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On Cameras
Hey all, I’ve been a poster here for a couple years now and you guys always have the best info. This post isn’t technically about Vegas, but it is about film making. I hope I do not offend any of you by posting this here.
So Soon I will be in the market for a “new” camera. After a good deal of research, looking at the Black Magic, the Canon mkiii, and the panasonic/lumix GH2, I decided that the GH2 is still the best buy for the money, especially after you apply the hacks. The MKIII looked the best to me image wise, but its about 4 times the cost of the GH2. The black magic looks good, and the price is right about in the middle, but it seems like I would have to get a lot of external drives and maybe even a server? Huh, what? A server? Yep, that’s what I’ve read anyway. Also it seems that maybe Black Magic’s native file formats don’t work well with Vegas?
Anyway, I have some questions about lenses. What I want is a 14-140mm zoom lens with a matte box. I’ve never owned a matte box before and dont really understand how they get attached to the camera. Most seem to be put on a kind of rail system that the camera also attaches to. I’ve seen this on tripods a lot, which is fine, but what if I want to go mobile with a merlin or something? Would I have to hack together some kind of rail system and attach it to the merlin? Or what If I just want to go straight hand held? Is there a way to hook up a matte box then? Do the matte boxes actually attach to the lens, or to the camera?
Thanks for any help!
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12 Replies
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I don’t know where you’ve been getting your information, but several people have dropped the Black Magic Pocket camera files right into Vegas. I believe that you may need the Avid DNxHD codec. I can’t imagine why you would need a lot of external drives and a server??
They still make matte boxes?
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
From what I’ve read of the BMPCC, it records in either ProRes or CinemaDNG. Not as easy a drop-in for Vegas… CinemaDNG is the higher quality format, and an open format, but not supported by Vegas yet. You can get some level of support for ProRes with Vegas via Quicktime Pro, but proprietary formats make me nervous.
There are transcoders that work with these formats, though: https://www.cinemartin.com/cinec. Still not as handy as dropping it directly into Vegas.
-Dave
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My figures are shooting 29.97 at 4k, 8 bit, equals around 9 GBs per minute. I could easily see myself shooting and wanting have available 12 hours of footage, as I’m a narrative feature length film maker. So that equals a need of 6.5 Terrabytes.
The information about needing a server I got from the most trustworthy source of info online–Youtube–of course. Ha ha ha!
Gotta Love the matte box!
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If you really need that much online all the time, then you have two choices. Three if you consider a very expensive media server. The cheapest solution is buy a few 3Tb drives and some USB 3 docking stations. There are 4Tb drives coming on the market now, but they are too new to trust. The next more expensive is to buy a 4-bay RAID box and fill it with 3Tb drives in RAID5 configuration.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Here is a 12-second clip from a BMPCC camera posted by a user on the Sony forum. It drops into my Vegas 12 timeline – no problems. It is recorded in ProRes HQ film log format and Vegas imports it as Apple ProRes 422(HQ).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1421565/Vegas/Blackmagic%20Pocket%20Cinema%20Camera.mov
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
Umm… where’s the 4K coming from? Is there actually a 4K hack for the GH2? 4K shooting ought to be no worse that 4x as large as HD shooting… so it depends on what you shoot. An AVC format ought to be just dandy at 100Mb/s, so that’s 0.75GB per minute if you scale to 4K. But it’s unlikely any HD camera would have the horsepower to hack a 4K AVC encoding. Maybe MPEG-2, depending on the compression engine. Or AVC-Intra.
Assuming AVC-Intra, that’s already pretty common. I think the Intra mode on my Canon 6D is around 91Mb/s, so that’s 2.7GB/minute. The GH2 AVC-Intra hacks go at least to 146Mb/s, scaling that to 4K will get you 4.4GB/minute. Of course, it’s not necessarily the case that you want to scale linearly going from HD to 4K. That’s also going to stress the memory card interface on any of these cameras pretty severely… particularly SD Cards.
There’s also the raw mode hack on the Canon 5D, which runs at 83MB/s for HD, so close to 5GB/minute for HD, which would be 20GB/minute for 4K… you’ll need a good SATA SSD just to be able to write that, it’s no going to CF or SD card.
Going to actual 4K cameras, Redcode (which is compressed raw video) runs 1.7GB/minute, 2.2GB/minute, and 2.5GB/minute. Relatively mild, particularly they pretty much just use SATA SSDs these days.
-Dave
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Hey Dave, sorry about that. The conversation kind of switched from the GH2 to the Black Magic.
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So if anybody is reading this thread and still wants to know the info, you need a rail system to use a matte box. Rails systems are relatively cheap, less than $200 USD. The rail system attaches to your tripod or whatever rig you’re using. The camera and the matte box then attach to the rail system.
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Hey Stephen, I wanted to like Man Made on facebook, but I couldn’t find a link.
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Thanks, but I am an old fart and don’t do FaceBook.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com
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