Extreme Cold? High Altitude?

[ethereal]

I'm looking into climbing Everest, and one thing that would be brilliant is being able to actually use the HVX on my trek. I'm considering it, because a) the oppurtunity is just IMMENSE, and b) it would help me fund it.

I know that people regularly take mini-dv cameras for documentation, but i don't want to end up with a ten pound brick to lug around. I'd hate my camera to go that way, to say the least. i loooooovvvvvveee my camera. :love4:

Anyway, can anyone tell me what all i should expect? what i should look out for, like the usual "don't breathe on the lens", "keep batteries warm", etc.

Anyone who's done anything like this before i would be very grateful if you were to provide ANY sort of insight.

I still haven't worked out how i'll be offloading and storing all the footage... simple macbook might do the job, but i really don't know. external harddrive as well possibly.

 

[Barry_Green]

HVX excels in the cold; we took 'em up to Alaska for the Iditarod and I've also seen where they've been used at the South Pole. Yes battery life is a concern; keep the batteries on you to keep 'em warm, and take lots of them. The only other concern is the LCD panel, it's liquid and it'll be affected by cold. We rubber-banded hand warmer packs to the LCDs and that made them perform fine. You can get a cold-weather jacket for the HVX, but there really didn't seem to be any reason to use it; we ditched ours after the first half-hour.

Why bother with a Macbook -- it doesn't have a slot and would therefore be largely useless; you could instead save yourself a ton of size and weight by taking just a portable firewire drive, and using the HVX itself to offload. But that presupposes you're going to have some heated accomodations; a hard drive won't spin up if it's too cold.

 

[heavyG]

I did it this spring with two HVX's and a Brevis...

Original post here: http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=135636&highlight=everest

Back in Mid April I got a call asking if I wanted to produce a job that was to shoot at Everest Base Camp, having worked in ad production for 12+ years I figured that we would be going to Whistler and 'faking' Everest... Nope, a week later I was on a flight to Nepal.

This is a big agency job; Maclaren McCann is the ad agency and Johnson & Johnson is the client - Big business and a big marketing push for the product. This is the kind of job that even a year ago would have been shot on 35mm, at the very least on super16.

In early discussions with the DP (Paul Goldsmith http://paulgoldsmithasc.com) we decided to use the HVX. The size, ease of use, and picture quality were the Dp's first choice. We also decided to use the Brevis Flip 35mm adapter.

So with only a week, I set out to get the gear together... I owned an HVX and a Brevis flip, but we wanted a second body and some more P2 cards. This was just as the show in Vegas was getting underway, and the new HVX200a was announced. I tried to get in touch with Jan & Panasonic to see if it was possible to get a new cam rushed out to me for the trip... she blew me off.
Andrew at Spec-comm did however have an HVX that I could have shipped overnight at an incredible price - I added two 32gb cards and a couple of batteries. One problem solved.

That same week Dennis at Cinevate also announced the revision of the Brevis. I contacted him in Vegas and he arranged to have a new unit and a matte box shipped overnight (free - thank you Dennis), I could ship the old unit back after the new one arrived. This gave me pretty much all the pieces I needed for the job.

Here's what we took.

2- HVX 200's
3- 32gb p2's, 2- 8gb P2's, 2- 4gb P2's
5- Panasonic Batteries
2- Spec-comm Batteries
2- Anton Bauer 10k Batteries
1- Brevis Flip unit (Rails, Matte box, FF)
- Nikon lens package
1- Panasonic 8" HD monitor
2- manfrotto tripods with 503 heads
- Century wide & tele converters for the HVX
- Macbook pro with Final cut studio2 & 2 FW external drives (4 extra laptop bats)
- Glidecam 4000
- Battery belts for monitor
- Lav mikes & boom with shotgun
- ND filters and pola's
-Cables & all the bits and pieces that you might need.
All fit into 7 Pelican / Storm cases / tripod cases

For this job we would be completely on our own! No rental house down the road that we could send a PA to. We needed to have everything with us since it was (is) a 9 day walk to EBC from the closest 'road'... actually an airstrip in Lukla.

The crew consisted of:

Myself (producer / 1st AC / DWM)
DP Paul Goldsmith (Academy award winner)
Director Aine Carey

There were also 4 people from the ad agency.

So...

We had a 4 day window to shoot this spot. We had a film permit from the Nepal Government, and we had an official from the Nepal Gov't with us at all times. This official saved our *sses! The political climate of Nepal is in a bit of upheaval, also the Chinese were trying to summit Everest with the Olympic torch. As part of this torch business the Chinese pressured Nepal to close EBC from May 1-? as long as it takes to get the torch up there. We were scheduled to arrive in Base Camp on April 30th...

China turned up the pressure before we got there, and started to ban camera's on the day we started walking. Our Gov't agent assured us that we would be OK - and we were - sort of. We could not use the Brevis! seems on the day we set it up for testing (worked great Dennis) the security troops shut us down. We could shoot but only with the bare camera.

After a 9 day walk where we covered only 100kms as the crow flies but gained 2,500 metres (8,000 feet) in altitude, we reached base camp. There is no oxygen! We were at 5,364 metres above sea level (17,590 feet) even putting on your shoes is tough, I'm from sea level so it hurt. I'd been there before so I knew what to expect, but it still smacks you in the head.

The technical challenges of shooting:
-Power is non-existent, everyone has solar panels but all that power is spoken for. That's why I had enough batt power to shoot for 3-4 days without charging.
- Oxygen... your thinking is so clouded, you think nothing is wrong. Camera set-up mistakes are soo easy to make at this altitude.
- The light is really harsh
- Weather changes on a dime, it was +20ºC with full sun and 15 minutes later it was -5ºC and snowing.
-There are no roads - everything has to be carried by hand for 9 days! We hired 6 porters to carry all the camera gear and our personal gear up the mountain.
- The walk is gruelling, even if you are in shape. Altitude sickness is tough to predict.

The camera worked great! No problems at all. We shot 720p24pn so we had enough P2 cards to shoot all day with having to back-up. back-ups were dona at days end in a cabin in front of a fire. During testing the Brevis worked as well, I wish we could have shot the spot with this attached (anyone want to go back?).
I would take the HVX anywhere!

The Anton Bauer 10k batteries rock! solid power even when the temps dropped. We really only had trouble with cam batteries in the early morning when temps were still cool, and even then no big deal.


The job is now in the hands of the editor: http://stealingtime.com/ in a couple of weeks we should have the results, and the spot will play probably non-stop during the summer Olympics.

G.