Timelapse on tape

Following on from my last post about tape in a tapeless workflow, I also had some fun planning some timelapse shooting.

The requirement was to demonstrate the amazing transformation from empty exhibition hall to finished ‘environment’ – ditto for the main presentation theatre. The build would happen over 2-3 days, and I reckon that the timelapse sequences would last around 5-7 seconds each in the final edit.

Weapon of choice would be my EX1 – it has great timelapse, slomo and interval recording modes. Trouble was, client wasn’t going to pay for me to bring one, rent another, and hang around whilst the shoot goes ahead. I know somebody who got to spend a week doing a single timelapse shoot somewhere hot and sunny. And the plants died, so had to be reshot – what a job: filming grass growing…)

Alternatively, a camera like the Nikon D200 has a built-in intervalometer. Providing you have enough power (big power grip or a mains outlet nearby), you can shoot in extra-high definition with a really wide lens, convert the raw images into a QuickTime movie and then pan around the final movie from within FCP or motion. But the client wasn’t going to pay for a photographer to bring his kit and set it all up…

So a couple of PD150s were hired to do it. The Sony PD150 is a venerable little DV camcorder from the tape age and whilst tape isn’t known for its strengths in time lapse, the PD150 does have an ‘interval’ mode.

Tape isn’t good for timelapse because even when the tape isn’t moving, the head is rubbing over the tape all the time it’s laced up. Rubbing the same little bit of tape for minutes at a time could lead to the head clogging up or worse still, scoring through the oxide so it’s one big drop-out and candidate for the point at which the tape will snap. Furthermore, if you disengage the tape from the head after each interval, you’re wearing down the transport mechanism, dramatically reducing its life span. It also means that taking a shot every 1-10 seconds is well nigh impossible because it’s long enough to clog your heads but too quick to unthread and rethread the tape.

So the PD150 timelapse mode records ‘about half a second’ (15-17 frames) of video every XX seconds. It’s not good for shooting things like clouds, and still leaves you with some editing after you’ve sucked in the video. Because you’re only getting half a second of real time video every so often, the footage still looks ‘narcoleptic’ – like a security camera. To get a smooth result, you need to speed up the footage by a factor of x15 or so, so you’re only getting one frame out of each burst of 15.

Aeons ago, there was a bit of software that we got with FireWire PCMCIA cards (so we could grab DV video with Apple’s Wall Street PowerBooks) which enabled you to grab every ‘n’th frame of the incoming DV signal. I hear that Adobe Premiere can still do this, but Final Cut Pro does not. So the clip is sped up in the timeline. Tip: remove the audio, as you’ll have no use for it and FCP will spend processor cycles trying to speed that up too.

So let’s consider a bit of maths:

The camera will record half a second of video every, let’s say, two minutes. This will eventually equate to 1 frame (1/25th of a second) every two minutes.

 A 60 minute tape has 3600 seconds of video, therefore 7200 half second intervals. With me? Those intervals occur every 2 minutes, so each hour tape will last 60 hours (2.5 days) in-camera, and 288 seconds (not quite 5 minutes) in the final edit. But then you can chop out the overnight bits and the periods where not much is happening.

With a little jiggling of the numbers, you can work out if you can get away with doing interval recorded tape. For anything faster (clouds, crowds), then you’re better off recording real time and speeding up in post.

Or get a file based device.

SDHC Cards – FYI

I am known as an advocate and proponent of shooting to SD cards in the EX1 – I’ve never suffered a problem in all the time I’ve been using them, and I have 16x 16GB cards and 8x MxR adaptors plus my two original Kensington 7:1s. I’ve even managed to capture short bursts of 60fps material on them, but that’s a different story. But…

Today, I want to issue a little missive of warning.

Nothing too dire – it’s got nothing to do with the camera, nor the adaptors. But it is a fairly fundamental issue that’s cost me two cards and some other cash spent on fancy cases.

I found a rather nice box that would store 8x SD cards, and bought several of them. I could have two sets of cards, and once filled, a card would be transferred from one box to the other, or so I thought. Anyway, the SD cards looked very slick and neat in their case and I looked forward to the ‘loading’ ceremony once on the job.

A couple of cards – as luck would have it, the first two I tried – would come up with errors on the camera. They wouldn’t format, they wouldn’t record. They played back fine. Hmmm. Tried changing adaptor, same problem. Cut to the chase: let’s check the write protect tab! SD cards can have a little write protect thingy that protects the card when slid back.

Well, the troublesome cards didn’t have one. Ah. That was the problem.

The snug-fitting SD case and my initial pressure in putting the cards in had snapped or pulled off the write protect sliders on two of the cards. Of course the camera won’t write to them. Nor will they erase them. Nor will the Mac and nor will ShotPut or any other software I could muster. I tried twiddling around with a needle, and that didn’t work.

They’re basically toast. I’ve lost the use of two SD cards. Bother.

Today’s lesson: keep the cards in the adaptors, keep the adaptors in boxes. Yes, they’ll take up room, but they’re safe and sound.

However, the two duff cards have still got stuff on them. So I am going to propose a little test involving a form of controlled torture of SD cards. I’ll try laundering them and see if they’re still readable. After that, I’ll get as creative as I dare before risking the blowing up of my MacBook Pro’s PCIe slot…

A Stitch in Timelapse…

Timelapse, the process of apparently speeding up time, is something I seem to do a lot of. It can make the task of filming ‘watching grass grow’ subjects into something quite interesting. The EX1 has been great for this, especially its slow shutter tricks. But timelapse, by its very nature, takes time – and often one will want to be letting something happen in front of the camera whilst you can be covering other things. Getting another EX1 just for that seems a little, well, over the top. Ideally, we’d have another little camera with high quality imagery and long battery life to cover these situations.

I once had such a little camera – a Pentax Optio 720Z – which had a great party trick: it was a compact cam that could do timelapse. Stick it somewhere quiet, set it to take a photo every minute or so, and leave it. A while later, up to 99 high resolution images to import into QuickTime Player (File –> Open Image Sequence), select a good codec, and you have a four second 25fps movie you can import into Final Cut Pro, even pan and zoom around in true Ken Morse style.

Well, it got stolen (from the office, not on a timelapse job!). And there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth as I trawled shops both real and virtual trying to find a good replacement camera with a built in intervalometer (the thing that enables you to do time lapse). Sure you can buy separate boxes, but it all gets complicated and you have to remember to bring it and have enough power in it, and you’ll need the right model for your camera. Plus some way to attach it to your tripod or whatever. The little Pentax was so much simpler.

To cut a long story short, I’ve bought a second-hand Nikon D200 rather than a happy-go-lucky Nikon D40x – Rick will be shaking his head in distain as he’s Canon man. I’ve always liked Nikon, and the D200 came with a useful f2.8 17-55 lens, a separate battery pack and some other bits for about the same price. But imagine my joy of joys when perusing Ken Rockwell’s great site (http://www.KenRockwell.com) – turns out that the D200 has a built-in intervalometer!

Sadly, the interesting Nikon D90, which does 24fps HD albeit with exposure limitations, does NOT have an intervalometer, and neither does the Canon EOS 5D MkII – which would be of great interest to me if it did 25fps HD even though the price tag is somewhat scary. The price of a Canon EOS 5D with a couple of zooms isn’t far off the price of a 35mm adaptor with rails and some secondhand lenses, with the Canon producing a whole new look. I can imagine it being a brilliant talking-head and candid camera. But 30fps to 25fps conversion and audio recording issues are pretty tough to crack outside the indie film world. And lets be frank: the DSLR form factor isn’t really optimised for shooting video.

A stills camera that can shoot HD did seem an odd proposal for me, but I am warming up to the idea. Not as your main camera, not even as B-Roll, but in the same category as lipstick-cams, pole cams and the like: special purpose, ‘special sauce’ shots and sequences.

And I’d be sure to bring a decent stills camera to every shoot.

You got the look

 

The film look. That ellusive, ephemeral, desirable image we’re all after with our sub-$10,000 cameras trying to look like Panaflex or Arri with lenses that represent a years salary.

It’s highlights that don’t bloom, it’s shadows with detail. It’s the ‘not now’ 25p (24p) look rather than the hyper-reality of 50p or 50i. But more importantly, there’s a way that shadows record, highlights occur, the whole contrast isn’t some simple straight line. Shadows ramp up from black to visible. Highlights don’t burn out, they add little grace notes to the tone of the image.

For the last couple of years, we Z1 owners shot stuff to create this look in the edit. We under-exposed the footage to rescue the highlights. We engaged Black Stretch to ensure that the shadows didn’t disappear. We eschewed the CineGamma modes that the Z1 

I’ll have a go at a definition of the film look. It’s just ‘a’ definition, not ‘the’ definition, and hopefully it will stimulate some debate as there’s a lot of misunderstanding that the Film Look means 24p or CineGamma or other marketing check box.

So what makes the look IMHO? It’s a combination:

1. Progressively recorded frames
2. A frame rate within perceived motion but not within perceived flicker [1]
3. A ramp up from black to dark tones that preserves detail yet produces rich shadows rather than a linear scale that makes shots look a little bland
4. A ramp off the highlights, so the last few stops of exposure happen within a limited headroom, rather than going straight from pale to ‘super-white’.
5. Big bokeh – these are the circles of confusion, the blobs of light that are totally out of focus in the background of a shot. In other words, shallow depth of field
6. A richness of colours that don’t bleed out of their bounds – the Film Look neatly colours-in within the edges [2]
7. Absence of artificial sharpening – those white edges round dark things and dark edges round light things that says CHEAP VIDEO
8. A subtle ‘boil’ in areas of even tone, rather than the blockiness and banding of 8 bit video (so that’s why HVX200s are noisy!)

Okay. Now here’s the footnotes.

[1] The human eye tends to see motion from a series of stills from about 12-18 frames per second due to the persistance of vision. Why was the cinema known as ‘the flicks’? Because whilst we can perceive motion at that frame rate, our eyes perceive flicker in higher frame rates. It only peters off at about 40 frames per second, and quite frankly we’re much more comfortable with computer monitors at around 50-75 frames per second – or ‘Hertz’ as we should say.

So, do we increase the frame rate to the point where flicker is invisible? Could do, but that’s going to be expensive. Double the amount of flim to shoot, double the bandwidth of analogue video to record. Tell you what, let’s cheat! Let’s show every frame TWICE!

Heck, that’ll do it!

Ah, but whilst this may work really well for projected celluloid and for European TV, our US cousins have a bit of jiggery pokery to do when film moves to video. I’ll save that for another day, but the point is that 20-30 frames per second gives us a perception of motion that’s half-finished. And that’s the film look.

Because the frame rate of film – therefore the ‘Film Look’ – is half-baked, it requires a certain style of camerawork that avoids some nasty effects of such a slow frame rate. Pans, zooms and follow-shots require the sort of care that cabinet makers apply to dove-tail joints. You won’t see them, but they’re there – and if they weren’t there, the film would fall apart like badly erected flat-pack furniture.

[2] And that means high colour fidelity, usually meaning 4:2:2 but with better chips and optics, clever codecs and high definition, this is less of a deal breaking issue in most cases.

So there’s no simple formula to the film look.

And I’d argue that there’s a new look around the corner – Digital Cinema. Now that’s a goal worth pursuing. I’ve seen glimpses of it in 720p50, and 1080p50 and Red may stamp their mark as a desirable look.

So I get the feeling that the Film Look will soon be as quaint (grinning, ducking and running) as Black & White.

 

A stocking filler for EX1 owners…

Find handholding a Sony PMW-EX1 a bit tricky? Want to nail tricky focus pulls every time? Ever had the creeping horror of finding an otherwise shot’s slightly soft when you’re back in the edit suite?

Get a ‘sock loupe and Hood Pro’!

Luminaries such as Philip Bloom and Adam Wilt have reviewed them and described them so I will simply point you in their general direction by way of the Hood Pro site. But one thing I will add is that the Hood Pro has had an unexpected benefit in hand-holding an EX1 by providing a sort of three-point contact.

Only a little pressure is required to add a disproportionate increase in stability over long periods. And if you can just about make out the image below, it’s fine for those of us who wear glasses too. It’s not a permanent addition to my EX1, but for hand-held and run-and-gun shooting, it’s become a ‘must have’ accessory. Get ready to kick yourself for not buying when it was cheaper – but that’s the global economy for you.

Just one note of caution, though – Hood Pro does make an all-black version, and in retrospect I’d have chosen that one instead of the fluorescent orange and blue version I have. It’s cheerful and fun, but not exactly discrete.

KxS is dead…

Before I explain that rather astonishing headline, it’s worth just pausing for a moment and considering the power of the internet and the power of the consumer USING the internet.

I’m a KxS shooter, which – in English – means I own a Sony PMW-EX1 but instead of very expensive SxS media cards, I’ve adopted SDHC cards in a Kensington adaptor. But the cost is that I can’t close the SxS ‘door’ on my EX1.

But I am not alone. In fact, there’s a lot of EX1 owners out there. Enough to cruise the web and wipe out stocks of Kensington adpators around the world. I kid you not. There have been shortages of this benign accessory, and murmours have turned into conspiracy theories about why Kensington haven’t replenished stocks following talks with Sony.

Okay, so Videography is a fairly small world. Sony users are a subgroup of that, and EX1 users are a very small subgroup of the Sony User clan. Those EX1 users who’ve heard of KxS surely must be a very small subset. Yet this group have wiped out stocks in the US, Europe and Australasia. Hmmm.

There was talk of a global conspiracy – Sony talking to Kensington, asking them in a Cosy Nostra sort of way to make KxS disappear. The lack of Kensington 7-1 adaptors grew to a global phenomenon. But then supplies begin to trickle back. KxS makes the EX1 viable in so many situations where once it was not.

And then comes Ross Herewini of e-films.com.au, a passionate and driven EX1 user who spots an opportunity and goes for it: behold – an SDHC adaptor specially designed for EX1 owners that allows cards that meet the grade to be used in an EX1 with the door closed. Built for the job, each one tested before dispatch. He’s dubbed it MxR.

I’ve ordered four, and when I buy my EX3 I will buy more – one for each SD card I own, as I’ve since found that swapping SD cards in adaptors is rather more hassle than the $35 it costs to buy individual adaptors per card.

So the internet has brought together an interesting group of people that have created a new product that will sell very well around the world due to a strange yet brilliant workaround also popularised by the internet.

KxS is dead. Long live MxR

Seeing Red again

What on earth will the cinema industry do with a camera like the Red Epic 617?

This is a camera that, if it were to shoot onto the equivalent film, would be using negatives over 180mm wide – that’s beyond IMAX by quite a big percentage. And film wouldn’t be able to capture the dynamic range that this camera can. Projection technology can only barely cope with such a source, and that’s with the help of esoteric multi-screen technology such as Spyder & WatchOut.

But will it bring people together to witness the magic of a movie? Will it enhance the stories? Will it drop an audience further into a created world? Is Ultra-HD cinema going to be a source of inspiration and action? Of course not.

Over the last seven years or so, my love of visiting the cinema has gurgled noisily down the plug hole. My peer group is in agreement that going to a cinema to watch a movie is a chore: poor sound, scratchy prints, badly behaved audiences, and the rest. Seeing Madagascar digitally projected from a hard disk a couple of years ago provided a lovely pristine print and a lovely clarity. But that technology hasn’t made it into the provincial cinemas yet, and I’m not holding my breath.

The Hollywood system isn’t exactly churning out movies for my age group anyway. Adolescents and teens must be catered for – this group hasn’t got the dosh to buy big screens and 5.1 audio systems that keep us at home thumbing through the Criterion Collection and prevent us old fogeys from crossing the cinema threshold.

But let’s look on the optimistic side: Scarlet and Epic will enable a raft of new Producers to make films that could not be made before. It could blow apart the Hollywood system that pushes film budgets ever skyward. But where are these films going to be viewed? Sure we have our computers and our TVs. Maybe cinemas will finally get a chance to find a digital projection system that will last enough time for them to make a return on their investment. Maybe (let’s be really optimistic) they get hip to recent innovations such as flexible screening and ‘quiet’ auditoriums like some did with the Saturday Screamers.

Or there’ll be a perpetuation of the system that keeps innovation out, spread betting a portfolio of film treatments, micro-managed to appeal to immature target audiences fed on a diet of star-lead convenience food for the eyes.

But the nurse says I must rest now.

It’s just that I sense an undertow of ‘Spectacle’ when reeling over the extreme resolutions of these cameras. That shooting in Epic proportions will make a dull safe story with familiar faces a little more appetising. That resolution is being applied like Monosodium Glutamate to enhance our appreciation of the movie.

I hope Red will be the catalyst for some amazing cinema to come. Small cameras that go places a cinematographic camera can’t usually go or be where cinematographic cameras can’t usually be. And I hope that the dinkiest little Scarlet will be cheap enough to be the Bolex H16 of a whole new generation of film makers.

Meanwhile, can we please just get 1080p50 right first?

A fundamental law of capacity?

An interesting situation cropped up a few days ago. Regulars may remember that I now shoot tapeless with an EX1, which has been a beautiful thing for my market niche.

So, a couple of very simple setups in a day: shoot an operations control room, interview a couple of people, maximum 2 mins of edited material. Then zoom off into town, intervew a few people at a conference. Maximum 1 minute of edited material.

So, 80 minutes of SxS card space should, in theory, be plenty. As I’d be travelling by public transport, I could lose 3 Kg of computer equipment by leaving it at home. Big mistake.

The lovely thing about tapeless is that when shots don’t work, you can delete them. The side note is that you need to start and stop between takes, otherwise it’s hard to chop things out, and with interviewees that have been ‘volunteered’ by their boss, and really unwilling to do any more than the bare minimum, there’s no real chance to fiddle with clips.

So the inevitable happened. The first shoot consumed 45 minutes, even with the occasional delete. The second shoot looming, I could sit on the train and manage my clips to get rid of 15 mins of dross, but with the risk of mucking things up, or I could split the journey and pop home to unload the cards. Which I did.

Okay, so I always knew this was an option, and would have bought the laptop if the option hadn’t been there, but it’s taught me a lesson, which will cost me £800: you need double the capacity of your planned maximum utilisation.

That goes for hard disks too. And power strips, come to think of it. Teabags. Edit days. Toddler clothes. Hmmm. A pretty universal thing, then.

PS: How come a train ticket from A to B, and from B to C, costs less than A to C?

Being a Monitor

Thanks to those who suggested alternatives to the HD25 headphones, which are now repaired thanks to the lovely people at Richmond Film Services. But this debacle has illuminated an interesting angle on things.

Yes, there are headphones that are ‘better sounding’ than the HD25s. Yes, noise canceling is really great, and the HD25 doesn’t do that (relying instead on a vice-like grip that glues your earlobes to your skull, which I hate). Most assuredly yes, there are more comfortable cans than HD25s.

My HD25s are audio monitors. I don’t want them to make things sound good, I need them to tell me what things sound like (Behold, the sound of a stable door being bolted over an empty void).

Ditto video monitors. I can buy a very very nice TV set for the price of my modest 15″ monitor, and it will display beautiful video images. But it’s not showing me what I’ve got, it’s showing me what I want to see. My interlace rant is a good expample: if you don’t check your interlaced footage on an interlaced monitor (CRT), you may never see the horrors of field dominance errors – usually from motion graphics inserted into a DV edit, or DV and higher end formats on the same timeline.

Analogy time. If your doctor took an X-Ray of you, and the X-Ray display device sort of fluffed your bones up and made them look nice and hid some imperfections in the internal organs, it wouldn’t be much use.

So we need to understand why we pay more for a less flattering result. The only trick is knowing how to spot a high quality monitor from a poor reproduction unit. Apart from peer review, sadly it seems to come down to the weight of the price tag.

Sony Z7 – a view from the trenches

If you’ll forgive the location-dropping, I’ve just returned from a shoot Marrakech where I managed to compare the Z1 and the Z7 side by side in a variety of shooting conditions. 12 hours before, I was shooting with a PD170. It’s been an eye-opener.

The Z1 is a venerable beast of burden, a sort of Ford Mondeo of adequacy which hides some truly great features behind a facade of bland competence. Not at its best in low light, it needs +3dB of gain in theatrical lighting. The lens needs help through electronic sharpening. The audio quality is adequate rather than startling. But beneath this bushel is an amazing camera. Quick auto-focus (even if it prefers to auto-focus on the background), snappy zoom (even though it’s servo-only and has a rubber-glove feel), and absolutely unburstable audio limiter; if you record events or accept a line feed, this is a wonderful feature. It is a rubber sheet, in that you really don’t want to imagine that you’ll need it, but you’re thankful it’s there when you do).

The Z1’s audio limiters and extra gain, tweakable white balance, hard OIS and HDV downconverts have made it a safe bet for event videography where there are no take-twos, no re-lights and often no idea what’s going to happen next. It’s battle-proven and whilst not perfect, it does the job well.

But let’s introduce the Z7.

The zoom is slower. But it has a true manual setting and you can whip it if you wish. The autofocus is lethargic, but the screen and manual focus is so good there’s no point in autofocus (I’d like to say that one just wanks it back for perfect focus). And then there’s the ‘see in the dark’ PD170-style low light performance. I’ll mention that the PD170 I used the day before had horrible audio problems: you could hear the lens servos interfering with the audio, the screen and viewfinder were difficult (unreliable?) to focus with – thus requiring Push-Auto to focus on the fly. Come back, EX1 – all is forgiven!

Yet the Z7 just kept going. I was reminded of my early PD150 experiences, shooting parties at night. On the Z1, I’d be shooting 25 fps at 18 dB Gain at wide angle, trying to get every last photon I could onto tape. The Z7 was happy to keep recording by torchlight, and the lens allowed me up to 60% zoom before cutting out the last stop of light.

The Z7 images of my borrowed unit needed some tweaking, but they exhibited the same lift in shadow detail as my tuned Z1 settings, and the highlights were good too – I think I could get them to DVX100 levels of filmic roll-off given a little time alone with a good CRT. In fact, the lens requires none of the sharpening that the Z1 demands, and produces natural looking images that I can compare favourably with DSR-450 footage.

The Z1 has got some great Event Videographer tweaks to it which I am yet to master on the Z7: tweaking the White Balance, sorting the manual audio levels with limiter for the same unburstable control, balanced shot transition, HARD mode Optical Image Stabilisation (truly amazing results for handheld work). I’ve not found the equivalents for the Z7. Yet.

As I watched Z7 and Z1 images go into FCP, I wanted to sell my Z1s. With the Compact Flash recording, I wondered about selling my EX1 too. The CF option is very compelling, especially for me as I write, watching 23 HDV tapes ingest. The Z7 is very very good. If only it inherited a few more things from the Z1.

The biggest draw of the Z7 in this day and age is the progressive modes. HD, the web, computer playback, it’s all progressive. Only CRT uses interlace. To convert Interlace to Progressive, you lose 25%-50% of your vertical resolution, making images soft. I know. I’ve been fighting this with my Z1s. The Z7 shoots native progressive images. That yields big sharp images from camera to screen. And that’s what sells HD.

The ergonomics of the Z7 are very good. But I’m concerned that by adding so much depth to the camera controls, people will not twiddle it or alter the controls to make it a better camera. Yes, the zoom is slow, the autofocus is ponderous. Work around it. The image is good, the screen is helpful, the sensitivity is wonderful.

The Z1 could do Standard Definition better than DV by going HDV and downconverting through hoops of fire.

The Z7 finally delivers HDV that deserves a true HD badge whilst fully serving the rest of us who need good Standard Definition video in a progressive world. And it almost sees in the dark.

The PD170 is dead. Long live the Z7.