Two Brothers

David Mullen ASC · July 5, 2004

I sat through about ten minutes of this movie in the theater just to see the lastest Sony F900 HDCAM-to-35mm feature these days, see if things have improved any. Not really - the same problems continue.

The best-looking material was a lit interior scene in an auction house with smoke in the air. Nice low-key lighting, no noise, sharp close-ups. Rich, warm colors. Depth of field was moderate, higher than the typical 35mm feature these days but not unusually high.

But the first images were shot in an ancient temple in the jungle and are noisy with poor blacks. Later the movie cuts back to that setting and the problem returns.

The jungle sequences are a bit all over the map, quality-wise. Some are excellent and the tigers look beautiful, with rich colors. On other shots, the chroma looks too hot or too low shot-to-shot. Noise comes and goes. Wide shots are soft. And the zooming following the moving tigers gets a bit video-ish. Some of the fast motions look too smeary.

The HD image was cropped and output to 35mm 2.35 anamorphic.

Neal Fredericks · July 5, 2004

not sure what the source materials are for the TV commercials of the film...but i can also see the "video smearing" and I agree with the zooming, very video-ish...

Mike Brennan · July 6, 2004

I've only seen the trailer at the cinema. I immediatly identified it as HD due to the motion blurring. They probably used less than 1/48th shutter.

Would be good to learn if this was intended.

Mike Brennan

Jason Rodriguez · July 6, 2004

Yeah, I've seen the "smeary" look and hate it, although I've been gulty of that myself when I didn't realize that the Shutter button was "OFF" even though I turned it "ON" in the menu.

BTW, if you have the shutter at 1/48th, you shouldn't get any abnormally smeary "video look" motion blur, would you?

Mike Brennan · July 7, 2004

"BTW, if you have the shutter at 1/48th, you shouldn't get any abnormally smeary "video look" motion blur, would you?"

No, 1/48th pretty much replicates motion portrayal as per film capture. However some people consider that HD when transfered to film looks slightly more stroby.

On HD (even HD transferred to film) I occasionally I see a "video look" on tilts when the speed of image across the ccd is or isn't synchonos with the scan of the ccd ( ccd is scanned from top to bottom). Film is obviously exposed from left to right? right to left? which has its own subtle signature and interaction with movement within the frame.

Remember watching the movie Simone on a long haul flight , I had forgotten it was shot on HD, until I noticed a very subtle video look on a tilt.

In Europe we go with 1/50th when shooting 24 or 25p.

Mike Brennan

Mike Brennan · July 7, 2004

"They probably used less than 1/48th shutter."

By this I mean they used a longer exposure time fro each frame, ie 1/30th or 1/24th

Mike Brennan

smirkbyfire · July 12, 2004

correct me if I'm wrong, but film is exposed bottom to top. Otherwise how would you get that blooming effect from the bottom when the shutter is out of sync (i.e. Saving Private Ryan.)

Mitch Gross · July 12, 2004

Film can be exposed in various directions depending on the placement of the mirror shutter (if that is the system used on the particular camera). Most cameras have the center of the shutter underneath the gate with the shutter spinning in a counter-clockwise direction relative to the gate looking out towards the lens. This would mean that the film is nominally exposed in a right-to-left manner. But there are numerous camera designs that have the mirror center to the right of the gate with the resulting travel across the gate moving vertically, not horizontally. And don't forget that the image is flipped in the gate. That and there's no reason why the shutter on a camera could not be engineered to rotate in the opposite direction from another camera.

"Simone" was photographed chiefly in 35mm by Ed Lachman. The "computer-generated" Simone charachter was shot in HD to give that material a different look. This mixing of formats was also done in last year's "American Splendor."

Rob van Gelder · July 25, 2004

I was Steadicam operator and Motion Control operator on this movie.

The problems you mention (poor blacks and noise) were - in my opinion - already visible on the set on the HD monitor.

Besides that, for the motion control shots we had to do multiple passes to get rid of unwanted animal handlers in shot or to combine tigers that in fact did not really like eachother much.

But light in the jungle changes every moment. Patches of light on leaves move around and there was often more than 20-30 minutes between a take and a clean pass.

The guys at the post-production must have had a hellish time to combine them!

About the videoish zooming: All tigers were really dangerous. That meant that we, the crew, had to be caged while the tigers were out of theirs.

So to get enough footage, we always set up minimum 5 HD camera´s (Panavised CineAlta) with zoomlenses. We prepared the camera positions so we would get the most out of it, wherever the tigers would be. For that we needed the zooms.

All camera´s were remote controlled or an operator had a separate cage for him and an assistant.

In case of Motion control, we recorded the moves from all axis and lens movements and replayed them for the clean pass.

The HD on the Steadicam was another burden, but manageble. It´s never fun to move a 1-meter long camera through a bamboo jungle or a prison corridor, together with actors.

Rob van Gelder, Bangkok, Thailand

Mike Brennan · July 26, 2004

"I was Steadicam operator and Motion Control operator on this movie."

Was the choice of slow/no shutter an artistic one? or driven by lighting budget?

regards

Mike Brennan

Rob van Gelder · July 26, 2004

As I can recall, we shot at 24 FPS, so 1/48 sec. Some shots, specially those with the little baby tigers were shot on 30 FPS to be able to slow down the motion in post, as little tigers move very "staccato". Lighting budget was not really any problem, I would not say that the sky was the limit, but there were plenty of lights (18K, Helium balloons, etc) available.

For some scenes with high speed actions we used 435 and Arri 3 camera´s, on various FPS.

Rob van Gelder, Bangkok, Thailand

Landon D. Parks · July 26, 2004

Exactly what Camera where used for HD in this film? Viper, HDC-F950, HDW-F900???

And what type of lenses did you use?

Landon D. Parks

David Mullen ASC · July 26, 2004

Just because you were shooting at 24P, it doesn't follow that the shutter speed was necessarily 1/48th since a video camera allows you to have "no" shutter at all (i.e. 1/24th at 24P or 1/30th at 30P, etc.) thus gaining a stop over 1/48th at 24P. From looking at the movie, I sensed that sometimes the shutter was opened up longer than 1/48th, like 1/32nd to 1/24th.

Rob van Gelder · July 28, 2004

It is possible that they tweeked the camera´s for certain shots. We had one technician constantly monitoring all cameras and adjusting exposure. For the nightshots (we had about 2 weeks of that) they might have used a longer shutter speed.

For daylight shot´s I can hardly imagine they used a longer speed as we had almost always ND´s in the mattebox to get less dept of field.

The constant adjusting of the iris was not always appreciated by the DP, we had one big monitor for 5 camera´s so that meant constant switching between de camera´s. The DP could never see any picture for a longer time as it was constantly matched (shaded) with the others.

The camera´s were Panavised 900´s with Evertz downconverter at the back and most lenses were 35mm zoomlenses so that meant about 2,5 times magnification, eg. a 24mm on HD had a similar angle as 65mm on 35.

Focus pulling was extremely challenging, no marks possible with the tigers, just the 7" HD-lcd screens as aid, or for one camera the big monitor.

We did have the 6-27 digital zoom and some primes that rarely came out of the box.

It was an amazing experience and my first big HD project. But after 5 months in cages we all got pretty tired of it!

Rob van Gelder, Bangkok, Thailand

Mike Brennan · July 29, 2004

The camera´s were Panavised 900´s with Evertz downconverter at the back and most lenses were 35mm zoomlenses so that meant about 2,5 times magnification, eg. a 24mm on HD had a similar angle as 65mm on 35.

Did you use a 35mm lens convertor?

Maybe they were 2/3 inch Panavaision lenses?

Mike Brennan

Rob van Gelder · August 1, 2004

As I said before, we had 1 or 2 6-27 Pana-zoomlenses that were made for Digital systems and the Digital Primes frome Panavision, so these were made for 2/3".

The other and most commenly used zoomlenses were original 35mm lenses. Therefore the magnification factor. ( 25-420 or something like that and shorter lenses (20-100?)

I don´t know the exact range anymore.

Rob van Gelder, Bangkok, Thailand