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Why did George Lucas use digital in Star Wars Ep.2


Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

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Just read what I wrote - the issue about depth of field is NOT a digital versus film one.

 

It's merely that smaller target areas use shorter focal length lenses to achieve the same FIELD OF VIEW as larger target areas with longer focal length lenses -- and shorter focal length lenses have more depth of field. However, shooting them at wider apertures will reduce depth of field.

 

Digital sensors come in all sorts of sizes but most are smaller than a 35mm frame and thus use shorter focal length lenses, just as the 16mm and Super-8 film formats do, both of which also have greater depth of field than 35mm. The sensor size in an HD camera is similar in size to a Super-16 camera and thus both share similar focal lengths and similar depth of field characteristics, which can be compensated by shooting at wider apertures. While in HD, it can be hard to achieve the super shallow-focus look of a movie shot in 35mm at T/1.4 or T/2.0 (and I'm not that fond of that look anyway, gets too "swimmy" looking on the tight shots), you can achieve the look of a 35mm movie shot at T/4 or so without too much trouble.

 

The trouble with the P&S Technik Pro-35 adaptor is that you can get a reasonably normal, slightly shallow focus look in HD without it by using the fastest HD lenses (T/1.6 to T/1.9 range) so the only reason to use the P&S Technik, other than to use your favorite 35mm cine lenses, is if you want the look of a movie shot at apertures wider than T/2.8 in 35mm -- which is pretty shallow focus and pretty tough on your focus-puller.

 

On the other hand, with the consumer DV cameras, which have even SMALLER target areas (1/3" and smaller CCD's), the depth of field characteristics get really deep focus, to the point where the P&S Technik Mini-35 adaptor is a pretty useful solution. But the depth of field of 2/3" CCD cameras is not so deep and more conventional solutions like using faster lenses at wider apertures is probably a simpler, less awkward solution.

 

There are other issues with the P&S Technik adaptors, like a certain softening of the image that comes from being rephotographed off of an internal groundglass, picking up the texture of the groundglass, even when spinning, in certain parts of the frame, losing some light with the adaptor, not to mention the basic issue: a shallow focus look is not always desirable. Consider that Lucas' first two features, "THX 1138" and "American Graffitti", were shot in 2-perf Techniscope, which has deeper focus than the 35mm anamorphic format he used after that. In some ways, using HD is getting him more of the depth of field he had back on those old 2-perf movies -- maybe he likes that.

 

As for shooting bluescreen elements, it's generally a good idea to have enough depth of field so that you aren't shooting out-of-focus edges against the bluescreen. You can selectively defocus the image and the background added later to the degree you want. And when you go through the trouble of adding an expensive CGI background behind the actors, I'm sure there are limits to how out-of-focus you want that background to be. Even back when they were shooting the "Star Wars" films in 35mm, often shots made against a bluescreen would be lit and shot at F/16 or so to hold focus. So shooting in HD is just making it easier to achieve that same depth of field for bluescreen shots.

 

I'm sure they saved some money by shooting in HD rather than in 35mm and then scanning all of that footage into the digital realm -- how could they NOT save some money??? The real question is that on a 100 million dollar feature, does it really matter if you save a hundred thousand dollars or so on 35mm film and scanning costs?

 

Having shot several HD features, I can tell you that there are some real cost savings over 35mm film... UNTIL you have to laser record the movie back to 35mm, at which point most of your savings are gone. You can say "yeah, but what about the costs of mastering in HD, onlining, etc.?" forgetting that most features shot in film also have to make an HD master at some point for home video distribution. It's really the film-out that is the real expense of shooting digitally, but for indie people who may never get a theatrical deal anyway, going straight to home video, they may never have to pay for a film-out. I shot one HD feature that went straight to home video and we probably saved about $60,000 by not shooting in 35mm.

 

I just shot a 35mm feature and we exposed 200,000' of stock. Even though we got a great deal from Fuji on the stock, you can probably guess at what the costs were to purchase, process, and telecine that much footage.

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grimmet...

 

SHALOW deph of field gives you the feeling of deeper images, not

greater deph of field. Greater deph of field gives you a flatter look.

 

The terminology is reversed in a way.

Why are you telling me? I know that. I just answered in the same terms that the poster posted. I know it's backwards, but that's obviously the way the previous poster understands. I guess I should have explained, but I figured everyone would get the gist, especially with the other explanations.

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Consider that Lucas' first two features, "THX 1138" and "American Graffitti", were shot in 2-perf Techniscope, which has deeper focus than the 35mm anamorphic format he used after that.  In some ways, using HD is getting him more of the depth of field he had back on those old 2-perf movies -- maybe he likes that..

Tattersal said that he shot Episode 2 at a T3.2, which is the quivalent of T11 in anamorphic, so he definitely was after more depth of field.

 

I just shot a 35mm feature and we exposed 200,000' of stock.  Even though we got a great deal from Fuji on the stock, you can probably guess at what the costs were to purchase, process, and telecine that much footage.

 

What was your shooting ratio on that film, David? I hate it when you have less than a 15 to 1 ratio, because as a 2nd AC you always get these annoying questions from the production office all the time like: 'Why are we shooting so much?' ' Last year I did a feature where we started with only 85.000 feet which of course was way too low. I always had to go beg for more filmstock. In the end we used around 100.000 feet, which still wasn't enough though.

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grimmet...

 

SHALOW deph of field gives you the feeling of deeper images, not

greater deph of field. Greater deph of field gives you a flatter look.

 

The terminology is reversed in a way.

Why are you telling me? I know that. I just answered in the same terms that the poster posted. I know it's backwards, but that's obviously the way the previous poster understands. I guess I should have explained, but I figured everyone would get the gist, especially with the other explanations.

Sorry, i thought that you were thinking the same way as he does

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It's odd he would say he shot everything at T/3.2 when Panavision developed at T/1.9 Primo zoom just for that shoot... Perhaps he meant that he shot bluescreen scenes at T/3.2 (which of course is like 99% of the live action!)

 

I don't if anyone saw "Children of Dune" but it was shot wide-open on the Panavision Digital Primo zooms (I believe) on the F900, generally at the longest focal lengths, so it had a fairly shallow focus look. It was also heavily backlit all the time. Thought it looked pretty good. His soundstage desert scenes were more believable than what Storaro did for the first one; this was because of the long lenses, hot backlight, and wind and dust added to obscure the translights.

 

--

 

200,000' would be a 20:1 ratio in theory for a 100 page script. We had budgeted 180,000' but at some point, a decision was made to shoot everything with two cameras by the last two weeks so the amount of footage we shot per day went up. You know, by the time you get near the end of a shoot, most producers just sort of throw up their hands and will do anything to finish the film. At that point, telling you to shoot less is sort of counterproductive.

 

I over-ordered some of the stocks, partially because weather changes and script changes ("it's now a day scene!" "No, it's back to being a night scene!" "Wait, now it's a day scene again!" "Sorry, we just cut that scene!" "No, it's back in again!"). On the last day, in a park doing a scene added back in, I had plenty of 64D stock but almost no 250D stock. The clouds rolled in and the exposure dropped to an T/2.8-4 or so, but I stuck to the F64D because I didn't have enough 250D. Luckily, it got brighter again towards sunset rather than the other way around and we finished the scene.

 

Ultimately I probably shot more 250D than originally intended because of the bad weather and low daylight conditions.

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I don't if anyone saw "Children of Dune" but it was shot wide-open on the Panavision Digital Primo zooms (I believe) on the F900, generally at the longest focal lengths, so it had a fairly shallow focus look. It was also heavily backlit all the time. Thought it looked pretty good. His soundstage desert scenes were more believable than what Storaro did for the first one; this was because of the long lenses, hot backlight, and wind and dust added to obscure the translights.

I am not certain if you are right here. A friend of mine worked on CoD (FX dept, even won an emmy for her work on the original Dune miniseries) so I'll check. Not saying your wrong, just that I'm not certain here. I thought they shot most of it using Super16, not digital.

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Hi,

 

For all the props Storaro gets, I thought that the Dune miniseries looked like complete arse. Use of translights was horrible and the rest of it was just uninteresting. I would have been very depressed to have shot that.

 

Phil

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Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

Umm, what happens if the film is shot in 25P like 28 days later on the XL1s and is viewed on 24p cinema? Sure you can just knock a frame out, but that but mismatch the video with the audio and you may notice a little jump every now and then.

 

 

 

And, about this whole George Lucas thingy. I suppose now I see that in using digital, it matches a highly animated films shooting needs. But, then again I suppose when watching the film, the resolution problems aren't exactly something you would pick out on unless you were comparing. Never less the film is still watchable.

And another thing, someone said about HD having the same resolution as film in the local cinema. Umm, you sure on that one? HD doesn't even fit the screen without being stretched. Film has a much higher res.

 

And, those medium format cameras. The shutter is in the lens I heard, to smoothen the shot. Do you get that kind of equipment when working in film?

 

And in the film "Lord of the Rings" and "Jurassic Park 3", I noticed there was a shot where the depth of field was adjusted. But, when you adjust the iris you have to adjust the shutter speed, but in movie that would involve an actor walking across the screen in a big blur with a slow shutter speed.

I know there are limitations, but how was it done in Lord of the Rings and Jurassic Park? I know when those shots took place there weren?t any actors involved, but there was still a bit of movement. Maybe nothing noticeable.

 

And in dark conditions of filming, sure you can adjust the shutter speed to gain the light needed. But using a higher ISO film would make sense, although, my Dad used to be a pro photographer and he told me that when you blow anything over an 800 ISO it starts to get very grainy. But then again that was a long time ago, and I suppose film must have gotten a lot better by now.

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You can never get more blur at 24 FPS than you usually do because

the usual sutter angle is from 200 degree to 170 degree. But you can't open the

shutter more than that. You get more blur in fast-motion shots shot

at smaller FPS. This is the reason why those highway shots with lines of light

made by car lights are so fast. You can never get this effect at 24 fps because

you are already using the slowest exposure you can. You can only use

shorter exposure for getting that strobing effects used in films like Saving private ryan.

 

The usual exposure time for 24fps is about 1/50 s You can't use

anything more than that without slowing the film down in camera (speeding the action) . So if the light is too low, it is too low. You can not compensate

with wider shutter angle.

 

Just to remove any confusion there, film cameras have rotating shutters,

not the ones like still cameras used. The exposure time depends on two factors.

The opening of the shutter, and the speed of the camera. If you are shooting at 24fps, that means that one whole rotation of the shutter lasts for 1/24.

If your shutter angle is set to 180 degree, it means that half of the circle is open

and half is closed. And in rotation it means that the exposure time is half that

of what it takes to rotate the shutter. In this case it is 1/48s then.

The largest shutter opening I heard of in a motion picture camera is 200 degree.

Someone correct me if there are larger shutter angles.

 

And what do you mean by "HD doesn't even fit the screen without being stretched" ? Everything has to be streched to fill the screen. The frame of film

is about 21mm wide, of course it has to be streched.

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Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

What I ment was, it can be blown up to local cinema size without losing quality. Unlike HD.

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I'm not sure you understand the concept of a blow-up...

 

HD doesn't "lose" quality so much as it lacks the same technical quality levels of 35mm in terms of resolution and color space, plus it can have compression artifacts, noise, etc. Not that film doesn't also have its own set of artifacts, it's just that we're used to those.

 

Some might say there is a loss of quality in the transfer process to film from HD, but I see it as more of a transformative process and if you preferred the HD original's look, you might feel that some of that has been lost in the transfer process. But certainly the 35mm frame is capable of storing all of the resolution of the HD original.

 

HD isn't "blown-up" to film because there is no optical enlargement involved -- the HD signal is not physically "smaller" than 35mm film because it's not a physical thing at all but a bunch of numbers. The digital frame is transferred (recorded) onto a 35mm negative (internegative) and a print is made and projected. The 35mm frame is like the size of a postage stamp and is enlarged quite a bit in projection -- it's amazing that it holds up as well as it does.

 

But in terms of resolution, HD is just below 2K and considering we are seeing a lot of 2K digital intermediates in the theaters these days, it's not a stretch to say that HD is close to the resolution of 35mm images we are seeing these days on the big screen. Plus the lack of grain gives the impression of greater resolution in so far as we use grain size as a visual clue as to degree of enlargement on the screen, so we get fooled by fine-grained images.

 

There is also the argument that what we see on the big screen is in fact below HD resolution, sometimes as low as an effective 800 lines. The trouble with this argument is that regardless of how much softening occurs in the IP/IN stages, the release printing stage, and the projection stage, you have to start out with an original of similar resolution because if the original matches the resolution of the FINAL resolution of a projected image, then it drops even lower once it goes through all of these steps. So regardless of whether what we see on the big screen is in fact close to HD resolution, we still need to start out with MORE resolution.

 

You don't knock a frame out to convert 25P to 24P -- you just play it slightly slower. It's a frame-to-frame, 1:1, transfer to film but the projector plays it at 24 fps instead of 25 fps. Audio will also be slowed down and might need to be pitch-corrected. The only real problem with PAL-to-film is not sync so much as it is pitch -- music and singing can sound a little odd.

 

You can't adjust the shutter speed with a film camera really, not to get long exposures in low light. To do that, you have to lower the frame rate, which then allows longer exposure times because the frame rate and shutter are interconnected -- the shutter is a spinning disk, usually a half-circle (180 degrees). With a 180 degree shutter angle, at 24 fps, your exposure time is 1/48th of a second. So to get 1/24th of a second, you need to run the camera at 12 fps. To get 1/12th of a second, you need to run the camera at 6 fps.

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Hi,

 

> Umm, what happens if the film is shot in 25P like 28 days later on the XL1s and

> is viewed on 24p cinema? Sure you can just knock a frame out, but that but

> mismatch the video with the audio and you may notice a little jump every now

> and then.

 

It's just run a frame slow. Every film you ever saw on PAL video was run a frame fast. Recently the technology has become available to adjust the pitch of the audio without affecting the duration, so you don't end up warping the sound slightly, but a lot of old films didn't even do that. Famously, the Kenny Loggins track "Highway to the Danger Zone" at the opening of Top Gun sounds very silly when run 4% fast.

 

Lots of independent features in the UK shoot at 25fps on film anyway, since it's then easier through postproduction and it's generally better for your theatrical release (if you even get one, as a cheap little movie) to be slightly slow than your TV and video release be slightly fast.

 

You can't knock a frame out, it looks awful.

 

> And another thing, someone said about HD having the same resolution as film in

> the local cinema.

 

It has been contended that 2K uncompressed can look as sharp as certain kinds of film, usually if you use fast filmstock and do things like bleach bypass. This is contentious, but certainly it isn't impossible to construct circumstances where video could look sharper. ISO800 super-16 bleach bypassed?

 

> HD doesn't even fit the screen without being stretched.

 

Well, it very nearly almost does, in 1.85:1. So little that I doubt anyone bothers upscaling it; the difference is well outside the projection aperture. The difference on a TV screen between 16:9 video and 1.85:1 film is about four lines each side.

 

For doing full cinemascope you do end up cropping, which is what happened with Star Wars. The Canon adapter that has been mentioned elsewhere is designed to avoid this by squeezing the image optically before it hits the CCD image sensor in the camera. This is good.

 

> And, those medium format cameras

 

Dowhat? Medium format cameras are still cameras.

 

> The shutter is in the lens I heard, to smoothen the shot

 

I think you're getting slightly confused with the idea of shutter angle. The shutter has to be there in a film camera so that when the film is pulled vertically downward by the mechanism in the camera to line up the next frame, you don't have light falling on it at that point. If the shutter wasn't there, you'd get vertical streaks as the film moved down (actually up, but it's academic). Watch the opening of "Saving Private Ryan" and notice how the shutter was intentionally put out of synchronisation with the pulldown of the film, producing the streaked effect. So, the shutter has to be there. Normally, it is a rotating disc, or rather half of a rotating disc, so that for the half of the time the film is not being exposed, the shutter is in the way.

 

What you've probably read about people using "small shutter angles" is that the disc does not have to be exactly half-and-half - you can get one with a 90 degree chunk cut out of it instead (many cameras are actually adjustable so you can have anything you like). This exposes the film for half the time as a normal 180-degree, half-and-half shutter, which means you need twice as much light. However because the exposure time is now shorter, things will have moved less while the shutter was open, and are less blurred because of their motion. This makes movement look more choppy and staccato - again, this was famously done for Saving Private Ryan. Watch the opening again and look closely at the falling pieces of rock and soil from explosions - notcie they are hardly motion blurred at all, and look kind of flickery and stroboscopic.

 

> And in the film "Lord of the Rings" and "Jurassic Park 3", I noticed there was a

> shot where the depth of field was adjusted.

 

I think you may be confusing depth of field and focus. You can change the focus during a shot - a "focus pull" - which changes how far away the focal plane (the distance at which objects are in perfect focus) is. Depth of field is the amount of room for error you have around that distance - you can have focus set at ten feet and a depth of field of two feet, meaning anything from (roughly) nine feet to eleven feet will be in focus.

 

Depth of field actually can change during a shot, but that's a more complicated situation. What you're probably seeing is focus pulls where the depth of field stays the same, you're just putting it in a different place.

 

> But, when you adjust the iris you have to adjust the shutter speed

 

Be careful what you mean by "shutter speed." You can adjust the shutter angle - see above - so that the amount of time the film gets exposed changes, and you can do that without changing the frame rate. So, you can keep shooting at 24 frames per second, open up the iris one stop (meaning twice as much light) and go from a 180 degree to a 90 degree shutter and you will see depth of field increase with no other changes, other than the stroboscopic motion thing we mentioned earlier.

 

Some cameras, such as the Arri 435, can automatically adjust the shutter angle during a shot, but it's considered a special option. Normally adjusting shutter angles during the shot is done to keep exposure the same if you want to change the frame rate during the shot - a "speed ramp" like you see a lot in "The Matrix', where things suddenly slow down or speed up.

 

> And in dark conditions of filming, sure you can adjust the shutter speed to gain

> the light needed.

 

Well actually you sort of can and sort of can't. Usually motion picture cameras are used at the widest possible shutter angle (typically 180 degrees or slightly less) to make the depth of field as large as possible and the focus puller's life easier. So, if you run out of light, trying to open up the shutter angle is not usually the way you solve a lack of light, because fully open is normal. Not all cameras have adjustable shutter angles anyway.

 

Remember that one stop of opening the iris is twice as much light - and if you have a 180 degree shutter you can't double the amount of light without having no shutter at all, and you obviously can't do that! So, even if you could open up the shutter more than 180 degrees, it woudln't gain you much.

 

> But using a higher ISO film would make sense, although, my Dad used to be a

> pro photographer and he told me that when you blow anything over an 800 ISO

> it starts to get very grainy

 

Well, anythnig over about 400 or 500 is considered fairly grainy for motion picture stuff (and yes, this means that the ISO500 stock Kodak call 5279, which is used all the time for ads and music videos, is often considered more than slightly grainy. You don't see it because the 35mm film out-resolves the TV image by so much.) This is because the motion picture negative is much smaller than the stills your dad shot, so the grains appear larger in comparison (There is one very rare motion picture format, Vistavision, which has negatives the same size as normal 35mm stills film, but normally they are under half that size.)

 

> But then again that was a long time ago, and I suppose film must have gotten a

> lot better by now.

 

Again yes and no. Kodak's latest line of film stocks have very good sharpness even in high speed types, but the fundamental grain size is... pretty much the same. Laws of physics (well, chemistry actually) kind of define it.

 

Phil

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Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

Oh and by the way, when I say blowing the HD footage up, I mean literally stretching it to the cinema size, which you can then see all the individual pixels. Like stretching a small picture on your computer. The HD cams go little over 1 megapixel, which, barely fits a computer screen without being stretched. And then, it has to fit a cinema screen?? Maybe I'm being very paranoid, and the overall result isn't that bad. But it still doesn't meet film. And George Lucas putting it onto iMax aswell, just stretching the small image even further.

From what I?ve heard film stretches much further.

 

My end conclusion to all this. I suppose in using digital it wasn't so bad, being that most of it was blue screened and it was mainly an animated film.

 

Hopefully soon digital will have the same features as film.

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Sorry, i thought that you were thinking the same way as he does

No, but it's cool. I reread the post I made and it sounds a little snappy. Sorry about that. I didn't mean to snap at you. I guess I just felt silly because I assumed that everyone would know that I know what depth of field is.....but of course they don't know that I know that. Anyway, no harm no foul.

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FWIW: When SW Episode 1 came out, I talked to a lab man here in Germany, and he told me that the dupe negatives they had received for the local theatrical release were extremely "thin" which resulted in excessive grain and lack of contrast when they were printed. They thought it was a mistake by the US lab and asked 20th Century Fox about it, but they only got mystic answers like "that's just OK".

 

Some lab people think that the film release prints were intentionally degraded that way to blur the difference between CGI and live action and to make sure digital artifacts would not show up on big screens.

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Or it could have just been bad lab work in making the dupes and nobody wanted to take the time to redo them. I know that Lucas was debating whether to release Episode 1 on Vision or Vision Premier print stock so obviously a washed-out low-contrast look wasn't necessarily what he intended. However, I believe he did release Episode 2 on Vision Premier, which helps with digital photography and may explain the stronger colors of the second movie.

 

Episode 1 was shot mostly on the lower-contrast 5277 but I don't think that was the problem -- Tattersal had used this stock on his other films like "The Green Mile" and "Con Air" and they looked rich and fine-grained in the theaters. In fact, "The Green Mile" came out around the same period as Episode 1 and I was surprised at how much better it looked considering it was in the 1.85 format. Shows you how poorly the D.I. was done for Episode 1 -- and now it sounds like the output was perhaps on the "thin" side as well, which explains things. However, I'm not sure if that would really mask the difference between the CGI and live-action.

 

Episode 1 was one of the first films also show using DLP technology, which Lucas was heavily promoting -- and oddly enough, the differences between the film and CGI were MORE obvious with the DLP projection.

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Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

Anyone seen that new XM2? Now I am excited about that, time to save my pennies I think. I heard it will retail at about 5000 dollars. Operating at about 1.3 megapixels. With 24P, 30P and 60i. Although considering I get about 80 quid a week, gonna be some time...

 

Although I doubt George will be using that, cinealta is his choice. I heard the cinealta cost round about 100,000 dollars... (WOW)

 

Oh and by the way, some people mentioned film cameras use rotating shutters. Umm, how do they operate? Because if it were just a black board spinning round, for a start there would be a black line through the middle where the shutter turns in 90 degrees. And the higher and lower end would be slightly more exposed than the middle. So, how does it work?

 

By the way, thanks for replying to this little chat, everyone. Learnt quite a bit, I have...

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Oh and also, I am thinking about buying some cinematography books to learn from. Any books that you recommend? I have read a bit of the "Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint", I kinda liked that. Nicely illustrated, for thick heads like me who can't read... lol, na only joking.

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It's a half-circle disk to one side of the frame so that half the time, the gate is open to light and exposing film, and the other half, it's covered so that the movement can advance the film to the next frame, just in time for the shutter to spin open again.

 

The movement of the spinning shutter -- which is intermittent (start and stop), not continuous -- is fast enough when it comes down over the frame that only a tiny percentage of the overall exposure happens as the blade is swiping over it. But when it is mistimed with the movement of the film, so that the frame is advancing before the gate is covered, you get bright highlights "smearing" upwards in the frame. You see this in some shots in "Saving Private Ryan."

 

Lucas is using the F950 for Episode 3, which can send out an uncompressed 4:4:4 HD signal to a separate recorder (in this case, an HDCAM-SR recorder). This is a big improvement over the 3:1:1 highly compressed HDCAM recording used by the F900 camcorder, which was used for Episode 2. It's still HD resolution though, although slightly improved (HDCAM is 1440 pixel across; HDCAM-SR is 1920 pixels across.) But with better color information, the impression of resolution should be better just as it is when you jump from DV25 to DV50 in standard def video.

 

It would have been even better had Lucas used the Viper in 2.35 mode because then he wouldn't have to crop 1080 lines to 810 lines to achieve a 2.35 : 1 aspect ratio for the 35mm scope prints. But now he wants to preserve the full 1080 lines for when he does the IMAX version (on the last film, they had cropped the image to 810 lines in post and did everything for 2.35 only, so the squarer IMAX version had to pan & scan from that.)

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Guest Daniel J. Ashley-Smith

Ah, XM2, I meant XL2. Canons new video camera coming out this september. And trust me there will be quite a few films coming out in the cinema that are going to be filmed with that. (That?s it, reply with some smart comment proving it wont...)

And no, not 1.3 mega pixels, 2.4.

Soo, who's excited?

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