Devin Walter

This forum is abound with requests for cheep 16mm cameras. Very few however broach the subject of sound. I'm looking for a camera with sound sync and a reflex view finder. I have four 100' roles in my freezer so it would be beneficial to be able to use them as apposed to a camera that only shoots 400' roles.

I've shot two short films using the Canon Scoopic. Both projects where dialogue free. From what I've been told there's no good way to sync sound to them. In fact, I was told if you tried the sound would become desynced. is this true?

I'm looking for a camera under $500 that has sound sync and a reflex view finder.

I'm currently looking at a Bolex M5 with a reflex zoom lens but it's a bit more than i'd like to spend.

Used the 7d Mark II with the Black Magic assist over the weekend. Results at 1080p 60fps IPB were just marginal enough. I used the Vision X profile. I'm in the same boat as you. Bought a 7dMarkII hoping the guys at ML would hack it. The ProRes feature makes it just barely acceptable to me. If I had to do it all over again I would have a Sony FS5 and two A7sII instead of two C100 Mk I's and a 7DMarkII.

That's honestly what I expected but it still sucks to hear. I wish canon would pull there heads out of there asses and realize if they put the same functionality as magic lantern in their cameras natively that they would sell a poop load of them because they would have the only SLRs that shot RAW.

I am in the same situation as you. I bought a 7D2 last May and have been waiting for ML just to get shot down by the ML devs. If everything pans out I am shooting a music video with a Atomos recorder in a month or so. If you want to I can tell you how I feel about the result. Clean 8-bit 422 should hopefully make some difference...

Please DEFINITELY let me know how it turns out. I'll be very interested to know how much better if any ProRes is for the 7D

Sure it can look good. But hey, we can all say the 5dMKiii is probably the "top" for ML, the most hacked/worked on, and on their own forum they admit to it not being really stable to run into any situation:

 

http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=16971.0

 

It's hard enough to work with raw from a "normal" camera like a red, on occasion, let alone when you get into some things like ArriRaw in any kind of post environment. In truth; most of the things you see shot on the Alexa on TV are recorded to ProRes-- of which there are many flavors.

And while, yes 14bit RAW is a lot of data (a lot more than pro-res) it's all about the tradeoff, 14bit raw is a lot of data.

In truth; in the years i've had my BMPocket (got it day one!) i've shot raw on it for a professional job exactly 1 time. Not that I don't like raw, it's fine, but its about more than what is just possible under the ideal circumstances of making things for yourself on your time in the film business.

Absolutely. But for my own projects i want the extra room to work regardless how much more time and effort it takes. I'm willing to do the extra work and just want the option. I looked into the pocket Cinema for a long time but in the end the battery life is atrocious so i would need to buy a V-mount battery and rails to hold it to compensate. Thought in hind sight i think i'd rather be doing that than looking for an external recorder. I would have needed to buy new glass or a meta bones adapter too though...

I'm not gonna keep kicking a dead horse. I'm getting similar answers ellswear. I'll need to do more research on ProRes and the Video Assist.

However, I do Disagree slightly. I can almost always tell a digital movie from one shot on film. Some have fooled me but not most. But I can 100% of the time tell an SLR. No matter how well you light or work with the camera an SLR always looks junky and it's down to canon's compression. The footage I saw from my friends MagicLantern-a-fied 7D easily put it up there with any of Blackmagic's cameras and even the RED in some cases. Before we saw that we where both ready to abandon SLRs. That's the look I was after and i've just never seen it replicated in ProRes. That speaks pretty loudly to the importance of the codec. Not that RAW should be used for everything o fcourse but it goes a long way when you're trying to make a little short film look it's best.

I'll keep looking as I said and i am leaning toward the Video Assist. I just wish i could find something that didn't make it feel like a gamble.

Thanks for your input. it gave me a lot to think about.

Then you're not looking at it properly. Pro Res and Raw both have no inherient look. And it's not about how they display-- it's about how much information they encode which you can play with later on. It's a major balancing act between efficiency and usefulness in a full production pipeline.

 

The Alexa shoots pro res-- and people say that's quite filmic

I didn't mean to imply they have an inherent look. I meant their capabilities and the final image able to be obtained from each. I'm not necessarily apposed to ProRes, i guess i'm just looking to be convinced. The processed RAW footage i've seen and played with has a LOT of room to be able to balance highlights and shadows and bring them both out. The examples of ProRes i've seen always feel like they're bumping into the limitations of it a lot faster, especially in natural light. That's what i mean by the "look".

I've already been burned with my camera which i admit was my fault for wanting to be an early adopter before i knew what was happening with magic lantern. I just want to make sure that if I drop $500 on another piece of gear to try to correct a mistake that i'm gonna be happy with it.

ProRes is probably a better bet for most projects, honestly. Just wait till you start dealing with a hundred TB or raw footage--- or more-- for a project.

I've never worked with ProRes before but the examples i've seen don't look to different from H.264. That might just be the fault of the examples i've seen but the raw my friend gets from magic lantern just looks so much better and closer to film. (I'm a film photographer and hate the digital look.). I've just never seen a ProRes clip that came anywhere close to it.

Oh, the mark 2? Right, yes. Pardon me, my mistake

 

Something from Atomos, then.

 

The Samurai series are very good. Spring for the SDI if you think there's any chance you might need it in future. They're great monitors, and there's good test and measurement.

 

There's also about to be an HDR option, to be released at NAB. Again, if this seems useful, get that, otherwise get one of the cheap Samurai that people will be offloading!

 

P

I was looking at the Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle 2 because it does RAW. The Atomos only does ProRes. Any thoughts?

Unfortunately, you're out of luck. The HDMI output on the 7D is notoriously covered in graphics that you can't turn off, and even if you could, the image isn't full resolution. Perhaps a bad purchasing decision there: the 7D is not a particularly good video camera.

The HDMI on the Mark II is a clean, uncompressed, full HD out.

I had been using a Canon t5i for years and was pretty disappointed in it. I had sworn off DSLRs for video until I saw RAW footage from my friends 7D after he installed magic lantern. When i saw the specs for the 7D Mark II my mind was a buzz with the possibilities that where now open to magic lantern and i bought one thinking the ML community would be working on it... How sadly mistaking I was... The ML forums are filled with Mark II owners pleading for a Magic lantern port and ML devs basically telling them to go screw themselves...

Now i'm stuck with a camera only slightly better than the one I had before with the only possible saving grace being the HDMI out. Supposedly it's a clean, uncompressed 8bit out but i haven't found much information on it or people recording from it. I don't like the idea of having to spend more money to bypass Canons terrible compression but it's better than nothing. But before I do I want to make sure i'm not wasting my time.

Is the HDMI streem good enough to justify the cost of an external recorder. If so what recorders do you recomend?

I've been looking at The Blackmagic HyperDeck Shuttle 2 which records RAW and the Atomos Ninja 2 which only records ProRes.

Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Thanks for the replies! I've really enjoyed the conversation on this topic. The question rose from curiosity more than anything ells. I just like the idea of squeezing the most out of any given film stock.

In most circumstances you guys are right. It makes more sense to simply move up to 35mm. However, there are two things here no one here seems to be taking into account. The price per foot would certainly go up, however, you can buy 16mm film in smaller roles than you can get 35mm. What if i'm making a five minuet short film and don't need 1,000 feet of film. If i'm shooting 35mm then as far as I know that's my only option. But if i'm shooting 16mm I can grab four or five 100 foot roles and be good to go. The cost per foot goes up but total money spent is still down.

16mm cameras also tend to be cheaper on the second hand market than 35mm. Since this camera apparently doesn't exist I can only speculate that it too would be cheaper but it wouldn't surprise me assuming it wasn't insanely rare. So, with the film being available in smaller quantities and assuming the cameras would be cheaper it would have been nice to have a negative similar in size to a smaller 35mm format for less.

It was mostly curiosity. A modification to a camera to do this would be interesting but it's not a simple matter of modifying the gate. You would have to rotate the entire film feed so i'd say it's highly unlikely but definitely a cool thought.

Hey guys. Brand new to the forum and i joined specifically because i'm trying to find an answer to this question.

Film usually runs vertically threw a camera but a few formats have it run horizontally to achieve a much larger negative. IMAX does this with 65mm and VistaVision does it with 35mm. Is there a 16mm equivalent?