4-60fps or 12-60FPS????

[John Sharaf]

It only matters if you desire to shoot at 4-11 fps. There is no better setting, in fact, there’s really no reason I can think of to have this item mucking up the menu at all!

JS

[Steve Mahrer]

Folks:

We added the 4-60 vs 12-60fps options to prevent users trying to shoot at 4fps and still trying to focus / track their subject…. the lack of “realtime” feedback from the 4fps slow capture to the operator is a killer. We recommend frames rate below 12fps be used on sticks.

Just for grins, set the frame rate to 1 fps….. then try to focus or track a moving person, it will drive you nuts! You have broken the machine to human feedback rule of <50ms lag in the human servo.

Steve Mahrer ( Panasonic Broadcast)

[John Chater]

I was at Panasonic a number of years back getting a demo of the Varicam with the much missed Michael Brinkman. During that time I was told that below 12fps puts a lot of stress on the CCD’s. Amongst other things lit pixels can become very apparent, So the 4-60 frames was a warning to that effect.
Turn your varicam to 4fps , 6db and let it warm up for an hour. Its a lucky person who has no lit pixels. I saw a camera the other day that I swear looked like a star map.

Steve- Interesting you disclosed the fact that you can get the Varicam down to 1fps. I remembering asking one of your top engineers how to activate that setting. He wouldnt tell me. I found out anyway 🙂 Now that people are figuring out how to do this with the HVX-200 I’ll be curious to see the effects on its CCD.

Best
John Chater
San Francisco

[Steve Mahrer]

Hi John:

The VariCam is guaranteed to work and provide high quality images from 4-60fps. The CCDs are not stressed by the slow frame rates, it’s just very hard to control dark current differences, hence visible pixels at very slow frame rates. This is why the slower 1-3 fps mode is buried in a service menu. This mode is NOT guaranteed for picture quality, many users do however simply map any visible pixels and use the slow frame rates quite happily. In the newer 27H model cameras, we have an adaptive software algorithm that corrects the lit pixels below 12fps, it work rather well.

I think we all share your views on Michael, it’s good to hear him remembered.

Cheers,

Steve Mahrer (Panasonic Broadcast)