Travis Fox Films: Blog

First and (hopefully) last product review

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 11:08:00 -0400

I’ve never done a product review in this forum, nor do I want to start. But I’ve recently had the misfortune to purchase something so horrible that I had to share it here. In short, I wanted Litepanels LED lights, but I was too cheap. Not to mention I rarely use lights, so I thought I could skimp.

So I skimped my way over to Cool Lights. CL’s Richard Andrewski is active on filmmaker and lighting online forums and effectively reassures weary customers concerned that they’re buying the cheapest LED lights on the market. At $449, they’re less than a third of the price of the Litepanels equivalent… and brighter!

The first set of lights I bought were indeed bright, but there was something strange. One was much brighter than the other (my light meter indicated more than one-stop difference). There also seemed to be a color difference. I talked to Richard on the phone and he said variations are expected and essentially that’s why Cool Lights are cheaper than its competitors. Litepanels use the best LEDs, which have little variance, while Cool Lights get the rest. Typically, Cool Lights employees match lights when ordered in pairs and seemingly that wasn’t done with my order. Richard graciously overnighted me a matched pair.

And that’s when things got very strange. The new pair were matched in the beginning, but that quickly changed. I was using one light as my main light in an interview and the second as the background fill. As you can see in the video below, the background light— which was dimmed to about 25%— gradually got brighter and brighter BY ITSELF in the middle of the interview. The clip below is 8 minutes sped up to 11 seconds. I blurred the face of the subject for privacy.

In the middle of the interview I thought I was going crazy. Did I set the background light so bright? I was forced to stop the interview to turn it back down, back to approximately to the brightness I originally set it at. The craziness continued! The light then went the opposite way and dimmed itself so much that it basically went black.

The lesson was one I should have already known. You get what you pay for. I shipped those lights back as soon as the interview was over.

The Franken-Camera

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:40:00 -0400

Recently, a couple people have asked me about my (and these are not my words) ghetto fabulous or franken-camera Canon 7d video system. In some ways, the DSLR system for me simply represents a better camera, not a fundamental shift in video storytelling. Over the years, I’ve changed cameras when technology changed and quality got better but my style has more-or-less remained constant.

The biggest reason I had for not adopting the DSLR sooner was ergonomics. I could deal with the lack of timecode, the audio fixes and the overheating, but I simply couldn’t hand hold the thing steady and interact with my characters at the same time. I wanted a DSLR built like the Sony Z1U, which I used lovingly for years. I checked out all the standard “rigs”, the Zacuto and the Redrock Micro, but they seemed to push me towards holding the camera like a Betacam, not cradling it like a baby or a football as is my practice.

In the end, I ended up saving money and getting a fit I could deal with. A $8 bracket (it’s literally the cheapest flash bracket that B&H stocks) holds the Ikan monitor out in front to the left of the lens just like the Z1U. I splurged on the other bracket (it was a hundred bucks), which holds the audio gear and balances the camera out by moving weight to the back of the camera.

When setting up a DSLR rig, it always seems to be two steps forward and one step back. I was concerned about weight so I opted for the M-Audio Microtrack audio recorder instead of the other options with XLR inputs. (I had long ago abandoned trying to deal with the camera’s audio) But the battery on the Microtek sucks, so I had to use a separate USB battery to charge the thing when its non-replaceable battery dies in the middle of the day. Still, the weight of both units is still considerably less than the other options.

With the ergonomics worked out, one of the first assignments I had was series of stories with NPR’s Adam Davidson in Haiti for PBS/FRONTLINE. As soon as I headed out in the hot Haitian sun I was soon confronted with a series of new issues to work out. The biggest surprise was the overheating. I had worked with 5D in the Chihuahuan desert in July, so I thought I was prepared, but in Haiti the 7D would shut down sometimes only after 30 minutes of shooting in the heat of the day. I quickly changed the way I work in order to minimize this DSLR flaw.

The other biggest headache was one I expected. My plan was to sync the audio at the end of each day of shooting. I used Plural Eyes and it worked about 90 percent of the time. Great, but that other 10 percent had detrimental effect on my sleep during the 12 days I was in Haiti. After I had synced the audio, I exported the whole day’s shoot into one file in XDCAM422 30p format (This is a standard at FRONTLINE and we chose the format so it would more easily integrate with their avid systems). That exported file became, for all practical purposes, my raw file. I imported into a new project to edit the piece. I also sent these files to FRONTLINE for them to prep the films for television broadcast.

Since the Haitian trip, the newest headache is keeping pace of changes to the DSLR system. Manual audio controls on the 5d has made me question my decision to go with the 7d and makes me wonder if a similar audio fix will come to the 7d or if I should switch back to the 5d. And with the release of Avid 5, the technical folks at FRONTLINE report that they will soon be able to deal with native 5d/7d files, which will (thank god!) save me tons of time converting everything to other formats.

A blog is launched (oh dear...)

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:35:00 -0400

Welcome to the new TravisFox.com!

As with any self-respecting website, a blog is an absolute requirement. So here goes, I’m going to try my best-est to actually blog a little bit about my work, thoughts about everything from boring technical camera stuff to high-minded rants about documentary filmmaking and journalism. No guarantees that I’ll actually be able to sustain the effort with, you know, my day job and all. Twitter is hard enough.

As for the site, this is, of course, a work in progress. Take a look around and let me know how much of it is not actually working. The video… uh, Films page isn’t quite ready yet, so we’re just linking to vimeo for the time being, but the rest might actually be working. So let me know what works, what doesn’t, what we should keep, and what we should lose (besides my videos).