BTM_Pix

To be serious for a moment, the amount of abuse that @Andrew Reid took from the shills, bootlickers, click merchants, grudge bearers and other assorted snide gobshites portraying him as being some sort of deranged bitter outlier who "You can always count on to be negative" for basically reading Canon's own words out to them was pathetic but very informative. I wouldn't hold out much hope of most of those people organising an apology pile on with the same gusto they organised an abuse one because, of course, thats not how they (t)roll but at least they've shown their hand about who they really are. I do hope it represents some sort of tipping point for the wider world in terms of the scales falling from their eyes about this sort of marketing though. In particular, I hope that if the R5 and R6 issues are improved or mitigated at launch or during its life cycle that people remember that the fire (ho ho) that was lit under Canon's arse to address this wasn't sparked by sycophancy.

I hope its a new camera purely on the basis that I'm running out of heat related barbs about the R5 and R6. Oh, hang on.... As opposed to a roaring fire like the R5 and R6. Phew.

Initially it will be for the electronic lenses of P4K/P6K but the motor driver interface is a separate module so it can be added to the system later. As a system, the PBC controls the camera and acts as a hub to wirelessly integrate the other modules such as the two AF adapters and the motor driver module so you can pick and choose which ones you need.

To be fair, I was very appreciative of their sage advice in that video not to listen to the biased opinions of people with relationships with manufacturers and certainly not to trust early reviews from these people. Its almost like Canon never took them on a trip to Hawaii to see the EOS-R, gave them a FREE one to giveaway as a click and subscriber booster on their channel and put out a review so speedily it was actually shot in their paid for hotel room isn't it ? Almost.

I enjoy his channel but if ever there was a wrong camera for him it is this one as it would have overheated by the time he got to his second point.

Tony knows Phoneeeey ? Interesting frame that though as he's got that anxious look of a man who's wife has had a couple of gins and is about to make some frank statements to his friends.

Can't believe no one has said "Fro Knows Promo" yet

Its not far off £1300 cheaper in some places. And thats just for a brand new one. By the time travel opens up again you'll be able to go and get a used one that has only minor internal smoke damage for a lot less.

Yeah, a constant linear offset won't be sufficient in most cases so our calibration will be with a connected tracked map of each motor. The calibration procedure for this system connects observed focus with measured distance at multiple points rather than the overall scale, as opposed to the PBC on its own which only needs two point to map this to range of the focus wheel. Display of distance on the unit, whether you are using electronic lenses on the P4K/P6K or manual lenses on motors (which will be included later), is something that you will get for free anyway. The precision of the Nucleus Nano system is actually 0-999 by the way rather than 0-100.

I think YouTube camera review videos shot on unusual cameras would be good. Like an R5 review shot on a thermal imaging camera for example.

Should be easy for someone to make a non tape based solution then to plug the hole. Although.... Maybe someone enterprising could incorporate an exhaust fan into that slot for the R5 users 😉

Thats good to know. The AF bit, not the dust bit. Not sure why BH don't address that on the "most helpful" bad review of it on their site !

I understand it disables the AF if you don't have either filter in. I'm guessing its microswitches inside the host adapter that are pressed when you slide them in so the camera knows you have inserted one or the other. So if its just physical then someone could make an empty 3D printable version of the holder to trick it.

Its still coming along. Or should I say they are coming along as there will now likely be two different options. I'll endeavour to show something of each of them in the next two weeks and the plan is currently to open pre-orders for them at the end of August for at least one of them. Component supply for prototyping has been a major issue as the design has been changing. Dual and offset is certainly doable but outside of the initial scope.

Well I suppose its all relative compared to what sort of tripod head you are using to do the tests now. Whatever the turntable or dolly are bringing to the party negatively, it is at least 100% repeatable and measurable so you can build it in. The turntables are gear driven which gives less variation than a belt driven one and the dolly can be run on a thin rubber mat to absorb the bumps. If you do have a slider then as long as you have some vertical drop space (i.e. put it on a tripod) then you could use a weight attached to a string one end of the carriage to pull it as it falls. A water bottle would do the trick as the weight as you could regulate the speed by how much water you put in. Nothing is going to be ideal unfortunately unless you want to throw a lot more money at it so you'd have to consider how much of a marginal gain any of it will bring you in terms of this project and whether thats worth it. Its all money you could be spending on buying a used EPIC and Motion Mount instead 😉

The turntable or the dolly ?

For a sub £20 budget option, there are plenty of battery operated product display turntables available on Amazon that you can just plonk the camera down in the centre of and will do the job for repeatable panning. If you want something a bit more elaborate and don't mind spending the extra £40-50 then Neewer and Andoer make very neat little motorised dollies. Their wheels can be set straight to do linear movements or angled to do inward or outward pans. They have different speed settings so you have a very repeatable may to monitor the impact the movement speed has on your tests and are operated by remote control. The upside is that aside from using it for your test you will also then have a film making tool that is a bit more creative than a turntable and can be put in your pocket and taken on holiday to up those production values !

I always found it an interesting example of the reality gap between what everyone says they need, in this case global shutter, and how many people actually then buy it. You don't exactly see a lot of them about.

While you are down this rabbit hole, you might want to take a look at the RED Motion Mount that they did for the EPIC. http://docs.red.com/955-0013/REDMOTIONMOUNTOperationGuide/Content/1_MM_Intro/1_Intro.htm As well as doing vari ND, it had a few tricks including simulating soft shutter and square shutter. There are links within that page to other explanatory documents about the process. What may be of use to you are the videos of it in action such as this one as its a unique reference really to how the look of the same camera can be changed with these simulations.

What has that got to do with what I said ?

Yes, I know. The broader point was that wherever that heat was coming from, Sigma had a strategy front and centre in the design to deal with it. Their initial presentation of the fp made as much if not more of an issue about it as they did about any other individual feature of the camera. It doesn't make Sigma any more right or wrong than Canon, just that they placed much more emphasis on it as an integral aspect of the design. Which left them no time to do any AF 😉

Sigma designed a heatsink and attached a camera to it. Seems they had some sort of intuition that full frame cameras in small bodies might run a bit on the warm side. Considering the gulf in price between the R5 and the nearest camera with a comparable spec, I'm sure some enterprising company could make some money rehousing them into more cinema camera style bodies with a proper cooling system. If this thing was £2K dearer and didn't overheat then I'm sure no one who wanted 8K RAW would baulk at that price. People have been cinevising stills lenses for years so maybe its time to do the same with bodies.

If your camera has PDAF then there aren't any. If it doesn't, then it can be faster than what you do have. The real benefit is in when you camera has absolutely no AF of its own.... But its not all sweetness and light.

Yeah, maybe they should have approached Sigma and swapped some AF tech for some cooling tech ! I think there could have been an opportunity for them to do something creative with a battery grip style accessory that mounted underneath the camera. Something like a removable/sliding section on the camera bottom plate which the cooling elements and fan in the base unit could then utilise to get at the internals whilst still sealing them to the outside world. That would suit both sides of the argument by not having to have something elaborate internally which many people might not need but also offering a factory solution for those who do want to use the more flammable features of the camera.

I'll be sitting this one out as I've no intention of spending £4K on anything that doesn't have an engine or four wheels for a goodly long time. There have been a number of people in the past that have used removable heat sinks on the rear of their (usually Sony) camera for those with tiltable screens such as this Something like that may help, not least because you've also removed the contact of the screen to the main body and I suspect running it on external power instead of the internal battery won't do it any harm either. But all of these sorts of solutions remind me very much of the payoff line at the end of a famous UK public information film from when I was a kid on how to mobilise the family to deal with a burst water pipe.