This week I had a chance to test two SPARKS on a proper production for the first time.
We were running in Baja Mexico at +104F/40C, brutal sandy conditions.
Here are the thoughts.
Somehow powering with the SPARK with a 6S Lipo for FPV did not work. The camera would randomly stop recording or freezing. Pixboom had assured me that 24V+ 10% should work perfectly fine but we ended up flying a small V-Mount battery instead.
I was running SPARK and Venice 2 on a Flighthead for our arm car work, which worked well but not having a setting read-out or even more importantly a record indicator was infuriating. As the camera was bagged it was close to impossible to see if it was actually recording (triggered via Preston and 3 Pin Fischer on the Mutinty Power IO)
I am not sure why anybody would need a clean feed from a camera like this. Having all overlays and record indicator for the SDI out is a must.
3) Judging exposure was mostly fine. I’ve been exposing the Rec709 to hold all highlights, which typically results in a 1.5 stop under exposure when working with the LOG files. Still trying to really understand the sensor!
Especially for FPV, where we ended up with +1TB files, converting to the trimmed DNGs proved fairly slow. Having 2x SSDs per camera was nearly not enough. Having 3x would be ideal for the speed that we were working at.
I initially still had some stitch line issues but was able to mostly trouble shoot those with the Pixboom team. Not ideal doing this in the middle of production but still very glad that we shot Spark over Ember.
6)Lastly an odd one: one camera shows a bunch of single frame DNG pxbc files across two cards. Still not sure what happened there - curious if anybody else has seen this.
All in all I am excited about what we shot and how it looks but the experience of the camera is still very very BETA. It feels like a prototype and not a full production camera.
Great feedback and first impressions. I agree with much of it.
Overlays need to be implemented asap. It makes it really hard to work with the camera without this. Having said that, I’ve been very happy with the images captured so far.
I had a shoot this last weekend with the camera triggered remotely. I ended up clipping a Sennheiser transmitter pack onto the camera with a lav mic and wore the receiver with an earbud so I could hear the tally beep when I rolled and cut. Not an ideal workaround, but it did the job.
I did a remote shoot too - 50ft with a combined SDI cable and remote switch cable. I checked the side tally light with binoculars. Solid green - idle, flashing green - prerecord, red - recording. I use Prerecord a lot, so the beep is not helpful unfortunately. Not a perfect situation, but effective. Also worth noting is that I run the fan on medium and haven’t yet had an overheating issue. Conditions have been warm but the camera has been in the shade.
With regard to the extra files - my touchscreen is touching itself and triggering run/stop randomly, mostly very short clips of only a few frames but I did shaft me yesterday when it run but didn’t stop and chewed the whole mag. I had to stop shooting to dump it.
I still have no idea how to expose this thing - I’ve set my highlights to a max 105% rec709 and when I get it into resolve - there’s plenty more room over and above that. An in-camera waveform showing true sensor data would be great - or even RGB clip indicators like REDs traffic lights.
the video feed via HDMI/SDI is massively contrasty - the sparks onboard monitor shows a truer representation of what you’re getting but it’s still off.
The sensor performs better than what I expected - just need the tools to enable us to use its full potential.
Interesting - now that you are saying it. I do remember an issue with the camera being bagged and trying to see the settings through the bag. Basically, the bag touching the screen and triggering random points on the display incl. the record button.
I am curious why we need a digital/on-screen record button when we have 2x (or with the Mutiny IO 3x) physical record buttons? Removing the touchscreen record button or at least having a way to disable it, would be a welcome feature!
You can disable the entire touch screen by flicking the lock switch on the left side (in front of home/live button).
All physical buttons still work when lock switch is on.
I had to have the screen locked whilst rolling or it would cut/run whenever it felt like it. Very very annoying and I suspect I’ve got a defective screen. I’ll have to reach out to support
Havnt raised it yet. I thought it was resolved from the last firmware update but it happened again on Sunday during a shoot. I’ll get around to raising it with them.
