As an occasional project .. I have been making a super8 camera digital conversion with a Raspberry Pi. After lots of messing about I finally have infinity focus across the image ..
So Toby and I went out to do a ramping test. I've got a Canon R3 which will do 200FPS so we made a rig that uses that as a base and then made a browsed move in Kuper. I have a Raspberry PI that recorded every frame that "Needed" to be taken and then made a list in a txt file. Once it was shot we took the MP4 file and split it into a run of tif files and then extracted the correct ones for the speed ramp. (This took a very long time) and then reassembled the move to this one ..
As you can see the track and contrazoom are perfectly consistent while the speedramps are really smooth. The final part when I throw the roll of tape is at 100fps.
The contrazoom is really small (the move is only 6ft long) because the only zoom we could find was a 28-80 stills zoom.
If anyone has any interest in doing this for a music video I have a Moco 16mm player recorder that we could develop into a varispeed playback system.
Originally theses heads were made for Isle of Dogs and had plates to mount a Canon 1DX in a cage. As most of the 1DX's have gone to camera heaven I have made modification plates to take an Arca Swiss plate. There are L brackets on Amazon for about £15 and cages that will attach to smaller cameras.
On IOD we had to make one camera to be nodal for VFX plates and I have a similar but larger head that is fully adjustable.
I think the off the shelf L brackets may not be totally up to the task, they are fine with the camera and lens but there is nowhere to mount anything so I will have made some 16mm aluminum ones with mounts for lens motor bars.
Jignesh Jhaveri told me that the secret of running a successful photographic studio in Mumbai is to have a toilet that his wife would be prepared to use. Here at Portablemotioncontrol central our aspirations are way lower than that, a realistic aspiration would be that husbands do not feel the need to warn their wives to avoid the facilities ..
We have a new water heater (that works) the whole "Pull a bit of string to flush the bog" has gone to be replaced by a regular handle. the tiles have been cleaned and the leak that was casing the puddle has been fixed .. there is green stuff in the bog and it smells pine fresh ..
We have however kept our select reading material ..
No longer will Tristan Oliver Bsc be so shocked by the state of the facilities that he cleaned it himself. Possibly the one and only case of a current member of the BSC cleaning the bog in a facility company .. I may still make a plaque ..
I made Slidey McSlideface a year ago and we used it on last years Tesco Christmas commercial and on the second series of "Interview with the Vampire".
I've been asked to give the specifications for an upcoming shoot and I realised that I'd never actually measured it.
The idea is that it's one single length of bearing track with a dolly. It's super smooth with any length of lens and can make a move up to 3.5m long.
It goes in my car for any job in Europe and and it could be flown as (Quite a bit of) hold baggage with a couple of modifications.
I bought some racecourse #photofinish cameras at auction. The idea was to put a lens of them and show with them on a rotating head do a #panaramic picture with them. This setup was a 28mm lens which made a 360 degree picture take 44 perforations on 35mm film. I used the continuous processor because I wanted to see the results immediately. So you get lots of drying marks and little perf damage.
I then used the worlds oldest scanner with windows xp to scan them (the scan is not big enough for all 44 perfs). The image is not actually soft the problem is that the rotator was not stable. It needs to be on a bigger head that doesn't wobble .. Standby for for photofinish pics and some proper "Lab" processed images ..
This is the first part of a project. I've been reorganizing and moving some of my equipment and making Instagram posts about things I have not used in a long time.
This is a very simple stepper motor driver, I think it was built for a Top Gear shoot.
The setup here is a small rotator with arca swiss plates and the slowest speed is 6 hours for 180 degrees.
The power input is 10-40 volts and this low current motor would run for at least a day with a V-Lock battery.
I shot this test with a GH5 and a 12mm lens on the automatic shutter speed setting with a 10 second interval.
You could scale this up to a massive geared head (which I have) and put a camera as big as an MSM Imax camera on it (Or any of my stable of Mitchells).
The speed on this is generated as an analog value, so it’s fine for time-lapse. If you need a repeatable move then let me know and I have solutions for that ..
This is for remote locations and dry hire.
I built 10 of these for a fashion commercial. the high intensity led in the flashgun turns on for the duration you set on the shutter.
In the video you see a regular camera and flash where it blows out the frame and leave part of the frame unexposed, then you see see my camera and flash unit where it rises and falls over a number of frames, then you see the same footage divided by 10 so you can see the effect.
Available for weddings Bar Mitzvah and Birthdays.
Finally finished the new Trumpton counter and Relay-DMX computer. The original Trumpton counter was the counter from Bob Bura's Mitchell (Bob Bura was the animator on Trumpton). This is much better and updated version with a display on a long cable. We tried to make a wireless version, and it worked perfectly in the country but not in a city, hence the cable.
