The Phantom Miro LC320S thread

[Duncan Brown]

Now that these are getting old enough to be afforded by mere mortals (or companies whose main business is not high speed cinematography) I thought I'd start a thread where we could share tips and tricks on these.  I realize for many of you, I'm probably asking you to dredge up knowledge from a long time ago!

We have one camera with a PL mount and one with an EF mount.  Anything anyone needs to know that they think I could answer, I'd be happy to.  My previous high speed experience was with 16mm film but I think I've come up to speed (oof) on these pretty quickly, so I hope I could be a resource.

Questions for existing/past users:

-- The touch screen is flaky, to put it mildly.  It generally seems to be a matter of calibration - the touch area and the screen image don't line up well.  Sometimes turning the screen off and on again seems to help, so maybe it recalibrates when you do that?  If you figure out the right offset to touch, to do what you want, then the next thing you want to do you'll find the offset is off-screen somewhere so that doesn't help.  The most commonly frustrating thing is trying to change the capture rate.  Many other things can be done remotely from the app on a PC, but seemingly not that.

-- The PL mount seems to be thicker than spec.  I haven't taken it outside to see if I can reach infinity, but other clues, like a zoom that changes focus massively when zooming, lead me to believe that's the case.  I got several shim kits with the cameras, but adding shims seem to make the problem worse.  It came with no shims installed.  Thus my guess that the lens is too far away from the sensor, not too close.

-- I'm still working on getting a computer set up to read the Cineflash cards so I may be able to answer my own question eventually but it would appear to me that there is no way for the camera to format a new blank card, is this correct?  (It's new and blank because I replaced the dead micro-SSD inside it).  Also, anyone know if you solder on a second connector on the circuit board inside and install another micro SSD in it (and reformat it), if it will magically become a 240GB Cineflash?  Or is there more to it than that?

Duncan

[Duncan Brown]

Not many people wanting to chime in, eh?  Well maybe a little camera-porn will, er, stimulate the discussion.

Duncan

[Duncan Brown]

[Duncan Brown]

[Duncan Brown]

I still think the camera can't format a new Cineflash (well, a Cineflash with an unformatted replacement SSD module installed in it.)  Oddly enough, once it IS formatted, and you decide to erase all the files on it in the camera menu, what it does is....format the drive!   But you can't get to that menu choice with an unformatted Cineflash.  That's some catch, that Catch-22.

We were finally able to format the drive with the Cineflash Dock hooked to an old laptop with an external SATA port and the proper cable, running Linux.  Previous attempts, with several differences, to just format the drive had not created a drive that worked in a camera.  So we used Clonezilla to create a backup image of the working Cineflash, then restored that to the repaired Cineflash.  That worked!  Now we have a backup image we can use to do that whenever needed.  At some point I'm going to solder on a second connector to the board inside the repaired Cineflash and see if we can make it a 240GB model by putting two SSD modules in it.

There's an interesting quirk with the EF mount - it's spectacular that it includes electronic aperture control, but the way it works is, every time you change the aperture, it opens up fully, then stops back down to the selected aperture.  It's like they don't trust it to know where it is and have to "re-home" it each time you adjust it.  Weird, but not too annoying once you understand what it's doing.

Duncan

Edited April 20 by Duncan Brown

[Duncan Brown]

Some more quirks I discovered.  I usually try to use the camera in tethered mode because it all just works better, but sometimes I'm not close enough to a computer and IT hasn't gotten me the laptop I requested for this yet 😞 so I'm forced to save to CineFlash.

First off there is all kinds of weirdness with the file naming, at least the way it shows up in the app when you access the camera.  Files can show up under different names than they previously had, new files don't always get the higher number names, files you are sure should be there aren't, until you delete older files you no longer need, then the newer ones show up, etc.  I've taken to just erasing the CineFlash before each time I need to use it.  Then the files I save up show up named in the order I saved them, they're all there, etc.  (This may have something to do with the timestamps on the files, which are all starting from the default date when the camera powers up because I never remember to set the time and date manually on it - another advantage to using it tethered, it handles that automatically.)

Pretty consistently now, the final frame or two of the last file I save ends up corrupted, and when you try to save it out from the app to another format, the save fails.  The easy answer is to just re-trim the video in the app to lose those bad frames, but I've taken to just saving the last file twice before I'm done with a session and ignoring the second one.  YES, I wait a while before powering the camera down after the last save, it shouldn't be an issue of interrupting the file write, but who knows.  Easier to just work around it.

Duncan

[Jaron Berman]

Great camera, capable of tying itself in knots pretty quickly.  You've already discovered that the PC software is VITAL to making it function, and that includes the every-so-often need to reset it.  Especially with the paint stuff - you can be looking at a miserable image via SDI / LCD and it can sometimes spill onto the RAW file as well.  Some issues do some don't, hard to know which will ruin your footage.

  The screen issue is a KNOWN issue.  I tried to send mine in to Vision Research and they got on the phone and talked me through some troubleshooting (PC reset).  But the bugginess in the touchscreen is "in-spec" - and the screen is meant to "sometimes" be used but not relied upon.  So yours is not broken, it's working as expected.  From what I could figure it was a grounding issue and maybe I'm remembering wrong, but I would sometimes have luck operating the screen with left hand while holding the shell of one of the BNC or LEMOs with the other (I recall them being all tied to ground).

 

Find a good USB (+ external power) to SATA cradle - the power is 100% necessary.  

Download and make a "portable" ubuntu USB thumb drive so you can use any computer to file manage the drives. 

 

Have fun with it!

[Duncan Brown]

Speaking of the vital software - it's not awful, I've certainly used worse, but it really irks me that any image changes you make (gain, color balance, etc) are immediate, permanent, and un-undoable.  Crazy, there's no "put everything back to the defaults" button (there is one in a couple of specific settings areas) and not even a ctrl-z-undoes-last-thing-you-did feature.  Like if you're trying to scroll up the panel contents with your mouse wheel and the mouse pointer happens to be ON a setting when you do that, whooooops!

Duncan