Slightly OT: What Camera

I haven't used a normal cam for years -- only got the results.
Now I got involved into a new project where those guys ask for shooting, CC, cutting and re-framing.
Many of you do use pro cams and/or semi-pro cams and do have experience. Maybe some of you might be willing to help me with some tips.
We need a cam which should be cheap, robust and records to HD (1920 or 1280) at 50p or better 60p continuously for +/- 2 hours. It should have a pretty good and fast auto setting for iris and/or shutter, focus is not an issue.
The 'cheap thing' is because the cam might be crushed during one of the 2h shooting sessions.

All sessions will be time-matched in FCP and color matched probably in Color, we need a 'as fast as possible' transfer from camera to FCP -- which means a tapeless cam.
So what do you recommend as the best (maybe 'one way') cam.

There is another thing. Finally the project requires a 300-600 fps continuos movie for the +/- 2hours. Using a standard cam this can be done (after the CC and cut) using roto mask, roto paint and AE with Twixtor which is a PITA (not Twixtor or AE), but it works.
So another idea was to use a high speed cam like a Photron camera (http://www.photron.com/index.php?cmd=products) these cams seems to be nice -- but we have to build total secure housing for them and at this time they only record 6 seconds, which is obviously way below 2h. But they announced a streaming version for June.
So here the question does anybody have worked with a cam like that?

Any ideas, cam experience, workflow ideas are really appreciated.

Andreas

Cheap, reliable, HD, and gets into FCP fast with no long GOP issues, I'm thinking of the Panny HVX200.



www.strypesinpost.com

How about the JVC GY-HM100? shoots to .mov

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

Quote

Finally the project requires a 300-600 fps continuos movie for the +/- 2hours.

Hold on a sec. Was that a typo, or did you really say you want to record 600 frames per second for two hours? You know that would leave you with fifty hours of slowmo footage, right?

If any camera can record continuous slow motion at 600 frames per second, my guess is it'd be the Phantom. But that's not a camera I'd ever consider using in a situation where it could end up destroyed. The insurance alone would cost more than I make in a year.

> at 50p or better 60p

I didn't read that far, now i'm confused. 3K fps is not gonna be cheap.



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm not even sure whether it can be possible. Like I said, my best guess is that the Phantom may be able to do this, at sufficiently low resolution. Like maybe spray out raw sensor data over Gigabit in real time as it records, or something? My understanding is those guys normally record to on-board high-speed RAM, then the frames are written out to "slow" flash RAM for later downloading after the recording's finished. I can't imagine any of those cameras (they have like fifteen models now) can record 600 frames a second for two straight hours. That's ? like wow.

how about something like this Andreas ? ... [everio.jvc.com]

I couldn't find the price and can't remember it's price but this camera was used to shoot Slum Dog and records to a mac. macvideo.tv has more on it around the time just after IBC last year.

[www.pstechnik.de]

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.

Belated thanks to you all,

I should have been clearer on my original post, but wasn't sure what I can tell or not as this was under NDA.

So here bit more:
To understand the 600 fps goal is to understand the project. The result is an interactive movie for research & development of cars. The movie(s) is(are) kind of image data base where dependent on speed of the 'test' driver all frames are played at low speed or frames are dropped on high speed. Basic math is driving at 50 km/h with 60 fps recording will result in 1.2 frames per kilometer of speed. To achieve a minimum of 12 frames per kilometer (to make the movie somehow smooth playing in this environment) we need 10 times the recording fps.
Using Twixtor and lot of roto work I can make 600 fps out of 60 (I've done that before for short movies. The people from Revision FX where extremly helpful there).
They more frames are recorded, the less painful roto work will be. At the end final movies have to be split into layers, which will play independently to avoid visual slomo or timelapse effects.

About the 600 fps cam, the upcoming Photron high speed cam will have a streaming option similar to my Lady Bug cams. It will record at 1024x1024 only but scaling up to 1280 should be not a real problem (1280x720 is the min requirement).

For the 'proof of concept' state we are in right now Andy's suggestion for the JVC was very helpful. It's small, not too expensive and records full HD (though with an ugly codec). While searching the JVC site I found the GZ-HM550 with records to cards instead of hard disk. This one does have one nice BlueTooth feature to connect a GPS recorder -- this is cool as we need geodata in any case.
Does somebody of you have any experience with that cam? Here in Germany it's only available as 50p version (60p is much better for us because of the projection) and all the shops where you can buy don't have a '30 day money back' option.

Again thanks to you all-

Andreas

> and records full HD (though with an ugly codec).

Not sure about the bluetooth feature, but AVCHD would mean you'll need to transcode before you can cut/edit. Many consumer (read: inexpensive) HD cams shoot to AvcHD. I'm not sure how many inexpensive and small cameras shoot to DvcproHD, but I'm guessing a tapeless HDV camera would be better, as it has significantly shorter transcoding time than AvcHD.



www.strypesinpost.com

Hi Gerard,

I made a typo in my post above (which I corrected). I meant the GZ-HM550, which records to SD cards. It still records up to about 5 hours.

Transcode is a real pain -- I know. My first generation Lady Bug needed a week to get 20 mins from Bayer to 10 bit TGA (6 streams) - though there were faster options for a rough preview.

But in this case it's not a really time critical project (compared to a daily soap, TV show or feature). The cam does have an simple video out, which I can connect to one of my nNovias to have a dub in DV25 quality for instant review.

The most intriguing thing is the BlueTooth GPS feature (which we need anyway with any kind of recording) and the BlueTooth remote control features and also the option to record with frame rates up to 600 fps. I haven't found any real review of that cam, nor have I found out for how long you can record at that frame rate, but the latter seems like a good option to test the 600 fps we desire within this first low budget test (the cam's price is 600 USD compared to the one day rental for a Photron which is 2000 USD -- beside the costs for insurance and bullet proof enclosure for the Photron).

So if anybody does have some experience with this cam (probably not) or do have a link for a better review, please let me know.

Regards
Andreas

There's this guy on Youtube that shot on 600 fps. Would be nice if he went out to shoot in bright sunlight, but he did have a shot of a lighter near the end.

[www.youtube.com]

I gotta say, this 600 fps thing on a consumer cam is wayyy coooool! And holy crap! thats a 4% slow mo on a consumer cam!

Here's what he said regarding the duration:

4 seconds for 120 and 300 fps, 2 seconds for 600 fps. It's surprisingly difficult to capture something interesting in that amount of time. After you shoot the clip you either have to wait for the clip to save (5-10+ seconds), or delete it (2-3 seconds). It also takes a few seconds to switch to the mode. So it's only really useful for 100% planned events.


Then again, they're very likely on CMOs chips, and I'm really not sure how much skew you'll get at 600 fps.


>My first generation Lady Bug needed a week to get 20 mins from Bayer to 10 bit TGA (6 s
>streams) - though there were faster options for a rough preview.

It shot RAW? That's pretty cool!



www.strypesinpost.com

Gerard,

Thanks for that link!

I looked at some of the other examples and some of them look amazingly good for a 600 USD consumer cam. The 'low light' movie -- even if it's too dark -- doesn't have any extreme noise. As we need to mount the cam on a driving car this was a good example for us. As you mentioned the CMOS might be be a problem with smearing, but this one looked great (beside the lens flares).

The high speed recording also looks fantastic for a consumer cam even it only allows a few seconds and won't be HD. It will allow us to do some testing for high speed on this project.

Colors do look over-saturated, but in our project it doesn't matter -- at this state.

Thanks again to all of you for taking care of me.

Andreas