EC4 Paint Box

Dino

Dino

Veteran
We took delivery of the new Panasonic EC4 remote paint box last week. It's half the price of the RC10 and much simpler to use. It seems to offer complete control of Panasonic cameras including HPX300, 500, 2000, 2700, 3000, 3700, HDX900.

It does not have an SD card slot at the remote and can't do frame ramping with the 2700 and 3700 with a knob, unlike the RC10, but it offers access to all menus, user buttons that match the side of the cameras, LED readout of iris, shutter, gain boost with full control of same, plus paint for gains and blacks, transport controls for record and playback. EC 4 has a smaller footprint and can quickly be mastered.

Really nice to have all camera functions at your fingertips in front of monitoring. Price is $2250 with 33' control cable. Max. cable run is 164'.
 

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Hi Jeff,
Where did you find this? I googled the EC4, but did not come up with anything - even on the Panasonic site.

Thanks,
Brad
 
Hi there. We've been looking at using the EC4 as a standalone controller, but as you've stated the documentation states the maximum cable length is 164'. Panasonic sells 100m (330') remote cables, apparently for use in conjunction with the BS-300 base station. I'm looking for someone who has the EC4 and a bunch of cable and can tell me what the real world max distance for control is - for example we use Belden 1694A cable for HDSDI which is rated by Belden at 371' but we've regularly used it up to 600' with no issues at all. I'd like to know if there is a similar situation with the stated numbers for the maximum EC4 run. Thanks! Chris
 
And another question is:

How does the camera react if you pull out the cable of the EC4 and how does the camera react if you reconnect it. I'm asking because it would be great to use this box as a multi camera shoot controller to match the cameras. So you could switch between the cameras using only one controller. That would be awesome.

Cheers

pro.
 
With the AG-CA300 - BS300 system is connected in conjunction with the camera, the EC4 signals are converted and embedded with the HDSDI signals , at the other end they are de-embedded and converted back. This allows you to go further then with the direct connection.
 
Ec4, ec3, rc10g

Ec4, ec3, rc10g

chriscj said:
Hi there. We've been looking at using the EC4 as a standalone controller, but as you've stated the documentation states the maximum cable length is 164'. Panasonic sells 100m (330') remote cables, apparently for use in conjunction with the BS-300 base station. I'm looking for someone who has the EC4 and a bunch of cable and can tell me what the real world max distance for control is - for example we use Belden 1694A cable for HDSDI which is rated by Belden at 371' but we've regularly used it up to 600' with no issues at all. I'd like to know if there is a similar situation with the stated numbers for the maximum EC4 run. Thanks! Chris
Click to expand...
I use these paintboxes on long runs all the time. You can go up to 200' reliably with 22gauge twisted pair data cable. You can exceed this up to 350' by using premium audio cable and supplying 12v power at the paint box side. The best and most reliable way, however, is to encode it to fiber. This will half the bulk of your cable, plus it is most reliable. The best system is probably Telecast, but they charge $20k... way too much (more than the camera and controller at that point). Volamp is a good, cheaper option at about $10k, but they offer NO support, so you're kind of on your own. Multi-dyne offers the "Silverback" at around $8k/system, but they have a few issues in their first run of production (I'd wait til NAB2012 for the next revision). In the meantime, you can use a Multidyne HD3500 and modify it yourself for about $6k (including tally, paint box, HDSDI, audio etc)... but you have to have some mad technical knowledge to get it right. Can you get by with 300-350 feet?
 
"How does the camera react if you pull out the cable of the EC4 and how does the camera react if you reconnect it. I'm asking because it would be great to use this box as a multi camera shoot controller to match the cameras. So you could switch between the cameras using only one controller. That would be awesome."

Can't really do this because even with "ECU data save" enabled on the camera, not all the settings "stick"... For example, the iris on the lens has to be set to "Auto" (on the camera side) to engage the motor for the engineer to control iris (on the paintbox side). As soon as the ECU is disconnected though, the camera goes into AUTO IRIS mode because of this... so there is no point. White balance sticks, pedestal sticks, gamma does not... stuff like that. Really the only way to do remote shading is with one paintbox per camera...

_MG_0200.jpg
 
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