220Mbit/s, 10-bit). The choice of Avid codec might be a reflection of a general move back towards Avid and Premiere Pro.

One of the issues we all face in Post Production is that although we don’t often digitise tapes anymore we still end up backing up, transcoding and archiving. Although we save time on ingest by the time you have copied it or transcoded it to a more useable format the time is about the same as digitising a tape into what you wanted in the first place! Back in the day your media was your archive and once digitised you had your digital media ready to rock in your chosen format.

Why do we transcode? If you have shot on a really high quality format such as uncompressed, ProRes 4444, Red 5K etc. you need to moderate the size of your edit storage and may not have a fast enough system during the cutting/editorial process. You may be doing the opposite; recording on low quality, low bit rate highly compressed H264 DSLR footage and transcoding to a higher bit rate more responsive codec for higher speed of working and increased resilience through the system.

Time is our most valuable asset in life and business; the smart money must be on recording to a codec that meets your post requirements right away.

HyperDeck Shuttle 2 mount

For those working on Avid this is a great piece of kit. Imagine recording on the cameras native system and this device too. The rushes can go straight into the edit and with decent docking stations such as e-sata you will have speedy high quality editing straight away. The camera native system XDCAM EX, H264, AVCHD etc. can all be backup. Even though we now are not using tape so much with all the problems of dropout, scratches, edge crinkle, stretch, condensation etc. we have probably all experienced corruption of files or discs. For any production I would advise having dual recording for peace of mind.

If we assume you can afford to have the SSD media sitting around then to use it like tape would be good. The SSD is your archive with the added advantage that you can edit it instantly, no digitising. Your masters and other media could be archived onto LTO. I think it more likely though that unless you have a pressing deadline that a straight copy onto central storage at accelerated rate is a more likely choice, especially if you need multiple workstations to be able to access it. I like to get the rushes onto a RAID system asap, it has been a good safe practice for us for years. Then once a pass of LTO is done you can think about erasing and releasing the media back to the shoot. Using the maxim that “If your data does not exist in three places, it doesn’t exist at all” If you had done a recording on low cost media such as SD card, compact flash etc. then that could be kept as further insurance until production was complete.

During production original media, RAID protected working copies and a backup are a must. When complete you can decide on the value of the material and discard as appropriate.

Every production has it’s own special requirements depending on the need for access to the rushes at a later date. If there is archive/stock footage value in the material then you will treat it differently to disposable material that will only be of value for a short period. It takes time to decide what to junk, organise before archive and when consolidate on the Avid does not quite work, you are not sure what you have! Given the cost of storage these days I am leaning towards “just save everything.”

Below is my approximate league table for cost of storage. There is a handy calculator for codecs here. The calculations are rough as I based them on prices I could find on the internet. Also I apologise for any calculation errors as I have gone bog eyed tapping the calculator… The interesting thing is the cost of storage of the compact flash cards, the Pix and Ki Pro mini need 600x and these don’t come cheap, they appear to be more expensive than the SR Memory but that was only based on the 1.5gbs card the 2.5 and 5.5 cards are more expensive again. SSDs seem to be the future and the Shuttle 2 is simple and inexpensive but only the laptop hard drive option is cheap enough to compare to tape. This means you can afford to leave the recorded media on the shelf.

external video recorders comparison

Sound Devices Pix 240

On balance looking at visual display, flexibility, interfaces, build quality, audio options, use of ProRes and DNxHD codecs, capital price and £/hour with SSD the Pix 240 seems excellent, it is like a Ninja on steroids, I saw it at IBC and thought it was pretty damn good. But for all those Yorkshiremen out there it is 10 times the price of the Shuttle 2.

I am sure someone will correct me on the numbers, exciting init?

I had a fairly average broadband connection for a while and although I wanted to have a better one there were not that many practical alternatives at a decent cost (I wanted Yorkshireman price). Mine is at present on average between 9 and 15 meg download and up to 1 upload. Not very fast but it has met our needs and only cost us £15/month.

We switched from our previous supplier because when it stopped working as we had to spend weeks talking to people in India who we couldn’t understand and who in the end said they would have to send someone from BT to check our installation! …

So I decided to go back to BT as we could actually have a conversation and if they needed to come round they could just invite themselves. I am not here to big up BT but they have been ok with us, anyhow I digress…

Now as a video professional and I am sure the same applies to many other sorts of digital businesses, I want fast upload! The download isn’t massively important as mostly it is to service email and research, online ordering and payment etc. You get the occasional need for large software packages but they can be got overnight and if you are really strapped you can go out to the shops. Shock horror, I know that is a bit out of left field, actual real things, being obtained by going out into the real world? But let us get practical, if we need to supply large amounts of data to a client we can put it on a tiny hard drive, place in a jiffy bag and use the post. It can be in many parts of the world by the following day. Snail mail it may be but for large amounts of data it’s the way to go.

But I have been looking for something to reduce my upload times to YouTube and Vimeo; and as a recent Dropbox convert ( I love dropbox), give us a faster sync with all our dropboxes. We also use an online edit system and therefore extra speed means less time uploading rushes.

I was contacted by people who rang me up saying that they could provide 2meg up and 2 meg down. Not bad I thought, as although the download was slow we got a twofold increase in upload speed. The catch however was that they wanted silly money, £200 a month for this service. Suffice to say I didn’t take them up on the offer. I got a phone call from BT the other day telling us that we now had the option of BT Infinity (a fibre optic connection) and this would only cost us £30/month. What do we get for this doubling in cost?

Well an astonishing 35 meg down and 10 meg up! That is going to be a game changer, 10 times our current best upload speed. In real terms if our upload speed was 500k it is 20 times faster. Even to a Yorkshireman this is good value so I have signed up. No instal costs, new optical router, fab. There is a 100gig a month cap for this price but you can have unlimited for £35/month. I think the domestic rates are even cheaper see here.

I can get it at home too so I might have it there as backup and another 10meg upload stream for jobs that need quicker delivery.

If you are on the right exchange you can get 100 meg down and 15 meg up, this all starts to make it useful for delivery instead of posting hard drives.

It obviously depends on the amount of data you need to shift but I will do a follow up post when we have been using the new system for a while to assess the real world impact.

Exciting init?

GH2 gets 25P

The new update for GH2 firmware is out, goto the Panasonic site or use this link
This is going to be a great basis for more quality hacks I am sure. For now I am going away from the old hacks and using the 25P at 24mbs to see what it is like.
25P at 24mbs playing back in camera has got to be a good compromise! These are the new functions.
1. Added a video mode [HIGH BIT RATE] which is suitable for editing video recorded at high bit rate(24Mbps).
2. Added a function [POWER ZOOM LENS] when using power zoom lens.
([DISP FOCAL LENGTH], [STEP ZOOM], [ZOOM RESUME], [ZOOM SPEED], [ZOOM RING]*)
3. Full area enlargement of AF area setting.
4. Improved in the speed of consecutive shooting when shot with auto bracket.
5. Increased number of recordable images in consecutive shooting.
6. [EX.TELE CONV. (Extra Tele Conversion)] can be set ON/OFF separately in photo or video recording.
7. More accurate light adjustment of built-in flash.
8. Improved in the AF performance in video recording.
9. Synchronization of alarm volume for low battery with [BEEP VOLUME].
10. Added a function [HALF PRESS RELEASE].
11. Improved NR (Noise Reduction) in high sensitivity shooting.
12. Added a function [TOUCH SCREEN] which is ON/OFF control of touch-screen.

Exciting init!

First BVE North

It is great to finally have a technical broadcast exhibition on our doorstep for a change. The big problem was that I saw so many people that I knew that I spent all the time chatting and not so much looking at the kit! In some cases it was about 20 years since I had seen them. It seems to have been well received certainly as a first time event, Dave Clark of Mitcorp/CVP said he had taken plenty of sales and it was a great way to network and would have liked another day. Certainly it takes a good deal of putting together so maybe a 3 day event would be optimum.

Rotolight

Rotolight at BVE North

I bought myself some Rotolights as I have been wanting some lightweight LED lighting kit for a while, there was an intriguing large Rotolight Anova that is being billed as wireless, if you are shooting in 2 locations you can sample the light in one and send it to the other so you get the same colour on the second unit!
• World’s First WiFi equipped light. Wirelessly control brightness, colour, system settings, and even update firmware.
• Revolutionary ‘Magic Eye’ (Patent Pending) technology uses iPhone/iPad to accurately measure colour temperature, and wirelessly transmits colour settings to ANOVA

See the news release on the web site

In general it was dealers not manufacturers that were exhibiting, no bad thing as you need to buy the kit once you have decided what to buy. Knowing what support is available for your gear locally is important as you want to get updates, quick service and advice to ensure any downtime is minimised.
Also buying on the internet may give you a cheap deal but you might get a grey import that no one will fix when you need servicing or repair!

I decided to look over an area that I have previously not looked at very much – Slo motion. In the past I have used library footage but if you really needed to get a dramatic look, capturing many more frames per second is always sexy.

Phantom

Phantom Flex

So first up was the phantom flex, this is a camera that performs well in many situations not just slo motion. I bumped into Paul Lilley (owner operator) who uses his very often at standard frame rate of 25P and I can see why when I looked at the performance of the camera in the Zacuto shoot out.The use of a global shutter gives it a “solid look” that not many of the other high end cameras have. Paul also had worked with some 3D academics to produce a beam splitter system

Phantom 3D Rig

that enables the Phantom to record 3D and of course with the added benefit of 3D slo motion. This works well until you get to below a metre and convergence is not optimum.

The Phantom Flex can record: Max speed at full resolution of 2560 x 1600 is 1455 fps in Standard mode and 725 fps in HQ mode
At 1920 x 1080, max speed is 2570 fps in Standard mode and 1275 fps in HQ mode. It also has great sensitivity as the ISO is rated at 1200. The Phantom is a bit of a beast and not exactly cheap so renting is a prefered option. Usually with specialist kit you want a specialist operator anyway to get the most out of the shoot day. So what other options are there?

Photron

Photron Slow Motion

The web site has all the models available but in our industry the Fastcam BC2 HD is probably of interest.
It is more of a TV friendly body with suitable add ons and will at 1920×1080 give you 2000 frames/second, so not far short of the Phantom, those 500 frames less could be quite critical for some applications though!

The BC2 HD provides four megapixel resolution (2048×2048 pixels) at 1,000 fps, full 1080 HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels) at 2,000 fps and frame rates up to 86,000 fps with reduced resolution.
I spoke with Mark Johnson form Slow Mo High Speed Camera Hire who was the owner operator on the stand. As with the other owners the types of filming he gets involved with is military, ballistic, aeronautic and industrial and diagnostic testing.

Olympus

Olympus Slow Motion Camea

Despite a lot of negative publicity recently, rapid share price drop and a slow speed guilt admission policy, Olympus has a high speed camera!

I spoke with Dave Hill owenr operator from Acrobat TV, he said that this camera is easy to use and quite cheap by comparison to the other cameras but does only have a 720 HD resolution. You would have to upres this if you were mastering at 1920×1080 but as slow motion has a different look and purpose you may find the trade off to be acceptable. In the North Dave can provide the camera with an operator or you can hire direct from the Olympus dealer Adam Marshall at Olympus Industrial Systems Europe in Essex.

The camera on the right is the basic model, the one underneath is a new model that has PL mount with video industry friendly settings like white balance, gain etc. on the control panel.

There are a few variations on the website but the maximum frames per second at the full resolution of 720P is 2000.

So if you have a need for high, medium or low cost slow motion image capture there is a solution for you in the northwest.

Automatic Duck software is free!

Anyone wanting to move data between Final Cut and Avid or Avid to Final Cut or After Effects could do worse than to use the Automatic Duck software. In fact you could do much worse as it is now free!
The guys are not able to support the software at the level they would wish so they are giving it away free.
So get over there and download it in case it goes offline in the near future.
Times change but it is exciting init?
DOWNLOAD PAGE.

Zacuto camera comparison

For rolling shutter tests and colour nuances watch The great Zacuto shootout episode 3.
One of the shocks for me was just how poor the Arri Alexa is on rolling shutter, the Phantom flex is great, anyway have a watch and see for yourself. I have an idea, how about using CCDs instead of CMOS!
Call me old fashioned, exciting though init?

Exchange FCP and FCx

Not sure if this was written before the add on to FCPX allowing interchange but it is worth a look anyhow for the export to resolve. The article is on FCP.co
It shows how you can convert between final cut 7 and final cut X projects by going through Resolve software.
Exciting init?

Lytro camera

Well here is an interesting toy, the Lytro camera. A camera that takes stills but also stores scene depth information. The software allows you to select what is in focus after the event! Always great in the edit to have control of focus after the shot was taken eh?
I wonder if you can do it over time? if so you could use it to get a focus pull and perhaps a zoom in on a video timeline.
If there is a way to use it like that it would be a good addition to location shooting kit for an arty focus pull here and there.
Here is a video report form C-net.
The light field sensor captures information about the angle of light coming onto the sensor as well as intensity and colour.
You can see a bit here http://www.lytro.com/science_inside and they also have more detail of how it works on their blog and even the CEO’s dissertation.
Exciting init?

iPhone 4S video

I can’t wait to get my iPhone 4S because the camera in it is fab. Apparently it is capable of 4K according to EOSHD but they use a lot of the video resolution to do camera stabilisation.
Here is a video shot on it by Benjamin Dowie and there is quite a creative look in terms of shallow depth of focus, amazing for such a small sensor at F2.4.
Omnivision has supplied Apple in the past but there is a rumour that Sony are building the camera, see here.
I assume it will be compatible with the Owle Bubo, might be a pretty good combo for affordable lightweight corporate podcasts. The Glif is a really simple cool mount for the iPhone too.
Exciting init?