This camera has been in the market for just about four years now and has certainly opened up creative opportunities. If you are looking for all the stats and marketing jargon, link over to www.visionresearch.com. Vision has been a fantastic company to grow with over these last years being extremely responsive to the professional cinema requirements and workflows. In particular look over their FAQ's and the "PhantomZone" blogs. The improvements introduced with the Phantom HD Gold are exceptional with reduced noise levels, the quality of the black levels and improved dynamic stability.
A Phantom HD experience is much more than a camera rental. You really need experience that can take you from capture to post. The camera itself is EXTREMELY easy to work with. Actually it is better to say, "It is deceivingly easy to work with." The software that controls the camera is simple to explain and is logically laid out. There are only a couple of physical connections that you would have to try hard to do incorrectly and when the camera is built up it can have the look and feel of a film camera. If you are of any caliber of camera assistant or DIT, we can have you up and running in very short order. The trick to having an exciting and successful shoot is the workflow you devise, which is exactly where you introduce additional challenges and negative pressures. Even more important is how you turn over your files or tape to post production. If we have had any battles, it has been the learning curve with the postproduction side and with the RAW files. The deceiving part is handling the RAW files and knowing exactly what you are recording verses what you are seeing.
What the camera package looks like includes the camera body, a standard HD video viewfinder, a riser that accepts support rods, a cable package that has a power plug, an Ethernet cable used to communicate with a computer and a BNC cable for image view. The camera operates at 24VDC, which can be provided by several battery options. A PC based computer is required, connected through a 1Gig Ethernet. We supply a laptop with the current Phantom software, properly configured, with all camera rental packages. What I really like to bring, is a full PC work station with raid storage and a fantastic graphics card that super speeds up the downloads and is even capable of color correcting the RAW files. I'll rave about all that a little later. For the basic package, a laptop it is completely capable of meeting most every production requirement, and can be very mobility efficient.
First the camera itself and how it works. The sensor itself is 2048 pixels by 2048 pixels. How fast the camera can shoot is directly proportional to how many pixels you want to record. The Resolution Chart below list the maximum speed capable. There is a pull down window in the software where we can select just how much of the sensor we want to use. We can record every pixel on the sensor, we can cut out a middle HD 16:9 (1920 X 1080), or we can go full 35mm, which is 2048 X 1108. We commonly refer to the camera being capable of 1000fps because we commonly record at 1920 x 1080.
Resolution/Speed Chart (fps)
2048 x 2048 555
2048 x 1104 (2k 1.85) 1,029
2048 x 872 (2k 2.35) 1,302
1920 x 1080 (HDTV 16:9) 1,052
1632 x 1200 946
1280 x 800 1,419
1280 x 720 (HDTV 16:9) 1,576
1152 x 896 1,267
800 x 600 1,890
640 x 480 2,316
512 x 512 2,213
256 x 256 4,410
16 x 8 111
The Phantom HD operates with a 14-bit sensor producing a 42-bit color space. In digital photography, how many colors you have between solid black and blown out whites is determined by "bit depth." Bit depth quantifies how many unique colors are available in an image's color palette in terms of the number of 0's and 1's, or "bits," which are used to specify each color. An image with a higher bit depth can display more gradations of colors. I love to get into dissertations about color but you would have to read it all. The more colors you can have, the more stunning the image in terms of photorealistic qualities. In the Phantom software, you can lower the color space to 10 or ever 8-bits. There maybe times and circumstances where this is utilized, but not very often.
The number of pixels you want to record combined with the bit-depth you want is the equation for determining how much memory space you need. If we are recording 1000 frames-per-second with the Phantom HD at 1920x1080 and 14-bits of memory depth, you will need 3.6GB of memory for each second of recording. Most all of the cameras have 16G of internal flash memory built into the camera body. That means you have just over 4 seconds of real time of available memory. Which means you have about 4400 frames recorded in those 4 seconds. If we are recording at 500fps, in HD we have 8 seconds of real time and at 250fps we have 16 seconds of real time.
Regardless of how fast you shot, you have about 4400 frames stored in the 16Gig memory. If you were playing back at 23.98fps, you have 185 seconds or just over 3 minutes playback. If you want playback at 29.97fps, we have 2.4 minutes of playback. The "CineMag" greatly increases this memory as well as offers significant workflow advantages. I will cover the CineMag a little later.
One issue to watch in playback deals with the 3:2 pulldown we commonly use in commercial production. There is a duplicate field for every three fields or so that is created when doing the 24 frame to 30 frame conversion for broadcast. Rarely can you really see that duplicated field, however, in extreme slow motion where you are paying close attention to the action, it is entirely possible that you will sense a jitter in the motion. For feature film or projection when we usually deliver in 24fps, this is not an issue, however, when we have to deliver in 29.97fps, we really need to consider this pulldown as an element in the decision to record the Phantom playback at 23.98 or 29.97.
Now about capture and playback. Once the camera is pointed in the right direction, and everything has beautiful lighting, the art department has all their ducks in the row and the clients are impatiently waiting for the action to happen, we want to make absolutely sure we capture the action at the exact right moment. We can trigger the camera to record on the word "action,” or we can put the camera into a recording loop, wait and make sure the action has happened, and then trigger the camera to stop the record loop. The software has a pulldown menu controlling "post trigger." We can set the "post trigger" to "1 frame" which means the camera will begin to record immediately into its memory. As the memory fills up, it then begins to erase and rewrite the current images. The camera will continue to record in a loop until you hit the trigger saving the 4 seconds prior to your trigger. This is the most common way to work with the camera. Waiting until you see the glass break or the liquid curl into the glass, guarantees you have the action. The "continuous loop, post trigger" method does not always work, so the software allows you to put your trigger anywhere within that 4 second action range. The operator can trigger the camera at the camera or the Digital Image Tech can control the camera back at the computer. The "trigger" on the camera, by the way, is either a physical button attached to the camera or it is a software button you can right click your mouse on within the software.
Now that we have just captured the most amazing action in super slow-motion and it is sitting inside the cameras memory, we have several options in viewing and exporting. To immediately review the shot, within the camera software, we select "video playback." This opens up a window that looks just like any other deck playback buttons. When you hit "play” the camera will playback the recorded video at 23.98fps. You can see exactly what you've got and if the action is exactly what you need. With three minutes playback, you could be watching for a long time before anything happens. There is a timeline at the bottom of the playback window. You can slide through the timeline until you see the action starting; mark this as your start frame and playback from that point. You can also mark when the shot is over. If you do not like what you see, you can dump the memory immediately and get ready to shoot again. If you love the shot and want to save it, once again we have several options.
The single BNC connector on the back of the camera can be set through the camera software, to export 10-Bit 4:2:2 HD video. (You can set this BNC to export in a wide varity of HD and SD formats through the cameras software.) Many, many commercials that I work, we record this video into an HDCamSR deck or directly into a Digital Drive Array as we are watching the playback. This actually becomes the deliverable to post production. Now this is not the best data the camera can produce, but it may be all that is required. It certainly is the quickest and most direct workflow method. We see what we have, we now have it recorded, we dump the memory and set up to immediately shoot another take. Extremely efficient and the quality of the image is still competitive with post requirements.
If we want every bit of data, resolution, color and contrast range, we would download the RAW data files in the memory through the 1Gig Ethernet communications into our laptop of PC configuration (more about RAW files to follow). This is not at all quick, worst case, if you wanted the entire 4400 frames, and you are saving to a firewire drive, it would take 15 - 17 minutes. On top of it taking forever, you cannot shoot again until it is finished. You can see a live image while the camera is downloading to the computer, so if you have a long reset, it is not a total waste of time.
This is where the CineMag is a lifesaver and worth every penny of an expensive rental. With the CineMag, a full download is 7 seconds. Not only is that a HUGH savings of time, you have some additional workflow capabilities. With the Cinemag mounted on the camera, when you are shooting below frames rates of 450fps, you can stop & start recording just like any other video or film camera. At higher speeds, you record into camera RAM and "upload" to the CineMag in seconds. There are two sizes of CineMags, the most common demand is for the 512Gig. With the 512G you have 66 minutes of playback time. You can mix and match rates within the CineMag and they are truly "hot-swappable."
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Phantom CineStation is a simple interface that connects to a PC using GigaBit Ethernet. Users simply snap in a CineMag to the CineStation and use the supplied software to view each cine stored on the CineMag, play the cine files over the dual HD-SDI ports or component video ports, set in- and out-points to trim the cines, and save the files to a connected hard disk drive. The Phantom CineStation comes with dual HD-SDI outputs allowing for 4:4:4 playback of the recorded cine files at all HD formats (except 60p which is 4:2:2), making it easy to review and select shots to download and archive.
