Nano Nightmare!
After filming with the Nanoflash for 2 weeks I have come to some important conclusions!
It’s pretty badly designed!
Let me qualify that! a few of the problems I have found with it.
The eject buttons for the cards is hyper sensitive! and ejects the cards with the merest brush.
it isn’t a soft eject either, and tends to throw the cards a mile out of reach if you are not careful. not good when you are changing media whilst dangling on ropes 100 meters or so off the ground.
We have been having problems with lost footage! the nano says it is recording, and we can view back the rushed on a monitor, but during the transfer some of the footage disappears. this is obviously not an ideal situation, as a couple of the key sequences vanished through the transfer.
we have come up with a couple of reasons why, the nano was not designed to climb with! and the action of climbing might cause problems. this I do not buy because the rushes we have lost have not been the climbing scenes, they have been the interviews
The cards might have been knocked at some point and lost the contact in the nanoflash, again not sold on that one but still plausible I suppose
I watch the nanoflash with a regularity more familiar to the symptoms of a severe OCD sufferer, and check constantly that the nano doesn’t display any error messages, that the embedded timecode is running, and that the word ‘recording’ is displayed on the screen. and that when I hit STOP the nano stops recording with no errors. this I do every take.
Myself, the series and exec producers have watched back some of the rushes and they then told the editors that the lost footage was on the card at the end of the shoot.
so what is happening between me handing over the cards and the edit taking the hard drives is a mystery.
I now have a few ideas to make the progress safer.
1. use an experienced data wrangle, or
2. have enough cards so you don’t need to transfer footage on location and format the cards on set. (not always possible) we are going to get enough cards to shoot in one location and then send all the cards off to the edit and use a second set of cards for the next location leaving the guys in the edit to transfer the data.
3. be care full setting up the nanoflash on the camera and gafa the cards in the slots so they cant move.
4. keep the firmware updated.
we are sending the nano off for repair next week to make sure it is not faulty, as the second camera nano is working fine, but they are not climbing, (but as I said we are having no problems with the climbing footage).
There is not a format out there that doesn’t have serious problems at some point in the work flow. I have had footage on a tape disappear to be able to see it in fast forward but not see any image when played! I still think we chose the right camera for the job, but we are seeing teething problems at the start of the project. still a long way to go till we finish. I am keeping everything crossed that we have no more serious problems.
Or alternatively! Shoot on film!!
