Viewfinder on old tape varicam…

[Freya Black]

You could well be right that it uses the timecode in some way…

I think if you locked off your tripod and recorded, that the frames would still not be mathematically identical because there will still be changes in the flow of air from frame to frame etc and micro-changes in light. Having said that, maybe you could get in trouble if you footage starts with the lens cap on!

It could be that it does something to detect the overall pulldown by looking at where duplicate frames occur overall.

I wish I knew how it was doing it, I only heard that rumour and it has the ring of truth about it but I’ve never been able to find out more.

Heres something else to make you think. I wonder if you could have removed the pulldown from your samurai footage by connecting the sdi output from the samurai to the input of the kiProMini and recording it? Probably a bit pointless unless you had a shot you really needed on the samurai but an interesting idea all the same!

love

Freya

[Bruce Greene]

I don’t remember how to revert to the factory settings. It’s a very complicated camera! You’ll really need “Goodman’s Guide” to help you out.

And there’s more than one or two menus in this camera also. There’s the “video” menu, the “film” menu, the “VTR” menu…

Also, I would turn off “flare compensation” if you have a decent lens.

The biggest challenge, might be “shading” or adjusting the response of the camera to provide an evenly exposed frame. This should be set by a technician without a lens on the camera. If there are any lens files stored in memory, you may want to delete them. If you shade the camera using a lens and an evenly lit white card, the shading will correct THAT LENS at THAT FOCAL LENGTH and F STOP only. Not very useful for a zoom lens with a lot of light fall off at wide apertures that changes as you zoom.

It is possible to screw up the shading at the deepest level of the menu. I hope the “factory reset” will fix this as well. Now you know where the DIT’s came from, and why so many didn’t really understand what they were doing in the old days! Video engineers understood this stuff, but just couldn’t understand why you didn’t want the project to look like a football game broadcast.

Varicam/Steadicam Owner
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.brucealangreene.com

[Bruce Greene]

You are so clever. Never thought of that! That would do it, but I suspect, it wouldn’t work unless the Samurai records the 24fps time code over the 60fps clip. Unless….the KiPro mini looks for duplicate frames.

BTW, For detection, the Samurai manual suggests waving your hand in front of the lens 🙂

Varicam/Steadicam Owner
Los Angeles, CA
http://www.brucealangreene.com