He echoes my thoughts so much regarding usage of the software as tools, edit packages are no longer things you nail your colours to but tools to make programmes with.

We don’t need to stick with just one programme and squeeze every last pound out of it as we have so many powerful tools now at our disposal that used to cost the earth. DaVinci Resolve is free, Lightworks is free, Avid are giving us Symphony for £715, it used to be £4500… The smart people will be using the cost savings here to invest in the boring stuff like marketing!

Without customers and paid jobs all our efforts are not industry but hobbies! Personally I feel that 4K will make it into the home in a bigger way than 3D, 4K is an immersive experience  because the resolution is what tells us that what we see is the real world.

Someone with monocular vision still feels connected to the real world when they see the killer sunset or the northern lights. Like the northern lights that are now visible in Scotland on occasion 4K gets nearer all the time.

I enjoy 3D now and again but I suspect that 4K will arrive at a better price with better quality than 3D tvs that you don’t need glasses for.

The new range of HP workstations has been released and they are even more capable of playing back 5K footage with the right graphics cards and fast internal raid storage.

Exciting init?

The sketch was going to appear here and get you all salivating and talking about the “Barnesycam” then I was going to dare someone to build it and keep an eye out for whoever came the closest… It was going to look like a C300 with a Ninja bolted on the back

barnesycam

cinema camera

For those of you who have not seen the announcement from NAB the specs above are nearly the same as the camera that has been revealed by Black Magic Design! And there was me thinking that for all that £6000 would have been a bargain, the price actually £1925 yes really.

The stuff in bold italic is where the Black Magic camera and mine seem to differ, as you can see there is very little difference. I have long wanted a higher than HD camera because as professional we enjoyed a brief spell where we were shooting in HD but only delivering in SD which gave us great flexibility to crop and zoom and do re frames without a quality loss. Ever since the ability to deliver in HD on YouTube and Blu-ray we have been acquiring at the resolution we deliver, it is always good to be working at higher res than your audience.

I wanted a camera that I could use in 422 rec 709 for regular jobs but RAW for higher paying customers or short films.

I loved the screen on my Ninja with the ability to see picture but also change data like description and timecode.

I wanted XLRs as for quick jobs we don’t want to get into separate sound and crapy 3.5 mm jacks (or smaller) get damaged quickly and don’t have much area of metal to contact with causing crackles, poor connection and sometimes none!

I wanted SSDs as they are the best for speed, resilience, cost per gig, availability and size as I observed here.

I wanted some sound monitoring as Phil Bloom has gone on at length it aint rocket science to allow you to listen to the sound you are recording.

Not all details are clear yet but I so hope it has a global shutter, I am naffed off with DSLR fall apart pictures although we now have warp drive (sorry warp stabiliser) with Adobe After Effects to work miracles with wobbly footage.

Talk about Yorkshireman price. Those damn Black Magic guys stole my thunder, my design and my fun.

Am I angry? NO; I can live with 1/4 inch jacks, a micro 4/3 sensor, lack of ND, HDMI and 50+P, but it has more resolution than I wanted and a headphone jack!

I put my deposit down straight away with creative video and put on my beret…  Viva la Revolucion

I think they would be daft not to have other features coming with future software updates, that is how Atomos have reduced obsolescence.

Panasonic should have gone 2k with micro 4/3 on the GH3 and AG-AF101 successor, I wonder if my panny lenses will work with the Black Magic Cinema Camera?

Here is a link to some early sample footage by John Brawley.

They didn’t get very snappy or creative with the name did they? for a small price I will license the name Barnesycam

Exciting init?

Basically this gives amazing 2K RAW footage for $3000, I hope it gets made as it would really sell I am sure, it does not follow the current “I want a bigger sensor” fashion but it would make great looking films and there are plenty of C-mount lenses out there from security cameras at low F numbers to help with  depth of field choices. Of course anyone with 16mm lenses already would be able to use all their existing glass. What about sound? well the spec is for real XLR connections and uncompressed sound, great!

Here are the specs, you can download the specs as a pdf at their web site.

This reminds me a little of an Ikonoskop camera which was 2K RAW but now is HD RAW with a 16mm sensor 10.6 x 6mm. The digital bolex sensor is bigger at super 16 size.

Ikonoskop

With any RAW camera you will be getting through cards quickly as RAW eats up data and you will be getting about 1 frame for each 2 to 3 megs, so that is around 5 gigs per minute.

A 32 gig card is only going to deliver 6.5 minutes of footage so data wrangling will be the order of the day on shoots. The sensor is a Kodak sensor and is CCD so no rolling shutter! I do dislike the picture break up you get with CMOS. It makes me wonder what camera the Kodak chip is in or destined to be in commercially?

Exciting init?

It’s arrival is very understated considering how long everyone has been waiting for this, having said that I like things understated. I really like the GH2 and I own one for all the reasons covered in previous articles but I have to comment on this release as the impact the 5D has had on the market is amazing.

I do use the 5D but generally hire in operators who own them.

Here is the initial spec list and the Canon page.

• 22.3 megapixel full-frame sensor
• 61-point AF
• 6 fps continuous shooting
• ISO 100–25,600 sensitivity, expandable to ISO 102,400
• Full-HD video with manual control
• 14-bit DIGIC 5+ processor
• Weather sealing
• 8.11cm (3.2-inch) 1,040,000-dot screen
• HDR mode

As you know I am about video not stills so here are my impressions on the video front. The main features that seem to have been comprehensively

bitched about were (you know who you are!)

1. Lack of headphone socket to monitor audio

2. Moire patterning on high frequency detail.

3. Average codec

4. Rolling shutter

5. No clean HDMI output.

Well it would appear that quite a few of these have been covered!

1. Lack of headphone socket to monitor audio RECTIFIED

2. Moire patterning on high frequency detail. GREATLY REDUCED

3. Average codec NOW OPTION FOR IFRAME ONLY (EOSHD reports it is 91mbs!)

4. Rolling shutter REDUCED

5. No timecode IMPLEMENTED

6. No clean HDMI output. ?

SO a big win here,  a 3.5 mm jack gives audio monitoring, Moire greatly reduced, an option for all I frame or IPB inter frame,

the DIGIC 5+ processor gives reduced rolling shutter, timecode is there for multicamera and audio sync but what about the HDMI?

The rumour is that the output can not be recorded clean, as soon a s the usual suspects get the body and start testing I am sure we will get the low down on the actual output. It wouldn’t surprise me that they have kept the output with data, if it had clean 1920 x 1080 output it might have an impact on C300 sales. These feature updates are a major step forward for all those who have invested in Canon glass and of course the rush for the thousands of people wanting an upgrade will release thousands of second hand 5DMKIIs onto the market.

The 5DMKIII has a neat feature on the recording front, CF and SD card compatability. You can dual record for security or auto switch on overflow for longer recordings. Now the camera goes up to the full 29 minutes as opposed to 12 minutes.

I am sure we will find out a few things that are not in the written specs when Phil Bloom gets his hands on it.

One of the things DIGIC5+ should have given (I am sure it can) is 1080 output in 50/60P mode. Even the C300 does not have this. These days we should not have to settle for 50P at 720, I bet the GH3 will have it, after all the GH2′s big brother the AG-AF101 can do 1080 at 50P. I think I will blog about my perfect camera next and we will see when it gets made.

At double the price of the 5DMKII I think the mark 3 should have had 1080 at 50P, auto focus and face recognition in video mode and a swivel monitor at least. Interestingly the price of the AG-AF101 is now only £2995, only about £400 more than the 5DMK3 and it is much more like the C300 in functionality with XLRs, timecode, HDSDI, clean HDMI etc. An AG-AF101 and a GH2 as second camera with the ability to exchange lenses is still a great combination.

Next week there will be even more options, exciting init?

G5

I know it is a little too soon for a spring clean but I am working on organising our kit and post setup into a more efficient operation. We are exposing the editing work we do for external clients by setting up a new web site; www.sublimepictures.tv and we are opening an operation in Liverpool. I am leaning towards keeping the Manchester operation Mac based and the Liverpool operation PC based with software along the Avid/premiere/resolve route.

I have had my quad core G5 now for many years and it is getting a little bit long in the tooth. We still use it for final cut editing but only with version 6 and we have an Avid Xpress Pro on it too. It has been a good workhorse but the limitations are now that we cannot use any Intel based software and once we have upgraded a project to Final Cut 7 in Edit 1 we can’t open it in Edit 2. So what could we use it for?

I have decided that as I am too tight to throw it away and hate waste so it still needs to earn it’s keep! We have been using a simple setup where the 8 core Mac pro has a SCSI RAID attached and we connect the G5 and laptops etc to the Mac pro via a Small tree 4 port gigabit card. It isn’t a full blown SAN but it does work, we have had 3 or 4 suites all capturing/ingesting at the same time and the SCSI RAID can keep up.

My new plan is to use the G5 just for ingest, backup and to act as a server. We have loads of hard drives coming through the system with e-sata but we have no way of using the drives in that mode so to increase speed we need e-sata on the Macs. This way you can also keep smaller jobs on drives that you can edit on and pass from one part of the process to another. For example we did some work on a pilot show for Lime Pictures where we transcoded and organised the material in the Avid and then sent the drives to London for the edit. Using the e-sata drives meant that the DNxHD 185X material was able to be edited from the e-sata direct and also passed on for grading. An efficient workflow if backups are done en route!

Once we have E-Sata connections we could use a Sonnet Qio which means that we would have fast ingest of all the main cards, P2, SxS, SD, CF. This can also be used on location in conjunction with e-sata drives for fast data wrangling.

Sonnet Qio card reader

Another benefit of using the e-sata is that you can use external RAID boxes to increase storage. If you have not been using RAID setups then you have missed a great way to safeguard your assets, speed up your editing and give good upgrade functionality. Once you have your enclosure you can usually upgrade the discs for bigger capacities as the disks get larger and cheaper. We started with 6 x 500 gig drives and now have 6 x 1 TB drives but could go for 2TB or 3TB next if required.

sonnet storage

There is an excellent site called Mac upgrade that organises the site by machine and it tells you all the upgrades you can do to your machine.

G5 pci slots, SCSI, E-sata, Small Tree Ethernet, Graphics

ACTION:

1. Take the small tree card from edit 1 and put it in the G5

2. Fit the Mac pro with cabled rear port for e-sata as it has two connections on the mother board (from Sonnet)

3. Strip the G5 of the extra firewire 400 ports to make room (firewire 400 is so last decade)

4. Fit the G5 with a 4 port e-sata from Sonnet and Small Tree Ethernet.

Check it all works with an option if I feel it needs it to use MetaLan server and client from Tiger Technology.

Effectively metaLAN Server is ideally suited for environments looking at leveraging low cost Gigabit Ethernet, but requiring advanced connectivity features.

I think that going forward there will be more 2.5 inch SSD and hard drives coming in as rushes so a cheap e-sata JBOD encloser would be a great rushes docking station whether the rushes are to be copied or edited straight from the source!

I also need to decide on the new machine for Edit 2, maybe an iMac or a second hand Intel MacPro with a Quadro 4000 card to accelerate Adobe Production Premium.

Wish me luck and check back to see how I got on at this post.

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.