[Ken Hon]

Aloha Derek,

Sorry, it’s been so long I forgot about the rubber handled thingy, but that does get taken off and tossed in a box. You also have to remove the cool drilled bolt that comes with the Kenyon Gyro and replace it with a slightly longer one. I’m pretty sure it’s 3/8s, it’s certainly not 10mm as I got it at our home depot and the don’t have much metric stuff. The base plate of the Gyro comes off with 4 screws and you can switch out the bolt. You just need a thin open end wrench to tighten it (adjustable is too thick).

The Gyro works fine as it is really set up to stabilize front to back motion, though it works some with side to side. The fig rig in you lap is free to roll in both these directions so the gyro resists these movements. I also tried hanging it by a variety of bungies and heavy rubber straps, something we used to do pre-gyro. But with the gyro the camera bounces up and down, it’s much better in your lap.

A friend of mine actually did the bungy thing in one of those cool Russian helicopters that Steve showed (that was awesome Steve), but as I recall it had rotors that turned 🙂

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Derek,

The fig rig comes with a quick release mounting plate. What I did was get a longer mounting bolt for the KS-8 and bolted it directly into the bottom mounting plate using the larger threaded hole (I forget what size it is, I just took the plate to the hardware store and found the right threaded hex bolts). I think I used the same hole that the plate was attached to the fig rig with. The KS-8 “hangs” under the camera this way. I put some of that dark rubber pipe insulation on the lower third of the fig rig and just rest the whole thing in your lap. Works well and my wife can fly for a long time now. It’s not a Wescam, but the amount of usable footage we get went up by an order of magnitude.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Alan,

We fly all the time with the EX-1 mounted on a FigRig with a Kenyon Labs KS-8 gyro and have no problems at all. I’ve seen the footage, but my take is that it would have been unusable anyway. It must have been very severe shake. I don’t think this camera has any problems that any other small camera doesn’t have.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha,

There is also a way to shoot 720 60P as slo mo in camera. Select your 720 frame rate that you want to edit in either 24 or 30P. Then in S+Q motion choose 60 frames. This will automatically film at half speed. That is it will film at 60P but download and playback at 30P. You can get it a bit slower using 24P. This is nice as you can see the effect on your viewfinder while you are filming.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Andy,

Boy are you lucky you got Walter to answer and not Bob! Walter is very nice and edits a very cool cooking show which I’ve now watched a few times just because of this board. Pretty fun actually. In addition to what Walter said, you need to hook up the blackburst sync/ref lines. Not sure about exactly where these are on a LH card as we have a Kona 3 with a K-Box. On ours you run a composite BNC cable from the Blackburst to the Kona sync/ref IN. Then run another cable from the Kona sync/ref OUT to the Sync/Ref IN on your Beta Deck. Then turn the 75ohm termination to ON. The ON means it’s the end of the line for the signal. Otherwise it reflects from the last connection back along the cables, definitely not good.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Jamie,

Jeremy is right that for the most part it is good. But we have noticed doing down converts via a Kona 3 to tape that some of the conversions produce illegal whites. The white level in the HD 709 color space is higher than the 601 SD color space and it can cause problems. We are going out via SDI, so downconvert and lay to tape and then recapture and correct the SD version. Going to Beta SP via analog I would do the timeline conversion Jeremy recommends, then play it out via an external scope (though the FCP scope seems pretty good too) and tag your trouble spots if you have any before recording to tape. The broadcast safe filter works pretty well, but you may need to adjust colors too. It’s a pain, but we usually find a couple of trouble spots.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

I totally understand. TC is messy. Our problems came when trying to do CloseCaptioning in DVDSP and finding the DF wouldn’t sync correctly. Hope you find an answer.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Craig,

Well this won’t be much help since I haven’t examined how the EX1 shoots DF. But, about a year ago I noticed that DVDSP didn’t handle DF very well and was getting strange stuff in FCP too. So while we had always shot and edited DF (a hold over I think from linear tape to tape editing on our part), we now shoot everything in NDF and we have a lot less in the way of trouble between decks, mpeg encoders, and computers. If we need DF, we convert it. Maybe some other folks have dealt with this differently.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Steve,

We fly mostly in a Hughes 500, but it’s so we can land on rough terrain (tails a lot higher). The camera worked great, but XDCAM still suffers a bit from the same data overload as HDV when flying low. The entire scene is in motion and it’s a bit blurry, but not too bad.

I put our camera on a Fig Rig with a Kenyon Labs KS-8 mounted under the camera plate. I had to get a couple of longer bolts, but it works great. Just set the Fig Rig on your lap and fly. I tried suspending it from the door frame, but the gyro had much less effect that way. Just waiting for the varizoom controller now. The gyro and the FigRig ran about 4k, but it’s been worth it. Not as good as a gyro platform but a couple orders of magnitude cheaper.

Aloha,

Ken

[Ken Hon]

Aloha,

Here’s our twisted workflow. Capture and edit straight cuts in HD, then output and downconvert via Kona 3 SDI to SD deck. Recapture material as SD uncompressed and finish whatever effects etc we need. How backwards is that compared to old workflows?

Anyway, the AJA IoHD will allow you to capture to a Mac Pro Laptop. It’s not cheap, but it works over Firewire 800 and does everything.

Aloha,

Ken