Magpie
Paul Cook, Easyrig, FS7, Sound, Litepanels. Photo by Jon Kemp.
Camera Equipment I already owned the Sony FS7, which I believe is a hugely capable camera and one that I am well accustomed to. So, it seemed sensible both practically and financially to stick with it as the core of our shooting package. In addition, we borrowed and rented a whole bunch of additional equipment. We rented the Sony XDCA-FS7 unit that attaches to the rear of the FS7 and outputs a 12-bit RAW signal from the camera. Quite luckily, Atomos had just released a beta firmware 55
(AtomOS 6.4) for their Shogun monitor/recorder to record FS RAW to 4K CinemaDNG. CinemaDNG is a really hungry file format and it meant that every 21 minutes of footage filled a 500GB SSD. We used a great piece of software called SlimRAW to reduce the file sizes by a ratio of around 3:1. This was lossless compression, so the quality of the image wasn’t compromised and we backed everything up to 2 x 5TB drives (instead of needing 6 of them).