Pimping the Camera Pt 1.

Why we all hate DSLR's. They're great for taking pictures but not purpose built for movie making so we have to add all sorts of expensive accessories to create "Frankencamera". After the whole process, sometimes you end up with something that looks a cross between a porcupine and the Tin Man. Often just as functional.


Our cameras had to to pimped to handle five days a week, ten hours a day for six months. No small order.  So I researched the plethora of DSLR cages, baseplates and custom rigs and more often than not, found them lacking one way or the other for pro use. Just about every cage out there, makes the whole enterprise so much  bigger than the camera body itself that it negates much of the fun of having a small camera. Zacuto's cage despite being expensive as all get out, lacks the numerous mounting points you need for accessories. Also, what I really hate about their accessories are the lack of ratcheting knobs. While this may seem minor at first glance, when you begin to mount follow foci, lens braces, monitors, etc, you need every millimeter of room you can get. Non ratcheting knobs constantly butt up against other toys and end up making your fingertips raw in order to crank down on them, especially in cold weather. Next up was Viewfactor, Letus and Cinevate Cages. Again all of them lacked certain vital features. First, they were all considerably bigger than our puny GH2 camera body. Viewfactor, though well designed, I wasn't about to toss money towards a company at that failed to deliver on their follow focus while holding people's money - for over three years! 


Cinevate, although they had QC issues in the past, they now use rock solid RAM mount parts for their cages. Still I wanted more 1/4" and 3/8" mounting points - like what you get from a cheese plate. Now the new Letus cages are much closer to what I had in mind. Milled from a solid block of aluminum, numerous points,  and a decent (non Arri) price point. Unfortunately, they were more purpose build for Canon bodies and not Lumix. 


Enter REWO. Who? They're a German company that makes their bread and butter with those uber high tech Porsche Cayenne Car / Crane rigs. That's big money high end support gear. But as filmmakers, the owners have an obsession with small cameras and channel that passion into making cages custom built per camera design. They're the only ones that make a cage purpose built for the GH2. It's a work of art. Small, simple and versatile. At about 600 bucks, the price is right. Also, I have a weakness for all camera things German. Unlike this country where quality takes a back seat to shareholder concerns, German products by and large, as they cannot compete with the world on cheap labor just go all out and try to crush the competition in quality and design, labor be damned. The only US exception to this Teutonic approach is perhaps O'Connor who remain unrivaled in the tripod world. 

So we ordered two REWO cages at 600 a pop. Now I'm thinking that's cheap for German film gear. Could they've gone the China route? So we waited about a month and literally three days before production, they arrive. Work of art. As you can see from the pic, the cage is barely bigger than the body. The distance of rods to lens axis matches with all standard matteboxes. 1/4" and 3/8" points all around. And ratcheting knobs! They also machined access points to get to your buttons, knobs, batteries and cards. 


Downside? Yes. When we mounted it on the baseplate of our Miller 25 heads, the platform of the baseplate made access to our Oct 19 lens mount support impossible to get too. So to slide away from the plateform, we added a Manfrotto quick release dovetail baseplate to the bottom. No problem. Complete access. However, Rewo's 1/4" and 3/8" baseplate threads are too close together allowing us only to use one thread / one screw to attach to the Manfrotto plate. So we have to crank down on the screw with all our might and pray not to get slippage. We do anyway so have to be careful to lift the camera by the tripod head not the cage. Mild pain in the ass. The solution will be for me to have a machinist drill an extra 1/4" thread far enough away from the 3/8" so we can use two screws. Will do this in the coming weeks. 


Otherwise, for the Lumix, this cage destroys the competition. Smaller, lighter, more versatile and built like a Panzer. Heil Rewo!


Next installment: Hand held rigs, follow focus, etc.

GH2 Ready for Prime Time? Finding the Right Hack

So we decided to go all in and see if we can make a GH2 work for a Network series. We did a series of tests with the camera hacked from 20mbs to 176mb/s hack by "Driftwood". This is almost eight times the data rate of a Canon 5D, five times that of an EX3, almost double Panasonics AVC Intra and so on. But not all is in the numbers. Can the camera handle this much data? The chip is more than capable of delivering that level of data but can the camera's DSP process, chew and digest the footage. Well, yes and no. Yes, if your takes are below four minutes. No, if you overload the codec with codec breaking shots. For example, we did several high speed shots weaving in and out of traffic from a skateboard. Every now and then when I got too close to parked cars, the amount of information from the moving cars, sidewalk, trees, and leaves, would make the camera say "no mas!".


Other caveats are cold weather. Our fist week of production was all exterior in 20-30 degree weather. The camera went bananas. Shutting down after a minute, two minutes, or whenever it felt like it. Menu items seemed to randomly disable themselves. Now I'm thinking surely, the developers and testers of the hack must have run into this. But then again, the hacks were developed over the Summertime and perhaps no one had a chance to stress test it under extreme conditions. We we're in a codec crisis. Shooting with children who often give their original interpretations with the lines with every take, we'd routinely run one to two cameras and keep them running until they got the scene right. When a camera would shut down after a minute, this was completely unacceptable. Being the head of the camera department, we were deep shit.


So back to the drawing board, we found a less intensive hack that only boosted the bit rate to 88 mb/s. And to our relief, no one in post could tell the difference. It seems after the 90 mb/s the margin of returns is negligible. But the stress on the processing is way less and our cameras returned to their predictable little selves. They performed in the cold and did takes as long as we'd like without a hitch. There was much rejoicing.  


Here's the link to the hack starter packs: 


https://www.dropbox.com/s/6wz0e4dlrl6xow1

You'll need this

http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/

And this (GH2 original firmware)

http://www.mediafire.com/?cwok7orwdegp2pg

This is new version PTool 3.6.3

http://www.gh1-hack.info/ptool3d.zip

I can't stress how much that I am not a computer guy. I can edit on FCP, set up email, start a blog, and do photo shop (on a good day). With that in mind, should you cheat the gods and attempt to hack your GH2, if you're not much a computer guy, find your local hackster and when he can figure it out, film him doing it. Having them explain it to you will do you no good unless you're fluent in Geek Speak. 

Once we had the hack working, I filmed someone on my I phone doing it, telling him not to explain anything, you're just complicating matters, just do it as simply as possible. One more peep from you I'll staple your lips shut.

Anyway, I digress. But this was by far the most challenging and frustrating part of incorporating these cameras into a production MO. For some, it's a walk in the park. I had many a contentious word with a superior who felt it was my responsibility as the DP to know how to do this. All I could say is, "would you let a computer programmer light your night exterior or lens up a beauty close up on a starlet?". He basically harrumphed and told me to figure it out. 

So there you have it. To hack or not to hack? 

the toy becomes a beast...

Next post: So we figured out the hack, how the hell to we make this toy camera into a production ready work horse?

Team Toons Prep - The GH2 Hack

Recently, I landed a TV Show titled Team Toons for the Cartoon Network. As our budget is tight and the show requires some of the most quick but difficult camera rigs (inside school lockers, stuck to ceilings, mounted on bikes, etc), we opted to shoot on the Panasonic GH2 Lumix cameras. You're thinking why would a network shoot on a 900 dollar still camera?

Enter the GH2 Hack by Russian hacker Vitaly Kiselev. This hack boosts the camera's 20 mbs bit rate to over 200 mbs. In a word it's insane! 20 mbs with the Lumix chip was already producing sharper and better images than the competitors, the Canon 7d and 5d. But at 10 times that, we're in the territory of high end digital imaging systems costing several times as much (starting at 20 grand). 

Though nothing in life is free (except the hack itself). Figuring out how to install it in a world bereft of manuals and gleaning info from a blogosphere seemingly only inhabited by computer geeks makes figuring this out to the layman like me a somewhat epic task. Like an infant's first steps. After much swearing to the heavens, staring blankly at computers screens, emailing every geek I know, I still could not figure out how to install it. 

Enter Steve Sherrick, a DIT from Boston I've know for a few years and my director, Will Wedig, both computer savvy but still able to communicate in plain English, the hack was successfully installed. The results of the first tests (see sample photo - video links to come) I did were nothing short of breathtaking. Here was a camera the size of a couple of cigarette packs, taking images ready for prime time drama. 

Too good to be true? Perhaps. Stay tuned.