Boxcar Scene Equipment Review

While we gear up for a quick shoot with our friend Ashly for one of her projects, I thought it would be worthwhile to jot down my thoughts on some of the equipment we used for the Nail House boxcar shoot.

The Camera - Sony FX3

There's a good reason the FX3 has become the go-to camera for YouTubers, videographers, and online content creators of all stripes - it's a solid camera. My own independent testing found one major issue - all the camera specs suggest that shooting XAVC S-I DCI 4K (i.e. the most uncropped, highest file footprint intraframe codec) would be the way to get good quality, but I have to concur with what some reddit users have found - the intraframe codecs on this camera are worse than the h.265 interframe codecs. In other words, even the Netflix recommended spec is wrong.

Just look at this nonsense!

This is a shot outside my window in natural light, and really cranked to see how the very edges of color are being handled. It should look janky, but notice how chunky the blocks of color are, especially the black in the top right and the darker grays in the middle.

This one is, supposedly, the quality codec with the beefiest file size. Compare that to this:

You still see blocking, of course, but notice how much smaller and smoother it is. This is the h.265 codec (XAVC HS). For normal usage, it really doesn't matter, but if you're really needing edge color information (say if you're keying), this becomes much more of an issue.

This means the best possible image quality out of this camera is with a nice, efficient codec! I love it! One tradeoff is you lose true 24 fps shooting (which, to be fair, I'm quite annoyed by because I've been saying we should be shooting even framerate numbers for a full on decade at this point, as the need to have ridiculous framerates like 23.976 and 29.97 are irrelevant when we're getting our god damned eyeballs blasted out by our 144 hz OLED displays!)

Another tradeoff is you need a powerful computer (heh good thing i'm a heh gamer) and the full version of Davinci Resolve (I've taken my savings from the Adobe ecosystem and applied it to Resolve and it's been well worth it so far).

This has major implications down the line, too, because we're conceivably saving on storage costs, archiving costs, and recording media. We were able to comfortably get by with dumping footage twice a day - once at lunch, once at wrap. At no point did we lose time needing to swap cards.

The one major thing I miss from the Blackmagic/RED ecosystems is the ability to define an undercrank framerate. We saw firsthand how much of a difference undercranking down to 23 or even 22 fps did on the short action scene we shot with them for some Cobra Kai promotional material.

Additionally, the system we had for getting a V-Mount battery onto the camera (the SmallRig Compact V-Mount system) was just a little bit annoying to scoot around, although the SmallRig VB99 Mini V-Mount Batteries were really nice as the USB slot could power the camera, one of the DC out ports powered the monitor, and the remaining D-Tap handled the wireless follow focuses).

The Lenses: Thypoch Simera-C Cine Lenses (E Mount)

If you recall, a big motivator for camera platform and gear came down to wanting a package as compact and lightweight as possible. Right as we were gearing up, Thypoch (a DZOFiLM affiliate) released their Simera-C primes, which checked all the boxes I was looking for, namely:

• Chinese made, because as noted previously, the Chinese lens manufacturing game is out of control right now and at the right price point you're maxing out bang for your buck (in my opinion)

• Cine lens, because ACs need to be able to pull focus on action and not just shoot pretty pictures of fields, rivers, and sunsets on their Leica mount Helios 44-2 vintage nonsense.

• Primes, because we want that handheld rig as tiny as possible.

At the time, the only conceivable downside for these lenses, at least on paper, was that they didn't have a 21mm available and we knew in our previs that 21mm was going to be an important lens for the action we planned in the train car. Bongani substituted some primes from his own kit when we needed to get that wide, and in the time since, they've released a 21mm.

I think these lenses performed exactly as we had hoped - a great-looking quality of image with non-annoying artifacting (flares, etc.) In fact, we're using them again on this Ashly project. And we got a "set of cine primes" for a very good price.

Only minor annoyance was we ran into a couple of close focus issues, but we solved those by creating more space and just punching in as necessary (if David Fincher gets to digitally perfect his horizons and adjust background drapes on his remasters, we get to punch in every now and then).

The Wireless Monitors - Hollyland Mars M1 and Pyro 7

We have, by my estimation, been at the dumb janky forefront of most of the major equipment paradigm shifts in the entertainment industry. I know this sounds like a lot of hot air, but note:

VGHS Season 1 was one of the first productions that used the Lightpanel 1x1 and 1k/2k replacements in an era when Kino flos and power-hungry incandescents were the industry standard. We fought against magenta/green coloration in those early LED panels, and swore up and down that pretty soon a lot of lights would be LEDs.

VGHS Season 1 also used the then brand new Teradek 1st gen devices as wireless monitoring solutions. They worked incredibly poorly whenever they did work and were a major headache in both the indoor and outdoor locations at which we shot. We swore up and down that pretty soon everyone would be monitoring things wirelessly.

Additionally, on Season 3, I was lucky enough to get our hands on the Freefly Movi M10, the first handheld 3-axis gimbal. I got trained on its usage by Rich Moriarty, an absolutely incredible camera op who knew every inch of that device and passed that knowledge down to me. The handheld gimbal was, I think, pretty clearly a major platform, although to my great disappointment everyone builds these things out to be hulking behemoths that require additional harnesses and rigs to support the weight, which completely misses the great strength of the handheld gimbal, which is that you can finally change the height of a stabilized platform quickly and easily. As my sweaty forearms bulged under the strain of the Movi with the Red EPIC, I swore up and down that everyone would be using these neat handheld gimbals soon.

The skateboard helmet wireless monitor is counter-weighted with a 2.5 lb weight zip-tied to the helmet. I would describe this picture to AI as "a technological pioneer."

VGHS Season 3 also saw us using the DJI Phantom 1 on Bus Puncher (Matt flew, I opped the camera). You can still see the DJI imaging chip struggling.

In any case, I can tell you there is no glory in being among the very early adopters of LED lighting, wireless camera monitoring, drones, and handheld gimbals. Nobody is all that impressed and your hubris is rewarded with having to slog through a lot of technical jank.

So it was with some degree of interest when I heard that Hollyland was making wireless monitoring solutions that bundled the on-camera monitor and transmission hardware into one handy unit. This, to me, was always the most obvious solution, as having a separate wireless transmitter was such a waste of cabling and was generally a royal pain in the ass to manage.

Moreover, the need for wireless monitoring by numerous imaging technicians, from hobbyists to professionals, meant that there were a lot of nice, robust, cheap wireless monitoring products in the years since the first Teradek. The Hollyland Mars and Pyro 7 both performed equally well. We had no dropouts or connection issues in our relatively small stage space, though the very slight latency made it annoying for the focus puller in several instances.

The Follow Focus - Tilta Nucleus Nano II

This one didn't matter one bit, because the professionals handling focus all had their own very expensive very tried and true professional cinema focus motors and wireless control systems. This was something we need to account for, bulkwise, in the future, as it was borderline comical how big these follow focus units were relative to the rest of the camera body.

The Camera Cage - Tilta FX3 V2

Better than the SmallRig one.

Conclusions

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the performance and utility we were able to get out of a "low end" cinema camera package. We have a small list of adjustments for when we shoot the rest of this thing, but overall, no major headaches by going cheaper!

-fw