That’s probably not going to delay any real business on set, but it can be confusing for an unfamiliar AC you might hand the Air to.Īnother little annoyance: While you’re holding the transmitter, it’s easy to accidentally press the Channel button on the side of the remote, which ups the transmitter’s channel by one and breaks the link between transmitter and receiver/motor. One annoyance: after the Remote Air finishes calibrating itself to a lens, it needs about 20 seconds before it will respond to moves from the transmitter’s focus wheel. The transmitter has no white disk for making focus marks, but you can put down a thin strip of tape, and make your own marks on that. The Air maps that range on the lens to the 360 degree focus wheel on your transmitter. The Remote Air’s motor responds by moving to one end of the lens’ focus wheel and then to the other (if you’re using a still lens without hard stops, the Air will still detect the gear teeth you’ve installed on the lens, and count them as hard stops). To calibrate your lens, just hold the “Nerve” button on the side of the transmitter for 3 seconds. You can guestimate your transmitter’s 30 hour battery level by reading the TX voltage. The display on the Air’s transmitter reports your channel and signal level. Powering them both off and then powering up the transmitter first should fix that. Note: once or twice, I noticed that they were linked but not responding to each other. If they’re nearby, you’ll see each report a signal level of 100% on their LCD screens. Once both transmitter and receiver are on the same channel, they should be linked and respond to each other. To get started, just turn on the transmitter and receiver and get them on the same channel by pressing the Channel button on each device (just keep pressing the Channel button to step through all 20 available channels). The transmitter has a non-user-replaceable internal battery which lasts about 30 hours, and can be recharged by plugging it into a wall or a USB power source.Īs for the receiver, you can power it from a 12 volt source with a p-tap- anything from a big production battery to smaller ones like Ikan’s IBS-U65, or those little batteries used on gimbals. The narrow transmitter is a bit unconventional in size, but feels good in your hand and its focus wheel has a nice weighted quality to it. The Remote Air comes in a slim hard case, with hard foam cutouts for all the pieces. Here are some hands-on, real-world impressions,…. Reverse motor direction for those ‘weird’ lenses? Check! Responsive transmitter/motor connectivity? Check. Now, after taking it on a few jobs over several weeks, I have my answer: it does a surprisingly good job, giving you many of the same features found in more expensive units. So given the Remote Air’s unusually low price (there’s also a two channel model for focus and iris at $2499), I had to wonder if the Air could really be effective on a real-world set. And price tags keep going up as you move to higher-end gear from cmotion, Element Technica, and the granddaddy of them all, Preston. After the Redrock, there are units from mid-tier companies like Bartech, Heden, Hocus Products, RTMotion - all roughly in the $4,000-$5,000 range for a single channel system. To put that price in perspective, the next low-cost kit I’m aware of is Cinegears’ Express Plus at $2129, and then Redrock Micro’s microRemote at $2690. 8 pitch standard torque motor and all the necessary cables and connectors to mount it on 15mm or 19mm rods. You can get a single-channel kit at B&H Photo these days for $1599, including a hard case, a handheld transmitter, receiver, single. Ikan’s Remote Air One (also known as the PD Movie) is a wireless remote follow focus that’s easily the most affordable I’ve seen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |