M Joel W

I suspect this reads like a primitive and poorly-researched request, but I hope it's not. In my experience, the Alexa has a certain smooth look to its imagery that I don't see with the Red or F5 or C300, for instance, and that I think is meant to emulate film's halation. I've shot and done post work extensively with all these cameras, it's not something I imagined based on clips online. It's distinct and even with vintage lenses there's a different quality to the Alexa. The smoothing is of higher frequency detail, not an overall softness or decrease in contrast or saturation. There's not much loss in resolution, but it feels rounder and smoother. I've read that Arri likely puts a diffusion filter on their OLPF. I've tried various diffusion filters; none have achieved this perfectly. Currently the best I've used is the hdtvfx 1/2, however it flares quite strongly at times and the softening is not too pronounced. I'm not sure if it's the right amount, or slightly too little diffusion. Of course it probably depends on the focal length and I have no idea how to put a filter behind the lens. Maybe I'll get different strengths for different lenses. I'm tempted to try the digital diffusion fx1 or digital diffusion fx 2 because they lack the ultracontrast filter, but I suspect those strengths might be too strong? It's very difficult to get a read on the level of diffusion here. They all look about the same. Maybe the #1 strength seems closest to the Alexa? I have no idea whatsoever from this test. The effect is too subtle: However in use (shooting 4k raw) I notice a significant difference even with the hdtvfx 1/2. I like that filter, but sometimes the flare from the added ultra contrast is too much. It's such a strange subtle difference, but the Alexa does something different I think. I love vintage lenses and diffusion filters, in particular classic softs, but they don't impart the controlled smooth quality, more of a glow.

Apologies. I can't use my full name because it's distinct and my employers would rather I not discuss work publicly. You can feel free to delete my posts if it violates forum rules. My bad on that and my apologies.

I'm kidding, but what I'm getting at is that lenses aren't traditionally as good an investment as more traditional investments, so if you're getting into it, you should have another reason. One cynical thing I've heard suggested is placing ads on craigslist or through local rental venues and seeing what gets the most hits. Every market is so different. One might want the basics (ultra primes, CP2s) another might want S3s and Kowa anamorphic.... I've met people who will wait for one big job that will pay off a big chunk of the investment. I've seen this a lot. With lenses. With a few Alexas. A few F5s. Because that confirms demand and pays off a chunk of the investment. The other approach I see is just buying what you want for yourself because you love it and then subleasing to a rental company (or better yet, insuring it and renting it yourself) to pay off the cost. Those options make the most sense to me. But also, LA real estate is a hot market. :/

I hear the S&P 500 is doing well. For riskier investors, Bitcoin.

Thanks, I just checked out this comparison video and the Atomic 3000 has more rolling shutter artifacts it seems (could it just be the DMX controller the used?), but it's very affordable: Do you need a special DMX controller for lightning strikes? Even though the Atomic 3000 is 3000w cans you power it off a 15 amp circuit? (Or a Honda inverter generator?) Thanks again!

What do forum members think he uses for strobes? Lightning strikes? They seem to be blue (daylight balanced). But there are no rolling shutter artifacts, which I see with other strobe effects on the Alexa. Is there an affordable way to get a similar effect that has the same slow decay? I don't think the show looks too cheap or overly digital. If anything, the lack of mixed color temperature, lack of stylized grading, and presence of high key low contrast lighting with a bit of lens diffusion looks like older tv. I prefer how film looks so I prefer the look of the original show, but I think the cinematography suits the story. It wouldn't feel so strange if it didn't look so normal. The style overall is a bit cheesy–from lighting to acting to vfx. Somehow it really works, although I could do without the flashbacks.

Disney just fired Lord and Miller, whom I respect very much and whose films I've really liked in the past. I don't disagree with your opinion that corporate influence stifles creativity and vision. I have a soft spot for the prequels particularly in terms of their intent even if I don't like them as consistently in terms of execution. Still I'm certain Disney wouldn't have let them see day one of photography if they were in charge of their production, and that would be a shame. I still want to read Lucas' treatments for the new trilogy more than I want to know how the trilogy they're making now ends! I like Lucas and the risks he takes. But Disney has made a heck of a lot of money since and from acquiring the Star Wars franchise, which they paid a heck of a lot of money to acquire and continue to pour money into. From their perspective, I can't blame them for firing Lord and Miller or for anything they've done with the franchise, hugely detrimental to my enjoyment as it's been. I feel like they were fired because they had their own intent and style. Which is what I'm more sympathetic to. It's what I want to see. If I were an aspiring producer or financier I'd feel differently, I guess. This is more a discussion of the industry though.

As a consumer, I'm 100% in agreement with you. I have the same concerns with music that you do. But I have no personal or financial stake in the music, so I'm free to. I just like sound quality and hearing the given artist's intent. That said, I also suspect that sometimes I gloss over digital cheats in contemporary music because they're done so well I never notice them, while I blindly appreciate the work those digital cheats facilitated. And I have a soft spot for conspicuous autotune like in 808s and Heartbreaks (horribly mastered, btw) same as a I have a soft spot for some Instagram photography. At least it's so far gone that it's ontologically sound in a perverse opposite-end-of-the-spectrum way. And as someone who works in the film industry, I've come to tolerate and even happily embrace some recent changes, even if I think they're to the detriment of the medium overall. I'll leave that at that... But I still think Terminator 2 and Avatar alike use CGI well, and Spielberg often uses it well, too. I also think that there's a lot of invisible work no one sees and which allow creatives to flex their intent like never before by deferring problems (not intent, but easily solvable problems like a blown highlight or distracting background element) into post to allow them to better allocate their energy. But that's still very simple stuff, like paint out and split screens. The more you rely on CGI, the worse it gets. And from a theoretical perspective, if I were a purist, I'd frown even on a little bit. I haven't read Michael Caine's book but now I'm curious. A good performance forgives many sins. I strongly recommend those first two Bazin volumes. It's a shame his writing is wordy and not condensed well in those compendia. I think he has a better understanding of film that any other theorist, and his ideas mirror yours. As a theorist, they mirror mine. As a creative and as an artist for hire, they don't entirely.

This is a complicated question. At the very low end you may find clients walking all over you with impunity and it's a disaster when the work falls through or they refuse to pay. On the very high end (where you're marking $50k/day as a commercial director) you can expect fierce competition and maybe only book a few gigs a year there despite pitching aggressively, which sounds even worse, but a few gigs still pays a healthy living wage. It's a complicated question. If you undercharge you'll find more work but it pays less. If you overcharge you'll find less but it pays more. In theory? It's a complicated question. I wouldn't take anything at face value. I wouldn't make decisions based on the biases of others, either.

I also liked Episode 3! I don't think George Lucas suffered from a lack of intent with the prequels, I think he suffered from a lack of external criticism checking his intent against broad audience reaction. Maybe he had the opposite problem from most contemporary filmmakers in that he went unchecked with Episode 1 and 2. But it's good he listened on the third film; that he internalized or took criticism on Anakin's arc paid dividends there. I really like his arc in that film and it feels organic and essential to the story. Until I read your post, I had no idea it was so heavily changed in post. I don't think there's anything wrong with winging it or changing what you've got. Casablanca was basically written as they shot and its script is masterful. I simply find the approach of deferring decision-making to the editing room to be contrary to what film's good at. Granted, I would think that, being a fan of Bazin's. I won't write more re: contemporary blockbusters such as the Hobbit because my opinion is biased. I do think the Alexa has a good look, my favorite among digital cinema cameras and not by a small margin. I think my second favorite look might be the iPhone, for the exact opposite reason, because it is so true to its digital roots. :) (I also think Canon has good color in its C line but that's a really different story! Maybe I'm biased because I own one of those!)

I hear you. I'm more of a moral relativist but I am very sympathetic to what you write. It's even worse with music. Most contemporary remasters are worse than the originals. They're much louder so they can compete with today's over-compressed music (read up on the loudness wars if you're curious), but as a result they lack dynamic range and impact. I have a very precious pair of hi-fi electrostatic headphones I love to listen to at night. With them, old music, recorded and mastered properly, sounds incredible. I can't imagine anything much better. But newer music sounds bad. Worse than with cheap earbuds. Newer remasters of old music sound pretty bad, too. It's a real shame that everything is now catered to the lowest common denominator, including image and sound quality. Particularly when we have the technology that could allow it to be so good. So I am very sympathetic to your cause. Clearly blu rays suffer the same fate as music and that fate is detrimental to both, in the case of film betraying the cinematographer's and director's intent in the same way I argue that modern shooting techniques tend to defer intent close to the edit. This is definitely not good. But I don't watch that much film lately and I'm glad to see the movies I like on blu ray, and the extra resolution, digital warts and all. As David Lynch says, focus on the donut and not the hole. :) But it's hard. The hole (DNR and digital compression and careless color correction and even menus and preroll that show the studio only has a financial stake and not an emotional one in the film) is vast and deep. Bazin is a film critic and theorist who drew on Claude Lévi-Strauss' (not the jean manufacturer) ideas on semiotics. He was the father of the French New Wave and, in my opinion, a genius. He understood things about the ontology or simply the unique purpose and ability of film that few remember. I believe he would have hated CGI and certainly digital, whereas I simply see CGI and digital as ontologically distinct media that only truly suffer when they attempt to compete with the real thing. So I don't agree with everything he wrote, but I find his writing to be brilliant and enthusiastic and inspired. Far more than I can say of my own. :) https://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&field-author=Andre+Bazin&search-alias=books&text=Andre+Bazin&sort=relevancerank

The tendency to cover scenes in blockbusters with dozens of cameras rather than one, but without any specific intent behind any of their placement and motion. And then finding the meaning and emotion of the scene in the edit instead of deciding on the intent in the storyboards. And the partial set approach that lets the look be discovered in post as well. None of this is bad by design (Bay, whom I like as a director very much in a few ways, has always taken an intuitive approach with a lot of coverage; so might Ridley Scott; I even liked Avatar a lot and it went full on digital), but even on the lower budget stuff I work on so many decisions are made in post because they can be. Again, it's fine. Why not if you can? It is a very cool thing to be able to do, and can be very useful and even necessary, but when it's taken to its logical conclusion on features with unlimited resources but very specific commercial dictums, that approach that allows you to "direct" after the fact, without any specific intent or vision on set, can be stifling. And like... the director's vision on set is the point of directing. So it betrays that. I talked with a super A list director about his experience going from TV to nine-figure blockbuster and he said that the shooting schedule felt similarly crazy but he (or really, his producers) had infinite control in post to change every little thing after. Not the answer I expected or wanted, but we do romanticize these things. I suppose what I mean is I dislike the tendency of delaying the decisions about the structural and narrative and emotional aspects of the scene from the set to the editing room. Intent should be a malleable through line, not something deferred to the last minute. And even the tendency to over-do it with reshoots, which are not bad by design but can be abused, is trouble. (Liman uses reshoots well. Raimi, too. They aren't bad. CGI isn't bad. It's the abuses and failures in intent that such technique allow for that are bad.) Hobbit was shot on green screen stages with a few master angles and then massive multi-cam coverage, like every contemporary blockbuster. That can be a problem. In that case I think it's probably mostly tied back to the producers' financial need to release the film in time. I can't blame them. But it can be a problem.

I sound forgiving of this stuff, but I'm not. It really upsets me. But I'm glad to have what I can get.

Very weird. Interesting. If I remember it was ENR? The blu ray still looked really stylized to me, but I haven't seen it on film since its release so I have no point of comparison. Both it and War of the Worlds looked good to me on despite the problems. The film grain and halation added texture, and I liked that the camera moves weren't stabilized. Space had physicality. Fincher removes that for a reason, and I get it, but usually those camera bumps work. Most contemporary directors are afraid of even the good and physical flaws (not so with Spielberg and Lynch), but I forgive Fincher because he's intentionally trying to dehumanize the camera. (But that's another story.) A.I. looked good on blu ray, too, and seemed to be a pretty faithful transfer. It's one of my favorite films so I was glad that it was. Great compositing, too. Spielberg really knew how to use CGI as though it were practical, letting it play in the medium shot. But he also used puppets unusually well. Such a great director. This is troubling. Raiders is one of my favorite films (no surprise by now lol) and I remember seeing it on 35mm about a decade ago and really loving it. The over-the-top showy coverage that Kael detested felt inventive in context and in a way seeing it helped me understand Michael Bay's considerable visual talent and the often unfair vitriol critics aim at him (even when his stories are terrible, his eye is good; but Indy also reveals a great eye and a fantastic story to which that eye is keenly attentive). I own the blu ray but haven't watched it. I plan to soon, but I run my projector in "bright mode" which isn't color corrected in the first place (my retroreflective screen was too heavy to ship across country when I moved so I need to use bright mode to compensate) so I won't be able to speak to the color. Fwiw, noise is also the most difficult thing to properly compress and encode so that's another possibility that it was removed to salvage the image that's there as best possible. But in that case, at least let a little bleed through and match the grain rather than destroying it. When I denoise noisy footage I always try to match the noise level to "normal" rather than clean. Some of the modern algorithms are so good that you can improve some footage, but film grain seems to denoise worse than digital noise, which is more predictable in structure. I saw Keanu (shot on Alexa) at the Arclight and it was wonderfully projected, but I noticed that the night exteriors were denoised completely and looked waxy, whereas the rest looked like normal Alexa footage with a bit of nicely textured digital noise (I like the Alexa as digital cameras go). So I sort of suspect that this bullshit is common practice even in theatrical release. Nevertheless I don't think it's worth getting too worked up about. Yes, there's apathy being shown toward films we care about, but these unfortunate changes only get to us if we let them and are only major in context. Butchering the image is nothing new. I've seen 16mm 4x3 prints of scope Preminger movies that were pan-and-scanned many decades ago and were far more unwatchable than the DNR footage I complain about today. The Minority Report blu ray still offered me a great movie, weird DNR and all. But it still makes me want to spend more time going to the New Bev even if I moved out of Koreatown. :) I am a film snob. A big one. Even if I no longer shoot it. Still, it's a real shame. But denoised Indy is still way better than native 3D 48fps Hobbit (not trying to be mean, I think Peter Jackson has talent it's more the trend toward writing by committee and directing in post that bugs me). Edit: Sandra, have you read Bazin?

This is very interesting. I was watching the Minority Report and Schindler's List blu rays and was surprised to see scenes go between relatively grainy and completely clean and waxy, almost as though the grainiest shots were completely degrained and the rest left untouched. Maybe they were. Really ugly. I tried some high quality DNR on a scene in an old Italian cult feature shot on 16mm or 35mm during the 70s maybe and it was a pro res master of the feature from a good source. Worked pretty well but when you had flame or particles they were mooshed just as you saw in the first post here. I've actually used dust and scratches DNR techniques to clean up dust from a set since.

I need to reference grain levels and color for something... does anyone have any (ideally underexposed or moral exposure) 500T or 250D film scans at 2k or 4k? Even a single frame is okay. I just need a reference for grain levels. Thanks!

This guy: http://www.ebay.com/itm/181490031691?euid=a988f9b7e3f844d1828e38a32d5a85ac&cp=1 The buyer indicates that it won't cover super35, although I would have guessed it would. I'm confused how a 16mm lens with a symmetrical design (tessar) can even exist in bayonet mount with a flange focal distance of 52mm. Anyhow, anyone know anything? It wouldn't happen to cover super35, would it? Is there a family of similar lenses... not much info on these guys. I know the Jena vs Zeiss history. More concerned with this particular lens.

Didn't like the movie, but was really impressed by the photography. The open gate Alexa prores I've seen is a bit fuzzy upscaled to 4k, but even sitting in the front row, I couldn't tell when they switched between 65 and Mini for the most part. In the first shot... how did they hide the operator's footsteps in the water? I have no idea. Does anyone suspect the post work was rather extensive? I saw evidence of power windows a bit and possibly even roto to brighten up faces, but some of the scenes were so high contrast I couldn't believe there was an exposure on the face and the footage was much cleaner than Alexa Mini footage I have seen before and worked with, including open gate. The image was great, I feel like the Alexa is unsurpassed for this kind of thing. Not a fan of the direction or script. The Malick aping was very sub-Malick. Beautiful photography, however. Curious to re-watch The New World, which is a great movie.

I'm not trying to keep any secrets, I just don't want to lose jobs because I've posted dumb/obvious questions like these publicly and don't want employers trawling. This has happened to me before, so... Anyhow, I'll contact Tim about deleting my account and post on dvxuser. Thanks.

Didn't realize that. Who could I contact about deleting my account and all associated posts? I don't feel comfortable sharing that information here. Thanks. What forums are available on cinematography where I can post under a handle? Still looking for an answer to this question.

For some poor man's/fill light stuff I need a lamp with the exact color temperature of high pressure sodium. I use storaro yellow, bastard orange, whatever, cts/cto coctails, whatever to get the "look" but to match exactly... Should I buy: http://www.filmandvideolighting.com/rosco-cinegel-3150-industrial-vapor-lighting-gel-filter-sheet.html?gclid=CPr81K2VwL0CFbBj7Aodt3YAyg or Urban vapor? http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=583893&gclid=CMD24ZaVwL0CFTMV7AodkRIAUw&Q=&is=REG&A=details Or buy a high pressure sodium light proper?

Sometimes your snark is so clever it's incoherent.

Amazing work! Catching Fire could very well be my second favorite movie of the year (Wolf of Wall Street might end up being the best of the decade, so behind that) and I loved the look of it. The first half in the various districts is so beautiful, particularly the day stuff… loved the cold magic hour look. Did you shoot late day and time for 3200K? Very pretty footage, perfect mood. Couldn't tell how much was real and how much was set extension... the stylization set the right mood and made it all feel real. The interiors are beautiful, too. Did you use mostly practical/pancake lights/soft lights all tungsten with natural light/soft light coming through the windows at 5600K+? Really curious how you lit the day interiors in the first half of the movie, so beautiful. Really the whole movie looks great, though. Excellent compositions, lighting, and great work on the production design/vfx side, too... everything comes together. Middle portion reminded me of Bad Romance, made me wonder if the studio picked Francis Lawrence partially based on his work on that. How did you handle the day-for-night and night exteriors in general during the last half? On stages? Close ups seemed more “lit” or had a bit more contrast… lots of power windows? The effect is good, but I can’t imagine how you shot so many night exteriors in IMAX. Seems daunting. Mix of stages and location and day for night and night for night or all location? AMAZING work. Such artful choices throughout. Can’t wait for the next two. Surprised so much is handheld telephoto. Did not have the shaky cam distant feeling of the first one, much more naturalistic and intimate. Again, great stuff!

That might be a great answer. What about Zodiac was well-blocked, though? I think the movie is an underrated masterpiece, but Fincher and Hitchcock feel more camera-oriented to me. How do you think the best directors learn to block? Obviously it's a matter of practice, but where does one start? I've heard the DVD series is quite good. Something I am curious about.

Done on green screen in Speed Racer. But used "grammatically" very well. Great film. Thought of this 8 years ago... should have done it and been an innovator. :/