Bexhill-on-sea: Test short made with SGBlade RR2

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Lost at sea!
Lost at sea!

I went out to Bexhill-on-sea on the English south coast, just west of Hastings and just south of Battle (Famous that!) to test out the SGBlade with RR2.

I had planned to be there by lunchtime but a few things delayed me. First off switching from Roto Razor 1 on the Shoot 35 SGBlade to the Roto Razor 2. This took me some time as it was my first attempt. Am sure with practice I can get the time down. Make sure you are doing it in a cat free/ dust free environment or like me you will get specks of dust everywhere…like I did!

Secondly I tried to use the tube rather than the flip on the EX3. I couldn’t get focus but Wayne Kinney assures me you can. I didn’t try further, because to be honest, you should always use a flip these days. Redrock, Cinevate, Letus and Shoot 35 make high quality flips than lose next to no light. There is no excuse anymore and the days of painful flipping in post and using magnet tricks to fool the in camera LCD or mount your monitor upside down on it are long gone.

I used three lenses on this shoot. My Nikon 17-35mm f2.8, 80-200mm f2.8 Nikon and Hartblei shift tilt 85mm f2.8. I def can see CA in some shots. Though my biggest problems were my own incompetence! First off the dust got into the Blade when switching elements. So I had to hide that as much as I could. Secondly I knocked the speed down to minimum accidently and couldn’t tell until I got home and ingested into my mac. On my EX1 LCD, I couldn’t see any problems. What I got was visible patterning of the GG and some godawful flickering. All my fault and it meant I had to junk 90% of my footage.

I prefer the Bokeh of the RR2, it’s more filmic, but the RR1 is def sharper. So it’s a toss up. The Blade is a very nice unit and it is capable of delivering some really high quality images when used properly (!)

Here is the resulting short made of the little usable footage I could salvage… Bexhill-on-Sea

5 comments

  1. Hmmmm. I see ugly CA too – it’s strong enough to be distracting. Do you think this is the SGBlade itself, or a combination of the Blade + the RR2 + the specific lens you were using?

    Regardless, fabulous work as per usual.

  2. sorry to be such a noob – what does ca stand for?

    also how much of the tilt shift did you use? i saw it in a couple of shots, but i was wondering if you used it on the hut and couple shots..

  3. Chromic aberration, it’s basically colour fringing.

    Couple of shots at end, the me shot walking away from camera and a long shot with very soft edges. The rest was just bad edge sharpness as I couldn’t stop down the camera as the dust inside the adaptor would have shown. Read more in blog for explanation of problems I had.

  4. hmmm, I think this is just another amazing Philip Bloom film, test or not, maybe it is just me, but looking at this short I sure don’t give a sh*t about chromatic aberrations or any other tech bubus. I prefer to enjoy the little movie. This is just my opinion of course I totally understand whoever is looking for CA, or compression artifacts or any other kind of problems as long as you still “SEE”

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