20 minutes Short-film with the D90

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Daniel Aragão

Active member
Hi there people,

today i finished my first (and last) narrative short film all shoot with the d90.

That's it. The film is looking wonderful but i must say that the biggest problem to use this camera on Set is the timer off. when it get's hot, it will run for only 1 minute or even less. And you just can't leave the camera ON LIVEVIEW to make a proper ajustment. Its hard. The results are very good, better than any other camera with adaptors ive used (maybe), but its almost impossible to ask the actors and crew to WAIT for the camera to cool down. its ridiculous.

alright,

The film is about a little girl who has a video of herself ****ing with her boyfriend all over the internet. friends from the school starts a hell for her.

we had 10 days of shooting. it has something like 35 scenes. Ive used the tripod on everything. I directed and did the camera work as well.

soon i will post a teaser.

thanks for everyone here. now i can throw my d90 on the garbage (joking)

If they upgrade the camera to fix the buffer and fix this timer off thing, it will be okey to use the camera for other work.
 
Buy another, so that you have two of them....

Then you could use two in the same time on some shots but allways have one that is "cold".

:-)
 
if you would connect the camera to an HDMI monitor...would the LIVEVIEW be disengaged thus saving the camera from getting hot?
 
Actually, you could buy four of them, duct tape them together, then shoot. The footage could then be taken in to FCP and used as 4k footage! Who needs a Red?
 
Hmmm. I have only had mine turn off once due to overheating and I had it in LiveView for, like, an hour continuously (with lots of couple minute takes in that time). I wonder if individual cameras do better and worse with heat issues. I now just turn off LV for a bit when I am setting up a new camera angle or whatever, still well over 50% duty cycle with it on, and have had no further problems.

Could you please describe your shoot and the camera's behavior more? Also do you have anything on the camera that might be holding heat in, have it under a hot light, etc?
 
mattsand said:
Where would the hdmi monitor get its image from then? /matt
Click to expand...

does it not work like any video camera with an out like S-Video, or BNC etc?
Does the HDMI receive a signal ONLY when the LIVEVIEW gets turned on? I have no idea as I have yet another couple of days before I get all the gear I just got. If this is not the case then it sucks that I just plunked $900 for an HDMI IKAN monitor!
 
The sensor on a D-SLR is only exposed when the mirror flips up and the mechanical shutter opens. So, it can't put out an image when its not in Live View. Thats what Live View is, and D-Movie mode is a function of Live View.

Some people have suggested that the heating issue is partly a function of the LCD, and at least that will be off when using HDMI.
 
Daniel,

Congrats on making it through ! I feel you pain. I've finished principal on a D90 short as well. 5 days shooting, another 5 in pre-prod, probably at 75% shooting.

I had similar issues with overheating, but having it overheat on a test scene I was prepared for it. I chose to shoot by doing nothing more than AE-L pointing around the room method for speed. It's not going to be as matched as the other more definitive methods, but it let me set and shoot more quickly. I kept most scenes to about 3mins, so occasionally I would find myself keep rolling on a second take in order not to reset, turn off sensor etc - would find myself counting down on the screen, 5,4,3,2... please finish that look/line! 1... yay. or bummer.

External hdmi (which I had both a big monitor and a 7" hdmi<>vga did not make a difference. It is the sensor on and streaming causing the overheating, not the camera lcd.

I did on one day, borrow a 2nd d90. This meant, 2nd fluid head tripod, 2nd follow focus, 2nd set of lens's to try and minimise time between shooting - tried to have it setup ready.
I of course tried to be too tricky and ended up shooting one scene's wide take with a 50mm 1.4 then when it overheated switched to the other which had a f4 50-300mm old zoom prime on it. Of course I had huge differences in light between the f1.4 and the f4 as it was a low light shot.
Lesson learnt. If it was my jvc200u I would have had a fixed f set keeping between setups and would have noticed it. Again, lack of full manual controls really infuriating.


With the follow focus the longer lens's were on the tripod with the d90 hanging off the back. When using a 50mm or similar, the camera was on the tripod with the lens off the front.
Changing between and rigging between the follow focus and lens support etc was not as much fun.

Trying to cut down shooting setup time with 2 setups for overheating was reasonably successful, but means extra gear and rigging to save time.

Cutting it down, by simply having another one setup on standby for the same tripod, same setup, would be reasonable. Especially where the longer lens's are on the tripod with the body hanging off the back, it's a quick change. I did not have the problem nearly as much as I thought I would have, but I was prepared for it, and had many discussions with the director looking at the screen, then switching off and looking at the scene not through the lens. You could simply not leave it on between takes, and in prep for takes for long, or inbetween takes. It was very disruptive to the flow.


I still feel the biggest improvement aside from not dealing with that (if not addressed by nikon), would be the little hood contraption with the light in it, so as to fix a reasonable exposoure without greycarding into the scene, or messing with your framing between locking, and getting different lighting results between takes. That really messed me around a lot, and will directly affect the result more so than the timing problem.

This was low-light shooting though for most of it (as it was specifically testing that), so there would not be nearly the same issues in daylight, you could just use some ND in a matte box, and get something pretty consistant without it graining it up.

Didn't mean to blurt in your thread here, but might be a good place for questions about longer creative shooting and coincidental timing.

I'd be interested to hear how you went with exposure locking etc, which methods you used, and what kind of lighting you attempted / used.

Thebes, my experience was that during test shooting, I had it out on a hot day, so thought it was related. The rest of principal was in normal room temperature type conditions, and it still happened. The feeling I got (Daniel might be able to confirm), is that there is some sort of magic threshold with the amount of time the sensor is on. Eg, 20 takes, 1 minute long. Never overheat. 1 or 2 x 5 minute takes, likely. 4-5 3 min takes, with lots of 3-4 minute of screen left on for framing, or AE-locking, or or lighting adjustments or anything you normally want to do inbetween takes, that is where it adds up to a problem. You just really have to cutdown to any non-shooting time not having the sensor on, which is a pain, and disruptive but managable. And if you were doing constant 5 min takes, it would still be a problem anyway...

:(

Cheers
 
i live in brasil, and its summer, so, very very very hot here!

but sometimes the camera didn't turn off when i was under the hot sun and did turn off when i was in a bedroom shooting a scene. so, i really don't know how it happens to be inside the d90.
 
yeah, i recently shot a pilot trailer for a feature and it's definitely the continuous running time that does it. the first day we kept the camera running pretty much all the time and it overheated after a couple of hours and it took forever for it to cool down. the next day we shot more footage and longer takes but left live view between shots, and it never overheated the whole day. i still don't completely trust it so i'll make sure i always have two on important shoots.

/matt
 
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