In the field: Sony Venice Rialto Camera Extension System
Back in 2018, I attended a Sony Venice workshop at Camerimage festival. Alongside a demo of the standard-issue camera, they also unveiled another variant — a Sony Venice sensor extension system: The Rialto. This was essentially the guts of a Sony Venice, connected to the sensor block via a 2m or 5m umbilical cable. “This thing looks cool”, I thought to myself, “but I don’t really see the use-case for it. Besides, didn’t ARRI stop making their version of this (the Alexa M) when they released the Alexa Mini?”.
In the coming weeks and months, I grew to love the Sony Venice as a worthy successor to the Alexa Mini. When the budget allows, it was my go-to commercial camera. Granted, it is a bit larger and heavier than the Alexa Mini, especially with the RAW recorder on the back, but in the 18 months since release, I hadn’t found myself in a position where I couldn’t make the form-factor work for me. That was, until September 2020.
Several weeks into pre-production on a passion project car commercial, I found myself scratching my head; I’d been stumped. For the most-part, we were planning to use a tracking car equipped with a black arm and Freefly movi pro. Furthermore, I’d planned to shoot with Atlas Orion anamorphics because I wanted the width, pleasing contrast, and flare, but without as much of the barreling usually associated with anamorphics. If you’ve used these lenses before, you’ll know they’re a bit on a chonky side. Despite my best efforts, balancing a full-sized Venice, with the recorder block, lenses, matte box and accessories on a movi-pro, just wasn’t happening. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done, but considering the external forces on the rig (wind resistance), we didn’t want to burn the motors out or have them give out at key moments.
How could I still use a Sony Venice, without the form factor of a Sony Venice?
“Have you thought about trying the Rialto?” Julian of Cinewest Bristol suggested to me. “Do you even have one?” I retorted. I’d not seen one in the wild since that demo in 2018. Turns out they did! It sounds like a bit of a cliche’ eureka moment, but that’s pretty much how it went down.
We organized a prep day with Alex at Mighty Sky, who owns the tracking car, to see how feasible the Rialto would be for this job. Aside from a bit of cable wrangling (the sensor extension cable is relatively hefty, so you need to give it enough slack to move, but not so much as to pull on the movi motors) the unit was a perfect fit for our project. Weighing in at 1.9kg (400g less than an Alexa Mini) and with the depth more akin to a DSLR, we had no trouble balancing the setup. The unit comes with a plethora of useful mounting brackets and is peppered with mounting threads, ideal for mounting our accessories. Fortunately, the sensor block has an SDI and 24v out, enabling us to power our WCU-4 focus motors. We stripped an LMB-25 matte box down to a single tray, and slotted in a clear filter to save the lens from stones.
Once we were confident that we could balance the camera unit on the gimbal, we moved on to deciding where we’d position the camera body in the tracking vehicle. The Rialto kit comes with two extension length options — 2.74m which is the default length, or a daisy-chained 5.45m. Due to power constraints this is the maximum length, although it was just about enough for what we needed. We placed the camera in the middle seat and ran the extension cable out of the rear (or front) window, depending on if the camera was mounted to the front or the rear of the car.
One benefit that we didn’t initially realise was power. Usually, if you’re using an Alexa Mini or similar, you use the gimbal batteries to power the camera as well as the gimbal itself. Juggling battery swaps and keeping track of how much juice is left can be a job on its own. It sounds obvious, but because the camera was inside the tracking vehicle, we were able to run it off of a large capacity floor battery, and because the sensor block was being powered through this too, so were the focus motors. Having the camera body to-hand also meant that access to other camera functions such as ND and the second base sensitivity were immediate. This is vital when you’re shooting sunsets — thumbling through the WCU4’s menu system trying to take ND off as the sun shuffles off the face of the earth isn’t an ideal situation to be in.
Another huge plus, if like me you have a deep inextinguishable hatred for wireless video transmitters, is that you don’t need them! You can use the Venice’s many SDI outputs to feed the various monitors inside the vehicle, and daisy-chain to pass a LUT along if needed.
Across the two shooting days, the Rialto system behaved perfectly. Having such large batteries allowed us to keep the camera running all day — with a crew so compact and with a lot to get done, this was a blessing. We kept the camera rigged on the movi even when travelling between shooting locations, and it didn’t miss a beat. We even took it through a Starbucks Drive Thru, much to the bemusement of the staff. Having a system that never turns off, never loses signal and doesn’t need fiddling with to change settings really keeps the shoot light on its feet. With the weight being a good amount lower than the Movi’s maximum payload, changing lenses and rebalancing was much less stressful than it could have been, especially considering all of the lenses in the set we had were different weights and lengths.
For all of its accolades, there are, as there always are with any creative solutions to technical problems, some compromises and pitfalls. While the setup does allow for a certain amount of roll-axis movement, I wouldn’t recommend trying a full spin with this setup, as you could damage the extension cable. Speaking of, I can completely understand why the daisy chain connector needs to be firmly held in place, but needing to grab a hex tool and perform what felt like brain surgery whenever we moved the camera from the front to the back of the vehicle was less than ideal. I really wish there was a fast-locking, thumb-screw solution for this. Another interesting trait of the unit, is that it is passively cooled. Yep, no fans here.
While not a perfect fits-all solution to any problem, the Sony Venice Rialto sensor extension unit remains a valuable filmmaking tool, and one that still very much has a place in modern commercial and film production.
A huge thanks to Cinewest Bristol for the hire and ongoing support, check out their website here.
