The Lost Bus is a 2025 survival-drama directed by Paul Greengrass for Blumhouse Productions in association with Comet Pictures and Apple Original Films. The film is based on the non-fiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire by journalist Lizzie Johnson. Set against the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, it follows a school-bus driver and a teacher who fight to guide 22 children to safety through an encroaching inferno. Combining Greengrass’s documentary-style direction with large-scale visual effects and environmental reconstruction by RISE FX, the film depicts one of the deadliest wildfires in recent history with stark realism.

Supervising the inferno: Oliver Schulz (IMDB | Linkedin) is a senior Visual Effects Supervisor at RISE FX, the Berlin-based VFX studio. Over more than a decade at RISE he has guided VFX supervision on major international productions including Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Blue Beetle and Megalopolis, among many others.

His background spans concept art, digital matte painting and 3D environments; skills that helped him to take the creative lead on blockbuster-scale environment and FX heavy shows. In this interview he reveals how he and his team at RISE tackled the challenge of recreating a burning landscape for The Lost Bus, combining procedural geography, wind-driven vegetation, deep-rendered volumetrics, and machine-learning techniques for depth integration, to bring the inferno to life on screen.

DP: How did you get onto the Lost Bus? 

Oliver Schulz: I came on board after wrapping up on Megalopolis and jumped onto the very first meeting with Charlie Noble and Gavin Round, Production VFX Supervisor and Producer. The project was already awarded at that time so we directly started talking about the Sequences and the scope of the Rise portion of work.

Luckily or better sad tragically this was a real event so in regards of look, there were many references and documentation of this day. So our first meeting was looking through a lot of real world footage from all available sources. Charlie had been prepping reference reels from the very beginning, so we could hone in on a lot of specific ones for each portion of the work because he had references for all of them!

DP: Roughly how big was the RISE team on The Lost Bus, and how long did you spend from first build to final comp?

Oliver Schulz: We started with a very small core team in May 24 and delivered the last shots at the beginning of 25.  I think around 50-60 people worked on the show in total during the production with up- and downramping based on specific project needs like temp deliveries for example.

DP: The antagonist of the movie is the geography of a very particular area, and the fact that it is on fire – how did you make sure that it was recognizably that specific part of the world? 

Oliver Schulz: We started with real world data derived from elevation models. That gave us a pretty good grounding in reality. We got lidar scans for very specific locations like the Pulga Bridges for example which was invaluable as this is usually something one doesn’t get from any publicly available sources. We spent quite a bit of time to get us a very good foundation of all key locations, which meant that everything had a geometrical base until the very last mountain you see on the horizon.

Our Lidar Supervisor David Salamon was instrumental in setting up this base. He used some maps imagery to give a rough base color to all those individual geometries that served as a rough guide later on in layout and surfacing for distributions of materials or assets. One has to keep in mind that most data was post 2018 so for instance vegetation had to be recreated from mostly photographic references shot before the fire. We tried to stay as true as possible to real world geography, but later on of course things had to be changed for storytelling reasons. 

DP: When merging New Mexico plates into your California canyon builds, how did you maintain scale and geological continuity?

Oliver Schulz: As production did not have access or in case of some very sketchy roads didn’t shoot at the original location for safety reasons, they did some scouting through the US and chose some New Mexico locations as stand ins for some of our sequences. The most prominent was the Pulga road for sure. In the film, the first responding firefighters trying to get to the origin of the camp fire first get sight when they are on top of the Pulga Highway bridge crossing the Feather River Canyon.

Without any better option they decide their best shot is to try and get to the fire following a very narrow road on the slope of the canyon. All shots on Pulga Bridge were shot on a Studio Backlot featuring full CG Environments including the FG bridge. This narrow path however was all shot on the New Mexico location with two big fire engines driving a slightly wider road. 

In production that meant that we replaced most of the visible Environment due to a couple of reasons. First of course it needed to have the right roadwidth and the correct canyon in the background. Second we needed to have very windy vegetation everywhere. Third in case all of that worked in camera which was pretty rare we still needed to put FX Elements into every shot consisting of dust, debris, smoke and later also embers. With those guidelines in place probably 90% of the shots became full CG exteriors only keeping small bits of photography for fire engines and some road pieces.

Once all those went into layout we made sure to keep a senseful progression to those shots meaning having the firefighters travel along the road during those shots in cutorder. The topography of the shooting location though was pretty different from the storypoint progression on the pulga road, so was the framing in camera when pointing at the fire from the fire engine interiors.

That of course meant as good and real our base was, it needed to be heavily augmented to make sense with storytelling and framing choices. Most shots feature the correct BG canyon but the midground is totally made up to allow for good view to the fire origin. All of this had to be understandable even with very frenetically moving handheld cameras.

DP: Let’s talk vegetation: How much botanical creative freedom did you have? 

Oliver Schulz: Vegetation was a big part of the environment and one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the fire. All FVX vendors had to tackle it in one way or the other which meant all were contributing to the research for which plant goes where. The foundation was once again the research and material collection from Charlie and his team.

We focused on the most common species found in this region of CA and made sure the level of dryness and the distribution made sense. So in this sense there was not too much freedom here as everyone tried to make this as real as possible from this point of view. For the build we actually just used the most common ground which is Speedtree with some augmentations done in Houdini. Part of the assets were also shares from other vendors which just needed ingestion and rigging in FX.

DP: You mentioned building a hierarchical “ecosystem” in Houdini. How modular was this system, and how much hand-authoring did artists still need to do per shot?

Oliver Schulz: This was something we actually invested a bit of time in at the very beginning and was overseen by CG Supervisor David Schulz and Layout Lead Mareike Loges / Senior Layout Artist Björn Markgraf. The core idea is nothing new and hierarchical just means that you start from the biggest Elements in your kit and than go smaller and smaller based on the previous distribution of Elements. First step is to either scatter or handplace big trees for example, following this you end up with a certain distribution. 

Based on this the system places smaller entities like younger trees or seedlings and smaller shrubs and bushes around or between the big trees. This distribution is based on simple rules like distance or terrain steepness. In case of the Pulga road we divided it up in two categories: mountains and roads. Both had similar procedures. We would always start with the rough blocking geometries matching either scan data, elevation data or sometimes just made up. From there we would generate the base coverage of rock cliffs which would hold out trees mostly in those areas. Following this we created the trees and bigger vegetation which would determine the ground coverage of rocks vs more pepply ground.

Roads were pretty similar but less complex as they mostly feature small stones. Again here we used some manually created maps to drive the distribution of small vs bigger pebbles that mostly accumulate on the side for example.

The toolset itself worked pretty well and as it was applicable as a template we could have a fully laid out shot in a day. Shot specific adjustments were applied on almost every shot though, mostly for continuity, visibility or art direction purpose. 

DP: Vegetation, environment, and FX were all dependent on one another. How did you keep versioning sane between departments?

Oliver Schulz:  That was a big topic indeed and it only is possible with two things: a rigorous approval system and a good pipeline that helps you track those approved layouts. We rely on our usd pipeline to do exactly that for us, it makes it somewhat easy (Im sure layout and production will hit me for this) to track department versioning. For each layout update we`d always get automatic QC renders that run through our inhouse “slapstick” system which is our inhouse auto comp engine.

When Layout would do a specific change it would publish this either on a shot or on an Sequence/Environment level. This will trigger a QC render from the shotcam of the affected shots. Once the rendering is done it will have a postjob that combines it with the prepped plate in nuke and runs another renderjob that will give you the layout reviewable which is than checked and can be approved and pushed into the pipeline from RV. This Layout than becomes available to the FX department which would run all needed simulations and hand off another QC reviewable for approval. Without those systems in place it would have been a nightmare to stay on top of all these versions!

DP: You said the layout department drove wind direction and strength instead of FX. How did that change your creative workflow?

Oliver Schulz: Yes that was indeed true and one of our early conversations we had internally to determine the approach all Environment builds would share. It was a practical decision based on two factors: We would simulate all vegetation on the asset level in different windspeeds for efficiency reasons and we wanted to keep iteration loops to a minimum.

This meant that I wanted to look at layout versions with moving vegetation as the strong directional wind would make it necessary to consider this already while layouting trees. As the direction is clearly visible you cant rely on spinning a tree 360 deg free in Y to create variations as the direction is “baked” in, so you need to see it moving in order to determine if an environment looks good!

The second reason is that FX needed to take care of vegetation simulation only once and when approved never needed to come back. This system worked really well and was accessible to the layout artists down to the single blade of grass, meaning one could really art direct where and how much specific things should move.

DP: You divided smoke into “hero” and “residual” categories. How did you manage density and readability without losing visual clarity?

Oliver Schulz: These two categories were simply based on the fact that we needed to deal with smoke in almost every shot. The ever present residual smoke needed to inherit a direction, needed to be art directable and also needed to render as fast as possible. Its pretty much the equivalent of atmospheric perspective in a wildfire scenario. Our Fx Supervisor Akin Göcmenli came up with a system of instanced presimulated caches that sometimes could consist of thousands of individual ones.

We started by doing simulations of smoke with a constant wind direction and speed that had a hidden source of emission and diffused pretty soon. That gave us a very soft falloff to the edges of the simulation grid which made these simulations perfect to overlap and look as one big single instance of smoke. On top due to those aspects it was quite easy to remove single containers and punch holes into the wall of smoke for visibility. We also invested a bit of time to develop shaders and render efficiencies to cut down on notoriously long volumetric rendertimes for this element.

Hero smoke was the category which either had a visible emission source in frame or simply had a hero storytelling element. These were usually shot or sequence simulations as they were mostly much denser and most of the time also much closer to camera. We also spend a good amount of time matching shading and simulation to real world references.  The secret to readability also lies in relentless QCing of outputs to make sure once you kickoff the expensive lighting renders, you are as certain as possible all elements are going to work. 

DP: The ember work looks incredibly detailed. How did you simulate believable motion in strong winds without visible repetition or looping patterns?

Oliver Schulz: Embers were a big part of the equations so by now you might guess…. Yes we spend a bit of time in asset prep to build some solid foundations. The first thing is of course the driving factor for all fx aspect: the wind.

FX developed hero wind forces that we used to simulate all elements with. A good amount of chaos and variance is key to not run into issues with readable patterns in any simulation. Another factor is collision. Embers will behave a certain way when they collide and thats what we tried to replicate. Also the ground plays a big role especially with the heavier emberclumps that slide over it.

Reality is unbeaten when it comes to little quirks and anomalies especially for something as complex as this. As no one is able to have a ground as detailed as the real world we also sometimes had a collision geometry that had slightly more displacement in order to have more detailed collisions happening. 

DP: Lighting and volumetrics are natural enemies. How did you maintain physically plausible lighting through that much smoke and fire?

Oliver Schulz: That was one of the biggest questions going into this project, considering that what was shot on set sometimes had very little to do with what ended up on screen, especially in terms of atmospherics. The best base for something to look real is to match the real thing. We did so in our asset phase and made sure our shaders and lightrigs were physically plausible, especially the ones only used to develop assets. 

We would match greyballs and reference macbeth charts in order to make sure scene lighting was correct in terms of lightbalancing. Then from there we developed shaders for all aspects.One of the most common issues I see is that volume and surface renders aren’t lookdeved in conjunction. What you end up having to do is to grade surface and volume render differently. This leads to very unrealistic renders very fast because there is no ground truth you can come back to.

We tried to make sure all our shaders worked with each other to have exactly this common base. Also when dealing with dozens of light sources and those issues on top that’s definitely a position you don’t want to be in when time is running…. All volumetrics do have very different properties to them where one of the biggest is how they scatter light. Back to front scattering can take a volume from being ultrabright to consuming all lighting energy and being pitchblack. So once you matched the real thing, use those tools wisely to deviate from there and support the story. 

We tried to always start with a balancing pass usually done still in lighting. This goes to comp as the foundation to do all the finetuning with. Still there was a lot of tuning left for comp and also we needed to break reality more than once to make sure that what you wanted to read in a frame remained readable when tons of smoke and fire went in front. Sometimes we needed to go as far as use the deep data to pull things in and out of the smoke to make them visible. Still the most valuable tool you have is the artist’s eye to determine the sweet spot of good vs real.

DP: You mentioned deep rendering bottlenecks, like OIIO running out of patience with too many AoVs. What exactly went wrong first?

Oliver Schulz: Haha yes that was one of the issues that came when switching to full deep with our renders. That means you have each component of each lightgroup rendered with deep data to put it back together in comp. That resulted in a lot of channels that apparently were too much for OIIO to handle. Thank god that was fixed otherwise I wouldn’t write this story now ;)

DP: Rendering holdouts took up to an hour per frame. Did you develop any automation or optimisation to make deep rendering less painful?

Oliver Schulz: Indeed rendering times for deep holdouts were quite painful and nothing to speed up really. With so many volumetric elements you need to deep hold out everything with everything to make sure its accurate. If you multiply this with the number of separate elements rendered and with the amount of light Aovs times the amount of components you end up with a staggering number of renders.

Plus in the end you need to denoise all frames so the best solution was try to plan out delivery dates as good as possible to have time for all those thousands prerenders to run on the farm. Still our compositing Supervisor Oliver Hohn and Lead Nicolas Burgers had some longer evenings ensuring all renders were there the next morning to be picked up by the compositing Artists.

DP: You used machine-learning depth generators to create deep data from plates. What tools powered that, and how reliable were the results?

Oliver Schulz: We started testing tools quite early in anticipation of very challenging compositing work. DepthAnything v2 was what we ended up using as a default prerender pass. The results were a mixed bag considering the wide range of plates we worked with, although it proved to be valuable to have. Comp remapped the relative value output of the depth passes to absolute values from deep data with help of lidarscans or renders and was able to create some good integration especially with more wispy type of smoke.

For denser smoke and more accurate holdouts especially for actors we still needed to rely on a lot of manual roto for good integration. The AI passes proved to be pretty successful though for fast temp work as you get something going in no time. Issues were mostly the missing good temporal stability and also the lack of precision. 

 DP: Before deploying new tech like ML depth generators or procedural ecosystems, how do you test them safely inside production?

Oliver Schulz: We implemented those during production directly on our project infrastructure, so developed, tested and used simultaneously. 

DP: Were there any spectacular ML depth map failures, like smoke reading as solid or background cliffs collapsing?

Oliver Schulz: Depth popping or lost shapes were the most common ones. But as none of these passes were used without correction in comp I’m sure I haven’t seen all of them!

DP: With so many volumetric layers, how did compositors manage complexity without drowning in passes?

Oliver Schulz: We have standard workflows for loading CG renders into nuke which do provide a basic level of organization. However the more elements you have the bigger the compscripts and we had some good ones for sure!

DP: Fire colouration is tricky. Did you use any spectral rendering or rely purely on LUTs to match on-set lighting and heat distortion?

Oliver Schulz: That is very true.. Luckily production tried to shoot everything with a practical fire which provided a good level of references in camera. If you than try to render as physically plausible as possible and have something in frame that you can match exposure to you are already halfway there. We didn’t use any spectral rendering here and rendered everything through Houdinis Karma in RGB.

DP: You switched to full motion-blur sampling for embers instead of faked streaks. How much did that impact render time, and was it worth it?

Oliver Schulz: Oh that was worth every minute of rendertime.. Real Motionblur for an element which is mainly visible in motionblur is a good investment. Plus the rendertimes weren’t actually that bad and took only a couple of minutes as you are not dealing with an expensive shading as well. The biggest benefit is getting nice curved and very interesting blurs especially with collisions.  The trick actually is to only invest time where its needed and render other elements with less costly settings. Deep compositing allows for it as you are not bound to any holdouts and you can combine differently rendered motion blur without any problems.

DP: How crucial was RiseFlow for distributing simulations and maintaining consistency across all sequences?

Oliver Schulz: We started implementing RiseFlow at the very beginning once we had our initial workflow for distributing elements figured out. The development was done by our Head of Pipeline Paul Schweizer and the implementation on the show was spearheaded by Jonas Sorgenfrei.

It actually is a very versatile framework that we use for a variety of tasks here at Rise. Its a modular node based System that can take arbitrary inputs and execute them in a chained workflow. FX built templates for various scenarios that got exposed variables like wind direction, speed, inputs for collision geometry etc. These could than be varied per shot and sent to the farm for execution. Once all those Sims were done, QC renders were submitted to the Farm and when completed, auto comped in Slapstick.

That meant that one artist could do changes on a big number of shots by adjusting the template and than resimming and rendering them over night. All render elements were deepcomped with our deep plate workflow and reviewed the next morning. This allowed for rapid adjustments and turnarounds which was a very crucial aspect of this fast paced production. 

DP: How did RiseFlow and Slapstick communicate between departments for reviews and dailies?

Oliver Schulz: RiseFlow and Slapstick are two different things really. The point where they communicate is that Riseflow might trigger a farmjob where Slapstick is hooked in as a post process that gets triggered after completion of the render. Slapstick again is a modular node based system implemented in Nuke that allows for a generalized template to be created. These inputs could take for instance all general elements that comp might use to layer a shot like mainplates, rotos, colorcorrections, lensdistortions etc and comp them together. We use Slapstick in all departments to create automatic reviewables for assetbuild like turntables with reference images, lighting slaps,fx slaps and so on.

DP: You’ve called The Lost Bus the toughest matchmove job you’ve ever seen. How did you solve the handheld, wet, low-light camera challenge?

Oliver Schulz: That was a tough one indeed. To solve this it really just comes down to the excellence of all individual artists that created those matchmoves. So there is no magic recipe to get through so many challenging matchmoves…

DP: Greengrass loves long, continuous takes. How did you manage to iterate and render efficiently on such heavy, unbroken shots?

Oliver Schulz: I guess it is really to choose your battles wisely… Invest into a good foundation early on and make sure to be as precise as possible in prep phase. Once the show is running and you are in full delivery mode there is no time to go back and redevelop anything.

Render optimization as much as possible and then relying on everything that was set up in the beginning is key to not have to think about accuracy anymore when you are trying to finish the shots. We did this and it really paid off, though having a couple of long shots with lots of elements to render we never ran into the issue of having to fear a render didn’t get finished in time.

There were some challenging shots for all departments involved but again the prep phase paid off and we managed to deliver everything in time. It’s really a Situation in which the Production team led by Michelle Cullen and Production Manager Androniki Nikolaou outdid themselves by planning and scheduling every milestone in production to make sure we had what we needed to finish shots in time. Of course that also means adjusting and revising this schedule each and every day based on client comments and changes.. It’s a tough job to make sure the whole production runs like a well oiled machine!

DP: Deep compositing only works if all layers align perfectly in space. Did you use diagnostic tools or pure visual QC to verify deep accuracy?

Oliver Schulz: The good thing about deep is that it’s pretty accurate as long as the sampling increments in depth are small enough for certain elements. It’s a game of keeping error thresholds low enough so you don’t pick them up actually. The balancing is precision versus filesize. Surface renders aren’t an issue really as you are dealing with front and backsides of hard surface objects really.

The fun starts with volumetric elements and this is where you need to tweak the settings a bit to make sure you don’t end up having 5GB per frame in volumetric renders. Still frames could grow to well over 1GB on bigger shots with all elements included, so we needed to do some rough calculations beforehand to make sure we weren’t running out of allocated serverspace.

DP: How did you maintain consistency for fire behaviour across sequences? Was there a single reference look, or did it evolve shot by shot?

Oliver Schulz: One of the big topics obviously here as the quality of the fire not only needed to remain consistent but also serve the story in how it behaves. When you look at fires in reality they all have very different qualities to them depending on a ton of external factors like what is burning, where it burns, what is the actual heat it produces and what is the influence of the wind and so on. So yes it’s crucial to pick a reference and not try to incorporate them all. The initial tactic we used was to create asset based fires with all components.

The two types that production defined as assets were “spotfires” and “forestfires”. Pretty generalized in description though mostly divided up by scale. So we took those two types into asset development and created a little scene with them. Forestfire in the background and spotfires in the foreground. This scene actually was the same one we used to lookdev all assets in. So we had a common ground for all assets really and the fx ones were not different.

We picked a general reference we felt was working well for each category and supplemented that with references that production had shot on set. The shot element though were mostly run by gas so wouldnt really emit any smoke but were a general ref in terms of breakup and edge qualities. Also those would come in native resolution where most of the actual refs are cellphone captures of much poorer quality.

So with all those references in place we started matching the fires again in different windspeeds. We tried to also implement all little details especially on the bigger forest fire like flambursts on dry wood, falling burning pieces of wood etc. Once fire was in place we hooked it up with all secondary elements like smoke and embers. We had already pretty robust setups developed for each of them individually so we could already build on a solid foundation using those as a base.

Once this little scene was successfully approved by production to go into shots we splitted out the individual components as assets again. These had all elements attached like smoke emission, ember emission, lots of different masks for heat distortion and were ready to be dropped into shots.

Using this technique we had a very solid foundation of very similar looking and behaving fires. Of course for hero shots we would need to resim those, but with setups in place and our template system it was mostly straightforward. Of course there are shots that need to tell a certain story like a fire coming right at you towards camera. Solving a problem like reading a perspective of a selfilluminating matter coming right towards camera is a different beast though you can’t prep for! This just takes a lot of creativity and trial and error to get right…

DP: What’s the single biggest creative takeaway from The Lost Bus you’d carry into your next show?

Oliver Schulz:  Don’t try to put out all the fires at once….

DP: Which shot makes you proudest or gives you flashbacks?

Oliver Schulz: Oh there are so many good ones really, honestly when I was watching all shots in a row I was so happy about the overall level of quality the team achieved in every aspect. So hard to pick singles but the Embercam full CG shots looked amazing on the big screen and were pretty spectacular… but getting them to the state we delivered them in was quite a journey…

DP: Finally, if you had to redo The Lost Bus from scratch, what would you rebuild first? Vegetation tools, compositing templates, or your caffeine reserves?

Oliver Schulz: Myself :)

The post Rendering the Inferno at RiseFX: The Lost Bus first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Cinematography and photography enthusiasts, mark your calendars for April 3 at 2:00 PM EDT (that’s 8:00 PM CEST for the European crowd). Why? Because Mustafa Morad will be showcasing the practical application of the Datacolor LightColor Meter.

The Datacolor LightColor Meter

This event’s star, the Datacolor LightColor Meter, is not just a tool—it’s a workflow superhero. Mustafa will demonstrate how this device can enhance your workflow and liberate you from unnecessary post-production tasks. Yes, you heard that right—less post-processing!

Register Now

Register now to receive valuable tips that could transform your workflow. Can’t make it? No worries, a recording will be sent to you, ensuring that no valuable insight slips through your fingers. Just remember to check your spam or junk folders if the confirmation email takes a detour. Stay curious, stay creative, and see you at the session!

For more details and to register, visit Datacolor.

Datacolor LightColor Meter: Precision in Light and Color

The post Mustafa Morad’s Datacolor LightColor Meter Adventure first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

DJI’s latest gadget, the DJI Flip, proves that good things really do come in small packages. Designed with creators in mind, this compact, foldable drone is perfect for those who want cinematic shots but don’t feel like lugging around a flying tank.

A Camera That Means Business

At the heart of the Flip is its 1/1.3″ CMOS sensor, which captures 4K60 horizontal video, 2.7K vertical video, and 48MP stills. If that’s not enough, you can slow things down with 100 fps Full HD 1080p video. Translation? Whether you’re filming a scenic landscape or your dog stealing food off the counter, the Flip’s camera has you covered.

Folding Like a Pro

The Flip lives up to its name with a folding mechanism that tucks its arms, motors, and propeller guards neatly under the body. It’s so compact, you might mistake it for a snack in your bag. But don’t let its small size fool you—this drone is ready to take flight at a moment’s notice.

Flight Modes for Every Mood

The Flip is packed with intelligent flight modes, each designed to make your aerial shots look like they came from a Hollywood set.

• FocusTrack: It’s like having a stalker in the sky, with Spotlight 2.0, Point of Interest 3.0, and ActiveTrack 4.0 ensuring your subject stays in focus.
• MasterShots: The Flip takes the reins, executing pre-programmed routes and compiling footage into a cinematic “masterpiece”.
• QuickShots: Think of it as the drone’s party trick—six preset maneuvers, including Dronie, Circle, and Boomerang, that make even amateur pilots look like pros.
• Hyperlapse: Want to make time fly? The Flip captures photos at intervals and stitches them into stunning timelapse videos.
• Panorama: Choose from 180°, wide-angle, vertical, or sphere modes for sweeping landscape shots. Or, in a more professional setting, the presets you need for photogrammetry.
• Cruise Control: For those moments when smooth, consistent footage is a must, the Flip keeps its speed steady so you can focus.

Safety First

DJI hasn’t forgotten about safety. The Flip features full-coverage propeller guards and a 3D infrared sensing system to spot obstacles and stop in its tracks before crashing into Aunt Susan’s flower bed. It’s practically a drone with a conscience.

Easy Controls, Wherever You Are

The Flip offers versatile control options. It can take off straight from your palm if you’re feeling adventurous, or you can use the RC-N3 controller for more precision. Prefer your smartphone? The DJI Fly app has you covered, with Wi-Fi-enabled footage transfer at speeds up to 30 MB/s.

Light as a Feather

Weighing in at 249 Grams with battery, the Flip dodges registration when using the standard intelligent flight battery. Add up to 31 minutes of flight time, and you’ve got yourself a drone that’s light, portable, and efficient enough for a quick aerial photoshoot—or an extended spying mission on the neighborhood cats.

Seeing Far and Wide

The O4 video transmission system lets you stream live 1080p60 feeds from up to eight miles away, so you can explore without leaving your couch. The drone also features SmartPhoto mode, combining HDR and scene recognition to make your shots look professionally edited. Oh, and let’s not forget the 4x zoom, because sometimes you want to get closer without actually getting closer.

What’s the Damage?

The DJI Flip is available in three flavors:

• The RC-N3 version is a wallet-friendly $439.
• The RC 2 version upgrades your experience for $639.
• Feeling fancy? The RC 2 with Fly More Combo—complete with extra batteries, propellers, a shoulder bag, and a parallel charging hub—comes in at $779.

Check out the full specs and pricing on the B&H DJI Flip product page.

The post DJI Flip: Pocket-Sized Drone first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

In nuce: As editor John Aldred from diyphotography.net reported in a comment on 20 September this year, the Ver.2.2 firmware update for the Lumix GH6 has gone online. The update has been available online since 27 September. According to Aldred, the new feature that users should be most pleased about is that – as Panasonic’s announcement states – “direct recording and playback of videos/photos via an SSD with USB connection” is now also supported. According to Aldred, one of the main requests from GH6 users to date has been that the device should be able to record directly to SSD.

In toto: In his commentary, Aldred discusses some of the technical specifications of the update. The most important ones follow below:

• Record to SSD with a maximum capacity of 2TB using Apple ProRes 422 HQ (max. 1.9Gbps) or 4:2:2 10-bit All-Intra at high bitrate.
• The new update limits the size of the SSD to 2 TB, which according to Aldred is not a major limitation, partly because 1 TB is the standard for USB SSDs these days, he writes.
• A negligible drop of bitterness: Simultaneous recording via SD card or CFexpress card slots – while recording to SSD – is not possible, according to Aldred.

Click further: The Ver.2.2 firmware update can be downloaded from av.jpn.support.panasonic.com . The following sources are available for further information.

Sources: diyphotography.net, na.panasonic.com

The post Firmware update for Panasonic’s GH6 supports SSD recording via USB! first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Patrick Poti.

This article originally appeared in Digital Production 02 : 2019.

Many loved the inconspicuous Blackmagic Pocket HD despite all its weaknesses – from short battery life to fragile sockets and a very flat screen. The film images were simply too beautiful for a camera of this price range and size. As soon as 4K became an issue, many people wanted a new successor to the classic 16 mm camera with better resolution. When the hapless Digital Bolex disappeared from the market, these voices became even more numerous. Finally, Blackmagic Design (BMD for short) announced the new Pocket at NAB 2O18, and obviously many fingers twitched at “buy” without thinking twice. Unlike in the past, BMD was almost able to keep to the announced delivery date this time. But that doesn’t mean you can get the camera right away: It’s selling like hotcakes. Does the new camera have that much magic?

The predecessor could actually be slipped into almost any pocket with a small pancake or 16 mm lens. That’s a thing of the past, because despite all the progress, processing four times as many pixels for RAW images and the corresponding heat dissipation cannot be accommodated in such a compact housing. The new camera looks very similar to a DSLR and is even a little chunkier. When you first touch it, however, the low weight (720 g) is surprising, which is also associated with a certain feeling of a plastic box. But it is a composite material reinforced with carbon fibres, which should be able to withstand quite a lot – others use such material in cars. In any case, there have been no reports of damage to the housing from those who have been working with it for some time. A few Ursa Minis, on the other hand, have not survived tipping sideways with the handle attached without breaking the metal housing.

At best, the torsional strength of the Pocket 4K could be somewhat lower than that of metal. With heavy lenses or even motorised focus pullers, you should probably attach the lens to the support rather than the camera alone. The housing is not rainproof. A common problem with the predecessor was the fragile sockets, especially the tiny HDMI connection, which usually failed when used frequently. There are now better things here: HDMI in full size, a much more solid, latching 12-volt socket and mini-XLR for sound (mono) in addition to the usual 3.5 mm stereo jack. The batteries have also grown slightly; they now correspond to Canon LP-E6. BMD has retained the lens mount for Micro 4/3 (MFT). The active cooling is audible, but only in the immediate vicinity. The outlet for the significantly heated air is not optimally positioned on the underside, as a larger tripod plate could jeopardise the cooling, especially if the camera is carelessly placed on textiles.

Despite the touchscreen, there are plenty of sensibly placed and clearly labelled controls, including three freely assignable function buttons, a photo button for stills and a quick switch to slow motion. However, the latter can lead to problems if it happens to be assigned the same frame rate as the one you are currently shooting with. If you then accidentally touch this button, the picture/sound synchronisation is no longer guaranteed – so it is better to set a clearly different frame rate so that it is noticeable. It is also to be hoped that the labelling will be more durable than on the old Pocket: anyone who has used it intensively must now be able to operate it blindly. There is no longer a socket for LANC (Control-L); remote control is only offered via Bluetooth app as with the Ursa Mini Pro. If desired, GPS data from the controlling device can be transferred to the metadata of the recording – e.g. on the tracks of rare animals.

Together with the well thought-out menu structure, from which manufacturers like Sony could still learn a lot, the Pocket 4K quickly grows into your (not too dainty) hand. The manual is available in several languages, including German. Apart from a few amusing translation errors such as “camera assistant” instead of “AC” for AC, it is well organised and easy to understand; there is even an introduction to DaVinci Resolve. The camera menus are currently limited to English, but translations are planned.

Monitor

The screen makes good use of the available space, has a full HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 and around 500 nits. Although it cannot compete with a Ninja V that is twice as bright, it is significantly brighter and sharper than its predecessor (which can hardly be operated without a viewfinder magnifier). Unfortunately, it cannot be tilted, making it difficult to work with it from very low or high positions. Nevertheless, this decision is understandable, as the camera was obviously designed to be robust. The fragile tilting mechanism of some other cameras and the continuous strain on the corresponding cabling is always a potential weak point.
The monitor offers clear displays of all important parameters, which lead directly to the corresponding setting when touched without a menu; of course, they can also be hidden. Loadable LUTs for the display allow image assessment – these can optionally be transferred to the recording if you need to deliver immediately presentable material. Contour sharpening, zebra and false colours can be switched on for control purposes, but there is no waveform, histogram or vectorscope here. When the menu is activated or in dark scenes, a slight light scattering can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner, but this is insignificant in practice.

Sensor and lenses

The sensor has also grown, even slightly beyond the usual size in MFT photo cameras such as the GH5 from Panasonic. While the latter has a sensor with a width of 17.3 mm and an aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1, the chip in the Pocket 4K is almost 19 mm wide, but only 10 mm high. It is clearly aimed at film and actually has real 4K pixels in the cinema standard of 4096 x 2160 – other camera manufacturers are happy if you don’t know the difference to UHD with 3840 x 2160. Now, neither means a true resolution of 2,000 lines with a Bayer pattern, but at least both formats are available natively without scaling. The sharpness of a Sony A7III with oversampling is not quite achieved, but subjectively the Pocket looks very sharp. With one small catch: BMD still does not use an OLPF (anti-aliasing filter), so part of the sharpness impression is likely to consist of false detail. however, 4K on a small chip is far less critical than HD because the resolution limit of many lenses already has an effect. We were only rarely able to detect moiré in natural subjects.

The larger sensor has consequences for the choice of lens: if you still have S-16 lenses from an old pocket, they are unfortunately no longer as suitable despite having the same mount. They vignette massively at 4K and can only be used for 2K or HDTV via windowing or with crop. MFT lenses, which are now available in an enormous selection with both autofocus and purely manual focus, do not cause any problems with the image field. With a crop factor of 1.9 instead of 2 (in relation to KB photos), they even have a slightly wider angle of view on the Pocket 4K. With appropriate lenses, autofocus is possible on an area tapped on the screen, but this is relatively slow and cannot be tracked continuously as with modern photo cameras.

The Panasonic 12-35mm/f2.8 or the Olympus 12-100mm/f4 can be used as universal lenses. Both are excellent lenses and have image stabilisation – with Olympus, the latter in the lens is rather the exception. For a film camera, the lack of internal image stabilisation is less important, as you usually use aids such as a gimbal or tripod and the stabilisation can then even interfere. With appropriate lenses, you can activate their stabilisation in the camera for hand-held shots, but this cannot replace a gimbal. All classic manual lenses can be adapted using an adapter if you love their look. However, you can hardly save any money with them now that the Sonys with E-mount are available and there is a corresponding run on good lenses. The lower speed of the zooms is generally unproblematic on the Pocket 4K, as the new sensor is significantly more light-sensitive than all previous BMD sensors.

For the first time at BMD, the sensor has two native ISO values, namely 400 and 3,200 ISO. Our tests showed that it is less noisy at 1,250 ISO than at 640 or 800, which are obviously only generated by amplification. Yes, the noise even seemed a touch lower than at 400, even if this is somewhat at the expense of the latitude in the highlights. Even at 1,600 ISO, the image is still quite usable, while 3,200 requires some noise filtering. The limit value of 25,600, on the other hand, is exactly that: borderline. The dynamic range is around 13 f-stops and therefore slightly below that of the Ursa Mini Pro, but this is still a very decent result, as our test subject shows. This dual ISO is explained excellently at FilmmakerIQ bit.ly/hess_dual_iso. The rolling shutter is acceptable, it is more on a par with other cinema cameras and is not as massive as with film cameras. The structure of the noise is different to that of BMD, it appears very homogeneous and the infamous fixed pattern noise is barely discernible. It is noticeable that in the waveform display of Resolve a clipping below the black level is recognisable in the noise, which we have not seen in this form with other cameras. After slight noise filtering, a normal noise carpet can be recognised again. Not only is the light sensitivity impressive for a still quite small sensor in 4K, the colours are also fully convincing. BMD once again shows that it understands colour science: it shouldn’t be too difficult to match correctly exposed skin tones with an Arri, even if the Pocket can’t really keep up in the colours of the limits of its dynamic range.

Recording media

Only the Ursa Mini is similarly flexible when it comes to storage media: in addition to CFast and fast SD cards, you can also connect an external SSD via the USB-C port (note: not identical to Thunderbolt 3) and record directly to it. However, there still seem to be minor firmware problems, because at least with the popular Samsung T5, you should first start the camera (approx. 5 seconds) and only then connect the SSD. Sometimes a card should also be inserted in the SD slot first so that the SSD is recognised (both use the same bus). However, BMD is aware of the problem and a solution should be in the works. Sandisk should urgently solve another problem: Some of the current batches of proven SD cards no longer work in BMD’s cameras, not alone in the Pocket 4K. Be careful with repeat purchases!

USB-C use is even more elegant and cheaper than the separately purchased SSD recorder for the larger camera or tinkering, as presented in DP 03:18. This means that everything is available, from fast but more expensive media to inexpensive and widely used media to media with long runtimes. A place for the lightweight SSD with some Velcro can usually still be found; unfortunately, USB-C is not secured against slipping out. On sufficiently fast media, the Pocket can manage 4K DCI or UHD with 60 frames, and with HDTV in the crop window it goes up to 120 fps. Unfortunately, no intermediate format of 3K (as with RED) is offered, so that a Bayer sensor would also deliver the full HDTV resolution. Currently, recording is only possible in DNG or ProRes 422, but BMD has also announced BRaw (see DP 01:19) for this camera. As the camera does not allow parallel recording on multiple media, not all formats can be recorded uncompressed at higher frame rates.

Power supply

Even though the Pocket 4K achieves slightly longer runtimes than its predecessor with the larger batteries, the power requirement for small batteries typically used in DSLRs is critical. The battery supplied by BMD achieves 49 minutes of continuous recording on an internal card, the remaining runtime indicator decreases continuously, it displays a warning shortly before switching off and switches off properly. In contrast, a new battery from Patona, which was also used for testing, lasted 33 minutes and switched off at 80% without warning. We have not had any bad experiences with these third-party batteries on other devices, but it is simply the case that the Pocket draws more power than a standard DSLR.

Unlimited reliability only seems to be possible with the rather expensive original batteries from Canon and those from BMD. However, BMD is currently experiencing supply bottlenecks not only with the cameras, but also with these batteries. Particularly when using SSDs, which also draw their power from the camera via USB-C, it is important to warn against using third-party batteries. One possible weak point appears to be the battery cover – its closure does not look very trustworthy, but the battery itself is secured against falling out by an additional lever. On the other hand, the cover is also easy to remove if you want to connect a more powerful battery (such as the Sony L series) externally using a dummy – the accessories industry has reacted quickly.

The Pocket also has a socket for an external 12-volt supply. Strictly speaking, it can be 12-20 volts, so that standard video batteries with D-Tap can be used without fear, although they can have up to 16.8 volts when freshly charged (nominal 14.4). The appropriate cable must be purchased separately. A power supply unit for this connection is included in the scope of delivery and also charges the internal battery; however, a separate charger is not included. When the camera is switched off, the battery can even be charged via USB. As long as a charged battery is in the camera, the power supply remains very reliable. If you have to change the external battery or someone unplugs the mains cable, recording continues without interruption.

Sound and timecode

The four internal microphones sound very good and have an amazing feature when a zoom lens with electronic connection is used: The sound is zoomed in! In the wide-angle position, the sound is more open and spacious; in the zoom position, it sounds closer and more intimate. Noise from the inputs is barely audible, but the fan becomes discreetly audible in a quiet environment. The mono XLR input offers switchable 48 volt phantom power – which places additional demands on the battery and costs around 10 minutes of battery life. The built-in loudspeaker is only used to determine the presence of sound. The output for headphones is usable this time, it has neither too much noise nor too much latency, as has been the case with some other BMD models.

Unfortunately, this is the end of the plus points: the 3.5 mm stereo input is far too insensitive and without an external preamplifier can only be used in front of the stage at a heavy metal concert, even with powerful microphones. However, a radio link with line output is sufficient. Whether this is a software error or a fundamental weakness could not yet be determined during our test. In addition, the inputs cannot be switched separately to line or micro level, they can only be switched together. This restriction is not obvious in the menu and can be irritating.
On the other hand, the use of external timecode generators is a good solution: you only have to briefly feed an LTC timecode into one of the inputs without assigning it to a track during recording. As soon as it has been recognised, a jam sync is performed, indicated by a small symbol next to the TC in the monitor. The synchronisation is then stable for several hours as long as the power supply is maintained. Consequently, it is wisest to work with separate sound recording if you do not want to tether the camera to an external mixer. The Zoom Recorder F4, among others, demonstrates very good TC stability. The internal microphones can at least provide a good ambience or a guide sound if you want to create the sound with Pluraleyes or similar programmes.

Which gimbal?

The choice should not be a problem with such a light camera, but the wide housing causes problems. On most gimbals, the handle hits the tilt motor if you can’t move the pocket far enough with an additional plate and still balance it. The Ronin S from DJI is currently available at a favourable price, which can be used with an additional plate. An alternative is the Moza Air 2, which can be used together with the Half Rig from Smallrig. Neither of these have been tested by us due to a lack of availability, but the reports from experienced forum colleagues are positive.

Comment

The Pocket 4K should be used for exactly what it is: a compact, very light and unbeatably cheap camera for the image quality. If you consider the value of the licence for DaVinci Resolve Studio, it costs just 1,000 euros. It can be used just as well in a YouTube home studio as a B-camera or crash cam alongside an Arri, and is also excellent as backpack equipment for landscape and wildlife photography. However, with its lack of ND filters, no viewfinder, weak sound section and critical power supply, it will not replace an Ursa Mini Pro, which also offers more resolution and dynamic range. Otherwise, you would have to put together a monster rig that is neither more user-friendly nor much cheaper.

The post More pixels in your pocket – the Blackmagic Pocket 4K first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Uli Plank.