- Banned
- #1
Keith Walters
Banned
I was going to post this in Andrew Rieger's
"Ok seriously, why are Red-related threads being shut down?" but that's been closed
I only wanted to comment on this post by Jim Jannard:
"A new post comes in and people are scanning so they read "Michael Bay says there were camera problems on Pirates 4." They don't bother to read all the posts... who does? So now the word is out, right? Putting the genie back in the bottle is no easy task. Think "RED ONE overheats on Ché". How many actually know that it didn't really overheat? It took us a month to figure out that the alarm (which went off in camera) was set 10C too low. To this day people think the RED ONE overheats. I heard it yesterday from Guillermo Navarro, the DP for Guillermo Toro, when he stopped by. And he owns 4 RED ONEs... which by the way have never overheated."
Hee hee. Even if you live to be 120, when they finally lay you to rest and the preacher is relating your story, when he gets to the part about RED, there will still be people in the crowd will nod knowingly to each other and mutter knowingly: “But of course you know the RED Ones had overheating problems…”
Count on it.
I would have suggested you set up a simple table of FAQs and common misconceptions that explained these sort of things. Then again....
A long time ago in a film rental company far far away (well, not it’s really anywhere now since it no longer exists) I built a 100 or so flicker-free colour video tap cameras. They were based on a commercial Hitachi surveillance camera, and cost us a mere `$2,500 or so each to make.
The closest commercially available competitor from CEI cost $17,500, had no anti-flicker system, was horribly over-designed and functionally, was a piece of junk compared to mine. (I know, because we inherited some from our competitors when we bough them out). Functionally comparable units were available from Arri, but they cost as much as a fully equipped RED One, were terribly unreliable, and delivery times were measured in years.
Knowing the sometimes cretinous nature of film crews, much thought was put into making my cameras as bullet-proof as possible. The original AC power supply module was replaced with a 12V regulated power supply that could run on an input voltage anywhere between 8 Volts and 37 Volts, and was virtually impossible to destroy. Since we had both 12V and 24V Arri cameras, and Arri 435s running on 30V SunGun batteries for high speed work, this was obviously a huge advantage. We largely slaughtered the opposition, particularly since we wouldn’t rent out a video door without the rest of the film camera.
(It’s interesting that a video tap camera that cost us about $2,500 to make, rented for $595 a day! With a 16mm Arri 16SR2, the film camera rented for considerably less than the colour video tap, and once you added the monitor/recorder, you were getting close to twice the cost for video assist! Just shows how important video assist is/was…
Then again, we also had perfectly good 3-year-old Tube Betacams, which cost more than an Epic in today’s money, and which were no-questions-asked broadcast-quality, as well as coming with a pretty good zoom lens, batteries and charger etc. They were listed for $295 a day, and you couldn’t give those away, because they were perceived as “outdated”, so go figure….)
Anyway, after several months of almost entirely trouble-free operation, I started getting reports that my video taps were “overheating”. So I got one that was reported as faulty, and ran it for severaL days, with blankets on it and so on, and it never missed a beat. I returned it to service, and after a few months looked at the rental record, but there was no sign of further trouble. Then I got another one, same story. Then another one a couple of months later.
So I started looking more closely at the rental records, and I noticed the problem only seemed to occur when they were using an Arri 435. So I hooked a supposedly faulty one up to a 30V battery and ran it until the battery went flat; never missed a beat. So, I put it in an oven and heated it up slowly to about 90ºC, which was too hot to touch. The colour balance went way off and the picture got very noisy, but the camera otherwise worked perfectly, and worked as well as ever when it cooled down. WTF?
Two of the exact same cameras were also built into the Moviecams that were used to shoot all six seasons of “Xena Warrior Princess”, without a single hitch, so I was pretty sure the battery voltage had nothing to do with it.
Then I got lucky. There was a report of a video tap “overheating” in a studio just up the road. I dashed up there, took one look at it, and the answer was instantly and infuriatingly obvious.
(To save space if nothing else, expletives have been deleted from the following text…).
The video camera was being powered from the 11-pin Fischer socket.
To explain, all Arri 12 Volt cameras came with an 11-pin Fischer socket, which allows you to add accessories, as well as remotely control the camera itself. It also supplies an unswitched 12 Volts from the battery. The later “Grey” Arri 24 Volt cameras had a “legacy” 11-pin Fischer socket, but all that did was supply 12 Volts to run video cameras, lens controllers etc. In their Krauty obsession with over-designing things, for some reason Arri limited the 12V output current to 600milliamps (0.6 Amps). If you even momentarily exceed that figure, the 12V power supply shuts down and you have to disconnect and reconnect the 24V battery to reset it. Which makes it just about useless for most accessories, like on-board monitors, non-Arri video taps etc…
Since my cameras drew very close to 600 milliamps, I made it clear from day #1, (or so I thought) that it cannot be run from a legacy Fischer socket, and I made up cables that allowed it to run from the RS socket, which supplies a nice stiff 24 Volts.
My first thought was that, as happens all too often, one of the many brainless would-be “Mr Johnny-can-do’s” who infest this industry had come up with a “solution” to the problem of the otherwise-occupied RS Socket.
“Where did you get that cable from?” I asked pleasantly.
“It was supplied with the camera.”
“WHAT?!!”
Yep, sure enough, one of the brain-damaged troglodytes that infested the camera Prep section had this brilliant idea of making up some 4-pin Cannon to 11-pin Fischer cables, and thought they’d show some initiative by making them up themselves and not bother the engineering department. (Years later I discovered that every Arri 24V camera that went out had been running with its metal case connected to the battery positive! It was only when it blew the crap out of somebody else’s LCD monitor, that I discovered that the 20 or so “spare” cables somebody had made up were all wired incorrectly…). Did I ever tell you about the time somebody there decided we needed to fit an earth wire to some double-insulated monitors? Oh, skip it...
The “overheating problem” was now quite straightforward. When the video camera was cold, it drew about 580 milliamps. As it warmed up, the DC-to-DC converter became a bit less efficient (probably as the copper wire in the converter transformer warmed up), and the current climbed over 600mA, shutting down the Arri Fischer power supply. So therefore: “The video camera was overheating”
Then about a year after I left the place, one of the people I used to work with there told me the ex-TV repairman they hired to replace me had been busily replacing all the DC-to-DC converters with a new type, which was supposed to cure the “overheating” problem, but strangely enough, it didn’t….
By this time they had been bought out by Panavision (I only officially worked for PV for about 18 months, which was about 12 months too long)*, and the decision was made to replace all the video taps with a new (and operationally inferior) type designed by a couple of ex-CEI employees at PVLA.
I was talking to some industry people a few months back, and I brought up the subject of video tap cameras. They mentioned that the new cameras apparently didn’t work as well as well as the old “Hitachi” ones, but they didn’t have the “overheating” problem… (The new cameras only drew about 400mA so the "overheating problem" was then "solved", which was a damned expensive way of solving a problem that never existed in the first place).
So even though PV Sydney no longer have many film cameras of any kind, and the Hitachi taps have probably been landfill for 10 years, the myth still lives on…
*One of PV’s endless line of ex-CEOs Bob Beicher once asked me why I disliked his company so much, I basically gave him a 20-page essay full of stories like the above; I only stopped because I got tired of typing….
"Ok seriously, why are Red-related threads being shut down?" but that's been closed
I only wanted to comment on this post by Jim Jannard:
"A new post comes in and people are scanning so they read "Michael Bay says there were camera problems on Pirates 4." They don't bother to read all the posts... who does? So now the word is out, right? Putting the genie back in the bottle is no easy task. Think "RED ONE overheats on Ché". How many actually know that it didn't really overheat? It took us a month to figure out that the alarm (which went off in camera) was set 10C too low. To this day people think the RED ONE overheats. I heard it yesterday from Guillermo Navarro, the DP for Guillermo Toro, when he stopped by. And he owns 4 RED ONEs... which by the way have never overheated."
Hee hee. Even if you live to be 120, when they finally lay you to rest and the preacher is relating your story, when he gets to the part about RED, there will still be people in the crowd will nod knowingly to each other and mutter knowingly: “But of course you know the RED Ones had overheating problems…”
Count on it.
I would have suggested you set up a simple table of FAQs and common misconceptions that explained these sort of things. Then again....
A long time ago in a film rental company far far away (well, not it’s really anywhere now since it no longer exists) I built a 100 or so flicker-free colour video tap cameras. They were based on a commercial Hitachi surveillance camera, and cost us a mere `$2,500 or so each to make.
The closest commercially available competitor from CEI cost $17,500, had no anti-flicker system, was horribly over-designed and functionally, was a piece of junk compared to mine. (I know, because we inherited some from our competitors when we bough them out). Functionally comparable units were available from Arri, but they cost as much as a fully equipped RED One, were terribly unreliable, and delivery times were measured in years.
Knowing the sometimes cretinous nature of film crews, much thought was put into making my cameras as bullet-proof as possible. The original AC power supply module was replaced with a 12V regulated power supply that could run on an input voltage anywhere between 8 Volts and 37 Volts, and was virtually impossible to destroy. Since we had both 12V and 24V Arri cameras, and Arri 435s running on 30V SunGun batteries for high speed work, this was obviously a huge advantage. We largely slaughtered the opposition, particularly since we wouldn’t rent out a video door without the rest of the film camera.
(It’s interesting that a video tap camera that cost us about $2,500 to make, rented for $595 a day! With a 16mm Arri 16SR2, the film camera rented for considerably less than the colour video tap, and once you added the monitor/recorder, you were getting close to twice the cost for video assist! Just shows how important video assist is/was…
Then again, we also had perfectly good 3-year-old Tube Betacams, which cost more than an Epic in today’s money, and which were no-questions-asked broadcast-quality, as well as coming with a pretty good zoom lens, batteries and charger etc. They were listed for $295 a day, and you couldn’t give those away, because they were perceived as “outdated”, so go figure….)
Anyway, after several months of almost entirely trouble-free operation, I started getting reports that my video taps were “overheating”. So I got one that was reported as faulty, and ran it for severaL days, with blankets on it and so on, and it never missed a beat. I returned it to service, and after a few months looked at the rental record, but there was no sign of further trouble. Then I got another one, same story. Then another one a couple of months later.
So I started looking more closely at the rental records, and I noticed the problem only seemed to occur when they were using an Arri 435. So I hooked a supposedly faulty one up to a 30V battery and ran it until the battery went flat; never missed a beat. So, I put it in an oven and heated it up slowly to about 90ºC, which was too hot to touch. The colour balance went way off and the picture got very noisy, but the camera otherwise worked perfectly, and worked as well as ever when it cooled down. WTF?
Two of the exact same cameras were also built into the Moviecams that were used to shoot all six seasons of “Xena Warrior Princess”, without a single hitch, so I was pretty sure the battery voltage had nothing to do with it.
Then I got lucky. There was a report of a video tap “overheating” in a studio just up the road. I dashed up there, took one look at it, and the answer was instantly and infuriatingly obvious.
(To save space if nothing else, expletives have been deleted from the following text…).
The video camera was being powered from the 11-pin Fischer socket.
To explain, all Arri 12 Volt cameras came with an 11-pin Fischer socket, which allows you to add accessories, as well as remotely control the camera itself. It also supplies an unswitched 12 Volts from the battery. The later “Grey” Arri 24 Volt cameras had a “legacy” 11-pin Fischer socket, but all that did was supply 12 Volts to run video cameras, lens controllers etc. In their Krauty obsession with over-designing things, for some reason Arri limited the 12V output current to 600milliamps (0.6 Amps). If you even momentarily exceed that figure, the 12V power supply shuts down and you have to disconnect and reconnect the 24V battery to reset it. Which makes it just about useless for most accessories, like on-board monitors, non-Arri video taps etc…
Since my cameras drew very close to 600 milliamps, I made it clear from day #1, (or so I thought) that it cannot be run from a legacy Fischer socket, and I made up cables that allowed it to run from the RS socket, which supplies a nice stiff 24 Volts.
My first thought was that, as happens all too often, one of the many brainless would-be “Mr Johnny-can-do’s” who infest this industry had come up with a “solution” to the problem of the otherwise-occupied RS Socket.
“Where did you get that cable from?” I asked pleasantly.
“It was supplied with the camera.”
“WHAT?!!”
Yep, sure enough, one of the brain-damaged troglodytes that infested the camera Prep section had this brilliant idea of making up some 4-pin Cannon to 11-pin Fischer cables, and thought they’d show some initiative by making them up themselves and not bother the engineering department. (Years later I discovered that every Arri 24V camera that went out had been running with its metal case connected to the battery positive! It was only when it blew the crap out of somebody else’s LCD monitor, that I discovered that the 20 or so “spare” cables somebody had made up were all wired incorrectly…). Did I ever tell you about the time somebody there decided we needed to fit an earth wire to some double-insulated monitors? Oh, skip it...
The “overheating problem” was now quite straightforward. When the video camera was cold, it drew about 580 milliamps. As it warmed up, the DC-to-DC converter became a bit less efficient (probably as the copper wire in the converter transformer warmed up), and the current climbed over 600mA, shutting down the Arri Fischer power supply. So therefore: “The video camera was overheating”
Then about a year after I left the place, one of the people I used to work with there told me the ex-TV repairman they hired to replace me had been busily replacing all the DC-to-DC converters with a new type, which was supposed to cure the “overheating” problem, but strangely enough, it didn’t….
By this time they had been bought out by Panavision (I only officially worked for PV for about 18 months, which was about 12 months too long)*, and the decision was made to replace all the video taps with a new (and operationally inferior) type designed by a couple of ex-CEI employees at PVLA.
I was talking to some industry people a few months back, and I brought up the subject of video tap cameras. They mentioned that the new cameras apparently didn’t work as well as well as the old “Hitachi” ones, but they didn’t have the “overheating” problem… (The new cameras only drew about 400mA so the "overheating problem" was then "solved", which was a damned expensive way of solving a problem that never existed in the first place).
So even though PV Sydney no longer have many film cameras of any kind, and the Hitachi taps have probably been landfill for 10 years, the myth still lives on…
*One of PV’s endless line of ex-CEOs Bob Beicher once asked me why I disliked his company so much, I basically gave him a 20-page essay full of stories like the above; I only stopped because I got tired of typing….
