May 2013
2 posts
Never Happened (music video)
Julien Bechara, director at Playtime Films, was in March 2012 my first rental client. I wrote about the result here.
A year later they made another music video using the Ikonoskop for Belgian band Hey Yeah!
Groovy!
Aiming for the highlights
I sometimes need a nudge from a reader or Ikonoskop owner/user to get me out of my writer’s block. I’ve seen some confusion and I have been getting some questions about the on-board histogram.
And I’ve also experienced some people who seem to think that shooting in raw means you don’t have to think about exposure. Well, let me assure you, the importance of exposure is as...
April 2013
1 post
4 tags
Firmware (1.27) 1.28
A couple of weeks ago Ikonoskop released firmware 1.27 (and 1.28 on March 3rd with bug fix for 24 and 30 fps metadata). This is a significant update in my opinion and as important as 1.24 was in March 2012.
A lot of whishes from users from all over the globe have been granted in this version. Let’s look at some major improvements.
1. Information Read-Out
Additionally in the viewfinder...
March 2013
1 post
11 tags
Weekend in Berlin: the fragrance of moving images
My first time in Berlin and I can’t say I’ve seen much of the city except for some bars, 3 restaurants, a hotel and the inside of a theater. But it has been an interesting and fun weekend.
Markus Seitz - PHOTO: SVENJA KLÜH
I was there for a workshop (very well) organized by Digitales Kino, a platform created by Markus Seitz and Sebastian Böhm for making workflows in digital...
February 2013
2 posts
4 tags
Living Images
Living Images from director Hardi Volmer is having its premiere today in Tallinn, Estonia. The film was shot on an Ikonoskop A-Cam dII, operated by dII pioneer Kristjan-Jaak Nuudi.
8 tags
Film Students
Last December somehow turned out to be Filmschool Month for me.
Patrick Geeraerts, head of the editing department of RITS in Brussels, asked me to deliver a lecture on the Ikonoskop for some sixty 2nd year students (directors, screenwriters, multi-cam directors, …). I asked what the scope for this class would be and he replied: “Try to broaden their horizon!”
I don’t...
January 2013
4 posts
4 tags
Resolve 9.1 - Are we there yet?
The latest version of DaVinci Resolve, 9.1, now includes CinemaDNG Input Device Transform (IDT) for grading Raw images in the ACES colour space.
This gives in my opinion, out of the box, the most accurate colour rendition of the Ikonoskop footage. Or as Jesse Borkowski said on Twitter: “I know! It’s like I got a new camera!”
To set it up in your Resolve projects, here’s a...
6 tags
Starting Point for Grading in DaVinci Resolve
In a prior post about Resolve, I wrote about my quick fix to get rid of magenta in the shadows and I mentioned it’s only one of several ways to get rid of it. All you want is a good starting point for your grading.
It’s in the grading that lies the power of the uncompressed raw CinemaDNG of course. That’s why you bought or use the camera in the first place. As Ikonoskop has...
3 tags
RawCinemaShop's Shot On Ikonoskop 2012 Reel
To celebrate this new year, a little tribute to the past year. It’s been quite an eventful one for me and it left me utterly exhausted. But nothing some hard decisions and time with family and friends can’t resolve.
It was a very educational year in regard to the Ikonoskop A-Cam dII. I’m thankful for all the people I’ve gotten to know, online and in person, just by...
10 tags
Workflow Round-up January 2013
I’ve been trying out a lot of different workflows over the past year, based on system specs, software version, firmware version, etc.
Some people probably still think I work with, what I called, the CineForm workflow. But I haven’t used it since last summer, to be honest.
When I started using a dII I was still on a Windows 32 bit system. After a couple of months of working with CinemaDNG footage...
December 2012
3 posts
5 tags
"Native" editing of CinemaDNG in Premiere Pro?
There’s no way to directly import and edit a CinemaDNG sequence in PremierePro. But this weekend I stumbled upon a promising tool developed by 19lights. It’s called Ginger HDR and it has a Merger functionality that creates wrappers for CinemaDNG sequences (batch). The creation of these .GNR files is lightning fast and the naming is just as it should be (name of the director containing...
4 tags
Reconforming Audio with Resolve 9
The shoot I mentioned in yesterday’s post, was the first project we recorded audio on-board of the dII.
It was also the first project I used Resolve (9) on for conforming and grading.
So how do you get the audio, embedded in the DNG frames, in a format no single decoder can read at this time, synced to the DNG sequences?
Use the Ikonoskop Audio Tool to strip the audio from the cDNG...
7 tags
Talking Heads with Canon 8-64 zoom, Vocas rig &...
A couple of weeks ago we used the dII on a shoot that looked up front a bit a-typical for an 80MB/s kind of camera. Six interviews, somewhere between 15-30 minutes an interview, to be intercut.
Ideal opportunity to test out some new stuff:
Canon 8-64mm S16 Zoom
Vocas Rig
Alphatron HD-SDI viewfinder
Recording audio on-board of the dII
The Canon 8-64mm S16 Zoom is a marvelous lens, that has...
October 2012
3 posts
8 tags
Getting rid of Magenta in DaVinci Resolve
UPDATE: obsolete as of firmware 1.27 (March 2013)
There’s a lot of magenta in the shadows of Ikonoskop footage in DaVinci Resolve. I don’t think it has always been that way, but it definitely is the case in Resolve 9 lite.
There are several ways to get rid of it. I offer you one solution here that’s very quick and easy. In my opinion you have to fix it before you do any Color...
5 tags
Getting rid of Magenta in Camera Raw
UPDATE: obsolete as of firmware 1.27 (March 2013)
We’ve talked about this before. How there seems to be a magenta issue in decoders like After Effects (Camera Raw) en DaVinci Resolve and rather a green issue in decoders like SpeedGrade. So I’m writing this for those of you who don’t seem to get rid of this magenta in the shadows in After Effects.
3 images with default Camera...
5 tags
The future of one Panchromatic
Last July, the guys at Ikonoskop asked me if I’d be interested in becoming a distributor for Ikonoskop in the BeNeLux region. I thought long and hard about this and finally accepted.
You probably already noticed that I’m quite passionate about the camera and the company that’s making it. And I’ve been a supporter right from the start of this blog, otherwise I...
September 2012
1 post
3 tags
A-cam dII & SpeedGrade - Part 1
OK, I haven’t forgotten about this blog!
But I should’ve written this post two months ago. Because I’ve been grading Ikonoskop footage all summer in SpeedGrade and I must say, at this moment, it’s absolutely the right tool to grade A-cam dII CinemaDNG with.
Because:
To load your footage just point at the folder of your project and select Each subfolder as one sequence...
June 2012
1 post
6 tags
Something I Love - Episode 3
Something I Love is a series about boundless enthusiasm. Each episode is a portrayal of someone’s passion.
Episode 3 - Pieter Van Eenoge
Location Sound Recording: Thomas Vertongen DP: Jelle Van Coillie Directed & Edited by Joachim Vansteelant Music by brunk (Bert Vanden Berghe)
Filmed in Bruges, Belgium on May 29th, 2012. Camera: Ikonoskop A-cam dII Lenses: Arriflex Zeiss Distagons...
May 2012
2 posts
8 tags
V.O. - When You See Red by Playtime Films
Julien Bechara from Playtime Films was one of the first to rent an dII from me a couple of months back. One of the DoP’s he’s working with, Gilles Labarbe, was following the blog for some time and was excited about testing an Ikonoskop. So they planned on using it for a music video.
It’s only after I saw some first test footage that I realized it was for one of my favourite...
3 tags
DaVinci Resolve Light 8.2.1 Beta 1
Great news from John Christoforou. In Resolve there’s now a solution for the pink highlights. Just watch this tutorial:
Now if you’re not familiar with Resolve, at first you’d still might be a bit dissapointed with the result after clicking that CinemaDNG codec setting. Because you’ve lost the pink but highlights still seem completely blown out (which doesn’t seem...
April 2012
6 posts
5 tags
External Recording - a Test
As the Ikonoskop Memory Cards are limited to a maximum of about 30 minutes (160 GB) of recording time (25 fps), there are several reasons why someone would like to use an external recorder with the Ikonoskop A-cam dII.
You need longer continuous recording time to cover an event or performance and you insist on using the dII for this;
You don’t really care for Ikonoskop’s...
6 tags
Something I Love - Episode 2
Something I Love is a series about boundless enthusiasm. Each episode is a portrayal of someone’s passion.
Episode 2 - Jeroen Peters
Filmed & edited by Joachim Vansteelant Music by brunk (Bert Vanden Berghe) Song “La Muñeca de Trapo” by Paul Avgerinos Filmed in Zeebrugge, Belgium on April 7th, 2012 Camera: Ikonoskop A-cam dII / GoPro HD Hero2 Lens: Arriflex Zeiss Distagon...
7 tags
Applause for the firmware/hardware update
End of March Ikonoskop released new firmware and some updates to the hardware. And dII users have been awfully quiet about it. Well, it’s time to speak up.
I’m going to highlight some major improvements, the ones that I find particularly interesting. I’m only speaking out of my own experience:
New calibration algorithm: The Kodak sensor is divided into 4 quadrants and...
Black & White A-cam dII
I’m quite amazed that this didn’t stop at the drawing board but is actually going to get produced: an A-cam dII with black & white sensor. What else do they have up their sleeves?
2 tags
Open Cross Platform CinemaDNG processing tool,...
How about an open cross platform CinemaDNG processing tool for developing, grading, transcoding, … your CinemaDNG sequences. Impossible? Will never happen?
Maybe, but still the community behind APERTUS are planning the development of such a tool. And they can use all the help they can get, so let them know you support this idea.
2 tags
Pomfort planning a CinemaDNG workflow
A while back I wrote to info@digitalbolex.com to ask them about their plans for their CinemaDNG workflow.
Elle Schneider answered me last week and wrote:
Our current plan is to work with Pomfort, the makers of Silverstack (pomfort.com) to create a custom workflow manager to handle DNG files that could probably be used with the A-cam or any other DNG system.
Pomfort’s answer:
I...
March 2012
5 posts
Appetite for Destruction
This is a still from what’ll become episode 2 or maybe episode 3 of Something I Love. Still a lot of shooting to do first.
But anyway, this has nothing to do with the title. While going through my CinemaDNG archive I noticed something peculiar about every single sequence I had imported in After Effects.
Normally all frames of a CinemaDNG sequence out of the dII have exactly the same size...
2 tags
Batch linking CineForm raw proxies in After...
The fastest way to transcode CinemaDNG sequences to an intermediate is via CineForm’s DPX2CF command line tool.
But what if you don’t want to render your final print from the CineForm raw files? What if you don’t trust anything that has some form of compression? So what if you want to use CineForm raw only as a proxy and render your final cut from the original CinemaDNG’s...
2 tags
Post (traumatic) CinemaDNG workflows?
People are cursing over the “available” CinemaDNG workflows, every day. At this time you can’t edit CinemaDNG sequences in any NLE. So you need to transcode to an intermediate or proxy first.
The tools to transcode CinemaDNG’s to an editable intermediate, I know of and/or have used, are the following:
Adobe After Effects (5.5) - to any thinkable format you’ve got...
1 tag
Digital Bolex
What exciting news: a 2K CinemaDNG camera for $3.300 and with a roaring name - Bolex. Their Kickstarter project got funded in less than 24 hours.
Looking at their specs and pictures of the prototype I’m making some assumptions:
Kodak sensor KAI-04050 (that’s the dII’s KAI-02150 big brother)?
Camera: a tweaked Allied Prosilica GX2300 ?
A very clever project indeed....
1 tag
DANCINEC: de-Bayer software
Some more valuable information on RAW image processing can be found in the comments of Dan Hudgin’s videos on Vimeo. I recognized Dan’s name from some comments on the Ikonoskop forum from quite a while back. He has developed and is still developing his own de-Bayer and Image Processing software (white balance, grading, etc.).
I’ve been testing his software for a while now and...
February 2012
6 posts
1 tag
Lack of Look
A while back I found this tweet:
I’m no longer in love with the Ikonoskop A-Cam DII. That look can be achieved with any camera by lifting the blacks and dropping saturation
At first I just found it some funny statement and thought something like “well serves you right for falling in love with a tool”.
But then it started to annoy me. Because this shows once more the degree...
The Masslessness of Digital
I found the following in a comment by Christian Offner on the ‘Side by Side Offical Trailer (2012)’ on Vimeo. Side by Side is a documentary that makes a comparison between digital and film workflows.
I can’t wait to see it. As a filmmaker who will probably never in his life shoot on film I yet am quite fascinated by the magic of a film-based way of making films.
Keanu Reeves...
1 tag
Something I Love - Episode 1
Something I Love is a series about boundless enthusiasm. Each episode is a portrayal of someone’s passion. Episode 1- Christophe Annys
Grip: Joost Broucke DP: Jelle Van Coillie Directed & Edited by Joachim Vansteelant Music by brunk (Bert Vanden Berghe)
Filmed in Ghent, Belgium on January 16th, 2012. Camera: Ikonoskop A-cam dII / GoPro HD Hero2 Lenses: Ikonoskop 9mm S16 / Linos...
1 tag
Express Card Reader
From the Ikonoskop website:
The A-Cam dll Express Card Reader is our fastest card reader, it will transfer up to 40fps or 130 MB/s to a fast harddrive or SSD. The reader is connected to a MacBook Pro 17” or the older 15” MacBook Pro with OSX Lion via the ExpressCard slot. It can also be used on any Thunderbolt Mac with Lion and Sonnet’s Echo ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt...
1 tag
They listen!
Ikonoskop is not really known for making big public announcements or speaking out in general … but they do listen!
I found this picture on Twitter and what I see is a solution to 3 common dII user frustrations. I’m excited about whatever else we might expect in the near future, but my guess is as good as yours.
No surprises?
I thought there would be alot to blog about, after that first production with the dII but honestly there isn’t.
For my workflow it’s not that different from working with any other camera. And because of all the testing and preparation, there were practically no suprises on the day of the shoot.
There’s one thing that didn’t work out as planned. I wrote some time ago...
January 2012
8 posts
Like a Phoenix from the Flames
End of December I ordered a Promise Pegasus R6 from Apple with 12 TB of storage. I thought it would be a fast (Thunderbolt) and relatively carefree (RAID 5) way to manage a CinemaDNG archive.
And it really was fast and relatively carefree … just untill last Sunday. When I arrived at my desk I saw that all the top leds next to the drive bays (6 of them) were red and that the Pegasus was...
1st Production Day
A week ago we’ve put the dII through it’s first full production day. Most of it was filmed outside. Temperature was near freezing point, but the camera performed really well, although it spent a good deal of the day in a rather unfriendly environment (see the dust on the guy’s glasses above?). Of course it’s not something I’d advice anyone to do, but I was pretty...
2 tags
Nikon F to C-mount Adapter
I use a Nikon D90 for still photography. Two years ago in anticipation of the dII I found on eBay an original Nikon F to C-mount adapter.
I was a bit puzzled though, not sure if I’d also find a reliable way of using the modern DX lenses with the dII. After all, how would I control aperture without an aperture ring on the lens?
The trick I’ve found was to buy an adapter with the...
Forget CreateProxies script
Hmmm … I’m thinking that over the years Adobe’s Creative Suite has gotten so vast and complicated that even Adobe have trouble finding their way in it :-)
I actually used the CreateProxies script because it’s recommended in Adobe’s After Effects Help:
Charles Bordenave (nab) provides a script on the After Effects Scripts website with which you can create proxies...
CreateProxies Hack
Update: you don’t really need the CreateProxies script!
In the post about the CS5.5 Workflow I mentioned this:
The CreateProxies script does a little bit too much for us though. After watching the Theo Lipfert video you understand we need to link compositions (not footage clips) to Premiere Pro for editing. Unfortunately after rendering the proxies, the script destroys the compositions it...
The Camera Raw Flicker Effect
I keep reading about dII owners experiencing a strange flicker effect when importing dII footage in After Effects (Camera Raw). It’s as if exposure changes during the sequence.
I have read about solutions like:
Do not set ‘White Balance’ to ‘As shot’ but to ‘Custom’
Close everyting and make a whole new setting
I’ve experienced the Flicker Effect...
Adobe CS5.5 Workflow
As I’ve moved to testing workflows on a 64 bit system, I thought it would be nice to finally give CS5.5 a test spin. On a Mac.
As a starting point I’ve watched the Theo Lipfert Workflow. I’ve tweaked it a bit to suit my needs (batch creation of proxies that are automatically linked to the source footage).
Step 1 - Load CinemaDNG sequences in After Effects
I’ll talk about...
1 tag
CineForm Workflow on Mac
I’ve started testing workflow options on a Mac. Of course the first one I’ve tried is the CineForm workflow as I like the speed and quality it offers.
But, as we know, the command line tool to convert the CinemaDNG sequences to CineForm RAW AVI’s or MOV’s is Windows only.
So I did the following:
- Bought a licence for Parallels: $79.99 - Bought a licence for Windows 7:...
December 2011
26 posts
1 tag
Konstantin Smola's Efficiency Filming
Please watch the following video of Street Trial Pro, Dominik Raab, in Vienna. It was filmed by Konstantin Smola on an A-cam dII:
I remembered from the Ikonoskop Forum that Konstantin owns just one 80 GB card. So I asked him how many he used for this shoot.
His response:
yes - i only used one 80gig card. i just shot very restricted - coming from a 16mm background really helped. I had no...
Film Is A Four Letter Word
New A-cam dII blog on the block! Please check out Aaron Vogel’s compendium on his camera.
Damn, that’s one catchy name for a website: Film Is A Four Letter Word :-)
1 tag
Vocas Adapter Plate
Neat! Vocas have created an adapter plate for the dII.
1 tag
Milky RAW
I’ve been searching for a while now, but there doesn’t seem to be alot of information online about how to interpret the look (or lack of look) of RAW. Maybe I’m just not using the right search terms. I would love for readers of this website to chime in and give pointers or talk about own findings to really widen and deepen the knowledge on developing RAW images from the dII.
RAW...
1 tag
MicroPrime Lenses
These look very promising! Just a pity that IB/E Optics does not seem to respond to e-mail.
From their site:
The new MicroPrime Lenses with C-Mount are suitable for 2/3” (Single Chip) HD Video Cameras. Focal Lengthes: T1.9 / 8.5 - 12 - 16 - 25 - 35 mm Features: - Compact size (Outside diameter max. 64 mm, Length about 70 mm) - Weight under 0,5 kg - High resolution -...
