F3: F3 Odyssey 7Q+ peaking oddness

That's a good idea, Doug.

The connectors on the F3 are pretty recessed and with those cables in particular I found it tricky to get them out at times. I am patient, but unfortunately I'm not the only one who ever gets near the camera.

My other camera is out of town, so I haven't tested them on anything else.

Anyhow, I've had those cables for a few years and they have been in and out of the case countless times. Maybe it just was time for new ones.


On a side note after shooting with an Alexa EV for the past year, the F3 felt like a featherweight that just sips batteries in comparison. It's an HD camera in a 4k world, but the quality of the footage (444 slog) still is very high and the camera I/O and mount are all pro grade.
I'm still very fond of the F3 and I'm glad I held on to it.
 
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Doug Jensen said:
This is unrelated to your cable problem, but one thing I do to reduce wear and tear on the camera's connectors is to add 3" BNC cables that hang from the camera 100% of the time. I never take them off. Not only does it save the connectors, it is so much faster and easier to connect and disconnect from my monitor or Odyssey. The poeple who design cameras must have smaller hands than mine. :-)

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Please note that every time you go through a set of connectors you lose about 6db in signal strength. This can be an issue if you are saturating a signal with signals such as 6G-SDI or RAW data.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Please note that every time you go through a set of connectors you lose about 6db in signal strength. This can be an issue if you are saturating a signal with signals such as 6G-SDI or RAW data.
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Yes, I understand that. But in practice, with over 5 years experience with the F55, and many previous cameras before that it has never been an issue. It is my understanding that a digital signal, like SDI, is either there or it is not. So if I'm getting any signal at all, that is as good as it gets and there is no gray area or signal degradation like you might get with an analog signal.
 
Guys, feel free to utilize any comment as you wish. I can tell you that in my time at Convergent Design we actually tracked service calls and issues. More than 80% of the time it came down to cabling issues.
 
That does not surprise me at all about the tech support because a lot of people don't have very good troubleshooting skills. That used to be a mandatory job requirement in this business and now people just throw up their hands and start asking for help at the slightest hiccup. The reason for my reply was just to point out that if someone has a consistent digital signal -- that is as good as it gets and a little loss of signal strength does not necessarily have a negative effect on the signal being received like it would for analog.
 
Doug: is it really that people don't have killer trouble shooting skills anymore, or that there is a lot more quickly available suggestive help on line today than we had way back in the Beta era when we had to crawl underneath migrating mastodons just to get a camera to the engineering bench?
 
captslomo said:
Doug: is it really that people don't have killer trouble shooting skills anymore?
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Yes, I believe it is. A lot of people don't know how to break something down into it's components and test each link in the chain methodically one step at a time in order to eliminate each variable until you land on the one that makes the difference. They are especially flummoxed when only certain combinations of settings or components will result in the problem. What I see most often is people changing multiple variables all at the same time and so they can never eliminate any variables. Debugging software I wrote in high school and college was some of the best training for troubleshooting I ever got. Everyone in high school should have to take a basic course in computer coding because it really teaches you logic. I'd say 95% of the time when I have a mechanical problem with audio/video gear, a vehicle, or any kind of machine I can pretty much pinpoint the cause before I turn it over to someone else for repair. What I lack is the skills and/or tools to actually do the work myself.
 
Multi-headed beast... Yes, we have lots of info available on-line that we didn't have 'back in the day', and lots of gear is a lot more complex/advanced today, also. BUT a lot of people doing this are less advanced than 'back in the day', too. During the last ice age of TV production, most people came up through certain paths, it was rare for someone to be able to just wake-up and decide to go buy $100K worth of production gear and become a shooter. Now anyone can just say "Hey, I'm gonna be a shooter", buy some gear without knowing anything and try to make a run at it.
 
Doug Jensen said:
That does not surprise me at all about the tech support because a lot of people don't have very good troubleshooting skills. That used to be a mandatory job requirement in this business and now people just throw up their hands and start asking for help at the slightest hiccup. The reason for my reply was just to point out that if someone has a consistent digital signal -- that is as good as it gets and a little loss of signal strength does not necessarily have a negative effect on the signal being received like it would for analog.
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Dear Doug

I'm a 25 year veteran of the movie business working in high end visual effects and solving problems is my job. I'm not going to pull out my resume, but I'm pretty sure you've put down your $10 bucks to see my work many times over. I haven't survived this long and accomplished what I have by relying on the kindness of others to solve my problems or do my job for me.

Obviously cabling is the first thing you check, but when all three 3ft SDI cables that you own turn out to be bad the process of elimination kind of goes out the window and you start to look elsewhere.


PS: Convergent Design was very helpful but also stumped by this error, since the faulty cables only affected the focus peaking and not the ability to record or any other function.
 
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Harry, my comments were not aimed at you and I apologize if it seemed that way. I was responding to Mitch's comments about his experience with CD customer support.
 
I'll make an amendment to my comment.

On issues that appeared complex, with functional compatibility problems where two devices that should work together but do not arise, and where the user is a well-trained and seasoned professional who has personally attempted a variety of diagnostic work on the situation at hand, in these conditions the probability that the issue is with a cable is still about 80%.

:-D
 
In my experience, a High Resistance Air Gap is generally the first place to check, and the most likely to have caused the issue.
 
haha - loved the video.
I doubt it will help in harry's case but it really has often solved the problem of not getting an image on the Odyssey after switching to UHD HDMI on the FS7.
Hell if I know why.
Lenny
 
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