Julien Bechara from Playtime Films was one of the first to rent an dII from me a couple of months back. One of the DoP’s he’s working with, Gilles Labarbe, was following the blog for some time and was excited about testing an Ikonoskop. So they planned on using it for a music video.
It’s only after I saw some first test footage that I realized it was for one of my favourite Belgian bands: V.O.
Great video for a superb band by a very talented team!
They transcoded the CinemaDNG to ProRes via After Effects.
You may have noticed some calibration issues. I can still hit my self over the head with an A-cam for that.
What happened?
As I never used or use the camera at any other gain than 0dB, I never had (re)calibrated it at +6 or +12. And further more I forgot to talk to them about calibration, so they were not aware of what to do as they shot a couple of scenes at +6dB.
So I’m writing this here as a reminder for myself and any of you that plan to rent a camera from me: make sure to ask me about calibration, how to use it (read the User Guide I provide), but more important, when to use it.
Great news from John Christoforou. In Resolve there’s now a solution for the pink highlights. Just watch this tutorial:
Now if you’re not familiar with Resolve, at first you’d still might be a bit dissapointed with the result after clicking that CinemaDNG codec setting. Because you’ve lost the pink but highlights still seem completely blown out (which doesn’t seem to occur in AE or CineForm). This is easily overcome by adjusting the luminance curve.
After a couple of hours of trying out the software, I must say, I’m totally amazed by the splendid results.
As the Ikonoskop Memory Cards are limited to a maximum of about 30 minutes (160 GB) of recording time (25 fps), there are several reasons why someone would like to use an external recorder with the Ikonoskop A-cam dII.
- You need longer continuous recording time to cover an event or performance and you insist on using the dII for this;
- You don’t really care for Ikonoskop’s proprietary Memory Cards and want to consider other options;
- You want to simultaneously record proxies.
Following is a test that was carried out by Konstantin Smola with his Ikonoskop hooked up to a Sound Devices PIX 240, recording 10 bit ProRes 422. I’ve converted it to a H264 file to put on Vimeo.
I won’t repeat what Konstantin calls the result, but take it from me … it’s something with a bad smell. So much contrast and no way of tweaking the incoming signal.
It seems great though for simultaneously recording proxies and 24 bit audio, and then working online/offline via some software that can read the CinemaDNG timecode (errrr … DaVinci?).
But wouldn’t it be great if Ikonoskop made some kind of external recorder that has an adapter that slides into the card slot at one end and takes a removable 2.5” SSD in the other end?
Something I Love is a series about boundless enthusiasm.
Each episode is a portrayal of someone’s passion.
Episode 2 - Jeroen Peters
Filmed & edited by Joachim Vansteelant
Music by brunk (Bert Vanden Berghe)
Song “La Muñeca de Trapo” by Paul Avgerinos
Filmed in Zeebrugge, Belgium on April 7th, 2012
Camera: Ikonoskop A-cam dII / GoPro HD Hero2
Lens: Arriflex Zeiss Distagon 12 mm
End of March Ikonoskop released new firmware and some updates to the hardware. And dII users have been awfully quiet about it. Well, it’s time to speak up.
I’m going to highlight some major improvements, the ones that I find particularly interesting. I’m only speaking out of my own experience:
- New calibration algorithm:
The Kodak sensor is divided into 4 quadrants and calibration is needed to give these 4 quadrants the same “black level”. There has been some discussion about this over at the Ikonoskop Forums.
In my opinion the old calibration algorithm already worked pretty fine, but it was not ideal as you did have to recalibrate sometimes (gain, type of lenses, etc.).
The new calibration algorithm is more accurate and using it has become much more user friendly. The function guides you through the process now, makes you choose the right level of exposure (while calibrating, not while shooting :-).
Let’s say I used to know how to create calibration problems and now I can’t anymore.
- Ghosting effect / Mirrored artefact:
If you’ve been studying everything there is to know about this camera, but you’ve never used one, you’ve probably read about some mysterious ghosting effect, also called mirrored artefact and it scared the hell out of you!
This was something that was easy to avoid though, as it happened when having a very bright light in the upper right quadrant and low exposure in upper left. These situations could lead to the ghosting effect (especially with raised gain). I have been able to recreate this one, but never experienced it by accident.
Well, with the new firmware and sensor board, I can’t even recreate it anymore. So hurray for that! - Color Matrix:
There have been some updates to the DNG metadata that are helpful to the software you use to develop them. Three new header tags for example (50722 ColorMatrix2, 50728 As Shot Neutral and 50779 CalibrationIluminant2).
The in camera Daylight/Tungsten setting now makes sense.
This is a setting that doesn’t affect the DNG’s nor the HD-SDI out. It only has an impact on the Color Matrices in the metadata. But if you now open DNG’s (that have been captured with the new firmware of course) in the Adobe software, the software actually knows better how to read the DNG’s and it doesn’t look so scary colorwise. You can now use the ‘As shot’ setting and this will be affected by the “in camera” DL/TS setting you’ve used.
I haven’t tested this yet in other software than Adobe’s.
Oh … and on Mac we now have previews of the DNG frames. This is so elementary, should get implemented for Windows users as well of course.
- Menu in OLED:
There’s now also a menu read-out in the OLED monitor on the right side of the camera. Very nice improvement.
Next firmware, please add possibility to have the menu in the HD-SDI out please!!!
- Improved “Battery Low” and “Memory left” warning:
Well I’m already conditioned in changing the battery after about 50 minutes, so haven’t noticed the improvement yet.
I’m particularly happy with the improvement “Memory left” warning (indication of how many recording time is left on the Memory Card), which now becomes red when diving under a minute. Why I’m happy? Because I suggested it a couple of months ago :-)
- Added “confirmation” on all maintenance functions:
My DP will be happy. He found it very dangerous that when you used to select Erase Card, it erased your card without asking for confirmation. Now it does ask confirmation, for the people who click on something that says erase when they don’t want to erase ;-)
- Oh, and they added a 23.98 fps preset.
- And oh oh, my Ikan VX7e now also works flawlessly in 25fps mode (improved HD-SDI connection?).
This is really great work and a great result.
I’m quite amazed that this didn’t stop at the drawing board but is actually going to get produced: an A-cam dII with black & white sensor. What else do they have up their sleeves?
How about an open cross platform CinemaDNG processing tool for developing, grading, transcoding, … your CinemaDNG sequences. Impossible? Will never happen?
Maybe, but still the community behind APERTUS are planning the development of such a tool. And they can use all the help they can get, so let them know you support this idea.
A while back I wrote to info@digitalbolex.com to ask them about their plans for their CinemaDNG workflow.
Elle Schneider answered me last week and wrote:
Our current plan is to work with Pomfort, the makers of Silverstack (pomfort.com) to create a custom workflow manager to handle DNG files that could probably be used with the A-cam or any other DNG system.
Pomfort’s answer:
I can’t tell you any details right now, but we are indeed discussing several options for the release of the Digital Bolex.
So stay tuned!
OK, I’m staying tuned …
This is a still from what’ll become episode 2 or maybe episode 3 of Something I Love. Still a lot of shooting to do first.
But anyway, this has nothing to do with the title.
While going through my CinemaDNG archive I noticed something peculiar about every single sequence I had imported in After Effects.
Normally all frames of a CinemaDNG sequence out of the dII have exactly the same size (3.4 MB in OSX and 3.2 MB in Windows - Apple always sees things bigger I guess).
But the first frame of each sequence I had imported in After Effects showed a complete different file size, much smaller. And it’s destructive. It can’t be undone. So what happens? Is Camera Raw doing this or maybe rather the CinemaDNG Importer (I have the latest version installed)? Either way some pretty destructive behaviour.
Update: It must be Camera Raw as Photoshop is showing the same behaviour. Tested on a Mac (Lion) with AE CS5.5.
Maybe this doesn’t mean anything. It’s not that you can’t change your settings in After Effects afterwards or anything (and it’s only the first frame). But it’s just weird.
I’ve submitted a bug report to After Effects. I contemplated writing something on the CinemaDNG forum at Adobe, but it looks as quiet as a library over there. Only difference … there’s nothing to read.
The fastest way to transcode CinemaDNG sequences to an intermediate is via CineForm’s DPX2CF command line tool.
But what if you don’t want to render your final print from the CineForm raw files? What if you don’t trust anything that has some form of compression?
So what if you want to use CineForm raw only as a proxy and render your final cut from the original CinemaDNG’s using the Adobe Dynamic Link workflow (AE/Pr)?
I’ve been looking at this in After Effects from all kinds of angels, but can’t seem to find a standard way of linking a folder of proxies (not created in AE) in batch to a bunch of original footage in the AE project. So I fabricated the following:
- Transcode your CinemaDNG sequences to CineForm raw AVI/MOV files, make sure to give them a name, followed by a sequential number. In my example: sequence folder AC005001 becomes playtimefilms_test_1.mov.
- Open multiple CinemaDNG sequences in After Effects. I recommend the Immigration script for this.
Just click Import and then hit return every time a sequence gets imported (Camera raw … sigh).
- Now you get a nicely organized directory structure of your footage. Select the sequences and drag them down to create compositions.
- Select the compositions (named Comp, Comp 2, Comp 3, …) and open up the Selected_Comps_Changer script. In the script {Search for} “Comp ” {… and replace with: “name of your proxyfiles_”. Make sure to type a space behind Comp. The script will change all the comp names to the names of your proxies, except for the first one (named Comp). Change this one manually.
- Now select all the comps and use the hacked Create_Proxies script (you know the script I first recommended and then told you to forget about … errrr … it’s back). But first hack it a bit further. I also deleted the part (line 428, 429) where the script actually creates proxies. I don’t want it to create proxies, I just want it to link the CF files to the compositions as proxies.
In the script dialogue screen select the folder where your CF proxies are stored as Destination and select an output module you’ve configured to render MOV’s or AVI’s (depending on to what wrapper you’ve transcoded your CF files).
- The script will then create a render queue (still further hackable) and seems to do nothing further. But click on a comp or sequence and you’ll see they have now all a linked proxy.
It’s really a fast way of linking in batch a bunch of proxies, that weren’t created in After Effects, to your source footage. But does this make sense? I just can’t believe there’s not more of a standard way built into After Effects to do this kind of stuff. Is there?
Please enlighten me …
