D20

Riley Garrett · August 28, 2008

Hey guys. I'm working with the D20 on a feature starting on the 8th. I was wondering if there is anything I should watch out for, and also if any of you have any tips. Also a copy of the user manual would be much appreciated if anyone has one. Cheers.

Adrian Sierkowski · August 28, 2008

Theres some basic info from google here:

http://www.fletch.com/rentalarriflexd20.html

on the bottom of the page. . .

Jon Rosenbloom · August 28, 2008

Don't drive over the fiber optic cable!

John Brawley · August 28, 2008

Hey guys. I'm working with the D20 on a feature starting on the 8th. I was wondering if there is anything I should watch out for, and also if any of you have any tips. Also a copy of the user manual would be much appreciated if anyone has one. Cheers.

Maybe you mean the D21 ?

I believe the D20 was a rental only proposition and have all been recalled now that the D21 is *out there*

I've used the D 20. The main things are...

The shutter has to be spinning to allow the HD split to get a picture.

I hope it's better on the D21, but on the D20, there were dinky BNC connectors that came out of the back of the camera for the HD-SDI recording and monitoring. Because you may have an SD monitor in one location (onboard) a HD director monitor in another and the SRW1 in another, you can quickly end up with 5 BNC cables going in all sorts of directions, making hand held a bit of a pain. Also, the BNC's were hard mounted to little PC boards inside the camera ! Yikes, i was forever sweating that someone would yank a cable and snap a connector off a board, or even worse, snap a board. They were apparently building some kind of tri-ax like fiber adaptor. Hopefully you'll get that so you can have a single cable from camera to the recorder.

The menu is actually very very simple. But you should remember that there are essentially two menu's. One for each of the HD-SDI output boards. If they aren't the same then you may end up in poop. It's possible for example to have one output setup for 4:4:4 and the other doing 4:2:2..but it's usually not good....you tend to end up green pictures on the SRW-1..it's standard effort when it's not happy.

They refused to give me a manual for the camera, because, and the logic is flawed, they kept telling me it was a prototype ! Good luck finding one. I sure tried hard and couldn't get one out of them or anywhere, no matter how hard I pleaded....

The camera is actually really nice. I liked the optical viewfinder. The pictures were astounding when played back in a cinema straight of the SRW1 on a Sony 4K projector. It was the first time I have actually been excited by pictures coming from a digital camera.

I was very impressed, although it has a funny odd noise pattern sometimes, especially in 320 ASA mode and when you have flat fields of tone. All normal apparently. Just went to see the mostly excellent "the bank job" and realised i was seeing the same thing there too !!! I've uploaded a frame grab from a digibeta SD PAL downconvert, and you'll see what I mean. It looks much better once it's in motion, and this low res QT doesn't do it justice. Lot's of dynamic range too....

I was impressed because I lit most of this film with a few bit's of rope light and a few practicals and was in very low light and hand held for most of it. Most of the time I was metering between 10-15 fc.

I have heard this noise issue is greatly improved on the D21, but have yet to test it....

good luck...

jb

Wonded.tiff

Edited August 28, 2008 by John Brawley