Comments on: ‘Filming in My Backyard just got easier’ – how life with a 5DmkII beats carrying a Betacam

By: Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 07:49:36 +0000

Bela,

I look through the Betacam viewfinder but it is sometimes difficult for me to tell if there is camera shake that’s why and second person is always a good idea. They have no say over the framing unless by mistake I don’t see a part of the helicopter or my foot in frame

By: Bela

Bela — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:51:45 +0000

Bob, I hear you, but then how do you frame and focus if it is someone else safe inside the chopper who is looking at the monitor and not you? I would have thought that you could affix an LCD to the handlebar at least in a safe fashion, so it won’t get sucked out of the aircraft?

I knew Laszlo Kovacs, ASC for many, many years, he told me many hairy stories with his various aerial shoots and things that went wrong.

By: Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:28:11 +0000

Bela, Thanks for your suggestions.

The slipstream will move the LCD monitor around too much, even with the betacam I take off the mic and lens sunshade so that the wind won’t catch it. Just the “bare bones” of the camera and a piece of rope around the carry handle in case anything happens.

By: Bela

Bela — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:00:47 +0000

Bob, unless you rig the camera in a hand-held or chopper-frame held gyroscopic stabilizer, there will always be some vibration conveyed by any moving vehicle, of course.

Why don’t you just attach an external LCD monitor to the 5D2 or 7D via the mini-HDMI OUT spigot and frame/focus the same way as you did with the Betacam SP camcorder? Even though you only get a 640×480 SD progressive image that way while recording, that should do the trick!

By: Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 06:54:58 +0000

Bela, Regarding the helicopter filming with Betacam, the camera is hand-held and a video feed goes to a small monitor that the assistant/producer holds so that they can check framing and stability. I don’t think that I will be able to use the 5DM2 or 7D in the helicopter because I currently place the betacam under my arm and additional support is from the my leg. I am sitting out in the slipstream with a foot on the skid bar. The pilot reduces the airspeed to what he thinks is minimum for the situation we are in. Obviously when only flying 30ft over the water he wants to keep the speed up in case of emergencies.

If I use the 5D or 7D I will have to adopt a different method of holding the camera because it doesn’t have a swivel LCD ( I hope Canon hears this) so I would have to hold the camera around shoulder height but this may introduce more vibration.

Bob

By: Bela

Bela — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 03:02:30 +0000

I hear you with the weight, Bob. It is amazing to me how a S16 film camera with a 400-ft mag loaded can actually weigh LESS than a Panny Varicam!! Not to mention the little Aaton A-Minima that takes 200-ft/60-meter mags and weighs-in at only 2 kgs (maybe 3.5 pounds).

http://www.aaton.com/products/film/aminima/aminimatechspecs.php

Anyhow, I agree that you need to beef-up the DSLR’s weight, a 5.6 to 9-inch LCD monitor comes in handy, plus batteries, support, audio gear, maybe even a counterbalance. Yes, and I would gyro it as much as I can.

In the chopper, have you used a hand-held small gyro, or are you just grabbing the camera by hand? I guess if you shoot at the widest angles, vibation should not be much of an issue.

I just run into this on CNBC: “In HD quality tests done by Consumer Reports, neither point-and-shoots nor DSLRs have the same quality as the video that you’d get with even the lowest-end, or lowest-rated HD camcorder.”

I must say, AVCHD would not be my first choice for compression, either. Panny’s AVC-Intra 100 codec is quite okay, and the 220Mb/sec data rate that you can record with the Aja Ki Pro ext. recorder (Apple ProRes 422 HQ) is even better.

By: Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:54:44 +0000

Bela, thanks for the comments. Yes the style we have developed is “non moving landscapes” as some of the videos have narration and consequently we have 3 language versions, English, Cantonese, Mandarin and occasionally Japanese. The narrated video will then have subtitles and I have found that to have subtitles over moving shots is very distracting.

The only thing I haven’t tried so far is using the DSLR’s for aerials, personally I like the weight of the Betacam as it has a stabilising effect. Maybe with the help of gyros I can avoid unnecessay wobbly.

All the helicopter shots we do are hand-held as there are no “nose mounts” available. We fly very low, the pilot normally complaining of saltwater coming onto the helicopter, and the helicopter is skewded so that I can look straight ahead, it all adds up to an exciting ride.

Bob

By: Bela

Bela — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:08:13 +0000

Bob, you are 100% correct. There is nary a better camera gear for you than one of these newfangled HD-SLRs.

Most of what you shoot seem to be slow-moving or even non-moving ladscapes and nature shots, and for those a CMOS camera truly excells.

It’s just when folks try to use these things for EVERYTHING, like for filming fast moving sequences and action shots, the images quickly fall apart, especially on a large screen,

A few weeks ago I saw the screening of a just completed indie feature film at one of the larger post houses in NY. The screen was about 16 to 18ft wide. The whole film was shot with the Panny GH1 DSLR, and I can tell you, it looked wretched. I got such a huge doze of headache myself, I could not watch more than 30 minuutes of it, and many others have walked out to discuss it in the foyer, too.

The CMOSsensor’s rolling shutter induced motion artifacts, amplified by the big screen, are nothing to sneeze at.