lab work and speed ramps

[Daniel Madsen]

I was on a set today and the 1st had a difficult time with the various ramping controls on the Panaflex GII (not as easy as a 435 I guess.) Anyway, he couldn't get the camera to increase from 24fps to 40fps back to 24. I suggested shooting it at a high speed and doing the ramp in post to which the DP replied, " don't speak out of turn" ( I was gripping ((obviously unacceptable.) He continued to explain that this process would be too expensive. I got to thinking (while sitting on an apple box in the courner) why and how expensive. Digitally it is easy and printing something at different speeds seems easy except mayby conveying when and where to ramp to the lab. Does anyone have experience with this?

 

 

 

Thank you.

[David Mullen ASC]

I had this issue come up the other day, deciding whether to rent a camera & accessories that could ramp, or shoot at a higher frame rate with the cameras I did have and just have them do the ramp in post. Since the director was not sure he really needed to ramp, and it was for only one shot, it didn't seem worth spending the extra money on the rental, so it may be done in post.

 

However, it does cost some money, usually some time in a Flame or Inferno suite to properly smooth out the motion during the ramp -- simply dropping frames doesn't create a smooth effect.

 

And if the footage has to be recorded back out to 35mm, that's an additional cost.

[K Borowski]

Well, if they've taken the time to do the effect in camera, that represents a waste of money if they just end up doing it in post and in addition they incur additional rawstock cost, editing cost, and laser output costs if the feature isn't going through a DI (which is still quite common). A lot of people still like the look of optical printing; I'm one of them. So being too lazy to fix the problem on set essentially means you're going to put a lot more time and money into doing it digitally, and you'll end up with footage that looks softer than the optically printed scenes.

[Patrick Neary]

Hi all-

 

has anyone here done ramps in post (I mean optically, for a film finish- not through video or a DI) and what was your experience with that? Any particular problems you encountered with the process?