[Todd Terry]

Just an update…

After just the briefest research… thanks to the recommendations in here from you guys it looks like one of the BlackMagic cards will work nicely. They seem to be able to do all we need, and more.

Another upside, is price. The Matrox MX02 cards we have in these computers were not cheap. If I recall they were in the $4,000-$5,000 neighborhood… times three computers. The BlackMagic cards are a tiny fraction of that. Bonus!

Of course the BM cards only do a fraction of what the Matrox cards can do, too…but they will do all I need them to do. And that’s the important part.

When buying anything new in the electronic realm, that always gives me an opportunity to get on my “Worthless?? But it’s practically new!” soapbox like the cranky old man I’m quickly becoming. It just chaps me a bit that I have what were pretty darn expensive computers that now probably are barely worth carting to the curb after only four years. Ah, electronics. Conversely, when I stopped shooting film a few years ago and got rid of my film cameras, I sold every one of them for more than I originally paid for them.

Hey at least my lenses are still appreciating.

Thanks again to all for the wisdom….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I hate to be one of those “I don’t have an answer but I’ll chime in anyway with my unsolicited comments” (don’t you hate those people?)… but I will anyway in this case because this forum doesn’t get much traffic and maybe something I say will drive the discussion toward a solution.

Firstly, I will say that I don’t know of any solution that will make syncing 100% effortless and trouble free like you are asking. There might be one, but I don’t know of it.

Secondly, have you done multi-camera syncing before? It sounds like maybe you haven’t and are fearing a daunting task based on something you have heard or such… but it really is easy as pie.

I’m usually a single-camera shooter of more cinematic style things, but I had to shoot an event last week and we used three cameras… My C300PL (pre-Mark II), a C100 (also pre-Mark II), and a little DJI Zenmuse X5. I synced these up myself on the timeline by hand (or rather, by eyeball)… and I didn’t use PluralEyes or even a clapper board… or even matching timecodes. My camera operators and I just tried to all start our cameras at roughly the same time (within a second or two of each other), then I just synced them by eyeball on the timeline using the visuals of the waveform in the audio tracks.

It really is terribly easy… this was about an hour-long event we were shooting, and after importing all the clips (into Premiere, in my case), it probably didn’t take me more than four or five minutes to sync everything. And I’ve personally never experienced any drift, everything stayed frame-accurate throughout the whole show.

Is there some particular reason you need for this to be so fool-proof?… or have you have bad experiences with syncing in the past? If so, knowing that might help us lead you to a solution…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks all… genuinely appreciate the responses.

I knew there had to be an easy solution out there, was nice to get some good advice to point us in the right direction.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Very possibly, Mike…

Will definitely check them out. I’ve never used any Blackmagic products, we’ve been so immersed in nothing but the Matrox world for a decade that I’m woefully uneducated about what else is out that… precisely the reason for my post. I need sum learnin’….

Appreciate it…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Thanks Craig, I’ll give AJA a look….

We were AJA users quite a few years ago, before the Matrox systems, before the Canopus systems that were before that. Or did Canopus come first here?… don’t remember. Either way, I’d completely forgotten about AJA.

No, not concerned at all about HDR or any other delivery for now… virtually all of our work winds up on the boob tube, either broadcast or cable.

We just need to be able to isolate and feed Premiere’s program output on “real TV” monitors.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

[Mike Cohen] “Stage needs some lighting – stage wash at a minimum….”

On a complete side note… if you haven’t already, I heartily suggest watching David Letterman’s new Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”

They have the most phenomenal and beautiful stage lighting that you’ll ever want to see in a situation like that. And it’s very understated. And it’s very backlit, with the key lights definitely being upstage, not downstage. It just gives a really pretty and interesting look.

Not that you’ll likely get the opportunity to shoot a conference lit like that, but it just goes to show how lighting can change the look of anything and make it interesting. These shows are shot on bare stages, no set pieces or anything (other than two chairs), not even any draping or rear drops or cycs (in the first two that I’ve watched so far, you can see all the way upstage to the bare back wall of the theatre), and it’s just unbelievably interesting.

Their camera placements and moves are also killer.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

It just depends on what look you want and what your tastes are as to whether or not the results will be acceptable to you.

If you have anywhere from a medium amount to a lot of motion on screen (which I’m guessing you do since you want to slow-mo), then when viewing this at “normal” speed you are going to have a fair bit of that “narrow shutter” look in your motion where everything seems sort of staccato and choppy. If you are (I assume) shooting the 60fps with a180 &deg, shutter, then the look will be the same as if you shot “normal speed” footage with a 1/120th shutter speed instead of the customary 1/48th. So yes, there will be very little motion blur and your footage will have the narrow-shutter look when viewed at the normal speed.

This may bother you, this may not, or you might even like it and feel it is appropriate to your project. Personally, I usually hate seeing a too-fast shutter speed the vast majority of the time. For every instance that it is used well and appropriately (i.e. “Saving Private Ryan”) that are countless other instances where it is used poorly and to the point of great annoyance (i.e., “Gladiator,” most any martial arts movie or fight sequence, and any film where the situation is either “Fast” and/or “Furious”).

There are some ways to introduce some artificial motion blur during editing which may help smooth out this staccato look, and it might be good enough. It will probably never look as good as shooting with the “right” frame rate for the intended usage though. If at all possible, I would ALWAYS try to shoot a normal frame rate unless I knew it was likely to be slow-mo’d. Although if you have scenes that can only be shot once that you might want to slow-mo, then overcranking might be the best choice after all and you just have to sacrifice a bit of the look you want for the normal-speed shots.

All that being said, it would be very easy to test to see if the look is what you want (or good enough). Just grab a camera and shoot some 60fps footage and see what it looks like on a 24fps timeline. OR… shoot some 24fps footage but set your shutter speed to 1/120th and see how it looks to you. You won’t even have to go into editing if you do it that way… you can instantly see what it will look like in your viewfinder or on a monitor.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

To me it’s not the camera that’s the big concern… it’s the glass.

At that distance I’d suggest at least 200mm lens… maybe even 400mm.

Canon makes an EF mount 100-400mm that might fit the bill… but it’s slow as molasses (don’t remember exactly, somewhere in the f/4 or f/5 neighborhood), so let’s hope your venue is very very well lit. That’s not a fault of that lens, all lenses that long and especially zooms are going to be slow.

As for cameras, I’m personally partial to the Canon “C” EOS series (since that’s what I shoot myself). My original C300 will go up to ISO 80,000 and I think the newer Mark II version will go even higher. Now, I certainly wouldn’t recommend shooting that high, but having that ceiling might be helpful depending on the lighting.

Obviously it goes without saying that you’ll need a rock-solid shooting surface and really good tripod and head (especially head… this might even be a job for a geared head) with a lens that long.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah I was really wanting to check out the C200, and had booked one on a recent shoot in Greece (if we travel very far we usually rent gear on location rather than ship or travel with it). But… when arriving at the rental place they didn’t have a C200 in, despite our much-confirmed reservation ….

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…sooo…. they gave us a C300 Mark II instead. I shouldn’t complain since it’s a better camera and the one we are used to, but I was wanting to see what the C200 could do.

I have started using the Osmo a fair bit too now. Cool, huh? It’s not right for everything, but when it is it’s a really cool thing. It took me a little while to accurately pull focuses with it, but I’m decent at it now. One thing that really helped was getting the (overpriced) CrystalSky monitor, instead of my phone… it’s so much brighter and easier to see, focusing is a lot easier. I’ve also calibrated (sort of) and marked my focus wheel so sometimes I’m just going old-school and focusing by guessing distances, which works pretty well. I will definitely never full-rig Steadicam again (and in fact am selling my rig).

One thing that is helpful for a lot of what I do is the ability to separate the Osmo handle from the camera head, which I sometimes do with the Osmo gimbal extension cable ( https://store.dji.com/product/osmo-gimbal-extension?from=autocomplete&position=0 ). Now, you are not supposed to be able to use this cable with the Osmo with the Zenmuse X5 camera (it’s really made for the smaller X3), but with a little modification it actually works fine (you have to carefully file down the locking ring on the extension’s mount). That way I connect two of the extension cables together and operate the X5 camera with the Osmo handle from 10 feet away (unfortunately two cables is the max you can daisy chain together… I’ve tried more). We shoot a lot of automotive footage, so we’ll sometimes put the camera on a suction mount outside a vehicle and are able to get good driving shots that are a lot easier (and a lot more controllable) than mounting the whole Osmo rig somewhere. I also have a 10-foot vehicle mounted boom that I cobbled together out of two old light stands, so I can get moving jib shots while driving (or rather, being driven), and the little X5 camera is so light it will fly on it just fine.

Lots of fun stuff going on in the world these days…. let us know if you take the C200 plunge!

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yeah, probably very different.

You do good work (yeah, I snoop…always). What are you shooting with now?

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com