The Phantom Miro LC320S thread

Duncan Brown · April 8

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 · April 20

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

Duncan

Duncan Brown · April 20

Duncan Brown · April 20

Duncan Brown · April 20

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