DPA 4061 lavalier mic with DAK4060 Accessory Kit and adapters

For my documentary film work, I’ve been pretty satisfied with my Tram TR50s over the past few years. But when the mic capsule came loose for the second time on one of them, I was in the mood to try something new. After reading some reviews, I picked the DPA D:screet 4061 lav mic.

Why I chose DPA

1. It’s modular, using micro-dot connector adapters that allow the mic to work with virtually any professional audio device (i.e., XLR, Sennheiser, Lectrosonics, etc).
2. DPA makes a whole line of well designed accessories designed to make it easy to hide the mic.
3. It sounds great under clothing using the included capsule for boosting high frequencies. It also comes with a capsule that boosts the mid frequencies for use when outside of clothing.
4. The built quality is excellent, and it’s designed to withstand hours of sweaty performance.

The biggest surprise with the 4061 is how great it sounds under clothing when hidden. And how easy it is to hide using the DMM0012 Miniature Concealer. DPA makes some special two-sided round tape (ADH0002 Double-Sided Tape for Miniature Concealer), which is amazing stuff. You place the mic in the concealer, apply a piece of tape, then stick the mic anywhere inside your subject’s clothing, or on their chest directly. Using this setup, the mic us MUCH quieter under clothing than my TR50s ever were. I’m not sure why, exactly, but I can tell you that it just works. Something about the capsule of the TR50 makes it especially sensitive to clothing rustle.

One note: The DPA Microphones DPADH0004 double-sided tape costs $14 for 10 strips. When it arrived, I discovered it’s actually just Top-stick 1″x3″ toupe tape repackaged by DPA. You can buy 100 strips for the same price on Amazon.

DPA has made a video with some tips on how to hide their mics (or any others, really) under clothing:

I’ve taken the time to decipher some of the materials described in this video.

• Molton  cloth – it’s the European name for what we call Duvetyne here in the US.
• Double-sided tape – the brand he’s using in the video is called Ve-ge Double-sided transparent carpet tape and 2″ x 82′ roll costs $12 on Amazon.

DPA lav vs Rode lav

I’ve also had a Rode lav for a few years, and it’s another decent sounding mic for dialog that uses micro-dot connectors. However, Rode’s implementation of the connectors is much less robust than those found on the DPA mics. The DPA mic has a locking connector, which is thicker, while the Rode connectors do not lock, and feel pretty flimsy. But they have held solid so far.

Rode vs. DPA micro dot connectors

The Rode lav is also easy to hide under clothing using their Invisilav silicon mic concealers. But in my experience the double-sided tape on these tends to come off very easily, and is very fiddly to apply. The double-sided taping system that DPA makes for their concealer is definitely superior.

Quality has a price

If you’re looking to save money, the 4061 probably won’t be your first choice. The 4061 with microdot termination is $449. You’ll need to add at least one connector, and locking connector for Sennheiser Evolution wireless systems is $100; for an XLR connector it’s $115. The accessory kit padded case, pictured above, adds another $134 and includes a magnetic connector. The mic alone comes in a smaller clear, hard-plastic case. The concealer and it’s yellow double-sided tape stickers is sold separately.

The good news is that high-quality sound equipment evolves slowly (unlike cameras, which get upgrades every few months, it seems). It’s very likely that this mic will still be on the job 10 years from now. If you look at it that way, it’s a bargain!

It’s as bright as an Arri 650. It’s an LED. It’s rated at 98 cri. But wait, there’s more. It can output any color in the spectrum. And it’s just $799? Wow, if this thing is for real, lighting junkies like me have a lot to look forward to.  This beautiful piece of engineering from Hive Lighting is scheduled to begin shipping in March.

Hive Lighting makes high-quality fixtures used in Hollywood productions, and they have earned a great reputation for innovation with their plasma lights. The WASP 100-C is their first foray into the fast-changing world of film LED lighting.

The WASP 100-C will work with a wide range of accessories, including a mini source four attachment that should allow you to throw a narrow slice of light all the way across the room, no flagging required.

The lights will sell for $1,200 normally, so this is a screaming good deal while the WASP 100-C ickstarter campaign is still going.

Who knew that getting cancer could be a way into Carnegie Hall?

When Lydia Miner discovered a lump in her throat, she faced a blistering regime of radiation therapy in order to save her life. But the side effects would have left her unable to speak, or even eat, for a long time. Then she heard about a new form of treatment, robotic surgery, pioneered by a doctor at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

I made this film for Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, a tireless organization that works to bring patients new tools in the fight against cancer.

This piece was shot on Sony FS5 (SLOG3), and I cut it on Final Cut Pro X. Thanks to producer Sara Finklestein and crew members Alexandra Watkins (summer intern) and AC Kollin O’Dannel.

Teradek 300 HDMI wireless video transmitter

I had a project a few days ago where I wanted to provide a client monitor. I rented a Teradek Bolt Pro HDMI wireless transmitter, and learned a few things that I’d like to share about wireless monitoring.

1. HDMI cables suck. I couldn’t get a signal and spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the transmitter wasn’t working. Turns out the HDMI cable was bad.
2. The Bolt Pro 300 receiver runs very hot. If it gets too hot, the signal will cut out unexpectedly. I found that placing it on a table was where it overheated – it was happiest with good airflow around the unit.
3. The SmallHD 502 and 702 monitors both offer loop through from SDI to HDMI, so it was possible to output to the client monitor via HDMI while at the same time receiving a rock solid SDI signal from camera to monitor.
4. Test everything thoroughly the day before your shoot.  The power requirements, the calibration of the monitor you’ll be using, and how you’ll be mounting everything. The details will kill you if you don’t get them right ahead of time.
5. Did I mention HDMI cables suck? Next time I will pony up the extra cash to rent an SDI transmitter, because the HDMI cables really aren’t worth the headache in a production environment.

I was pleasantly surprised with how little latency the wireless video signal had. It was no problem to use the wireless signal to pull focus with. I can definitely see incorporating the SDI version of this system into my future production environments.

When I started filmmaking with a DSLR about 7 years ago, I discovered that the most difficult thing to get right in post production was skin tones. No matter what I tried, they just didn’t look right. A lot of the time, I couldn’t even put my finger on why.

Then I discovered FilmConvert Pro. With my Canon DSLRs, all I had to do was drop FilmConvert on a clip, and something magical happened. The skin tones suddenly looked human and alive. That made such an impression on me that I used FilmConvert to grade my first feature-length documentary, which was shot on a pair of Canon 60Ds.

In the years since I’ve moved into shooting more and more commercial work on higher quality cameras. Along the way I taught myself how to use DaVinci Resolve and began relying on it to generate dailies. So when I decided to try FilmConvert again recently on a commercial project, I was surprised with a new discovery: the skin tones I was getting in Resolve didn’t look as good as the ones that FilmConvert could give me!

The good news, however, is that FilmConvert works inside Resolve, so I don’t have to give up the power and precision of Resolve. I can still create complex masks, track motion, etc., while using FilmConvert. I’ll explain how to do that below as I create a nursing recruitment video. But first, I should mention that it’s possible to use the standalone version of FilmConvert  if you don’t have Resolve, or any other editor, for that matter. But it has some limitations.

FilmConvert Standalone version

The first thing I noticed about the standalone version of FilmConvert is that It feels a little raw. Some of the basic Mac OS conventions don’t work. For example, in the Clip Browser, if you want to use the arrow key to advance to the next clip, you can’t.  So you are forced to use your mouse to select clips, which slows me down. It also takes more than two seconds after clicking on a clip for the thumbnail to appear, which doesn’t seem like a big deal until you start scrolling through a list of a hundred clips. There’s also no way to play a clip in the browser – you just get a static thumbnail or list view.

These days I’m shooting a lot of my projects on a Sony FS5, so I was disappointed to discover that MXF files are not supported in the standalone version of FilmConvert. You can, however,  import an XML file from an application like Final Cut or an EDL from Resolve. But that adds another step to your workflow.

On the plus side, however, once you get your clips into the app, the Film Settings panel makes it very easy to preview clips and audition different settings. Hitting the space bar plays clips as expected, but JKL keys are not supported for shuttling through footage. Once you’ve found a look that works for your project, you can save it as a preset.

The app also provides a menu called Viewing Target, that allows you to change the gamma to match that used in the three most common finishing platforms – Premiere Pro, FCPX/Quicktime or FCP/Resolve. Very helpful.

DaVinci Resolve

DaVinci Resolve and I have a love/hate relationship. I love the power that Resolve gives me to control color, but with great power comes great responsibility. I hate the amount of work it takes to tweak things before they look just right, especially with SLOG footage. Also, SLOG 2 footage requires slightly different tweaking than SLOG 3. But I’m never sure exactly which tweaks.

With FilmConvert’s OFX plugin version, you can get 90 percent of the way to your grade simply by dragging and dropping. It’s a real timesaver for me to load FilmConvert, which knows all about the differences between picture profiles, as my first step. From there, the remaining tweaks are usually simple.

Before we jump into Resolve and see how this works, I should mention that the footage for this project was shot on my Sony FS5 using SLOG-3/Cine overexposed one stop to kill noise. When I open Resolve and place the clips into a timeline, here’s what one of the ungraded SLOG clips looks like:

Uncorrected SLOG-3 clip looks very flat

Note that you can do everything I’m demonstrating here with the free version of Resolve.  Then, download the OFX version of FilmConvert Pro, and follow the directions to install it in Resolve. The first time I installed FilmConvert this way, I made the mistake of trying to apply it to my clips in the Edit tab, which contains a OpenFX tab under the Effects Library menu. Ignore that, and instead apply FilmConvert on Resolve’s Color page. Here are the steps.

1. Import your clips into Resolve and add into Media Pool.
2. Create a new timeline with your clips.
3. Open the Color tab. For my workflow, I want to convert all the clips simultaneously, so instead of applying FilmConvert to each clip, I start out by switching from Clip mode into Timeline mode. This allows us to simultaneously apply FilmConvert to all clips in the timeline. 
4. Create timeline node. You’ll notice that there are no nodes in the node tree when you switch into Timeline mode. You will need to add one before you can apply FilmConvert. From the Nodes menu, select Add Serial Node (or press option-s).
   
5. Apply FilmConvert. Click on the OpenFX menu to reveal the OFX Library, and scroll down until you see FilmConvert. Drag it onto the timeline node to apply it (below):
   
6. Default profile is applied. You’ll immediately notice the clip gets grainy. FilmConvert applies a standard profile by default, and adds a lot of film grain. We’ll fix that in a minute.
7. Add a serial node. In order to make global color corrections later, I add a second serial node in front of the one I’ve applied FilmConvert to (shift-s). FilmConvert should always be applied to the last node in the node tree. Then double click on the 02 node so that it’s active.
8. Select Camera. Next, in the FilmConvert menu in the Settings sidebar, we want to select our camera profile:
9. Select picture profile. Also choose the picture profile you used when shooting. FilmConvert gives you options for +1 and +2 overexposure options:
   

   Select picture profile

   

   Image with default profile, which is too grainy for my taste

10. Adjust grain. OK so now you should see your image starting to look better. But the first thing I notice is that it looks very grainy. I’m not a fan of film grain for most commercial videos (the whole point of having high quality camera sensors is to get rid of grain, isn’t it?So the first thing I do is reduce the grain slider to 0. I DO sometimes like the grain for more creative pieces, however, and in fact, the grain can be very helpful in disguising thinner 8-bit codec adjustments. In those cases, I find that setting the grain slider between 30 and 50 is about right. But for this piece, we’ll keep it clean.
    

    With a few exposure adjustments, our image begins to pop

11. Adjust the exposure. The next thing I’m noticing is that my clip is a little dark. FilmConvert provides contrast adjustment tools within the  plugin. You can make global exposure and color temperature adjustments in the plugin’s Camera Settings menu. Or scroll down to make more detailed adjustments to lift (shadows), gamma (midtowns) and gain (highlights). However, we’re already working within one of the most powerful tools for contrast and color adjustment – DaVinci Resolve – so I tend to make my global changes in that node we added previously. But if Resolve’s controls are intimidating to you, don’t worry! Just grab the Exposure slider and move it until your image looks properly exposed.
12. Choose a film stock. OK, so with a few contrast adjustments made, our image is looking pretty good. Now for the fun part: choosing our film stock. This is the palette you get to play with, the place where subtle differences can be hard to see, but have a huge impact on your final look. I recommend using one of Resolve’s comparison tools, Grab Still, to help you see the difference between stocks side by side.  With the default Film Setting selected (KD 5207 Vis3), click on the viewer and select “grab still.”
13. Grab a still for each stock. Select the next film stock on the list, KD 5213 Vis3. Grab another still. Repeat for each of the stocks you want to compare (FJ Neo through KD TrX400 are black and white, so I’ve skipped those). Now click on Gallery at the top left of Resolve’s window. You will see a thumbnail of each still displayed in the left column. You can click on each still and give it a name that matches the film stock. 
14. Expand the gallery. In the menu at the top of the stills, you’ll notice a slider that controls the size of the thumbnails. To the right of that is a search icon and a four-arrowed icon. Click the arrowed icon to expand the gallery.
    

    With gallery expanded, you can easily compare the subtle differences between film stocks.

15. Select film stock. Choose the film stock you like best. You can make further refinements to the look in the FilmConvert plugin controls. Film Color and Curve are two controls that help you dial in the exact look you want. I find that FilmConvert’s Curve tends to be quite contrasty when applied at the default 100 percent.  You may want to back it off slightly. And Film Color is like the opacity sliders in Photoshop that allow you to back off on the intensity of the entire plugin (dialing this down to 0 returns you to completely flat SLOG3).
16. Make individual adjustments. Check the other clips in your timeline. They will likely need individual adjustments, and you can do those on the Clip node, rather than the timeline node.
17. Export dailies. When you are happy with how each clip looks, switch to Resolve’s Deliver window, and export your files in the editing-friendly codec of your choice. I export to ProRes for editing in Final Cut Pro X.

Before we leave Resolve, I want to point out one more very cool feature of FilmConvert. It’s the ability to export a LUT based on your film look. I use this a lot, because I most often am shooting SLOG on a Sony FS5 using a SmallHD 502 or 702 monitor. These monitors support LUTs, so by loading this LUT into the monitor, I can see what the video will look like AFTER FilmConvert is applied using my settings. It’s a great way to previsualize on set. If you have a client looking over your shoulder while shooting, this is invaluable. Here’s how to generate the LUT:

Click “Export 3d LUT”

The default name isn’t very helpful

Give the LUT a name that accurately describes the look being applied

The resulting .cube file can be then loaded onto the monitor.

OK back to cutting our video. The next step in my workflow is to cut my footage in FCPX. So I import the dailies we’ve generated in Resolve into FCPX, and start cutting. For this particular video, I will use some additional media (animated stills) that doesn’t have FilmConvert applied to it. That’s OK! FilmConvert works with FCPX too (provided you have the FCPX-specific plugin, which can be downloaded from the FilmConvert site.

The stills I’m working with were shot with an unknown camera. So to match them to my footage in FCPX, I drag and drop the FilmConvert plugin onto the still, and using the on-screen controls, select the Default profile.

In FCPX, we can match unknown camera types using the default settings and onscreen controls

This shot is too warm – I want to cool it off. So I drag the puck in the middle of the color wheels in the direction of my desired color shift.

Before applying FilmConvert

After applying FilmConvert

To apply the same change to all of the additional stills, simply copy and paste the effect.

Here’s the finished video:

Getting a consistent film look is quickly achievable using FilmConvert, without having to delve into the complexities of color correction. And even if you do know those complexities, grading from scratch takes a lot of time. And that’s why I like FilmConvert Pro: it frees me to focus on the story, and empowers me to ship faster. What’s not to love about a tool that can do that?

Just after sunrise, the 365-degree view from the top of Sourdough Mountain Lookout is breathtaking. Shot with Sigma 20mm f/1.4 Art series lens.

For this post, I’m going to let the pictures do most of the talking. How did I find myself in a place to take these photos? Well, Kyle Hart of Rhino Camera Gear sent out an invitation to Rhino customers a couple weeks ago, inviting us to join him and one of his team members on a backpacking trip into the North Cascades. That’s what I call customer relationship management!  I still can’t believe I was the only person who said yes.

Kyle’s goal for this trip was to find an epic spot to shoot a timelapse of The Milky Way. Well, we found that spot. It’s called Sourdough Mountain Lookout, and I’ve never seen a view like the one we saw as we woke up in the morning. The fog spread below us in all directions, like a glacier from the ice age. It was an unforgettable moment.

I hadn’t had my coffee when I headed out for this trip at 6 in the morning, and forgot the motor for my slider in my living room. (Tip: never leave the house without having coffee first). So for this trip, I left the timelapse shooting to the Rhino guys, and focused on shooting stills with my 5dmkiii.

As a result of this trip, Rhino Camera will soon have some fresh content on their website featuring tips on how to pack Rhino sliders for backpacking, and how to shoot a great Milky Way timelapse. I’ll put up a link to that here as soon as it’s up.

One of the things I’ve noticed now that I’m doing the bulk of my shooting on super 35 sensor cameras instead of a full frame DSLR is that my set of Contax Zeiss primes just aren’t getting used that much any more. Why? The lenses, most of which are f/2.8, just don’t look as good when adapted with the crop factor of f/1.5 using the Metabones IV adapter. So, why not just just use them with a Speedbooster?

Answer: because of protruding rear elements (see below) that prevent them from fitting on the Speedbooster.

It’s really quite extraordinary the difference in look that a full frame vs. a super 35 sensor makes with this glass. Using the IV adapter, my 35mm f/2.8 Zeiss becomes about a 52mm lens in terms of field of view. Sometimes the change in field of view is fine – when I want a longer focal length. But another thing happens that’s rarely desirable: what was f/2.8 on full frame now has the depth of field appearance of f/4. And the difference between apparent f/4 and f/2.8 on full frame? Huge.

Over the weekend, it occurred to me that there might be a way around this impasse. Why not get a Dremel tool and grind those nasty rear elements out of the way? A close examination revealed that the elements are useless for video work anyway. I will never be using these lenses, which are permanently cine modified already, for shooting stills on a Contax camera. So I ran across the street to my hardware store and got busy.

First thing was learning about griding wheels – turns out the one you want for this job is the aluminum oxide grinders that are designed for metal work. Pictured above is the B132 grinding stone, which worked great.

To prevent fine metal shavings from falling into the lens, I carefully used painters tape to mask off the rear elements of the lens and block the openings into the lens. Then I made sure my glasses were on, and got busy.

The metal pretty much just melts away with carefully applied pressure.

Bits of metal become flattened and hang over the sides of the real element, which I was able to scrape away with a small screwdriver. I also used a vacuum cleaner to suck out any stray metal dust.

Pulling away the tape reveals the flattened elements.

Now the moment of truth: It fits! I ground down all 5 of my lenses in my set (25mm f/2.8, 35mm f/2.8, 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.4, 135mm f/2.8).

I tried all 5 of the lenses on, and all fit, but I noticed the 35mm in particular was very tight. This and the 135mm were the most difficult to work on, as they were very tight when attached to the adapter. But they seemed to fit OK after repeated grinding sessions. Woo hoo! I’ve got a set of dreamy Zeiss glass with the full frame look on my FS5!

But before you get as excited as I did, let me tell you the rest of the story. When I put one of my Canon L lenses on the Speedbooster, everything seemed fine … except the image stabilization didn’t work. Crap. What did I mess up…

A close look revealed the despite my best efforts at grinding, something had remained on at least one of the lenses that tangled with the last contact in the row. For the Zeiss glass, it doesn’t matter – it’s all manual anyway. But for the Canon lenses, you need every one of those contacts in working order. Sigh.

I’m still not sure what messed that up – but it obviously did. So my solution has to make this Speedbooster my dedicated  “Zeiss only” adapter.

It now lives in the same Pelican case as the Zeiss Contax set. I had to spring for another one to use with my Canon L glass. If were going to do this over again, I’d start by purchasing one of the older Speedboosters (you can find them on Ebay for a few hundred bucks cheaper than the new Ultra Speedbooster that I used), and plan from the beginning to dedicate a Speedbooster to the Zeiss glass, instead of thinking I could continue to use the same one with L glass.

All in all, though, I’m thrilled to have the full frame look back with my Zeiss glass on Super 35 and am looking forward to shooting my next project with this glass. Here’s why:

25mm f/2.8 Zeiss adapted to Sony FS5 with Metabones IV adapter (1.5 crop factor makes approximate field of view of 37mm):

35mm f/2.8 Zeiss (after grinding) adapted to Sony FS5 with Metabones Speedbooster (.071 crop factor makes approximate field of view 37mm):

Notice how much more selective the focus is on the orange umbrella in the second frame. If you’re not noticing the difference, click on each image to view at full resolution.

PS. Since this post went live, I’ve learned that Metabones makes a Contax CY -> Sony E mount Ultra Speedbooster. Duh! I would have been much better off just buying that, saving the contacts on my EF Speedbooster, and leaving well enough alone. But then I wouldn’t have had anything to blog about, would I?

Sony has been pretty sneaky in their release of firmware version 2.0 for the FS5. There’s been no big public announcement that I’m aware of, aside from this brief post in Alister Chapman’s blog. Maybe that’s because it isn’t fully ready to roll out – for example, there’s currently no way to purchase the upgrade to the raw-output option contained in the 2.0 firmware. So what’s the big deal?

Well, for me, the auto-nd feature is pretty epic. It’s the first time I’ve gotten really excited about an auto feature on a camera since Canon released dual-pixel autofocus. Auto-nd on the Sony FS5 is like having a pair of sunglasses that automatically get darker or lighter, almost instantly, in response to brightness. You can now do things like go from indoors to outdoors seamlessly, without affecting ISO, shutter or iris. This is huge: a creative tool DPs have never had before.

Sony Catalyst Browse displays GPS info contained in video clip metadata.

Also cool: The GPS feature, which is now enabled by default. What’s it useful for? I’m not sure yet. None of the GPS info is showing up in FCPX. But it does appear in Catalyst Browse, the free app from Sony for logging and transcoding footage. I look forward to finding useful ways to use this info. Chapman has suggested that one possible use will be the universal time that each clip is tagged with. However, it does not appear to be frame accurate – the frame field is empty on all clips.

Note: The GPS feature seems to be quite unreliable, with the signal coming and going and most of the time I’m seeing “No GPS” on the screen. I know that there is GPS in my area, because my cell phone is working with it fine. So the receiver on the camera seems pretty weak.

This 2.0 firmware has me really excited about shooting raw. I can see one really great use for it: shooting interviews in 4K, to enable getting two shots (medium and tight) frame same camera.  I can’t wait to get my hands on the raw upgrade as soon as it’s available.

No shit. There I was. At the end of a long day of shooting for a commercial client with a rented C300mkii, and I get this error message: “Buffer overflow.” I tried to dismiss the error but the camera’s OS had frozen. I had to pull the battery to cycle power and restart. I hit record and same error. Additionally, another error popped up with something like “some files need to be recovered.” WTF?

My rented 256gig Lexar 3400 Cfast card was 6 minutes away from being full in slot A. I had a fresh card (same brand and capacity) in slot B, and my first thought was to switch cards. I did that, and everything was happy. I finished the shoot without further incident.

But when I inserted card A into the reader that evening, much to my surprise, my Mac froze and had to be hard-rebooted. Damn! Now I was getting nervous. This was a big project for a client who had flown to Portland from Austin, at considerable expense. I started to imagine the extremely uncomfortable conversation I was going to have to have with him.

“Um, you know that second day of shooting we did? The one where you kept telling me the shots looked so much better than our first day of shooting? Yeah, that extra day of shooting that you didn’t plan to pay for but did because I convinced you it would be worth it?”

I did some Googling, and discovered that the only Cfast cards officially supported by Canon for the C300mkii are all SanDisk cards, in capacities only up to 128GB.

I was extremely disappointed to find discover this fact, because my rental house, Lensrentals.com, had listed the Lexar drive as “works well with” the c300mkii. But who knows whether the Cfast card error thrown by the camera was related to the media anyway? Maybe it was something else. But I didn’t want to point fingers: I wanted to find a solution.

I put the bad card back into the camera, switched into media review mode, and held my breath as I tried to open the files. And guess what? I could open them! Big sigh of relief. If the data was readable on the camera, that meant the files would be recoverable. But how?

After several attempts to do disk first aid and data recovery on the card failed with the same OS freeze as before, I got another idea. Would it be possible to copy, one at a time, the files from the Cfast card onto the camera’s SD card, which normally records proxy media? Nope. No can do. There isn’t even an option for that. But as I was exploring the C300mkii’s file options, I discovered that it IS possible to copy files using the camera menu from Cfast card A to B. I took another deep breath and gave it a try and…bingo! The file copied and the copied card was readable on my Mac.

It took me about half a day to painstakingly go through all 128 files and copy them over, but it was the best half day I’ve ever spent.

I alerted the rental house to the potential card compatibility issue, and they said they’d investigate. I still have no clear optic on what caused this data drama. But I do know a couple of things. The first one is that a problem like this has never happened to me while shooting with my Sony FS5. The second is that the next time I rent a C300mkii, you can be damn sure I’ll be sticking with the cards that Canon has officially supported.

UPDATE: After investigating, the fine folks at Lensrentals.com told me “it looks like the card was defective” and issued me a refund for the card rental.  “We haven’t had any higher issues with these cards/cameras than any other. I wouldn’t hesitate to use them again – just perhaps with a backup or two.”