THE SICA BLOG: September 2016

GO PRO Hero 5 / Karma Drone

07:51:00

Like steady cam ‘GO PRO’ cameras is a major invention. It has really changed the outlook of sports and action imaging. It is now considered as America's fastest growing Camera Company.

The Inventor of the Go Pro, Nick Woodman had the idea of using a wearable camera to capture action footage

Go Pro though was under development in the late 90's, but the first Go Pro came out in the year 2002.

Go Pro can be attached to animals (It allows for people to observe nature without disrupting it) or any type of vehicles; camera is too small that it can be placed to film hidden angles.

Go Pro has come a long way kept on improving with customers depend. Earlier it started with VGA recording without audio, then it introduced HD videos to 4k video capture, in-built audio recording and high speed filming. Also had their own customized rigs to place cameras on to any kind of moving platform without professionals in an easy and quick way.

Go Pro has lined up its cameras under ‘HERO’ series.

The latest addition is Hero 5 Black, Hero 5 Session and Hero Session.

These entire new edition cameras just fit into a size of palm and records 4K video, water proof without its casing.

Hero 5 black

Interesting additions:

2 Inch touch screen
Raw mode for stills
Manual control options for white balance and ISO settings
Automatic cloud upload of videos and photos
Image stabilization
Better audio control and stereo recording
Voice controls for starting and stopping recordings
12 MP still images

It has fixed lens and focus, angle of view can be adjusted like earlier Go pro cameras, black edition offers 4K video at SuperView and Wide 24 frames per second.

Medium and Linear view shoot in 2.7K, while Narrow view records at 1080p resolution.

Priced around $ 399

Hero 5 Session

Have nearly all features of Hero 5 black. The important specifications not included are touch display, raw photo mode and still images of 10 mega pixel.

Price around $ 299

Hero session

Most economical model of this series is priced just around $ 200. It is a very good model for amateur filming.It has 4k video recording, water proof and still images with 8 mega pixel quality.

What lacks is voice control, image stabilization and auto upload to cloud,.

Karma Drone

Go PRO, another new product in the line up is its new drone named ‘Karma’ but the package promises more than a drone.

It has a casing that holds the drone, controller and a surprising addition in the pack is ‘stabilizing karma mount grip’- a gimbal.

So consumers not only benefit for aerial filming, the gimbal in the pack will be more useful for follow shots and glide aways!

The design is very compact and camera hangs off in the front of drone and keeps the propellers out of the shot.

GoPro drone has a video game style controller with simple two joysticks and a take-off/land button. The controller has a built-in touch screen. So there is no need for phone or a tablet just to adjust settings.

Karma is well designed and also user friendly. Easy navigation and set up for anyone who can assemble toy set can operate. The built allows the drone to fly within seconds.

According to company specification, drone provides smooth glide hovering as high as 3280ft (1,000m) at a maximum speed of 35mph (15m/s).

The video is stabilized by its 3 axis gimbal attached to the drone.

Karma drone is priced at $ 1099 along with Hero black edition camera.

For only drone it costs around $799.

You tube link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1C6QRodsc8

CJ Rajkumar

Author/Cinematographer

Technology

Shutter

03:19:00

The term shutter comes from still photography where it describes a mechanical ‘door’ between camera lens and the film.

When a photo is taken, the door opens for an instant the film is exposed to the incoming light. The speed at which the shutter opens and closes can be varied - the faster the speed, the shorter the period of time the shutter is open and less light falls on the film.

Shutter speed is measured in fractions of a second. A speed of 1/60 second means that the shutter is open for one sixtieth of a second. A speed of 1/500 is faster, and 1/10000 is very fast indeed.

Video camera shutters work quite differently from still film camera shutters but the result is basically the same. Technical difference is that, rather than using a mechanical device, the shutter speed is adjusted electronically varying the amount of time the CCD is allowed to build a charge.

The shutter opens and closes once for each frame of video; that is, 25 times per second for PAL and 30 times per second for NTSC. Thus, if a camera has its shutter set to 1/60, each frame will be exposed for 1/60 second.

If the speed is increased to 1/120, each frame will be exposed for 1/120 of a second. The shutter speed does not affect the frame rate, which is completely separate and in most cases always stays the same.

The main effect of higher shutter speed is that individual frames appear sharper due to the minimisation of motion blur. Motion blur occurs when the subject moves within the frame while the shutter is open. The less time the shutter is open (i.e. the faster the shutter speed), less movement will take place.

A side-effect of higher shutter speeds is that, the movement appears jerkier. This is because motion blur tends to smooth consecutive frames together.

Instead of shutter speed in seconds, rotating disc shutters use shutter angles.

The larger the shutter angle, the more the light passes through. The relationship is designed to be similar to shutter speeds – half or doubling the angle will half or double the light.

Most film movie cameras have shutter angles from 0^o to 180^o. The most common shutter angle used is 180^o, which gives us the ‘film look’. This corresponds to exactly half the duration that each frame will take in one second.

Example: If a movie is shot at 24 frames per second, each frame takes about 0.0417 seconds. A 180^oshutter will let light pass through for half this time period, which equates to 0.0208 seconds, which is roughly 1/48 seconds.

When cameras don’t allow you to choose 1/48 seconds exactly, can approximate the same effect with a shutter speed of 1/50 seconds for 24 fps.

Usually, CMOS sensors use rolling shutter systems while CCDs use global shutters. However, this is not universally common. There are CMOS sensors with global shutters and CCD sensors with rolling shutters.

CMOS sensor technology used by most of the digital cameras as a CCD alternative because of its ability to image with less power for high frame rates even when using large, high-resolution sensors. CMOS sensors require less specialized manufacturing and because of this, it often cost a fraction of the price of CCD sensors of the same size.

Because of the lower cost and ease of use, CMOS sensors have taken over the consumer imaging market. Since 2009, the market share for CCDs has been declining steadily as CMOS sensors have been standard sensor not only for cameras but also in almost all of our personal devices, from cell phones to computers.

CMOS stands for Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, which actually refers to the process for making CMOS sensors.

Active Pixel Sensors read all of their pixels linearly from top left to bottom right while the shutter is open. The pixels don’t store any charge, they simply read how much light is hitting that pixel at the exact moment and convert that into an electrical signal.

A rolling shutter (as opposed to a global shutter) is always active and “rolling” through pixels from top to bottom. This can result in the now-familiar motion artefacts often referred to as moire effect.

CCD stands for Charge Coupled Device.

The pixels in a CCD store their charge until it has been depleted. A camera that has a CCD sensor almost always also has a shutter system, which can be electronic or mechanical. While this shutter system is “closed” (or off) the pixels can still be read because they store their charges. While the shutter is open, the sensor is collecting light and after the shutter closes, the AFE (Analog Front End) reads the pixel charges one by one and dumps any excess charge and gets the pixels ready for the next frame.

In other words, the CCD captures the entire image at the same time and then reads the information after the capture is completed rather than reading top to bottom during the exposure.

In today’s modern Digital cameras, there are two types of electronic shutters:

Global Shutter
Rolling Shutter

Global Shutter

Film cameras have rotating discs and each frame is exposed whole. Such a frame is called a progressive frame.

Global shutter captures a frame completely like a motion picture shutter disc operate, so all the pixels are read at the same point of time, so we have a whole frame.

Black magic 4k cinema camera, Sony F-55, feature global shutter.

Rolling Shutter

A rolling shutter is an electronic system that scans lines (rows) of pixels, similar to television scanning. Rolling shutter sometimes creates an artefact while recording moving images, or camera panning. This is because of the amount of time taken to read pixels from an imaging sensor which is still exposed to light.

If the subject changes during this readout, the remaining rows of pixels in the image will be exposed to the changing light.

As a result, objects moving horizontally may appear to be jerked somewhat diagonally by an amount proportional to the relationship between the speed of motion and the readout timing of the sensor. Some cameras, such as the Arri Alexa, use rolling shutter but have extremely brief readout time, minimising (though not entirely removing) the problem.

Red cameras offer motion mount shutter to solve the artefacts created pixel read out.

Rolling shutter artefacts - very common in CMOS-sensor cameras, most notably the HD video-capable DSLR still cameras.

CJ Rajkumar

Author/Cinematographer

New Equipments

Panasonic GH5

08:59:00

Lens

Leica M 0.8 LENSES

21:49:00

New Equipments

ZIP MATTE BOX @ weight of a filter

23:45:00

Matte box is an important camera accessory for cinematographers. A matte box serves two purposes.

To cut down unwanted lens flares and
To allow change filters (Filter holder) in front of the lens.

Sometimes cinematographers have to sacrifice use of ‘Matte box’ especially during hand held operations, fixing cameras to drone or rigging to vehicles due to its extra weight.

During some critical filming stages when there is a need to use filter on the lens without hefty matte box, technicians use to fit in filters using Gaffar tape or Blue tag in front of the lens, which is unsafe and allows more flare.

So there is always a need for Lighter version of Matte box.

Wooden camera, a famous manufacturer for different camera accessories has recently introduced the Zip Box which is designed to be a very durable yet lightweight and affordable matte box.

This Zip box is a lightweight rubber matte box that is designed to clamp onto lenses of varying outside diameters.

They have versions for two different size filters 4×4 and 4×5.65 and have different clamp on versions for lenses of varying diameters including 80-85mm, 90-95mm, and 110-115mm.

Zip Box 4×4:

80-85mm lens diameter
90 – 95mm lens diameter

Zip Box 4×4.65:
80 – 85mm lens diameter
90 – 95mm lens diameter
110 – 115mm lens diameter

Zip Box 4×5.65 holds one 4×5.65″ Panavision size filter (100x144mm) and clamps to the front of lenses within three exterior diameter ranges:
Zip Box 4×5.65 (80-85mm) is great for the wide angle DSLR lenses, ARRI Standard and Super Speeds and other small cinema lenses
Zip Box 4×5.65 (90 to 95mm) for ARRI Ultra Primes and Leica Summilux-C
Zip Box 4×5.65 (110-115mm) for Zeiss CP.2s, Angenieux Optimo Zooms, ARRI Master
Primes, Focus Optics Ruby, Cooke Panchro/i 18mm, RED Pro Primes and many more.

The lens shade design allows for even the wide lenses and sensor sizes to be covered with vignetting. Stainless steel components and unibody rubber design are durable.

Zip Box Adapter Rings are also available to suit almost every small DSLR lens and can be adopted like the Sony E and MFT mount lenses

High light of the Zip Box is, it weighs about the same as the filter itself which makes it perfect for gimbal and drone use.

Zip Box is very much reasonably priced around Rs.7000/- and adapter rings at approx Rs.1800/-

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_9Za5Zv9YA

CJ Rajkumar

Author/Cinematographer

New Equipments

Canon XC15-4K Camcorder

02:21:00

Lens

Sigma Global vision Cine Lens

01:29:00

Once upon a time photographers used to buy Sigma lenses as they were cheap. That perception has changed with the recent series of Sigma lenses, especially their art series lenses were applauded by professionals and independent film makers started using for video filming.

Sigma with Global vision series has announced Cinema lenses in three categories FF Zoom Line, High Speed zoom line and FF High speed Prime line. All these lenses are weather proof and feature luminous paint marking for operation in the dark.

Each CINE lens has 180 degrees of focus rotation, manual linear iris control and electronic mounts for metadata.

Sigma Global vision cine lenses set to launch around January 2017 which will have total eight lenses from three categories. E, EF lens mount will be available towards the end of 2016 and PL mount lenses will be available from early 2017.

FF Zoom line 24 – 35mm

This zoom lens is compatible with image sensors larger than Super 35 and covers Full frame sensor and designed to suit optical performance required for high-resolution shooting in 6K-8K

Technical Specification:

Aperture – T 2.2 to 22
Weight- 1.5 kg
Close distance focus- 11 inch
Filter size – 82 mm

High Speed Zoom line 18-35mm / 50-100mm

This lens is compatible to Super 35mm or APS- C sensor offers constant T 2.0 aperture throughout the range. Filter thread size is 82mm for both Zooms.

Technical Specification:

18- 35mm lens

Aperture – T 2.0
Weight – 1.4 kg
Close distance focus – 0.9 feet

50- 100mm lens

Aperture – T 2.0
Weight – 1.9kg
Close distance focus – 3.2 feet

FF High speed Prime Lens

These five prime lenses are compact; offer full-frame compatibility ranging from 20mm, 24mm, 35mm and 50mm to 85mm, the entire line-up is with aperture T1.5 to T 16

Close focus distance