06Feb Anytime Tools 32 pc MICRO PRECISION SCREWDRIVER SET
Getting ready to put in that Samsung 840 EVO SSD into my Asus Zenbook. I’ve been waiting for this 32 piece screwdriver set with torx bits to show up since last week, apparently prime shipping isn’t always 2 days. Not exactly the most exciting purchase, but for $8 you get a pretty decent selection of precision bits including some of the less common types needed to disassemble laptops and other random gear.
The bits in this 32 piece screwdriver set are pretty decent, but the screwdriver handle is just cheap plastic with a metal insert to hold the bits in place. Still for $8, i’d say it would be just fine for occasional use. I have a few other small projects I need to take care of and this set should do the trick.
I should have the installation video as well as some speed tests up for the Samsung 840 EVO next week. I’m pretty interested in testing out Samsung’s new RAPID mode. The benchmarks I’ve seen so far have the drive hitting above SATA 6 speeds when using this software patch. RAM buffering an already speedy SSD seems like a very unique approach to the current SATA limits. I’ll keep you posted.
05Feb Nady SGM-12, still the cheapest usable shotgun mic on the market
For the price the Nady SGM-12 shotgun microphone is still one of the best values on the market. At $30 it could be described with buzzwords like “adequate”, “acceptable”, and “usable”. The audio from the Nady SGM-12 isn’t particularly impressive, but it is very usable for a $30 microphone.
Over the years i’ve managed to mangle or destroy several Nady SGM-12 microphones and every time I do, I order a replacement. It doesn’t require phantom power, it provides a hot signal, and the switchable microphone pattern is handy. If you’d like to download some more audio samples of the Nady SGM-12 you can find them here and here.
If you are looking for an extremely clear microphone that does an amazing job of reproducing the human voice, you might want to look elsewhere. On the other hand if you are looking for a useable, ultra low budget shotgun microphone that provides acceptable audio, the Nady SGM-12 is a good place to start.
On a side note, Nady was the first company to offer this microphone roughly 7 or 8 years ago. Since then, they’ve started producing it for other companies under various names and they are usually sold at higher prices. If it looks like the Nady SGM-12, but has a different model and brand name on it, you are most likely looking at a Nady SGM-12.
04Feb Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive and the 830 it’s replacing
The Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive showed up from that ebay sale I posted a few weeks ago. The plan for this drive is to the upgrade the Samsung 830 256GB SSD that I installed a year and half ago in my Asus Zenbook ux32vd. The Zenbook still does a great job, but I want a little more space so that I can work on small and medium size projects without an external hard drive. With windows 7, adobe CC, and a few other editing tools I use on a daily bases the 256GB SSD only leaves me with about 120GB of free space for editing. That’s enough space for a few quick edits but it’s pretty easy to collect over a 100GB worth of footage in a single day shooting with two cameras. The Samsung 840 EVO 500GB drive should give me around 320GB or so of swinging room so that I’m not constantly attaching a 500GB or 1TB USB drive to access clips.
It seems build quality has improved in the newer SSDs, the Samsung 840 EVO offers up a nice aluminum case, while older drives like OCZ Vertex (above) are housed in plastic. The strange part is the old OCZ drive uses around 2 watts when running, while the 840 EVO only uses 240 milliwatts (.24 watts). It would make more sense if the OCZ case was an aluminum heatsink, maybe that’s while the old drive is so much thicker than the new one.
I don’t know what the threshold is when you convert from a normal user to a “power user”, but after a year and half of use, the original Samsung 830 256GB SSD has seen 2.3TB of writes to the drive. That works out to around 4.2GB a day on average. That’s not exactly and endurance run, but i’m guessing it exceeds normal use. In that time I also haven’t run into any S.M.A.R.T. events with the drive and everything appears to be working normally.
Read and write speeds have stayed pretty consistent on the Samsung 830 256GB SSD. The drive still hits above 520MB/s reads and 400MB/s writes. I’m not expecting a big jump in speeds with the new Samsung 840 EVO, but I went ahead and dropped it into a system for quick testing while I wait for a torx kit to show up.
Looks like the Samsung 840 EVO has a slight jump in read speeds at 541MB/s and a large jump in write speeds at 536MB/s. The 100+ MB/s write speed is a nice bonus, but it looks like the drive takes a hit in the random reads. That shouldn’t be a huge issue as I wasn’t unhappy with the speed of the 256GB SSD and the 840 EVO is pretty close in speed overall.
Once I get the torx kit, i’ll post an upgrade video for the Asus Zenbook ux32vd. Even though it’s an older laptop, it still keeps up well as an NLE system.
03Feb Redrock Micro Hero 3 Cobalt Cage Review
I’ve been testing and using the Cobalt Cage for about a month now and it’s quickly become a go to item for most of my daily Hero 3 use. I don’t do a lot of extreme car racing, so the attractiveness of the Cobalt Cage for me is the number of mounting points. Add 3 or 4 cold shoes adapters to the cage and you have a place for a microphone, field recorder, monitor, and whatever else you can think of.
Even though my Hero 3 is usually relatively safe, for this review I decided to risk it with a little more abuse. The Cobalt Cage is supposed to provide full protection of your camera from drops, impacts, and crushing forces. So check out the video above to see me drive over the Cobalt Cage with a truck and toss it off a 3 story cement dike.
For those of you using quadcopters, the Cobalt Cage adds 6.35 oz (180 g) to the weight of the Hero 3. I’m not sure what the max capacity is on most quadcopters but that basically triples the weight of a Hero 3 black edition which I believe is around 3.5 oz in it’s case.
As I noted in the review, the only downside I see to the Cobalt Cage is the thumb nut on the back of the unit. If you don’t get that nice and tight your Gopro might come loose when falling from a moving vehicle. Also, if the impact ends up severally bending the thumb screw, you might have a hard time getting your camera out of this rather solid piece of aluminum. Still those are pretty minor concerns when compared to the protection this case provides.
You might also want to check out this earlier post if you are trying to decide between the Cobalt Cage and Combat Cage.
01Feb USB 3.0 card reader speeds and why it matters
This question came in and I thought it might be helpful if I answer it on the site.
Since USB 3.0 has a max transfer speed of 5 Gbps and USB 2.0 has a max of 480 Mbps, and SD class 10 cards have a minimum speed of 10 Mbps, does it really make any practical sense to upgrade to a USB 3.0 card reader since the card itself will always be the bottleneck?
Some of the confusion stems from “bits” vs “bytes”, but there is also a little more to it. First of all a bit is a single numeric value, either a 1 or a 0, while a byte is made up of 8 bits. These are usually notated with a lowercase “b” for bits and an upper case “B” for bytes.
In this case USB 2.0 provides a maximum of 480 megabits per second transfer speed. That gives you a max transfer speed of 60 megabytes per second. However USB 2.0 is half-duplex, which means it can only send data one direction at a time, in other words you can’t write to and read from a card simultaneously. This drops the actual data transfer speeds to and from the card down to between 25-40 megabytes per second. On top of that these speeds are further limited by the fact that USB 2.0 specifications apply to the USB controller not the actual port and there are usually many USB ports tied to the same controller. If you have more than one device plugged in, transfer speeds are spread across multiple devices. With a USB keyboard and a few other random things attached you’ll probably see speeds closer to 20 megabytes per second or lower.
So lets take a look at what this means. In this case i’ve tested this middle of the line (in terms of speed) Sandisk Extreme 45MB/s card. It’s not the fastest card on the market, but it’s not slow by any means and does a good job of keeping up with DSLR video recording. I’ve setup the test to write 3GB to the card then read 3GB from the card to verify the data.
As you can see from this H2testw write test, the card is averaging 17.7 megabytes per second connected to a USB 2.0 card reader on my editing bay and reading from the card at 18.7 megabytes per second. That’s not horrible in terms of write speeds but it’s far less than the 45MB/s advertised. Now lets test that exact same card on the Transcend USB 3.0 card reader.
The Sandisk Extreme connected to the Transcend USB 3.0 card reader running the exact same test is now delivering 33.7 megabytes per second write speeds and read speeds of 38 megabytes per second. With the USB 2.0 card reader 2 min. 40 sec. to read 3GB worth of data on the Sandisk Extreme card, while the USB 3.0 card reader will give you 3GB in 1 min. 18 sec. which is roughly double the USB 2.0 card reader speed.
Double the speed when ingesting footage is a significant difference, and it becomes even more extreme when using cards with read and write speed ratings in the 90 MB/s and above range. With this Sandisk Extreme 45MB/s card alone you’ll be able to to copy a full card in 13 minutes instead of 26 minutes. That’s a pretty decent increase for a $14 investment in a USB 3.0 card reader.
31Jan Canon 5d Mark III Body $2550 with free shipping
Another Ebay camera body sale, this time they’ve got the Canon 5d mark III body on sale for just $2550 with free shipping. That’s a great price for the 5d mark III if you are looking to upgrade. As with most of these ebay sales this is likely a Canon lens/camera combo that’s been separated to get the sales price. These deals usually sell out within a day so if you want one, you might want to move fast
.
I had good luck with my Canon 6d order (no signature required) from one of these sales, but some people have reported issues with the package requiring a signature. So make sure you have someone around sign for it if that’s required. If no one is home to sign, call the shipping company and have them hold it for you at the distribution center.
30Jan Transcend USB 3.0 card reader quick overview
I’ve had pretty good luck with the Transcend USB 3.0 card readers and I keep one in each camera bag. I needed another card reader to replace the one that was “borrowed” by a fellow filmmaker on the set of our last shoot (It’ll probably be 6 months before I see it again). When I checked on Amazon, for whatever reason the white Transcend USB 3.0 card readers are about $5 cheaper than the black units. The card reader is identical in specs and performance, it just has a white case instead of a black case.
If you’re still using a USB 2.0 card reader, you might want to consider upgrading. With faster memory cards your read and write speeds will be limited by the connection speed of USB 2.0, while the transfer speeds of USB 3.0 will remove the bottleneck from your read and write operations. Before you make this modest $14 upgrade however, check to make sure that your system actually has some USB 3.0 ports. There is no point in upgrading to a USB 3.0 card reader if all of your USB ports only support 2.0. The Transcend USB 3.0 card reader will still work when plugged into a USB 2.0 port but again you’ll be limited by the port speed as opposed to the card’s actual read and write speeds.
Regardless, for $14 the Transcend USB 3.0 card reader is reasonably priced and it works. It would be nice if the included USB 3.0 cable was a little longer, but for the price, that’s pretty easy to forgive.
29Jan Shortly After Nightfall Film Noir project
Rob was asking for some more examples of my work. This video contains a handful of shots from a film noir project I worked on earlier this year. Special thanks to the OxBow Motel for letting us rent the entire place for the weekend as well as the cast and crew for spending 4 days in the middle of nowhere. The establishments near by were limited to, the motel, a gas station that closed at 10 p.m. and a bar that doubled as a restaurant until 9 at night.
Although we didn’t have the budget to go completely retro, the costumes and general style of the motel really added to the shoot. The high contrast lighting was achieved using this set of lights and some hand made gobos. If you’re interested, you can find a few more photos from the shoot here. If you really want to follow along with projects I’m currently working on, you can always check out my IMDB page.
29Jan Filming product close ups with a Gopro Hero 3
It can be tricky trying to get camera placement just right when shooting hands on product shots. One of the most affordable ways to accomplish this sort of thing is to use an extremely light camera like the Gopro Hero 3.
A boom mic stand is designed to hold heavy condenser microphones in place even when the stand is fully extended which makes it a perfect overhead mount for the Gopro Hero 3. In this case you can see that I have the hero 3 floating over a small table about 2 feet above the work area.
To get the Gopro Hero 3 attached to the stand you’ll need the 1/4 20 cage adapter and this 1/4 20 to microphone stand adapter. In this case i’m using the aluminum 1/4 20 gopro adapter I posted awhile back. Once everything is attached position your gopro and adjust your field of view in the camera to accommodate your work area.
In the above test video I didn’t bother trying to color match the product shots with everything else being filmed. Matching the footage from the Hero 3 to DSLR video is pretty easy if you record in “protune raw” mode. The raw label in the camera doesn’t mean you’re getting raw stills from the hero 3, it simply allows you to make a few more adjustments to the picture profile using Gopro’s free editing software. With a little bit of tweaking the protune recordings can be made to match a DSLR without much problem.
You can find a few examples of the setup in action on my second youtube channel here. Once the intros and formats are flushed out the hands on product stuff will start showing up on my primary channel.
28Jan 80’s themed Christmas horror story shoot
I don’t normally share much of my outside work on the site, but I ended up on a fun and interesting project this weekend. An 80’s themed Christmas horror shoot filmed in a restored 1911 historic theater. We had a great time with the cast and crew and after we wrapped up, we talked everyone into posing for this Breakfast Club shot.
Our special effects crew did a great job on all of the Christmas themed death scenes and you can check out more photos from the shoot here. Thanks to everyone that worked on this project for staying up until 3 a.m. to finish things up. Scheduling can be difficult when trying to film between screenings at a working movie theater.
