Hal Smith

Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen are still putting fannies in the seats at cinemas worldwide.

Fair enough. Are those two as large and adaptable as the Portabrace?

Sounds like a practice inherited from the legitimate stage. I've had the pleasure of working on a few productions that were planned and designed with this kind of attention to detail. All the creative aspects were integrated with each other...which means I had sets that allowed for lighting, costume colors that were coordinated with set colors, actors were in positions on stage where it was possible to light them to their best, etc. I got high praise for my lighting on all of them...but in truth they were easy jobs since I didn't have to spend all of my time fixing problems that had been created for me by idiot Directors who had no understanding of just how collaborative ALL the theatre arts are supposed to be.

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1008/10082620canoneos60d.asp

Some people seem to equate what they can buy a cheap Chinese backpack for at Walmart with what purpose built professional gear costs. I've got a Portabrace Nagra bag I first repurposed for a PD4 (worked surprisingly well) that now carries a piece of test equipment. You cannot wear out their gear.

I did this in a professional stage production of "Driving Miss Daisy" in the bombing scene with a pair of High End Cyberlights programmed to sweep right to left, shutter off, reset to initial position, shutter open, and then sweep again. Moving mirror fixtures are much more agile than moving yoke fixtures and work best for this sort of effect.

I'll take #1...PM me a link and I'll get an AMEX number to you. I've been looking for something that would make a nice companion to my 7D for run and gun. I'll vote for no magnet. There are too many ways of that causing a disaster...like erasing a couple of credit cards tucked away in a filter pouch!

I think Avid FreeDV was the replacement. If you're a student there's a student version of Media Composer 5 which goes for around $400US. The only problem there is you have to have a pretty stout computer to handle MC5 and all of its features. You need a computer in the league of HP Workstations with Nvidia Quadro Pro graphics, HP Elitebook laptops with mobile Quadro pro graphics, etc. Having said that I got pretty okay results with MC4 running a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with GeForce AGP card...but I wasn't trying to edit HD or layer up a lot of effects.

I'm not qualified to talk about Macs but I would think about better speakers. You've got a good pair of headphones but the problem with headphones is you're hearing the recorded sound dry, IE with no room acoustics. Since most real world listening to sound tracks is on speakers in anywhere from small rooms to auditoriums you should think about a sound playback facility that somewhat duplicates that real world. The list of shorts, features, docs, etc. that didn't go anywhere because they didn't have good sound is a very long one. Top quality sound is under-rated by a lot of film novices but talk to a successful film-maker who has actually sold something and they'll tell you that the quality of their final sound mix had a lot to do with their project's success. In my opinion JBL speakers are about as reliably good as any speaker. Yes, there are better speakers but only at ridiculous prices. JBL just introduced a line of good sounding small powered speakers that I heard at NAB this year and liked quite a bit. It happened I ran into the Metropolitan Opera's sound engineer for their radio broadcasts at the JBL booth at the same time I was there and he liked them also. They sound a lot like the Control Monitor series but have the additional benefit of being self powered. The 5" woofer and a 1" dome tweeter version is the LSR2325P, around $200 each and the one with an 8" woofer is the LSR2328P at around $300 each. That's within your budget and I think you should consider upgrading to speakers in this class. You could add the matched MSC1 monitor system controller (it enables one to equalize the playback room itself) and LSR2310SP subwoofer at a later date but the speakers alone would be a good starting point for what you can afford now. http://www.jblpro.com/catalog/General/ProductFamily.aspx?FId=73&MId=5 Set up a good listening environment to do your mixdowns in. A good size living room with the listening position at least six feet away from the wall behind it is a good place to start. The furniture, carpets, drapes, etc. in a nice, comfortable living room serve to provide a reasonable environment for mixdown. The pros are mixing down in remix rooms that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but a nice living room can serve surprisingly well...and has the benefit of that's exactly the way the average person watches and listens to television and DVD/Blu-Ray's. I'd think about setting the speakers up on plumbing PVC pipe poles about 3 or 4 feet off the ground and about 3 feet from the wall. You don't want to jam the speakers up against the wall because that tends to artificially boost the bass. It wouldn't hurt to ask JBL for their advice about speaker placement for that series. My two cents worth: Take what you like and leave the rest. ;) An afterthought: Don't throw your crappy speakers away. A lot of people listen to film and video on crappy little speakers and cheap earbuds and it wouldn't hurt to double check any mixdown for minimal intelligibility on junk equipment.

Damn! Nice idea Guy

Go fish for a sucker somewhere else...jerk.

Hopefully you're not shooting with a HDSLR? One of the worst examples of aliasing with them is reflections off waves and ripples in water.

If he's transferring at 2fps he could be using burst mode on the 7D instead of video. Doing it that way would generate a zillion GB's of data but with TB drives now cheap that could be an option. How fast will a 7D recycle in still mode? He could be running the camera in straight still mode triggering the 7D shutter off the 2C's shutter or motor.

It's the client's call, they're paying the bills. The caliber of people I work for understand that t-shirt, cargo shorts, and New Balance shoes are best for what I do. I wear a business suit on rare occasion, usually when I'm trying to smooze someone out of something. Recently a very good client of mine mentioned that a person from their headquarters was visiting various divisions and operations, studying what they do. My client requested I adhere to their dress code for working IT and similar professionals; rugby shirt, chinos, and clean athletic shoes while the visitor was on-site. Fair enough, I complied and everyone was happy...after all, they're paying the bills, including mine.

I was part of the process of getting a friend with Mexican film industry experience a green card. One very large concern INS has is regular employment. We got him over the hump because I was able to hire him full time to help out with my engineering business. He's got 3/4's of a mechanical engineering degree from his youth and we used that to create a position for him. But it also was highly helpful that his daughter is a bilingual public school teacher with a Master's Degree. She got her green card with very little fuss since she has professional skills that are highly valued by INS; A fully bilingual person with a Master's Degree in Elementary Education who wants to teach in the public school system. When the INS person she had worked with getting her green card realized that my friend was her father it got a lot easier real quick for him. But he still had to be gainfully employed which is where I came into the equation. Some work, some money, and a bit of luck.

LED's starting to become popular in architectural applications. What you're not including is the savings from not having to run a high current electrical service to conventional lights, the savings in air conditioning load, the savings from the reduced structural load of LED's versus conventional fixtures, the savings in installation costs from installing light weight lighting, etc. Plus I would hope the DOD plans on being around long enough to see a considerable savings over the years in electricity cost. Also: $2K is the retail price, contrary to public (uninformed) opinion the Defense Department pays less than wholesale for commercial items. I've got a pretty good handle on what the DOD pays for high end commercially available electronics test equipment. They'll pay around $12K for something that would cost you and me around $18-20K.

I suggest reading and looking at everything on Shane Hurlbut's blog. He's pretty much the "Old Master" now when it comes to getting high quality results with Canon HDSLR's. http://hurlbutvisuals.com/blog/

Calibration is vitally important with lightmeters, it's usually recommended to get them calibrated yearly. If you buy a used one, get it calibrated before you use it on a critical job. Ask around and see if there's a good calibration lab in NZ or Oz and what they're used to working on.

Please do, there's a lot of us here that feel pretty good about "one of us" having moved up to the big time!

The Chairman of a university Photography Department who declared film was dead...and proceeded to junk a full color lab. Yes, I said JUNK, sent it to the maintenance department's dumpsters. Fortunately the faculty convinced the idiot not to junk the darkroom and B&W lab gear because it would be useful to teach students why digital was so much better. He retired a year later, now they've got advanced students shooting 4X5 Sinars in the studio and field. A couple of the students have even bought 4X5 Graflexes for themselves off eBay...including an absolutely pristine ex-Marine Corps Crown Graflex. The thing the "fad of the moment" people never grasp is there are a lot of young people out there who really enjoy "Old School" techniques and appreciate what silver can do for an image. There is some humor in watching the kids shoot film with 60 year old cameras while using their iPhones to run photographic calculator apps.

For my 7D I use a Lexar Firewire 800 card in my computer and a Lexar Firewire 800 CF card reader. Not the cheapest route but I can import 12 minutes of video from 30MB/s cards (SanDisk Ultras) in less than 3 minutes. Lexar has a similarly high performance USB 2.0 reader for CF/SD cards, I haven't used one but Lexar is a company with a dedication to high quality products. People who have bought them from B&H PhotoVideo have reviewed it highly. One user reports 4GB CF card downloads in less than 3 minutes which indicates the USB 2.0 reader is reasonably quick. Ultimately the Firewire 800 reader is going to be faster on fast UDMA CFcards but the USB reader still looks like a good device for both types of cards.

The SLC rental houses don't have Internet connections? ;) http://www.LensRentals.com has both the Canon 50mm f1.0L and the f1.2L in their rental stock. They advise prebooking either one. http://www.lensrentals.com/rent/canon-50mm-f1.0-l/for-canon http://www.lensrentals.com/rent/canon-50mm-f1.2-l/for-canon

Look at movies that use that sort of camera movement. For instance: "Hurt Locker" for shaky cam, "The Devil Wears Prada" for studied looks. I could tell you my opinion on the subject but watching some films and seeing where different techniques are used will educate you as to what the people making features think appropriate to different content.

Some people are having success using black promists to reduce moire. Obviously they have to use a different grade for different focal lengths. I had a chat with Tiffen about the subject and they allowed as how there is active research in this area.

I knew you were my kind of guy! A fellow owner of a big, bad Ford. The frau drives a Hyundai Accent to and fro work. My personal car? A 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis LS Limited...I do like those V8's, my previous ride was a 1995 V8 T-Bird. At least the wife can look Al Gore in the eye. ;) PS to Richard: NO big car bitchin' allowed, the Marquis was assembled north of the St. Lawrence, your people made a buck putting it together. I do wish it didn't smell like old hockey skates on a cold, wet winter's day.