Groundglass Extravagance
 

I shall be off tomorrow slightly north of town for a shoot which will involve two JVC GY-HD100s with Mini35-400s, one JVC GY-HD250 with Mini35 Compact shooting slow-mo and a demo PMW-EX1 with Letus Extreme, also shooting 720P slow-mo to see how it stacks up against the HD250.

So that totals four groundglass devices operating on an action scene with about 100 extras.
A very steep learning curve is going on for me right now and am getting cross-eyed from reading the manual too fast. There's that many yellow stickies hanging out for fast-finding, that it looks like a lawyer's appeal book.

In keeping with the program as far as site sponsors are concerned, I have not identifed the supplier save for saying that the vendor is Western Australia's only Sony Premium Dealership and about 2000km from the next nearest one.

Bob,

You're such a tease.

Post results asap. Good luck and don't have too much fun.


BTW, what is the shoot about? Commercial, music video, documentary?

Speaking of slow motion, I shot with a Letus 35A the other day, in 48 Frame rate on and HVX200, and noted play back showed artifacts fromt he ground glass. Admittedly, 35a is old technology, but I am wondering what people are seeing with the new adapters shooting slo mo ?

I guess it won't hurt to say where and what. It is one of the last shoots, a battlescene with medieval re-enactors. I don't know the detail of it, only that the big one will be Sunday if it doesn't rain.

Tomorrow is on a smaller scale. It hopefully will give me time to get the camera all learned and sorted.

The project is Congoro. The website is is www.congoro.com

We will hopefully have the slow-mos covered with the two other cameras running normal frame rates. If we can get usable slow-mo glimpses it will be a bonus.

Jim Frater, who will be shooting steadycam there on Sunday apparently gets away with slow-mo with his Mini35 compact on his HD250.

Phil Bloom likewise routinely does it with the Letus and EX1.

I hope to talk Barish into staying with the f1.2 55mm and 58mm lenses for the slow-mos or at a pinch the f1.4 85mm and 28mm. There may well be flare but hopefully not too much. The backdrop and some of the location will be pine forest and the action on green fields. If we avoid sky through the trees and bury the grain in textures, we might get away with it.

Just reminiscing. This whole Mini35 thing started with me taking an Agus35 along to the Death Bet shoot in Fremantle to learn how to use it in a production environment. I ended up shooting some behind the scenes footage with it.

Two other film-makers who rent an office in the old Prison saw it and next thing I knew I was being asked some advice on how to set a Mini35 up.

All good fun for the workers today, plenty of clattering swords against shields, blood and gore abounded and one of the horses dumped its armour-clad rider, not a pretty sound. However he was allright, with a few facial scrapes from the metalwork.

Now all I have to do is work out how to get the clips across from the EX1 to the computer so I can clear the memory card for a clean start tomorrow.

If anyone has any clues besides the ones in the EX1 manual they would be appreciated.

System here is PC, Windows XP with Service Pack two and online updates.

Here is a quick clip of one test. Sorry about the short-sightedness of the cameraman who was unable to keep focus.

http://exposureroom.com/members/DARA...d34484ca9ff75/

On reflection, I have probably jumped the gun a bit in posting the clip referred to in the above post for unrestricted access, so I will be selecting the restriction option on the website.

Bob ...
 

So, we won't be able to see the clip?

Sorry Dean.

The clip will remain protected because some of the footage may be used in the actual production, not behind-the-scenes.

There emerges a different copyright issue that I don't want to expose myself to for the time being until I educate myself some more upon the subject.

When I am confident I will not be crushing toes, I will unlock the clip.

I finally worked out how to make Prospect 4K and the camera speak nicely. I had gone about it in a very complicated way because I could not get the XDCAM browser to work beyond being a clip viewer which it does quite well. It turns out you can get at the clips directly with AspectHD and convert them.

As for the EX1, I am impressed. - With the Extreme on front, more like a kid on Christmas day actually. It takes a little more these days to stoke the fires of enthusiasm under my arthritic bones. (It is also raining and water going in the dams so all is well with the world right now.)

Gotcha on the copyright issues. Tell us more about AspectHD and converting the frames. I suppose you are talking about 4.2.0 upconverted?

The slow-mo clip mentioned above is now unlocked again for the time being.


There is another at this web address :-

http://exposureroom.com/members/DARA...0680b99a8cccc/

Neither are outstanding from a camera op's point of view. lots of failure to follow focus, the hallmark of this camera operator accustomed to short sightedness. I was using a 105mm and 85mm, both handheld and also yesterday with the rig bagged up to keep the rain out.


Dean.

I'm using Prospect4K upgrade, not AspectHD. The conversion quality setting was "Filmscan"

For one lot that I converted, in HDLink and in the convert function, I selected the in-camera folder which contains the mp4 clips. Prospect seems to have automatically extracted and listed the clip files. A click on "start" and off it went without any stoppages.

The other lot, I had copied the entire folder across to a new folder with Explorer into my computer because I was unable to either learn how or get Sony's XDCAM browser to do it. The camera manual recommends you do not do this as some information may be lost. The clips were all under the FAT32 filesize limit so I thought it might be okay.

I was too short of time to go troubleshooting so just took a punt and selected the folder I had copied the folders to, clicked on "start" and away it went again.

This may not be the recommended method but it seems to work.