Aapo Lettinen

ok so it was Atomos framerate vs camera framerate mismatch, great that you found the issue! When you are shooting slow motion and there is no sync sound, your destination framerate vs the recorded file framerate does not matter at all. You will just change the rate in interpret footage settings (premiere, ae, etc) or clip settings (Resolve) to match the playback framerate to the project framerate you are finishing with. The end result will be the same you wanted if you recorded 120fps stored to 25fps file vs 120fps stored to 48fps file etc. when the playback speed of the clip is set to your target (for example 29.98) when editing the project so that all the frames are played back intact and no frames are skipped or interpolated or blended (which happens if the playback framerate does not match the project framerate). Playback speed of the recorded clip is just metadata, it is not set to stone and on most video files it can be altered on the actual raw material too by altering the metadata of the file. the actual video data stays always the same, you just tell it to play back at different fps. same thing in editing programs, you just tell the program that "this clip which the camera marked to be 59.94fps is wanted to playback at 24fps" and that's it. The clip becomes longer in seconds&minutes (because it plays back less frames per second) but there is no artifacts because no one is altering the actual video frames, just playback speed

could if there would be some lock to secure the button in the correct position. if such lock would fail it would likely destroy the camera so the friction coupling would still be good to have.

yes I am not a machinist but even I can tell that is not acceptable surface finish and will cause issues. the original manufacturing is of better quality, in most cases Soviets added at least the absolutely mandatory finishing touches to surfaces where it is really needed for the camera to work. If looking a Konvas gate for example, it is rough on some areas which are not touching film and are just "dead weight" but all the areas which DO touch the film are grinded and polished like they should. And the underside of the plate is, I assume, precision grinded to some tolerance which allows all the gate plates thickness being correct by 1/100th of a mm if measuring them and comparing to each other. So the soviets did care if it would had made the camera considerably worse to leave some surface unfinished. They shot propaganda with them after all, someone would probably had ended up in gulag if the camera would had messed the film because the rails being unfinished or other lazy manufacturing error 😄

erasing the drive clears the partition table so that the data on the drive is not fragmented anymore and it can potentially record faster data rates. So a formatted drive is usually a little bit faster than a drive which has something on it (especially compared to a drive which has clips recorded, then some of them removed without full reformatting, then recorderd more on the same drive. this causes lots of fragmentation on the new data), depending on if the storage space is "continuous" or if there is only fragmented free spots available to store more data for the existing files taking the rest of the space, then the "drive needing to continuously jump from one spot to another during recording" which slows it down. This is very common and if formatting seems to partially help with the footage problems then it may indicate that your ssd is not fast enough and you need a much faster one. I personally use Angelbird drives for 5.8k and 60fps 4.1k proresraw recordings and for under 30fps 4.1k I use WD blue line 3dnand drives, don't remember the exact model but they are often just fast enough to store 4.1k raw at normal framerates and sometimes 60fps 4.1k might work if the drive is newly formatted and one dares to risk one or two drops every now and then. About the clip test, are you sure your interpret footage settings are correct and the editing software is not doing any pulldown on it? I can't imagine the camera adding pulldown on 120fps footage, there is something else going on. When importing slow mo material which is meant to be played back at the "native slow motion rate", you should set the project fps to your final output delivery fps (like 23.976 or 24.00) and then in the interpret footage settings of the clip select that same framerate for the clip's playback speed and ensure there is no additional settings anywhere else which could mess up the footage.

This project is on hold at the moment, will need to wait for more orders to be able to move it forward. I assume it will take couple of months for the World economy to stabilize enough that people would be confident to invest on camera motors again. This will affect the schedule of the project but otherwise the goals stay the same: to make a reasonably priced and very compact and lightweigh completely new crystal sync motor for the NPR. Likely the price stays the same, 1200usd + shipping for the normal 2-speed version and about 1800usd + shipping for the version which has footage counter and 9 or 10 crystal speeds. it could be possible for me to make a OLED display version of the higher priced model, it depends on how many orders there is. there is pros and cons because the oled is less durable in the long run than the 4-digit 7-segment Led display I was originally going to use, and oled takes more time and resources so it affects the motor body finishing level. But I will look for the possibility if there is enough orders to finance that kind of version. Let me know by DM or here if interested in this motor. I can start working on it as soon as there is enough orders in 🙂

seems it drops complete frames but l would suspect it is the camera and not the recorder. kind of like shutter/framerate mismatch but probably something else. how it looks like when you inspect the jitter frame by frame, is there a repeating pattern and how it behaves when counted the frames?

I actually like Atomos products a lot. Have some Rode microphones too but the Rodes have had the same issue than with some Blackmagic products, the quality control can be a bit hit and miss at times and sometimes need to send stuff back for repairs or replacement (like the NTG3 which started to buzz and pop in cold temperatures despite it being specifically made to withstand humidity and cold better than a normal mic. switched to my backup NTG2 which had no problems at all whatsoever. sent the NTG3 for inspection after the shoot but they could not find anything wrong with it. weird stuff all in all )

I have not used that combo but often HDMI RAW has most issues with the hdmi cable not being reliable on the very high data rates (frequencies and bandwidth) on the highest settings. it is a bit hit and miss with the cables, the expensive ones may be better but not always. I tend to blame the cable if some settigs can't be reached and the ssd does not drop frames. sometimes the ssd drives can be the issue too but you can spot it easily because the not-fast-enough ones will fill the buffer and start to drop frames. with the normal NinjaV the Angelbird drives have been best for me with raw as they are designed to support fast continuous bitstreams instead of the normal computer drives which are good for data bursts but suffer on continuous data stream like video recording, you can see this on computer use too and not just on video recorders. but don't know which ones you use on the V+ and they are probably fine if you can't see the Ninja indicating frame drops.

it is planned to work on 12V. the magazine motor could be run with a separate converter which lowers the 12v battery voltage to 8v, that is easy to do so users can likely make that kind of cable by themselves if needed. Some users would likely use the motor with v-lock batteries which should work fine if a similar style down converter is used to lower the 14.4v to 12v

yeah you see why I like to shoot stuff with cameras instead of trying to draw or paint 😄 maybe it is a mutated lizard-roo of the radioactive wastelands, who knows 😄 the tail is important to mark out that it is supposed to be something from Australia. otherwise it would just look like a dog with short front legs 😄

that is hard to believe considering how absolute garbage the Z6 camera was. low quality sensors (bad pixels from the factory etc) and wrongly designed sensor electronics with random channel noise/flashing etc. The dynamic range was really poor, they claimed 14 stops and the real dynamic range was something like 9 stops or so... outright scamming as the real specs were so different from the published ones. Not the most reliable camera either, had to be rebooted now and then though still not that bad. Additionally their image processing was very poor quality, it could remove the black hole sun effect on simple highlight but complex highlights like overexposed tree branches had black edges all over the place as that confused the in-camera processing. Firmware updates did not help. I just got rid of the camera after the indie feature was shot, it felt like escaping the prison when the camera shop accepted it as a trade-in for the Panasonic I have had some years now. I mean, Panasonic cameras cost less and they never had these things, even the GH3 I first got in 2013 was fine with highlights and did not have reliability problems and bad pixels and no random flashing etc. It was just very reliable camera which delivered images, period. I traded it for GH4 in 2014 which I shot with for almost 10 years, all kind of making of stuff and such. Insanely reliable camera and most of the footage worked perfectly for the application. Just last month I traded the still-working and good condition GH4 for a slightly used GH5s because I wanted better dynamic range and codecs. I expect to use it as a backup and stills camera for years to come. It is just, pretty much everything but Nikon can be good for movie stuff, only the unreliability and unnecessary image issues drive people away. That said, some of these are the issues of the Blackmagic models too which is why they will never become real professional cameras and will always thay in the low-to-mid level indie and prosume use, maybe sometimes borrowed as a F or G camera for some action scenes in real movies but never used as a A, B or C camera. When shooting with the GH4, I could shoot about 2.5 hours with a single small onboard battery. that is insane compared to the pocket cameras which drained similar capacity LP6 battery in something like 20 minutes! if making indie shorts the Pocket would be better image quality wise than, for example, a GH5s but if you need to shoot somewhere remote it may sometimes be good to have a camera which survives the whole shooting day with 3 batteries instead of needing 20 batteries or huge Vlock workarounds to be able to manage without mains power

the FS7 was released after the F5 and F55 which were released in 2014. Same sensor than on the F5 but different processing and lower quality sensors overall, they had higher noise level than the F5 sensor had because seemingly they put the off-spec ones to the FS7's and saved the best ones for the more expensive cameras. The Canon C series cameras are weird indeed, I think they are meant for some kind of hybrid documentary+corporate use which they fit well after you get used to the weird camera shape and operating. I have handled tons of C300mk1 and C200 material, the C300 stuff looked generally really nice and was easy to grade even when the format specs on paper are pretty depressing... low bitrate long gop but when it looked really nice most of the time the audience did not care. very economic to shoot with, great for nature stuff and such. The C200 not that easy to grade, still very nice image quality overall after one gets the perfect grading settings locked down which takes time. most of the basic LUTs looked weird so manual work in post needed. Good camera after that. Not very competitive though when it came out. I know people who shoot feature films with them so very capable cameras still. The main issue with Canons, I think, is that they probably did not know well enough who they wanted to make the camera for so it is a bit of this, bit of that, difficult to figure out until actually shooting something with the thing (to reach that point it would need to be purchased or rented first which may not happen if people struggle to find out what the camera is about) The FX6 and FX9 type cameras are a perfect fit for TV documentary and reality work, even more so than the FS7 which was also extensively used for that purpose. If watching any kind of reality show which was shot in recent years you can spot it is the FX6 or FX9, almost all the time. For narrative action short some other kind of camera might be more tempting but the Sonys are absolutely killer for documentary/reality stuff. Not the cheapest cameras out there though so working-for-free projects would likely use something else.

Photochemical finish requires setting almost all things perfectly on set and very little can be corrected afterwards apart from the actual vfx scenes which are scanned anyway. Some filmmakers really like this approach, having to make everything perfect from the start instead of repairing half good stuff afterwards. Some people who do DI like to use only simple printer light controls etc stuff which can be done photochemically to emulate the feel and mindset of photochemical. For example Rodrigo Prieto did this on Biutiful and you can see the it on trailer too, clear difference to normal DI look

Oh it might have been the meme I included in the original post, removed it because the audience was clearly wrong and it was not even the funniest one 🙂 still would had hoped the camera had BOTH the hdmi AND the sdi. would make it much easier for people with dslr background who likely have all their existing accessories with hdmi connectors. Anyway, great that we created at least some amount of good conversation after all! Personally not sure about the viability of the Pyxis design but surely it fits at least some special purposes. Would had hoped for a better sensor, the backup HDMI along with the existing SDI connectors and some kind of good wifi remote control similar than z-cams etc have. would make it so much easier to rig and use. the OLPF is good as well as the L-mount which is easy to convert to PL and most stills mounts. easy to use for indie and documentary stuff. and clearly an improvement over the Pocket line of cameras if SDI is useful and the box design makes sense for the use scenarios

Could be well working solution if it can supply the needed amps reliably. LiPo batteries usually lack the outer protective shell and they can be really nasty if damaged so it would be good to arrange some kind of protective box for it (plastic project box or something 3d printed for example) to protect it. probably velcro should work fine for mounting but as said I would not use plain LiPo battery, better to have a protective box as they can catch fire and even explode if they are punctured or deformed too much causing internal short circuits which heat them to breaking point. They are meant to be installed inside devices where the outer casing of the device protects them, or in case of drones and RC stuff they don't have casing to reduce weight but then people just need to accept the risk that they get easily damaged with potentially catastrophic consequences. I don't have Bolex motors to test out anything as my Bolex is too old model to use motors. if making motor modifications I would need to purchase a newer Bolex model with motor mounting points to test out the designs, that is why there is minimum order amounts in place as purchasing a camera body and couple of original motors just for tests costs quite much