Video Review: SACHTLER Ace – new ultra affordable fluid tripod from cinema5D on Vimeo.
Sebastian fron Cinema 5D sent me a link to their new community driven review database and within the database is this review of the ACE tripod from Sachtler, I was asked if I was going to review my ACE but why re-invent the wheel when someone has already done one.
Link to database http://www.cinema5d.com/news/?p=9045
I have decided this year to give three products I personally bought a special mention for their usefulness and good design qualities.
Firstly I will start off with the Manfrotto 24 LED light that I picked up for £69 in my local Jessop store, it takes two AAA batteries and has a dimmer. There is nothing fancy about this light other than its extreme portability and usefulness on corporate shoots.
This wee light is carried about in your pocket and can be a God send if you need a small bit of fill light as happened to me on a shoot only last week. On two occasions I had a need to light peoples faces and this wee chap was just the trick.
Its well made for its size 70mm x 55mm and comes with a removable cold shoe.
My second useful product was the Zacuto Z-Finder EVF Pro, this has been invaluable in many ways over the last 4 months. Picture quality is nothing short of fantastic and with firmware updates you can now see your sound levels coming out of your camera.
I used it recently when I shot a two camera demonstration of manual handling and I took a 5 meter HDMI output from my second Sony NX70 and sat the viewfinder next to my NX70 so I could monitor my sons output as he is in training.
The other thing its great for is monitoring high shots especially using the Sony FS100 as the LCD design is shockingly bad for use in high shots.
It was not cheap at $1000 but is the best of its kind to date and built like a tank.
Recently I purchased another tripod an ACE from Sachtler, I saw this at IBC 2011 and was very impressed with its overall build quality Sachtler have finally learned that not everyone can afford their £2-3K tripods and to be frank those tripods are not fit to use with a Sony NX70.
As you can guess the NX70 needed a tripod and at just over £500 the ACE with mid spreader fitted the bill. Sachtler have made a fine job with their first budget tripod and amazingly its very usable with its basic drag and tilt system.
So there you have it three tools that I have been impressed with during 2011 more often than not for their simplicity in use and size, the LED light just ticks all my boxes for filler shots, the Zacuto EVF Pro not only looks good but outperforms itself with such an accurate LCD screen and the Sachtler ACE is the right tripod for smaller camcorders like the Sony NX70 and at just over £500 performs better than a lot of tripods twice its price.
This will be well attended so get your skates on and register here…
http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/index.php?t=events/19/
Sunday being a slack day saw me watching the 2011 Tour de France stage 15 which finished at Montpellier, France. I was able to keep abreast of the race on my iPad.
Todays Tour de France is full of technology keeping arm chair fans like myself updated at every turn of the 194Km. During the race I noticed one of the commentators mention Chasing Legends a fantastic DVD directed by Jason Berry.
Photo © Joe Foley
Jason “There is no greater sporting event in all of cycling than the Tour de France. Chasing Legends touches on the rich history, passion and true grit of The Tour as seen through the eyes of Team HTC Columbia along with commentary from Phil Liggett, Paul Sherwen, Eddy Merckx, Lance Armstrong and some of the sports most prolific heros. With a stunning array of HD cameras, poignant and touching interviews, “Chasing Legends” will take viewers deeper into the pro peloton than ever on a roller coaster ride of action, story and emotion.”
Photo © Joe Foley
This is Jason using his Sony EX-1, just one of the cameras used in the making of this legendary documentary about the heros of cycling.
For some of us one of Sony’s glory periods was the introduction of Hi8mm, a break from SVHS, now we had a high band recording format that came with a far smaller tape.
I got a phone call today from a chap who simply wants to convert all his 8mm and Hi8mm tapes to DVD but no longer has a player or camcorder in which to do so. I told him to phone round a few of the video boys who might just have a Hi8mm tape deck collecting dust.
It brought out my own demons with Hi8mm, sadly I have some tapes up in my attic with some lovely original footage of my children now imprisoned to a format that went out of fashion when mini DV came along.
None of us thought for one minute that it might be better to keep one of these Hi8mm tape decks or camcorders in case the future wanted to view the past. This chap was in the same boat as myself looking through EBAY for a small ounce of gold dust in the shape of a Hi8mm camcorder…with outputs.
95% of camcorders in those days had YC and analogue video outputs so it was easy to dub footage from one tape format to another.
If anyone out there has a Sony Hi8mm PAL tape deck or a camcorder they fancy getting rid of give me an email and I will give you an offer for your machine. Email hdwarrior@me.com
I had this very camcorder with twin VU meters, manual everything a good old headphone socket, Sony like most manufacturers have forgotten in recent times that we like to be in control of our camcorders, yet they will insist in not giving us mic inputs or headphone outputs till fairly recently.
The Sony VG10 was a classic example of Sony forgetting the “feature rich” past with no control over the sound nor the ability to switch the gain to 0dB or the ability to mount the camcorder on your shoulder…sometimes the future does not always bring the best from the past !
There will be many products released soon that feature Thunderbolt, but LaCie has got in there first. Take a look at the tiny “Little Big Disk” 500GB of SSD.
Don’t you love days where you are just amazed at all the new technology that gets announced? Hot on the heels of Apple’s announcement of Thunderbolt ports on the new line of MacBook Pros, Lacie has announced the Little Big Disk which houses two 250GB solid state drives.
Let’s just pause for a minute here. That is half a terabyte in a hand sized drive that weighs 1.5lbs, will run at 700MB/s and does not require a power supply? Am I dreaming?
No, so we will reproduce some of the LaCie info here, but make sure you checkout the details including some transfer stats on the website.
Thunderbolt technology supports daisy-chaining up to six computer peripherals. Devices such as the LaCie Little Big Disk will include two ports to join a daisy chain with compatible peripherals such as hard drives, monitors, cameras, etc.
A single cable attached to one of the ports provides two channels of up to 10Gb/s in both directions. This means that video and data can be pushed both ways without compromising the bandwidth. On a single line, an editor can digitize HD from a video source while playing high resolution images on a display.
Adding the Thunderbolt technology to a mobile drive brings the power and transfer rates previously reserved for fibre channel rackmount storage to the palm of your hand. The Little Big Disk featuring Thunderbolt technology weighs approximately 1.5 lbs. Further, the bus-powered interface gives users another layer of portability since they can travel without a power cable.
A journalist can easily carry the Little Big Disk with his camera and laptop when covering a remote story. Rather than waiting to cut a package at the station or in a mobile van, the journalist can quickly download his footage and edit in the field. Thanks to the Little Big Disk’s mobility and Thunderbolt technology performance, the time to get a package on air will be considerably reduced.
To complement the fast transfer rates offered by the Thunderbolt technology, the Little Big Disk features two 250GB Intel 510® Series Solid-State Drives (SSD). SSDs have no moving parts, making for reduced data access rates, higher levels of vibration resistance, and lower power consumption. Further, SSDs support multiple streams of uncompressed video and multichannel audio due to their superior performance and enhanced durability. The two solid-state drives are preconfigured as a Striped RAID Set for enhanced performance.
Today was fun day number two at the Brown household, yes today was a trip back to the home of Glidetrack and to meet my good friend Alistair Brown who did a retrograde to my Glidetrack HD turning it into a GT with go faster stripes !
I had fallen out of favour well over a year ago with my Glidetrack slider not because it wasn’t working properly, far from it, mainly because I now owned a camcorder that was far from suitable to use with the slider, a Sony PMW-350K.
It was recommissioned from a dusty existence when I needed the odd product shot for my reviews using the Canon 5D2 which on the whole was just the job but I felt the slider was not as smooth as I felt it should be so I called Alistair at Glidetrack who told me to get hold of a tin of silicon spray from Three in One. Although it was better it still felt a tad grungy, not as smooth as I thought it should be.
Alistair told me that a new carriage was near completion, one that was a lot smoother due to a special roller system so today I picked up my slider and I kid you not it’s 20x better than my old slider with virtually no resistance on the track at all…fantastic.
The new “HYBRID CARRIAGE” is a must especially if you plan to use the Panasonic AF101 speaking off Alistair asked me to bring down my AF101 to see if another product he sells would fit onto not only the 101 viewfinder but the Cineroid EVF as well.
Look at that sexy red eyecushion on my Cineroid and better still it makes for a far nicer feel when your eye rests on the microfiber rather than the rubber eyecup itself, I was like a wee boy just after opening his presents at Christmas time, a splendifferous new sliding carriage and a new sexy red eyecushion for my Cineroid…Whoopee !
This has been one of my better days and thanks to Alastair I look forward to using my Glidetrack GT in anger very soon along with my red viewfinder eyecushion, please remember the GLIDETRACK slider is made in Scotland which is a part of the UK and I do support well made home produced products and you should to.
I will be doing a review of the Glidetrack GT slider very soon showing you all the new innovative extras that come with the new Hybrid slider.
Today I had a chance to work with the Cineroid EVF and can I tell you it was a breath of fresh air. The Panasonic AF101 has a very crisp LCD and on the side of the camera you have a detail button which helps you while focusing.
The EVF in the camera is OK but for me far to small, it’s best to turn off the colour in the viewfinder and use the focus assist which gives you a red outline when you are in focus.
That said you can use a portable production monitor like the Sony 740 as seen above to check your focus but while on location you tend to hand your monitor over to the client to view your shots.
Enter the Cineroid EVF from Korea a cracking EVF, made for any camera that has an HDMI output or as was first intended a DSLR with a mini HDMI socket.
While filming today I discovered a great benefit while producing a high pull focus shot, the ability to see what I was doing remotely from the camera itself, fantastic.
As you can see from the picture above the colour rendition is very true which is essential if you are relying on your colour balance to be correct, the Cineroid is also as sharp as a tack and can easily be used for pull focus. You also get various functions like peaking in red or sharpness mode, zebra settings, monochrome, underscan, pixel mapping, 4:3 guide bar and the image can be rotated or mirrored.
CONCLUSION : It is well made, plastic construction, the battery compartment takes a nack to open it, looking at the picture above you slide the compartment to the right then it lifts off. The screen is as good as the Sony EX3 in both colour trueness and sharpness, it’s miles above anything you get with the Panasonic AF101 itself. Two minor details are the mini to mini HDMI cable supplied obviously meant for a DSLR but the AF101 has an HDMI socket so an appropriate supplied cable would be useful…mini HDMI to HDMI.
It takes one Sony like NP-F570 Li-ion battery which I am told will last you 3 hours, I am fortunate by having not only 2 F570 batteries but a Sony battery charger as well !
I found the power pins used to connect the battery a bit flimsy and I think with a lot of use may cause a problem but these are minor details compared to the quality of the picture itself…well recommended from HD Warrior.
UPDATE : Good news…the Cineroid EVF I have is a non production model and the battery pins have been changed for the production model due out this month (Jan 2011).
FURTHER UPDATE : Hello, my name is Spencer Doran at OCTICA. We represent Cineroid in the UK and offer full technical support for the EVF. The note regarding the centering of pixel to pixel mapping was reported to us yesterday and is being addressed. A software update has been developed at the factory and is currently being tested. We expect that it will be released at the end of this week once testing is complete. We will make it available to anyone who wants it as a free software update later.
Freelancers like myself do not care to stick labels onto our camcorders as they have a better secondhand value if they look pristine. If you have not bought a camcorder for a while you will not have noticed the amount of easy smear plastic thats making it’s way into the market place. Sony use a strange plastic on the PMW-350 that smears very easily, you can wipe it clean at the end of a shoot but I am no fan of this type of plastic coating.
Most camcorders have a vacant space on the “tape/memory slot” side of the camera, I cannot imaging trying to scrape off a sticky ident label after a year in fact I have no doubt that it would damage the plastic.
My solution is simple…as always this is an idea waiting to happen, a side plate that is made of the same material as the camera body that you choose to screw on if you plan to use an ident label ie. BBC NEWS, SKY NEWS etc. How easy would it be for Sony, Panasonic, JVC to supply such a plate in the camera box that you could choose to use or not use depending on your type of work.
The screw holes on the camera body would be produced as part of the production line so all you have to do is screw your plate on and your away…how simple is that idea and it looks more professional.
