Phil Rhodes

They're cheap! Whole set under £1000.

Ursa Mini Pro. Nikon Series E.

Well, let's make sure we can get all of the info, first. Pictures of the connectors are helpful but it would involve knowing what pins do what and where they're supposed to be connected both ends. What info do you have?

AVI and Quicktime are container formats; what you put in them matters, but as containers they both do largely the same job. Quicktime is arguably a more modern format and has greater capability though you may not notice the difference in practice. The trick is that various software will give you various different options as to what you're going to put in these files. I'd decide based on that, more than anything else. P

That's not a particularly difficult thing to make; I'm sure you'll find somewhere, though I suspect it'll cost you. I could do it if you're desperate. The trick is figuring out what the pinout and specific connector types are supposed to be; is that information you have?

I still have...

It did!

Your best bet would probably something like the Grass Valley LDX 86N series. They're software-upgradeable so various examples will have various capabilities, but they advertise 15 stops of dynamic range (presumably in pursuit of HDR broadcasting), Rec. 2020 colour (not complete coverage, of course, but beyond 709) and peak at (I think) 180fps. It's difficult to put a number on sensitivity. Broadcast cameras like these are generally described in terms like "f/12 at 2000lx." The standard interpretation of this is that the camera will produce a 100% video signal when viewing a white (89.9% reflectance) chart under the stated illumination with an optical system of the given transmittance. Even though it is common for broadcast camera manufacturers to publish a signal-to-noise ratio in dB, which is a lot more than cinema camera manufacturers tend to do, it's still difficult to calculate a sensible ISO equivalent from this, but you could establish it experimentally quite easily. The very latest cinema cameras, with lower pixel densities on larger sensors, will naturally outdo 2/3" broadcast cameras, but the field has not stood still. One interesting point is that the LDX 86 series feature pixel binning, where the sensor will collect the values of four adjacent pixels to produce one output pixel for HD work, or send the pixel values as is for 4K work. The camera will also operate fundamentally in HD mode, for increased sensitivity and lower noise, and then upscale the results for 4K output. My impression is that the LDX 86N in particular seems to have significantly greater sensitivity than an Ursa Mini Pro, based on my experience of them side by side on a trade show floor, and the Pro is reasonable at ISO 800. It's only an impression, though. This is a six-figure camera, to be clear. P

To be fair, they have improved 2/3" chips quite a bit, especially considering the fact that people like Grass Valley now have 2/3" studio cameras with circa-4K resolution, high frame rates, and astounding low light performance that's better than earlier standard-def cameras of vastly lower pixel density. The difference is that these are rather expensive studio cameras not field-portable camcorders. It was from this sort of thinking that the Viper emerged and I was always dismayed that it wasn't followed-up.

The MPEG-4 codec supports a huge range of pixel formats and bit rates; it's quite possible to inflate a file with the right (wrong) settings. I'd try to avoid so many conversions; see if you can get the DVD to an uncompressed AVI or Quicktime movie, do your work on it, and then play with the compression settings on output until you arrive at a quality-filesize compromise you can live with.

Yes, all seems pretty good.

Bear in mind that Panasonic's P2 cards are also made quite literally out of SD cards. Flash reliability problems are almost invariably caused by connectivity issues, though, so adaptors (regardless of format) are a dubious bet. At risk of being seen as an unstinting Blackmagic fanboy, I very much like what they've done on their recent cameras which can take SD cards (for lower-bandwidth jobs) or CFast cards (for higher-bandwidth occasions.) Hard to object to that. One of the upsides of CFast (and SD, for that matter) is that they're serial formats so they have a smaller number of pins than, say, a compactflash card, so the reliability issues are rather smaller. Compactflash cards have 50 pins, of which all but ten or twelve are used for critical things; CFast only has half that number, of which only four are actually signal and only a few more are absolutely required for the thing to work.

The desktop version seems fine, but I wonder if there's a way of getting a more condensed list of unread material on a phone. Even with it set to collapsed mode, it's a bit chunky. In general, though, I think we should thank Tim for his stalwart work. Administrating something like this tends to be something of a nightmare of settings files and server configuration and it's easy to start griping about changes. We'd all be griping a lot more if the whole thing collapsed under the weight of spam or other security issues.

I see - I haven't had much contact with Film9 but it seems to be much the preferred approach. I wrote an article recently about the fact that modern transfers of old film can make the film look better than it ever did. It's even true for 35mm, which generally looks much better when transferred straight from the negative (or a closely related element) to a 4K release than it did even in the cinema. Modern technology is really buffing up older stuff nicely. I think what helps Super-8, even if you choose not to degrain it, is the stabilisation. S8 registration was never great and that affected everything. Have you seen some of the stuff that was shot more recently on the 50ASA daylight negative on super-8? It's on YouTube somewhere. The lenses start to let it down, as they often weren't wonderful on S8 cameras, but otherwise it looks like bad 16mm. P