Acclaimed Wildlife Cinematographer Mark Payne-Gill’s verdict
on the Phantom VEO4K: “More efficient and more productive”, written after
having used the Phantom VEO 4K to shoot Owls in April 2018, in contrast to his
extensive experience using the Phantom FLEX 4K.
It’s part of the job description of every natural history
filmmaker to travel, often overseas, typically to remote locations or extreme
environments - or both – and without the luxury of a porter to lug the gear for
them.
Any innovation that can reduce the payload, improve
versatility and still deliver the unique perspective on a subject is game for
wildlife cinematographers and Mark Payne-Gill is no exception.
A highly skilled lighting documentary, wildlife cameraman
and naturalist, Payne-Gill is renowned for excelling in long lens,
high speed and macro cinematography along with more specialised experience
with time-lapse, motion control and low light night filming. With over thirty
years field craft experience, his credits include BBC Natural History
Unit’s critically acclaimed Blue Planet 2, Planet Earth 2 and Planet
Earth series and Offspring Films’ Big Cats: Amazing Animal
Family for which he was BAFTA nominated for best cinematography in 2016.
“A lot of what I do is needing to be reactive and to just
grab a camera and run with it,” he says. “Anything that gives me more freedom
to work in those situations in a way that is more efficient and more productive
is attractive to me.”
The Phantom Flex 4K broke ground with its ability to
record high speed action at 1000 frames a second in 4K. Payne-Gill had used it
extensively including in the Namibian desert to capture the behaviour of
insects and small reptiles. Yet its 6.3kg weight and bulk meant it was not
designed with the needs of the wildlife photographer in mind.
“Just carrying the Flex for 50 yards to another position to
catch different light is more of an effort than it should be which is why I was
excited to try the compact Phantom VEO 4K,” says Payne-Gill.
The VEO 4K builds on the Phantom’s imaging legacy with
identical sensor technology but in a package which provides exceptional
economy of movement and of budget.
Payne-Gill took one of the first models in the UK, at VMI,
out to a meadow and woodland area owned by bird specialists and handlers Lloyd
& Rose Buck near Bristol to test record owls in flight.
“The first thing that struck me was just how compact the
camera is. Fully stripped-down, the body weight is just 2.5kg and
that means you can carry this in a single Peli. A Flex plus accessories means
you are having to pack three cases so there’s an immediate cost saving there
and less hassle for the team in terms of lugging boxes around.
He continues, “Whereas the Flex needs a power hungry
120-150W and several big block batteries requiring separate Peli cases, the VEO
4K only draws 80W and the power lasted really well on a normal
V-Lock. That on its own is a game-changer for streamlining your travel
kit. Smaller, in this case, gives you more.”
Even better than this are the new compact Hawkwoods Mini
V-Lock batteries which are ideally suited to working with the Phantom VEO 4K
camera.
Like the Flex4K, the camera hardware includes a global
shutter and optical low pass filter. The camera can be placed in a hide or on a
jib/crane and remotely controlled via an optional wireless control
unit (including control of the capture process and allowing playback
mode of all controls, save and transfer commands too).
“Although the master controls of the camera were, for me,
sited in an awkward place, the main menu system itself felt very easy to
navigate and certainly no issue for anyone familiar with Phantom operation.”
The beauty of the VEO’s size is a big bonus for any
camera-operator, enabling them to hand hold or shoulder mount it for longer.
“When you’re shooting very short clips of 2 seconds duration then stabilization
is not necessarily an issue but the VEO’s lighter weight also means that you
can mount the camera on a gimbal, crane, jib or on board a heavier-duty drone
without issue.”
The workflow with the VEO 4K is just the same as with its
bigger brother. You can record continually onto its onboard RAM and halt the
recording function by activating a trigger to ensure that you never miss an
event. However, the main selling point of the Flex - its superfast
download of media to CineMags which can be accomplished in seconds - could be
the Achilles heel of the VEO4K.
“The VEO4K boasts a sizeable 72GB internal storage but
offload is to C-Fast 2.0 cards, a workflow that is undoubtedly slower,” says
Payne-Gill. “In continual shoot mode you would press the button to halt
recording so that all 72GB is filled. After this, set to replay mode,
then scrub to locate start and end points, assign handlebars, then delete all
unwanted material.”
He calculates that a 10 second clips at 1000fps with Flex
would take about 40 seconds to download “but often you are trimming it to maybe
a third of that and you can be done in 15 seconds”. By contrast, 5.6 seconds of
1000fps capture on the VEO4K will play out for almost 4 minutes when
played at 25 fps: “That’s when your workflow in the field starts to slow up -
if you are saving a lot of clips.
Payne Gill explains that when he works he is always keen to
trim the clip as quickly as possible in the camera, making sure to discard the
media that he doesn’t need, “and ensuring that the ones I do save are as small
as possible to maintain an efficient workflow.
“In addition, you can use the partitioning function where
you can select from two shots out of the RAM and if you don’t like the first
take you can go for the second one. This will improve your efficiency. It all
comes down to managing your technique in the field. If you understand and work
with the camera’s limitations you can work extremely well without too much, if
any, of a compromise at all.
“The whole thing about the VEO4K is that it is a lot cheaper
than the Flex but that does come with a catch. On the one hand you don’t need
to carry big CineMags – which also come at a cost – but the C-Fast write speed
is comparatively slow. You’ve got to weigh up all the variables as you would
with any tool.
“For instance, the VEO 4K can be supplied with your choice
of either PL or EF mount, to enable a wide range of industry standard lenses
without limiting your choice to the most expensive film primes.
“The VEO4K will certainly allow a producer achieve superb
high-speed images in 4K at a price that they previously might not have been
able to afford.”
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