Review: Tascam DR-40

I talked about DSLR microphones in the past (check this link) and how they add extra quality to your video. We can take this a notch further and use a separate sound recorder instead of using the recorded audio from the camera. We have a Tascam DR-40 to our disposal so why not give it a quick review. We made a video about it so check that out first and then continue to read the article where we cover some extra ground compared to the video.

The video

Why use an external sound recorder?

Sound recorders have much more features than the built in recorder of a DSLR. Let's mention the most important ones and compare those to the Tascam DR-40.

• Most DSLR's have limited input level control. It is done automatically or they have only a few settings. The Tascam can be finely tuned thanks to the graphical metering and the input level buttons.
• Unless you use a stereomic on your DSLR you will get only one channel of sound on your video. The Tascam DR-40 has up to 4 channels of sound available (two of which are used by the internal condenser mics). They can be used to record separate mics but also for recording a duplicate of a single mic where the second channel can be lowered in volume. This way if your main channel peaks by accident the second channel will still be good.
• The bit rate of the DSLR is usually set to a fixed value and is baked into the video. Most sound recorders allow you to record low quality as well as high quality and it is of course always a separate file. That allows you to use different types of compression like mp3. Even the sampling rate can be adjusted. The Tascam-DR40 goes from 44.1kHz to 96kHz and saves them as 16 bit or 24 bit. 
• The Tascam DR-40 has 2 XLR input connectors which provide phantom power. This allows you to use high quality condenser mics like a boom mic or Lavalier mics. Phantom power allows you to use long cables so you don't have to set up the mic close to the recorder if you don't want to.
• Since it is a separate recorder you aren't bound to the camera's location either. You can use a long lens and just leave the recorder close to the subject you are filming.

The Tascam DR-40

So now that we have seen some advantages of an external sound recorder it is time to look at the DR-40 a bit more closely.

The unit is made out of plastic. Only the protection bracers for the condenser mics are metal. Dropping it is not a good idea so handle it with care. It has an LCD screen with amber colored backlight and decent buttons for accessing its many features. The play, record and stop buttons are nicely centered and big so no worries pressing the wrong button with the fat fingers syndrome there.

You need 3 AA batteries for powering the unit. It allows you to use rechargeable batteries and even has a setting to change the type so the charge level is displayed correctly. The USB port can also be used to power the unit. This is really recommended when using phantom powered condenser mics as they will drain the batteries rather fast.

The sound is recorded to an SD/SDHC card. There is a 2GB card in the box when you buy it. That looks small for todays standard but it is enough for several hours of good quality sound. So far I haven't seen the necessity to upgrade the card. Your recordings can be uncompressed WAV files or compressed MP3 files. 

The built in condenser mics can be set in an A-B or X-Y configuration.

As mentioned before, you can record up to 4 channels simultaneously when using the two built in mics and two external mics.

The unit has a whole list of features which would take me too much into detail to explain here. Stuff like overdubbing, auto-record when a certain sound input is detected, pre-recording period of 2 seconds, limiter controls, tuner function for tuning your instruments and much more are available.

My experience with the unit

I use this unit mostly with 2 Shure Lavalier mics and so far I think it is a really good piece of equipment. I think it is one of the cheapest units around with powered XLR inputs. It is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and is lightweight.

The sound quality is great but I did notice that when I import the files into Adobe Premiere that they tend to sound really quiet. I always have to boost the volume quite a bit. Luckily this doesn't have an impact on the quality as the noise levels are equally as low.

Transferring the sound to disk is super easy. Just use the USB cable and plug the unit into your computer. It will show up as a USB drive for easy access. You can also take the SD card out but it is well protected by a sturdy cover which needs some skill to remove so using the USB port is more convenient.

I love the headphones jack for in the field monitoring. This is really missing on most DSLR's. The on screen metering and the peak warning LED are great but hearing your sound directly is way better. You can immediately identify a bad take due to non intended noise and redo the shot. I use good closed shell headphones so I can fully concentrate on the recording itself.

Links

Check the official website to see the full feature list and some product stills.

Official Tascam DR-40 site

Playtime with the Sony NEX FS700

I get more and more filming jobs than real VFX work lately which in a way is a pitty but I also see it as an opportunity to learn new things. For one of my latest clients we needed a high speed camera. Luckily for us Sony released the NEX FS700, an affordable 1080p camera with amazing frame rates.

Not a Review

First of all I like to say this is not really a review but merely my thoughts after using the camera for two days. I didn't have time to do an in depth test or read the complete manual. We only used the camera for shooting at high frame rates as we wanted cool slow motion shots.

The Kit

The camera was a rental and came with the kit zoom lens which isn't the best glass around. It did do ok but having Nikon glass on my DSLR we are used to better. It has an apperture of 3.5 at 18mm and 5.6 at 200mm. There are lens adapters for sale so it is possible to use the glass you already own. We used a 32GB SDHC memory card which records the video in AVCHD. A great feuture is the build in ND filter. It also comes with a XLR boom mic. This is hardly important for a slow motion shoot but a great feature none the less. 

Handling the Camera and Shooting Slow Motion

If you ever used a video camera like a HVX200 then you will quickly get around using the FS700. It took us less than an hour to get used to handling the camera in manual mode.

We had the PAL version of the camera so the available frame rates for me were 200, 400 and 800 fps. The NTSC version does 240, 280  and 960 fps. At 200 fps you get full HD. The resolution goes down a bit at 400 fps but it still looks great. The resolution and quality at 800 fps really drops. So 800 fps is great fun to test but it is no longer usuable if quality is an issue. You can really see the difference, even on the LCD screen of the camera as the image gets cropped to record only a smaller section of the sensor.

Some remarks when shooting slow motion:

• You need extra light. The shutter speed goes up quite a bit which lowers the light input considerably. You could adjust the ISO to a higher value but that really brings out a lot of noise in the image.
• Don't use lights which are flickering like fluorecent tubes. We did the test and the flicker is horrible. Tungsten and sunlight are much safer here. We haven't checked HMI lights but as far as I know they flicker as well even with high frequency electronic ballasts. In a pinch you can get rid of bad flicker with the FurnaceCore tools from The Foundry but why fix it in post if you just avoid making the mistake while shooting.

The camera records the footage to a buffer which is only big enough for around ten seconds of footage (It depends on the frame rate you choose). After recording your scene, the camera needs time to write the images to the memory card which can take half a minute or so. It is stored as 25 fps footage so you can immediatly play it back on the camera to see if your shot is ok. We connected the camera with a HDMI cable to a monitor so the client was able to look as well without everybody having to bend over the little built in view screen.

The result of the Test

As a picture is worth a thousand words and a video even more I like to show you the video we made after an evening of test shooting. We used a 1K tungsten lamp to light the scene and shot various items at 400 fps. This is not the footage we shot for our client.

Review: Rode Videomic Pro and Stereo Videomic Pro

Sound is 50% of a movie. Most people stop watching your movie when the sound is badly recorded. With the whole revolution of shooting on DSLRs, new types of microphones have been designed. Rode has come up with the Videomic Pro and the Stereo Videomic Pro.

We have those microphones available to us so what is better than making a blog post about it? That's right, a video on our bbrevisited channel! Watch it and discover how these Rode microphones perform under different circumstances.

Some afterthoughts

I must say that it is rather annoying that the Nikon D7000 has no sound metering. This caused some of the recordings to be distorted as the signal was clipped. I did put the internal amplification on medium. The distortion could have been avoided by leaving the setting on automatic. That aside, the rest of the test went rather well.

The cardioid patterns of both microphones are very useful to pick up less sound behind the camera and more in front. They still pick up sound from a quite big environment though and do not filter as much out as a shotgun or a lavalier mic. I can agree that for the Stereo Videomic Pro this is rather an advantage than a drawback as it is designed for grabbing that environment. The big advantage for both is that they can record straight into the camera so no separate sound recorder is needed and they do beat the built in microphones of DSLRs hands down.

I found that the Videomic Pro picked up a bit more bass than the Stereo version but both performed well. The Stereo Videomic Pro records two channels which no built in mic can do.

Battery life is really not an issue. More than 70 hours on the Videomic Pro and even more than 100 hours on its stereo brother is really good performance. It will last you many days if you turn off the microphone every time you are not recording. Both microphones are also quite compact so they won't take up too much space in your bag.

If you are serious about recording sound properly I really recommend these two models from Rode.

How we made Toilet Run

Toilet Run is Belgian Boomsticks' second production.

The idea

Queueing for a public toilet is something which happens to all of us now and then but is never pleasant when you need to go urgently. It gets worse when it is out of order and you need to find another one. What happens when it becomes a race to get there first but the path to it is full of obstacles?

Since all obstacles are in different locations we wanted to have something which tied it all together. Using the map with the animated heads was the ideal solution to avoid discontinuity in environments. All obstacles are merely accidents. We didn't want them to be induced by direct rivalry between the two characters.

Equipment

We used almost the same camera and sound equipment as with Agent Orange (check this link) but we did have some extra ropes en rigs to get over the ditch. The rope was a regular  climbing rope and we had an issue getting reasonable tension on it. Without tension Jef-Aram would get wet feet rather quickly. Luckily we had a Grigri with us, which helped us tighten the rope. We know that this is not the proper way of using a Grigri but it worked and that is all what matters when you need to shoot stuff in a couple of hours time.

Again we tried to use the GoPro to get some nice shots on the cables but  the shots didn't work that well. It is better to cut them out as bad shots would bring the quality down a lot. I guess we still need to train more on how to position the GoPro camera. The lack of a viewfinder just doesn't make it easy.

Music and Sound FX

We tapped again into our royalty free library of music and sound FX but this time we also added more of our own foley recordings. All cloth movement and some impacts were done by us. We noticed that when two objects collide you do not need one sound but two. Both objects have their own distinguished sound. The truck hitting Jef-Aram is a combination of a metal sound from the body of the truck and a human impact sound. This makes it much more dramatic.

Post Production

The first small bits to fix were the toilets. As a matter of fact those are not toilets at all but electricity booths. The first one was solved practically with the"out of order" messages. On the second one we painted out the voltage signs and added a toilet sign in After Effects.

A bit of more work was the map. We designed one big map in illustrator and colored it in Photoshop. The colored map was then taken into After Effects for the animation. In the end we showed only a fraction of the map in the clip. It was useful to draw the whole map as it gave us more continuity while editing.

The full map. Click to enlarge.

The biggest challenge in compositing was the truck hitting Jef-Aram. We first wanted to hit him with me driving a car but since all the obstacles were more things that just happened as accidents instead of direct rivalry, that seemed too violent. We decided to go for a truck instead of a car as the impact would be more dramatic. The problem was that we didn't know anybody at all who could drive us a truck. At first we were thinking of using an image of a truck but that idea was quickly ditched as we realized there is no perspective change on a translating image. So we jumped in the car and drove around an industry area where lots of trucks pass by. Most people are not too happy getting caught on camera so instead of filming a truck passing by we drove by a parked truck ourselves. This gives exactly the same result in perspective change. After some rotowork and color grading the truck fitted right in.

A still of the truck while driving past it. Just using a photo of a truck would never have the right perspective change while driving by.

The truck moves so fast that it was not even necessary to animate the wheels properly to make the effect convincing enough. Luckily for us the weather was the same as on the day of shooting the electricity booths. The cloudy sky provides soft shadows in both images.

What's next?

Jef-Aram and I are already working on our next short. Make sure to stay tuned. You can do this by following us on twitter or by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Links:

Belgian Boomsticks YouTube Channel

Jef-Aram's Blog

Frederic's Twitter Page

Jef-Aram's Twitter Page

How we made Agent Orange

Jef-Aram Van Gorp and I joined forces as the Belgian Boomsticks and we produced our first YouTube short. In this post I explain the how we made it all happen.

The Idea

Jef-Aram and I are fans of shorts like the ones made by Freddie Wong and Brandon Laatsch. They are low budget, have decent enough effects and have often great stories. 

Since making shorts is fun we decided to give it a go ourselves. Guns and action are always well received with the YouTube public but we wanted an original angle on this so Jef-Aram came up with the idea of using bananas as guns just like kids usually do. To extend this a bit we added the double barrel leek to the arsenal.

With the general theme being fruit and vegetables, sugar and salt was quickly added as the so called drugs as these are bad when eating them in big quantities.

We consider this a hobby project so we had only limited amount of time and resources to complete this next to our full time jobs.

Equipment on set

We both have some filming equipment so we threw everything together for this shoot.

Camera's:

• Panasonic HVX 200
• Nikon D7000
• Canon 600D/T3i
• GoPro Hero2

Sound:

• Rode VideoMic Pro
• Rode NTG2
• Rode NTA2 (studio Mic for additional sounds)

and also some tripods and the Edelkrone Pocket Rig (Link to Edelkrone Pocket Rig review).

The HVX 200 is an older camera so it was the limiting factor resolution wise. 720P is more than enough for YouTube so we decided to stick to that. 

The biggest problem when shooting with different camera's is color balance. Every camera has it own characteristics so we had to solve this one in post production. We did make the mistake to shoot a bit overexposed. The H264 codec in the DSLR's is a lossy 8bit format and does limit the things you can do when color channels get clipped to their maximum value.

We left out any footage from the GoPro camera. Although we had some cool shots, the angle was so wide that even the shadow of the camera man filming with one of the other camera's was in view. Since we don't have a clip on LCD screen for the GoPro it was hard to estimate what we were shooting exactly. Something we need to prepare better next time around.

A screenshot from the GoPro. Although it looks cool it is useless because the shadow of the camera is visible in the lower left corner.

The microphones did give a good results. These are condenser microphones with a cardioid pattern which helps just getting the voice of the actor and not so much the environment. Luckily for us there was not too much wind that morning. It was -15 degrees Celsius though which made it hard to manipulate the small knobs on the cameras without our fingers freezing off.

Music and Sound FX

All music is royalty free. We bought these some time ago at a big discount. This is a good way to get cheap music which does not infringe on the youtube copyright rules.

The sound FX were free samples on the net. These were also royalty free. When you grab files from the web, make sure to check their license before using them.

Post Production

Post production consisted of cleaning up bits and pieces we didn't want to have in view after all, adding muzzle flashes, some smoke, a bullet hole in my head, a bit of blood and the orange disks which we use for the glasses of Agent Orange. The effects are quite rough but they'll do the trick when everything is moving fast.

Using compositing to clean up the plates is really powerful and it is not too hard to do. When something is just visible for a couple of frames it easy enough to copy the background from a couple of frames before. If the camera is handheld it is a bit trickier but nothing a tracker cannot solve.

The banana in the lower left corner came a bit too early into view when Agent Orange points it to my head.  It was easily repaired by taking a part of the wall two frames earlier.

The Muzzle flashes and dust clouds come from the Action Essentials 2 pack from Video Copilot. The pack is not to expensive but I am sure you can find free muzzle flashes on the web. Check if they got an alpha channel as it makes compositing them over your footage much easier. If they are against a black background it is easy enough to pull your own matte.

The blood spatter is just a paint splatter image we pulled from the web. We created a matte, gave it the right color and made it blurry. Since it sticks to the lens, there is no need to track it in.

Frame without the blood spatter.

Frame with the blood spatter and the hole in my head.

The more tricky effects are the ones you need to track over more than 10 frames. Both the oranges and the bullet hole in my head do move around. We started with a full 3D track but everything moves so much that it would become a nightmare to clean up the jumpy tracking points to get a solid track.

So we switched to the classic four point track instead. We let the computer do the track but every so often the computer got totally lost and you have to correct it manually. The perspective change was done by hand as it was just quicker to do this for a couple of frames then for the computer to try and figure it out.

Oranges fixed with gaffer tape to the glasses. Didn't look very cool so we had to replace them in post.

Oranges replaced by a clean image.

What's next?

Jef-Aram and I are already working on the second short. Make sure to stay tuned. You can do this by following us on twitter or by subscribing to our YouTube channel.

Links:
Belgian Boomsticks YouTube Channel
Jef-Aram's Blog

Frederic's Twitter Page
Jef-Aram's Twitter Page