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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

View Factor DFF + Bonus

View Factor FF

View Factor FF

During the "Youtube" Demo, i could hear the motor from the FF unit.
If that was running over dialogue in a confined area, it maybe an issue.
 
Offhollywood said:
How silent are your motors?
ANY sound issues at all?
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Mark, We found that there were two major issues causing some noise, one was the aluminum gears we were using, the other was the grease filled drivetrain. We have since moved to plastic (Acetal Copolymer) gears and are now using an oil filled drivetrain. The noise should be substantially better than in the video. From my experience I'd say that the motors in the video were slightly louder than an M-One.... I think the new design should be closer to that of the Arrri Motors.

weirdcrew said:
That I've understood. My question was directed to wether there will be an "upgrade" from the standard Impero to the Pro, considering you will most probably come out with the standard first (and I'll most likely get that in the wait for Pro)?
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Fred, If you were asking if you could buy and add-on that would make your standard into a pro then the answer is no - the designs aren't modular in that respect. Maybe it will change though.

CrewPix.com said:
Not sure I'm sold on using 6 little allen screws to adjust the motor bracket. Seems time consuming.
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The protos have six screws to put the gears on - it was a quick way to verify the design but not representative of the final product. The final design has no screws - it pops on and is held in place by several detent pins.

macville said:
Curt, two questions... Should your motor be considered the RED motor, or is it different? How will you be taking reservations next week? With a deposit or like RedRock and just signup on a list?
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Well, thats a good question. Our motors were originally going to be Red motors but we couldn't deliver at a price point that made sense to go forward with Red Branding. Jim still has the red motors listed on the website so maybe he's got some plans that we're not aware of. So you guys have a decision to make... wait for Jims at $1250 ea or go for ours at $900 ea. :) We will be taking orders next week on our website (with a deposit).
 
And one can change the overall speed of the unit just by changing the final drive gear to one with a different number of teeth. Which is commonly done with manual units depending on the overall degree or throw of a given lens.
Curt,
The idea of being able to change the viewing angle the way you described sounds good.
 
chuck colburn said:
And one can change the overall speed of the unit just by changing the final drive gear to one with a different number of teeth. Which is commonly done with manual units depending on the overall degree or throw of a given lens.
Curt,
The idea of being able to change the viewing angle the way you described sounds good.
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Actually, I think the whole reason behind changing the drive gear... Curt said somewhere that you can change the throw of the FF control wheel so lens's with smaller throws don't have such a small "control throw" (aka, lenses like the RED 18-50) That way those lenses have much finer control by just changing a small setting on the FF (or maybe motor) unit.

Matthew
 
You can adjust the gearing of the motor on the fly, adjust the lens travel range, and adjust the knob travel range by pressing a couple buttons on the knob. This allows you to take lenses with limited range and expand it so the entire range of the knob controls the limited range on the lens. You can also limit a certain range on the knob to cover the full range of the lens.

Basically you shouldn't have to change out gears for anything other than getting a different pitch for the les you're using.
 
Do you have a wireless handset for this motor or is it only cable driven at the moment?
 
CVB said:
The wireless Impero can run all three of the motors but one at a time.
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Does that mean you can't do an iris pull at the same time as a focus pull?
What about zooming and focusing simultaneously? It sounds like this is not possible.
 
How much amperage does the full wireless+3 motors draw? If the brain and one motor approaches the 1A maximum output from the rear Lemo... it's fairly significant?

Also, what's the "resolution" of the digital control? How many steps are there per 360˚ of gear rotation?

How simple will it be to swap out the gear on set? I'm sure you've seen the thumbscrew used on the FF4... will changing gears on these motors require 6 allen bolts?
 
Brook Willard said:
...will changing gears on these motors require 6 allen bolts?
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Hi Brook, hope all is well, this from Curt in a post above... "The protos have six screws to put the gears on - it was a quick way to verify the design but not representative of the final product. The final design has no screws - it pops on and is held in place by several detent pins."

I look forward to hearing from Curt on your other questions.

Cheers,

Andrew
 
Evin, The motors can do simultaneous moves and have no problems running at the same time. The Impero standard will be similar to a bartech in that you only have one input device - the knob. The difference is that you can hit a button and jump over to iris or zoom and do quick adjustments then go back to focus. I added a couple buttons for each axis that provide presets for two positions... if you are riding the focus and need to jump from preset one to preset two on the iris, then you can hit one of the buttons to jump between them. Same for the other two axis. The ramping and speed are adjustable using some pots on the back of the unit. You can override the presets so you don't accidentally hit them during normal use and you can also lock out the control so it only operates the currently selected axis.

We are using zigbee for the wireless so it uses an architecture that is digitally encrypted... no interference. The plus side is that you can map multiple Imperos to the same receiver and run focus on one unit and Iris on another - great for DP's that want to do Iris. BTW, The pro will have three input devices - a microforce-like stick for zoom, a knob for focus, and a slider for iris. It will allow you to run all three functions at the same time.

Brook Willard said:
How much amperage does the full wireless+3 motors draw? If the brain and one motor approaches the 1A maximum output from the rear Lemo... it's fairly significant?
Click to expand...
For best performance you need to run at least 12V@1.5A per motor (18W) the receiver draws about 0.25 Amps@12V(6 watts). You can run one motor and the receiver of of the rear lemo on the camera no problem, three is a no-no.

Brook Willard said:
Also, what's the "resolution" of the digital control? How many steps are there per 360˚ of gear rotation?
Click to expand...
The encoder on the motor is 13bit (8192 cpr) so that gives you a resolution of .044 degrees at the motor.... then we run it through the 50:1 zero backlash harmonic drive... the resolution is limited to the harmonic drives performance which is typically +/- 3 arc minutes (.05 degrees). We are using the same encoder on the impero control knob so you have essentially no discernible cogging... it feels just like a regular follow focus and you forget that its a motor.
 
EDIT: oops late!

Evin,

He says in the video that the motors are on a "bus" which means each one has an individual address and can be sent simultaneous commands. Just like having multiple firewire or USB devices hooked to a computer.
 
Evin Grant said:
Do we have pricing/availabiliy for the pro yet?
Thanks Curt.
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The pro is going to lag about a month or two behind the standard version... mainly due to the horrendous amounts of coding we're going to have to do. Pricing is expected to be $1200 but I reserve the right to tweak that. The pro will have a full color graphical interface and lens database. We're not only getting the lens limits for displaying the zoom,focus, and iris values on screen but were also mapping out the lens performance curves to get a relation between focal length and lens breathing. All of the data will be available online so you can download the info to an SD card to use in the pro. Lots of work ahead :) - Luckily were getting some contractors soon.
 
You really should test it in the salt air in Kailua.
Aloha
-A
 
Hi Curt,

What would you say would be the best way of doing this, for us that wants the Pro? I would love to have two (for each of my cameras) Impero micro and Pro as a solution. Can your considered Pro "packaged deal" be added afterwards, if I got the Micro? They're both using same motors?

The way I see it is to get the Micro and then bite the bullet and nicely stay put and try to not buy the standard when it comes out. As the Pro gets out I would just include to the motor already purchased in the micro system? Would that that be feasible for you?

Thanks


fred
 
Fred, Let em think about that a bit... I'm sure we'll have some sort of package deals but the savings aren't going to be huge - Our margins are pretty low so there's not a lot of room for much discounting. I'll see what we can work out.
 
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