Speckled dead pixels

J

japanicjess

Member
Hi All!

Just wondering if anyone has run into this problem. Last night we were doing a little test shoot in a studio and I didn't pick up on it through the viewfinder but the last few shots of the night seemed to have speckled dead pixels appearing and disappearing in the blacks. I've darkened the image so they are more visible.

https://vimeo.com/167223037/64abc334fc

I'm recording from SDI A out to a hyperdeck shuttle, could this just be a bad connection issue with the sdi? It seems to have cleared up today I did a test with the sensor cap on and it recorded the cleanest blacks ever. Would hate for this to happen on a shoot where money was riding on the line!

Cheers guys
 
Hey mate,

I'd definitely be running a 'black balance' or whatever weird nomenclature Sony use to describe it. Have your lens cap on to exclude any light, and let the camera run for 10 minutes or so to get up to temperature. Then running the black balancing procedure a few times and see what that does for you.

Also try recording out of both SDIs and see if you notice any difference between the feeds.

Cheers,

Mark
 
I used to run a black balance at the start of every shoot. Just kinda one of those things you do with the F35.
 
This looks like a bad cable problem to me. What recorder are you using? Dual link SDI?

Black Balance 3-4 times in a row.

I hate to suggest it but it could be the CCD unit going bad. I sold one of my F35 blocks to a owner in Russia with a similar problem. Good new is, if you hunt a little bit, you still can find the CCD's. But I hope this is not the case.
 
Yikes, here's hoping it's not the CCD unit. Don't know how many of those are still floating around. Sony charged a cool $50k+ for one, but that's stupid. Honestly don't know why they wouldn't make them available for a fraction of that since even if the world supply of spare CCD's runs dry the cost of getting a replacement would be another F35. At $5k to $6k it wouldn't be fun, but it wouldn't be an end of life event, either. They must have at least a couple of these things lying around pre-built to service the rental industry back in the day. It's plain they'll never move those units at $50k, that's for sure.
 
i used to get white snow like noise from some cheap SDI cables i bought. It was more the connection didn't have a strong enough spring mechanism behind it. so it was slightly slightly not connecting 100% of the time.

replace those cables bro!

to test, record something and hit the cables slightly :)
 
Awesome cheers for the help guys! Yeah I feel like it was a problem with the recorder connection because I was buried in that viewfinder the whole time and would have noticed speckled white pixels popping up in the blacks but it only showed up on the recording. I turned the camera on the next morning and did a test output from the hyperdeck onto a huge monitor and there was no speckling. Maybe I bumped the sdi at some point during the shoot. Bought a new sdi anyway and here's to hoping it doesn't happen again! :badputer:
 
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