When shooting high speed video (or film), it’s common to run into problems with flickering lights. In addition to all of the usual suspects such as fluorescents and the like, fixtures that we don’t normally think of as being “flickery”? such as smaller tungsten bulbs and all household incancesdents actually flicker quite a bit at high speeds.

Of course the best solution to this is to use flicker-free sources, but sometimes there’s no choice but to shoot with flickery lights, and in those situations the deflicker tools that are part of the Furnace kit from The Foundry can work miracles.

Here is an example of a clip shot at 300fps with a Phantom V7.3 under stadium lights and what I was able to do with it.

I “discovered” something interesting about the zebras on the Sony EX1. (I put discovered in quotes, because having looked in the manual I see that this behavior is actually documented - albeit in a fairly obscure manner. Also - I should point out that it was actually Mark Benjamin who brought to my attention the fact that the zebras didn’t match the spot meter function of the camera).

The zebras displayed for “Zebra 1” represent a 10% luminance band centered around the Zebra1 level. In other words, if you set Zebra1 to 90%, you’ll get zebras from 85% to 95% - the zebras start at 85%, not 90% as you’d probably expect.

Zebra2 seems to work as expected, however.

Here is the relevant sentence in the manual:

1 (Zebra1): To display a zebra pattern in the area
of ±10% centering the video level set with
“Zebra1 Level.”

Now you know what that actually means!

For my recent trip to Mexico, I took along my brand new Diana camera. Here are (some of) the results. I’ve done a little bit of dust-busting on these scans, but no other correction. Film used was Portra 400NC and Tri-X.

Click on the images to see them full size. (Well, fuller size, anyway.)

From Cancun:

From Xochimilco:

It’s been almost two years since I’ve updated this site. It’s interesting that the last post I made mentioned seeing the Phantom at NAB 2006, as my past year has been almost consumed by Phantom. It’s been quite a ride - we’ve seen the Phantom HD evolve from a RAM only camera in a prototype housing to a real HD camera (with a viewfinder and all) with a new generation of sensor, and the ability to record to on-board mags. Those of you who know me know how Phantom-centric my life has become, between training, developing post-production strategies (even writing some software), and generally helping the Phantom get rolled out properly at Abel.

It’s given me the opportunity to do some traveling as well - I’ve been spending more time on the west coast, and I recently returned from a two week trip to Mexico, which now has two Phantom HD’s - complete with CineMags - one at Industria Film Studios, and the other at Simplemente. Hopefully I’ll be spending more time down there in the future.

I’ll try my best to keep the site updated from now on.

So, NAB 2006 is over, and though I didn’t get out of the Abel booth for more than a couple of hours, I did manage to see a few interesting things (that I’m at liberty to reveal. Heh.). Some impressions follow, in no particular order.

Panasonic
There were a few new cameras on show from Panasonic. The two most interesting (to me) were the HDX-900 and the HC-1500.

The HDX-900 is essentially a multi-standard, HD version of the SDX-900. It is switchable between 59.94 Hz and 50Hz (for European deliverables). At 59.94 Hz it’ll do 720P at 24 (actually 23.976) fps, 30 (actually 29.97) fps and 60 (you get the idea) fps, and record 1080i while exposing at the same frame rates (which gives you 24P, 30P and 60i). In 50Hz mode it’ll do 25P and 50P in 720, or 25P and 50i in 1080.

The HC-1500 is a tiny box camera that does what the HDX-900 does and adds in the Varicam functions as well (Film-rec mode and variable frame rates).

Not a camera, and not made by Panasonic, but being shown in the Panasonic booth was HD Log from Imagine Products. HD Log is video logging software for the Mac, which now natively supports the MXF files created by Panasonic’s P2 cameras. If you are shooting (or posting) a lot of P2 footage, you will want this program.

Sony
As usual the Sony booth was about the size of a city block, which unfortunately means that by the time I left I had already forgotten what I had seen at the beginning. Bear in mind that it was my seventh day in Vegas by the time I got there.

On show was the F-900R, the lead-free upgrade to the F-900. In addition to being smaller, lighter and quieter (it’s minus one fan), it has built-in HD-SDI and options for down-converted output and a cache card (for pre-record). Expect to see a lot of rental houses upgrading their inventory.

An upgraded HDC-1500 now replaces the F-950. It’s basically just like an F-950 but can now do 60P (in 4:2:2). Oh, it can also do 720P. A camera more squarely aimed at the film-making/episodic-television market is a camera who’s name I missed but looks like a mutant Panavision Genesis. Unlike the Genesis it has a prism block with 2/3″ imagers, but it shares the Genesis’ ability to wear an SRW-1 HDCAM-SR recorder as a pseudo magazine, either on the top or back of the camera. Interesting.

Sony also has a couple of little box-cameras (though not quite as small as Panasonic’s). There’s a 1/2″ one and a 2/3″ one. I saw the 1/2″ one over a year ago, but I think the 2/3″ one is new.

For XDCAM users, Flip4Mac was showing the new version of Flip4Mac MXF which now (ahem, soon) supports XDCAM HD. It even does proxies.

Thomson/Grass Valley
OK, I didn’t actually make it to the Thomson booth, but there were a bunch of cameras around the show. I got a chance to see the Infinity camera at the Canon booth. I can’t really testify to much about the camera, but I can say it is definitely one of the sexier-looking cameras out there.

The Really Cool Stuff
When I was in High School, I remember playing with an incredibly cool animation program on an Amiga. It was entirely spline-based, and really easy to use. I didn’t know what it was called, and over the years I’ve periodically wished that there was something like that program on the Mac. If I actually did animation I’m sure I would have known that that very software has in fact been on the Mac for some time - but not running in the right circles I just found out on Thursday. The program is now called Animation Master, and is considerably more sophisticated than it was in the Amiga days. I’m still kicking myself for not buying at the show for the special show price (I had to run back to the booth, and the show was over before I had a chance to leave again), but fortunately the regular price is only $299, so I expect to playing with it some time this coming week. I can’t really begin to describe the software — just check out the site.

Last, but certainly not least, is what to me was by far the coolest, most amazing camera at the show — the Phantom. Vision Research has made a series of high speed digital cameras for years, primarily for industrial and scientific use. They now have two new cameras for the creative market. One has a 35mm-sized frame at 1080P resolution that will go up to 1000fps. A second camera has a 65mm-sized frame with 4K resolution that will do 150fps (at 4K — with higher frame rates available at reduced resolution). They use standard film lenses, and have on-board RAM-based recording (of course it is necessary to download the footage after every shot, but compared to shooting high-speed film this is quite painless). The footage from the camera is amazing. There is a demo reel on their website. I can watch it over and over — I think I was hypnotized in front of it for over 10 minutes at the show. I would have stayed longer if someone wasn’t pulling on my shirt.

I’ve uploaded a Word document listing the changes made to the Varicam in the latest “H” model. It’s also listed on the File Downloads page.

Down for over two weeks. That sucked. But the site’s up again on a new server — hopefully for good now.

OK, the site upgrade is done, and I’m back with a whole new look.

Let me know if anything doesn’t work.

I’m going to upgrade WordPress (the blogging software that runs the site) this weekend. If things go well everything should be back to normal pretty quickly. If you notice anything amiss, please let me know.

After the upgrade I’d like to make some layout changes. If anyone has any ideas (or more usefully, a new CSS stylesheet!), I gladly accept donations!

After an unexpected IP address change and subsequent DNS problem, bustedskull.com is finally back!

Of course if you’re reading this you know that already.

This is something that has come up more than once: You shoot a multi-camera switched VariCam shoot, recording the line-cut in addition to recording in-camera iso’s. In post, you want to digitize the line-cut in Final Cut Pro HD using the 1200A deck, using the iso’s to improve the edit without having to rebuild everything from scratch. It you shoot at either 24 or 30fps, here is a tip that will save you some time, sweat and/or hard drive space:

Rather than run time code directly from your timecode generator to the VTR recording the line cut, pick a camera that is running off of a power-supply (so you know it won’t have to go down for a battery change at any point in the shoot) and run the timecode out from that camera to the VTR (making sure that the VTR is set to take external _USER BITS_ in addition to TC). Now you will have the proper flags on you line-cut tape to allow you to capture your footage at 24 of 30 fps in Final Cut. The only caveat is that at 30 fps, when you cut in footage from a camera tape you may have to shift it a frame back or forward. This is because on many VariCams (depending on how recently its firmware was updated) the pulldown cadence at 30 is not locked to timecode. This isn’t an issue at 24 since the cadence is locked so that A-frames are always on 0 and 5 frames.

At some point in the future I’ll post something worth reading here (hopefully some explanations of what I’ve learned about the technical arcana of film and video production and post production.) For now, however, you’re probably here to download the files I’ve got in the download section (see the link to the right). The list of files available will grow, as well as the related documentation. If you have any questions, either email me or post a comment.