After reviewing the Phantom Flex 4k a few years ago I didn't think think there would be much to challenge it for a long time...and there still isn't really - unless you need a similar image from a far smaller and cheaper camera - that's the VEO 4k.
At its heart, the VEO 4k is much the same as the Flex 4k; same sensor and processing, and a similar user experience. The main difference is that while the Flex uses very experience, bulky and blisteringly-fast Cinemags for recording, the VEO uses CFast cards. The trade-off with using CFast cards is much smaller size and cost...but at the expense of speed. The speed difference is quite noticeable of course - but so is the size. For use on gimbals or drones there is no contest, and as long as you trim your clips carefully the CFast workflow is still reasonably fast - especially if you use memory partitioning wisely. Memory partitioning is particularly effective due to one of the most amazing things with the VEO - you can trim and save shots while still shooting on the remaining partition slots!
As with all cameras of this ilk, buttons and dials are very sparse. Apart from the card eject button, there is only one on the operator side, the Trigger - this enters recording mode and triggers a shot. On the other side are 3 buttons and one dial. Operation is basic, simple and fairly intuitive. The top button is used for entering playback mode. Holding the middle one performs a black reference - this should be done any time any setting is changed or when the operating temperature changes. Fortunately the camera has an auto-capping shutter mechanism so there is not need to put a lens cap on each time. The bottom button scrolls through the various display modes - zoom, full zoom and threshold (which displays parts of the image which are blown out in any of the colour channels).
The dial has two functions; to scroll through and change menu functions, and to set in and out points and save shots to the CFast card. On the record / live view screen pressing the dial in enters the 6 menu screens. These contain all settings needed to operate the camera - everything from changing resolution and frame rate, to partitioning the RAM and setting IP addresses etc. We'll go through the important settings after we look at the other function of the dial - during playback. When in playback mode, pressing the dial in enters the trim and save mode. Here you can set in and out points, play the shot saved in RAM forwards or backwards, and save it to the CFast card. This is used in combination with the top button, the Play button. Hit the Play button to go back to the screen showing all shots that are currently stored in RAM memory, scroll through them with the dial and hit the dial to play them or delete them. It's really pretty quick and easy...and also vital, as with the slower speed of saving to CFast card vs Cinemag, you wouldn't often want to save the entire RAM - it would take a LONG time! Below is a comparison of the save times for the VEO vs the Flex. Typically a shot after trimming would tend to be perhaps 500 frames, giving a 20 second on screen time. You can see that if you trim it to this length then the save times on the VEO are not too bad - and especially if you use partitions, meaning that while the file saves you can still capture the action - a game changer!
In live view / record mode the dial is used for changing the camera's parameters. Frame rate goes from 1-1,000 fps in 4k and up to 2,000 in HD. You can also format the CFast cards and decide how many partitions you want to use. At 4k 1,000fps a single partition will give about 8 seconds of real time shooting - so depending what you're aiming at you would tend to choose 2 or 3 partitions, giving several bites at the cherry but still enough in and out time that you don't miss the action. The trigger point can also be changed - by default it's an end trigger - so wait for the action and hit trigger and it captures everything before that point up to the length of the partition. Trigger position can be changed to anything in between start and end.
Something else that can be changed is whether the camera shoots with a rolling or global shutter. This is a very interesting one! You might think that obvious thing to do is just shoot everything with global shutter - thereby avoiding any skew or problem with flash lighting etc. that are normally the bane of rolling shutters. But with highspeed filming skew isn't really an issue because everything is slowed down so much the skew doesn't show. The rolling shutter also has an extra stop or more of dynamic range - and this is noticeable. What the global shutter does have though is more sensitivity - an extra stop or so. This seems a little counter-intuitive as with cameras like Sony's F55 and the RED cameras, when using a global shutter you get LESS dynamic range! Not quite sure how this works with the VEO, but it is the case.
Lens mounts are user-interchangeable - simple to do using 4 allen bolts - obviously just being careful to minimise dust intrusion onto the sensor. On the subject of the sensor, it is slightly bigger than Super 35 and so APS-C lenses likely won't cover...it's nowhere near full frame though, so some APS-C and Super 35 lenses with good coverage might just be OK. The lens mounts available include Canon EF and PL (with electronic contacts for aperture control) and Nikon F (manual iris). The iris control is via 2 buttons on the front of the camera - on the off-side to the operator - and therefore incredibly fiddly and hard to reach!
Power is supplied via a Lemo connector, typically from a V-lock battery mount. The little Hawkwoods mini batteries I used power the camera for an hour or so each - not bad going at all. It's a big help if you use a twin battery adapter as in the pictures as it allows hot-swapping of batteries. With the Phantom cameras if you lose power then you lose any unsaved shot in the RAM memory - so hot-swapping is a very nice feature to have!
Not much to complain about with the well engineered, nicely thought out piece of kit. The CFast cards are obviously nowhere as fast as the Cinemags, but that's what keep the size and price down. One little niggle / glitch is that when a card is full it reports "CF Error" in the viewfinder. This is not an error, just that the card is full. When inserting a new one it is obviously worth saving the last clip again as it will likely not have gone onto the old card. Other than that I've not had any problems, and rigged out sensibly and sparsely it makes a perfectly portable unit capable of sensational quality whenever 1,000 frames per second is required!
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