[00:00:00] Hey there, I’m PhotoJoseph, and if you’re watching this video because you scanned the QR code on my backpack, then this video is going to explain what you saw us doing at NAB! And if you’re watching this video because you’re subscribed to my channel — thank you! — and you are going to now see what we are doing at NAB. And of course if you’re watching this after NAB, then you’ll be able to see all the content we created, and this video will explain how it was made.
[00:00:21] So let’s get started here. First of all, this project is being sponsored by ATOMOS so thank you very much ATOMOS for putting this together for us. What we’re essentially doing is creating short stories on the show floor of all the interesting companies, technology, and people that we come across. We being; myself and my buddy Aaron Parecki. He and I are both going to be doing this, taking turns shooting and being on camera, so be sure you’re following BOTH of our social channels — all those listed here below.
[00:00:46] So the short stories that we’re going to be shooting are not going to be done just on our phones — oh no no! — we’re doing this with a proper camera! So here’s how this whole thing works, and what makes this so incredibly cool. Let’s take you through the rigging.
[00:00:58] First of all, we have here the Lumix S5II. The S5II is a full frame LUMIX camera that is going to allow us to shoot in super high quality — in fact, we’re not just shooting HD or 4K — we’re shooting Open Gate, and I’ll explain why in a moment.
[00:01:10] The video footage that we shoot here goes into the Ninja V which has the ATOMOS Connect system on it. That means that the footage we shoot will have proxy files uploaded to the cloud — to the ATOMOS Cloud — which will then be passed on to frame.io.
[00:01:22] We have a remote editor in Los Angeles who’ll be grabbing those clips in near real-time, pulling them into Adobe Premiere, editing out short format videos — these are going to be vertical format videos — pushing them back up to frame.io, where we can review them and then post them on our social channels. That’s the gist of it, so let me explain exactly why things are configured here the way that they are.
[00:01:42] The first thing you’ll notice is that the camera is mounted vertically, and I already said I’m shooting open gate. And if you’ve watched me talk about open gate on the channel before, you might be thinking “well hold on a minute; why are you shooting it vertically?!”
[00:01:51] When you shoot open gate, you’ve got plenty of resolution to go wide for a widescreen delivery, and tall for a vertical delivery, all from the same shot. That is true from the final footage — from the final 6K file that comes out of the camera — however that’s NOT what we’re actually cutting the social shorts from. We’re cutting those from the proxies, and the proxies are 1920x1080.
[00:02:12] So if I shoot horizontally, that means I’ve got a 1920 wide with actual pillar boxes on it, because it’s a 3:2 aspect ratio, and 1080 tall, which is not really enough for a vertical, social media short, which really wants to be 1920 tall. So we didn’t want to scale from 1080 up to 1920 — too much!
[00:02:28] So the solution I came up with was to go ahead and rotate the camera vertically, so we’re getting a 1920 tall (that will have some letterboxing on it but not much — we’re gonna have to scale the footage up about 15% if we want to go full height, so not too bad), and we are going to have a final width of the actual final file that comes out in 6K of wider than 3840! It is… it is… uh well here I’ll put the pixels here of how many pixels wide it is! That’s the full resolution of the file. But we will have a wider than 4K vertical file for our final 16x9 delivery that we’ll do after the show.
[00:03:00] So we’re going to be able to edit a widescreen recap of the show later, but from the show floor, being 1920 tall — minus just a little bit — footage that’ll be coming off the proxy files is what the editor will be cutting from.
[00:03:13] So again, we’ve got the S5II vertically mounted here, feeding into the ATOMOS Connect. This is the Ninja V here; we got the Ninja V with the ATOMOS Connect system on it — you can see the antennas here that are going to be feeding that footage up to the cloud.
[00:03:25] Now you might be wondering “how in the world are we going to get this up to the cloud?” Is it just going to go through my cell phone? Is it just going to go through the NAB Wi-Fi? If you’ve been to NAB before, you know the Wi-Fi is not so reliable. So what we’re actually doing instead, is we’re going to be using a system called a Sclera.
[00:03:41] The Sclera is a bonded cellular modem setup — that I don’t have with me yet, so I’m just showing you a picture of it on screen — this I’ll be picking up when I first get into NAB — and that is going to give us a really robust reliable wireless system to get the footage up to the cloud.
[00:03:56] For audio, you can see here that I’ve got the LUMIX XLR1 on here. This allows me to mount multiple XLR inputs, so I have on here a RØDE NTG-2 that’s feeding into one channel — that’ll give us just some nice, ambient, “everything” noise — and then I have a wireless receiver for a Sennheiser handheld mic. So Aaron or myself (whoever is hosting) will be able to have this in hand, and talking to whatever guest we might be talking to. That’ll give us really good clean audio and it’ll give the editor two different audio tracks to mix from.
[00:04:22] This whole thing is being held together inside of a Kondor Blue cage. This is the new cage for the S5II. It’s such a cool cage design, because it really is designed to go vertical or horizontal. You can see I’ve even got the handle mounted up top on here. So if I want to go handheld, all I got to do is pop this off the monopod, and now we can go handheld. Now granted, I’m still tethered for the power, but this just is enough so that I can get close to something if I need to, that I don’t want to have it on the monopod for.
[00:04:50] Also on this cage system you’ll see that it is mounting on the Ninja sideways here; I can rotate this, spinning around as needed. I’ve got my beautiful Kondor Blue cables powering the S5II as well as powering the Ninja V itself, all from a single V-mount battery that is down below, and of course as the battery runs low, we’ll just swap out that V-mount.
[00:05:08] So that’s the rig that we’re shooting with and the story behind what we’re doing at NAB. If you’re watching this during NAB and there is some tech, some company — something that you want to know more about on the show floor — drop us a comment in one of the videos that we’ve posted on the socials! We’ll be monitoring those, and if we see something that we haven’t covered yet, we’ll do our best to get out there and hit it. So thank you again very much for watching I hope you enjoy this tour of the tech here and I’ll see you guys in the next video!
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