F35: Rigging experiments.

Grug

Grug

Veteran
Well while my incoming F35 langours in customs, Jesse kindly lent me his for the day to run some camera tests against the Red One. However when I got home I decided to try a couple of quick rigging concepts I had, and to my complete surprise, everything actually fit together perfectly.

So here's a super simple rig I put together with just a couple of off the shelf parts, that actually works a treat:

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Because the handle takes care of both the EVF and the Odyssey7Q, I don't even need the little cheeseplate anymore, so that can be stripped off along with the dovetail bracket for the Sony EVF, saving even more weight.
 
Off topic but right now I'm listing to NPR radio THE MOTH RADIO HOUR (KCRW here in LA) and they have a special, live from the Sydney Opera House, some great talent on radio today.
Did you ever get another F3? I think the new PIX E5 would be a streamline fit for that camera, along with the Gratical Eye.


Broatch Berry
Venice CA

Screaming Dime
 
Appreciate the kind words Broatch, cheers.

B.Berry said:
Did you ever get another F3? I think the new PIX E5 would be a streamline fit for that camera, along with the Gratical Eye.
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I did, the F3 arrives today actually. The PIX-E5 would have been my choice for that camera, but because the F3 will be serving B-camera duties to the F35 on a feature I'm off to go shoot in Delhi in a week and half, I needed the recorders and recordings matching, so it'll be uncompressed .dpx from both cameras to Odyssey 7Qs for this one (12-bit on the F35 and 10-bit on the F3).
 
That's going to look great! Another member (or old member ED DAVID) shot that combination on a project I think it was in Cuba? Ed, has some nice work up on Vimeo.

Broatch Berry
Venice CA

Screaming Dime
 
Grug said:
Appreciate the kind words Broatch, cheers.



I did, the F3 arrives today actually. The PIX-E5 would have been my choice for that camera, but because the F3 will be serving B-camera duties to the F35 on a feature I'm off to go shoot in Delhi in a week and half, I needed the recorders and recordings matching, so it'll be uncompressed .dpx from both cameras to Odyssey 7Qs for this one (12-bit on the F35 and 10-bit on the F3).
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On Odyssey7Q+ you could do Apple ProRes 4444XQ 12/10-bit for both cameras as well. Save a lot of room.
 
Mitch Gross said:
On Odyssey7Q+ you could do Apple ProRes 4444XQ 12/10-bit for both cameras as well. Save a lot of room.
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Thanks Mitch, but the producer bought 120TB of storage for the production, back when we were expecting to be shooting 3:1 4.6k Raw on two Ursa Minis - and he wants to use those harddrives, so I'm using uncompressed .dpx to oblige him :)
 
Without cables looks clean grug. But with all the cables I think not so much? What is advantage of zacuto eye vs sony viewfinder besides weight? Zacuto weight is half but zacuto need external power. Screen is much smaller in zacuto. Luminance is 250 cd/m2 vs 280 in sony viewfinder. So what advantages?
 
SJX said:
Without cables looks clean grug. But with all the cables I think not so much? What is advantage of zacuto eye vs sony viewfinder besides weight? Zacuto weight is half but zacuto need external power. Screen is much smaller in zacuto. Luminance is 250 cd/m2 vs 280 in sony viewfinder. So what advantages?
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The Zacuto is leaps and bounds ahead of the Sony EVF in every way bar the simplified cabling of the Sony.

- The image is MUCH larger (bigger and better magnifying optics in the Zacuto)
- Sharpness is significantly better too, and you have peaking and 1-to-1 pixel zoom which makes achieving and confirming focus VASTLY easier
- LUTs, waveform, false colour, frame guides (the monitoring features of the Zacuto give you all of the information need, and are super easy to access)

For me, having the resolution to be able to comfortably find critical focus and the built-in LUT capabilities are the most important features, and they alone make it worth having over the Sony. Add in all of the monitoring features that you now no longer need to look at a monitor to confirm, and it's a no-brainer for me. It just makes the camera much easier to work with.

And the braided cabling that Zacuto supply is really neat, doesn't get in the way as much as I'd feared it might.
 
How much does that setup weigh with lens and all?

Having just shot a short film with a pretty decked out F35 on mostly shoulder rig, I have realized how much camera weight is important to me. Love the F35 but man can that thing be a beast.
 
It's certainly not light. I don't have scales to weigh the full package. But you save approximately 300g with the Wooden Camera handle and Zacuto Eye versus the standard Sony EVF and handle.
 
Battle of the Old Beasts:

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I learnt something today - if you want to feel better about the weight of the F35, just lug an old Red One around for the day!

Certainly an eye-opening test. I was very impressed by just how closely I could match the cameras - 12-bit uncompressed 4:4:4 1080p DPX from a striped CCD versus 12-bit, 4.5k raw shot in Redcode28 compression from a bayer-pattern sensor.

I was testing for quality of colour keying (for a pretty hefty colour grade), so unfortunately didn't have enough time to run any significant tests of over/underexposure. Both cameras rated at 400 ISO to keep the images as clean and noise free as possible. All up, I'd have to say there's very little in it overall. I'm seeing just a little bit of an advantage in colour separation with the uncompressed footage from the F35 (I suspect it's the lack of compression that's making the difference). Skin tones and colour are also a bit nicer off the bat to my eye, but that's not actually a huge concern for this project, and the Red can be brought surprisingly close.
 
Love the epic rigs for each cam. Can you post the test video that you shot? Would love to see the awesome imagery coming out of these bad boys!
 
Grug said:
Battle of the Old Beasts:

Mqeamuy.jpg


I learnt something today - if you want to feel better about the weight of the F35, just lug an old Red One around for the day!

Certainly an eye-opening test. I was very impressed by just how closely I could match the cameras - 12-bit uncompressed 4:4:4 1080p DPX from a striped CCD versus 12-bit, 4.5k raw shot in Redcode28 compression from a bayer-pattern sensor.

I was testing for quality of colour keying (for a pretty hefty colour grade), so unfortunately didn't have enough time to run any significant tests of over/underexposure. Both cameras rated at 400 ISO to keep the images as clean and noise free as possible. All up, I'd have to say there's very little in it overall. I'm seeing just a little bit of an advantage in colour separation with the uncompressed footage from the F35 (I suspect it's the lack of compression that's making the difference). Skin tones and colour are also a bit nicer off the bat to my eye, but that's not actually a huge concern for this project, and the Red can be brought surprisingly close.
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Out of curiosity, if you've been able to match the F35 and Red One so easily - and it sounds like this feature will have a strong grade? - what has dictated the choice to shoot on F35, especially given this is a project you're heading overseas to shoot? Not a dig at your choice, I think the F35 is a beautiful camera and has an amazing character to the image and I think India will come up beautifully on it, just a hefty legacy camera to take with you (not that the Red One is any smaller, but say compared to other more compact cinema cameras, you mentioned the Ursa Mini 4.6K?).
 
Dan Pears said:
Out of curiosity, if you've been able to match the F35 and Red One so easily - and it sounds like this feature will have a strong grade? - what has dictated the choice to shoot on F35, especially given this is a project you're heading overseas to shoot? Not a dig at your choice, I think the F35 is a beautiful camera and has an amazing character to the image and I think India will come up beautifully on it, just a hefty legacy camera to take with you (not that the Red One is any smaller, but say compared to other more compact cinema cameras, you mentioned the Ursa Mini 4.6K?).
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The Red One/F35 comparison tests were for a sci-fi short I'll be doing back here in Melbourne as soon as I return from India, and that project will have a heavy grade. The feature will be much more conventional grading-wise.

The Bollywood feature I'm shooting over in India is a separate thing entirely, and a bit of a long story as to the final camera choice we settled on, but I think that story might have some value to people, so (for what it's worth) here it is... I'll be shooting the feature on the F35 with an F3 as B-cam, both cameras recording uncompressed 4:4:4 HD to .dpx on Odyssey 7Q recorders (in 12-bit and 10-bit respectively), lenses will be my Zeiss Compact Zooms.

Now the obsolete Sonys weren't my first choice for this film, nor my second. In fact, if I'd had to create a list of my preferred camera packages for this film, they'd probably have fallen somewhere around my 6th or 7th choice. So how did I end up there?

Well initially I wasn't going to be bringing any gear over with me. Just my light meter and my little box of lens filters. And I was perfectly happy with that. The producer was planning to purchase two Ursa Mini 4.6k cameras for the film, and has a set of EF-mount Leica Rs that we'd be using on them. Now I'm not a fan of SLR glass for narrative production (due to the mechanics), but the Leica glass is lovely, and it's my ACs who'd have to worry about pulling focus with the lenses, so I was okay with it. The specs on the new Ursas seemed pretty great, so that's what we were going to do (my main concern was the cheap tripods, matte boxes, follow focusses - just accessories in general, that we'd be working with).

However, as soon as the new Ursas started shipping, consistent and very concerning reports came in of serious issues with build quality, reliability, and bizarre artefacts like the magenta vignette that was showing up in a lot of people's new cameras. And since we’ll be shooting around Delhi, which isn't a film-hub like Mumbai (where equipment is easily sourced), I had serious concerns about the cameras being able to last the distance on a 52 day shoot (through an Indian summer and into the Monsoon). We have an Academy Award nominee and an Emmy winner working on this film, and frankly, I wasn't willing to take the risk of having the cameras shut down production just because they're very new, and built to a price.

The producer agreed; and since budget, the length of the shoot, and certain idiosyncrasies of renting gear in India ruled out simply hiring two camera packages locally - we decided that I’d bring my Sony F5/R5 package over to function as our A-camera, and we’d scrounge up whatever we could to function as our B-cam.

At that point however, production was pushed back a couple of months. And I just had to sit on things. In that time I decided to sell my F5 and move on to a camera better suited to the sort of productions I generally do, so I was looking at either a used Alexa or maybe an F65 or possibly a new Varicam LT (the Dragon was an outside option, mainly because I’ve been burned by it out on location, and have been pretty wary of it since then).

When production got back on track though, my producer told me he’d need me to bring two camera packages with me. And this really threw a spanner in the works. The budget we had for camera gear would MAYBE cover the rental fee for ONE 2nd-tier/obsolete camera for the length of our shoot, and we needed two. So I was going to have to supply the kit myself.

Now the funds from the F5 gave me enough to purchase a nice, current, used camera (for which I already had all the support gear I’d need). However a second camera would require a second tripod, matte box, follow focus, AC monitor, with some cameras an EVF, and in the case of the Alexa or Dragon a full set of ND filters (as I’d only need up to a 1.2 with internal ND cameras).

Now I’ve been burnt by crappy support gear before - follow focusses that slip, matte boxes with filter trays that get stuck (and cause filters to crack or fall out when you force the stuck tray out), tripod heads that you simply can’t get smooth moves from. All of these things are serious issues. And ones I really didn’t want to contend with in a foreign country, where we weren’t going to be able to get the sort of rental house support that I could usually count on. So I talked it over with the producer and made the call that we’d go with good (i.e. expensive) support gear, and ‘obsolete’ cameras - as that was the only way I could cobble two decent camera packages together with the money I had available and the rental fee that could be supplied.

I was actually much more zen about this decision than I’d feared, and I think it comes down to the simple fact that all the cameras are great these days, and the real differences between most of the current cameras (versus the obsolete ones) are less to do with overall image quality, and more to do with feature-sets (Ks of resolution, high frame-rates etc.) neither of which we were really going to need for this film.

With that decision made, I had to whittle down the list of options I could afford:

2x FS7s (prosumer build-quality, dodgy raw support means heavily compressed XAVC for recording)
2x C500s (external recording, limited dynamic range, poor highlight handling, awkward form factor to rig)
2x Scarlet MX (limited dynamic range, poor highlight handling, my aforementioned reliability concerns)
2x F35 (1080p only, external recording, awkward form factor, heavy, low sensitivity, 50fps max)
2x F3 modified with Element Technica Body Armour (1080p only, external recording, 10-bit limitation, 60fps max)

Choosing between these options was a serious challenge, as each and every camera presented its own unique set of caveats. In the end, the key drivers in my decision making were build-quality/reliability and dynamic range/highlight handling - as I needed to trust that the cameras would survive the rigours of the shoot, and I needed the highlight latitude to be able to get pretty pictures with a potentially limited lighting and grip package. This pushed me towards pairing the F35 with the F3 in the end, as the big Sony (in my experience) trounces the rest of the options for overall image quality, and the body-armoured F3 would match it closer than the rest, but be light enough for possible gimbal work, and be able to shoot comfortably at up to 3200 ISO when we have seriously low-light situations that the bigger camera couldn’t handle.

Paired with Zacuto Gratical Eye EVFs and Odyssey 7Qs, we’d also be able to use consistent LUTs with both cameras for monitoring. And, thanks to the producer having bought 120 TB of storage for all of the 4.6k raw footage we were planning to shoot with the Ursa Minis, we’re able to record uncompressed 1080p 4:4:4 DPX files from both of the old Sonys, which gives us extremely high-quality masters - which I’m confident enough with for a final DCP deliverable.

So there you have it. That’s how you end up shooting a feature film on an F35 and F3 in 2016! :)
 
Grug said:
... Now I'm not a fan of SLR glass for narrative production (due to the mechanics), but the Leica glass is lovely, and it's my ACs who'd have to worry about pulling focus with the lenses, so I was okay with it. ...
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*Keith writes in his notebook*

"Never AC for Grug..."

:happy:
 
keithlango said:
*Keith writes in his notebook*

"Never AC for Grug..."

:happy:
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Whaaaaat?! .....but I'm the literally the guy who'll work with dinosaur cameras just so my ACs can have pretty things like Zeiss CZ.2s, Arri FF-5s, LMB-25s and bridgeplates!

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Great read thanks, good to hear the thought process. Hope all goes well and I look forward to seeing the results.
 
Grug said:
Whaaaaat?! .....but I'm the literally the guy who'll work with dinosaur cameras just so my ACs can have pretty things like Zeiss CZ.2s, Arri FF-5s, LMB-25s and bridgeplates!
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I was able to resist your crass seductions until you mentioned bridgeplates. I'm all yours!
 
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