Hal Smith

If a projector were to be able to pull the film down between frames faster, there's a good chance it would rip out the sprocket holes. Film is a well developed technology where there are many, many factors involved in how things are currently done. A quick example: The print film used in a commercial movie house uses a stronger polyester plastic base than camera film's cellulose triacetate base . It is so strong that if it is used in a camera, and there is a film jam, there's a good chance it will damage the camera's mechanism. A modern projector has to be built to handle that risk, cameras would weigh a ton if their mechanism was built strong enough to take a print film jam. Kodak description of film structure

You'll like these: Kodak film examples More Kodak examples

Kapabel Your math's wrong: 172.8/360 is the ratio of time the shutter is open. 1/24 seconds is the time elapsed for one frame. Dividing 172.8 by 360 then dividing by 24.0Hz (AKA cycles per second) gives you .020 seconds which is the time for two complete on/off cycles of the HMI's light in 50Hz countries (1/50Hz = .02 seconds). If your shutter is open for exactly the same time as exactly one or more complete half cycles of the power, there's no flicker PS: The rules of this Forum require your real full name as your user name (like mine, "Hal Smith"). Go to "Your Profile" and change your user name to what your name actually is.

Dear Cap'n, I thought you'd like that link! Love, Admiral Halsey

Why learn a program that, in it's new version is intended for an amateur market? Worse yet, its old version is now an orphan with no support. Avid by no means is my favorite company but they are dedicated to supporting professionals, not kids making iPhone movies.

FCP-7 has been discontinued and was instantly obsoleted by Apple. The replacement, FCP-X is a completely new animal, projects edited in FCP-7 are not compatible with FCP-X. The consensus about FCP-X in the professional editing community is that Apple should have named it iMovie-Pro. The post houses running FCP-7 are tearing their hair out as to what to do now that their editing suites cannot be upgraded. I read that Apple authorized a few more copies of FCP-7 be sold to post houses needing additional seats but there's no future for it. Frankly, I advise looking into Avid, the current version is Media Composer 5.5. It's a bitch to learn but is an industry standard. Avid requires a pretty stout workstation class computer to achieve its full potential but Avid capable ex-corporate lease workstations show up on eBay for as little as $500-750. Ex-lease HP workstations show up in that price range and usually still have some warranty left so you're covered if there's a problem with it. It is possible to build a good computer for Avid on the cheap if you're good with computer hardware. I'm an engineer familiar with high end computers from my business business building and fixing radio stations. I bought an as-is HP8400 workstation off eBay for $400 that was still in HP warranty for six months more. I fixed some cosmetic damage, bought a pair of HP branded quad core Xeon processors and 8GB more of HP memory off eBay, then had HP come out and fix a couple of "issues". Warning! For HP to honor the warranty, any hardware changes you make must be HP branded parts that were on the option list when the computer was new. For instance: If you upgrade the video card with an Nvidia card newer than the computer (like I did), and need warranty work, you must put the original card back in the computer if you need HP support. I ran into that with my XW8400 and the HP tech nicely told me about that rule in advance. It turned out my memory problem was a motherboard issue...and I got a brand new motherboard...for free! HP really takes care of their workstation class computer users. If you're a student, Avid offers some great discounts. If you do buy Avid and they come out with a newer version within less than a year or so they've always offered a good upgrade deal to move you into that newer version. I suspect this is because they want to simplify their support requirements. I've taken all the upgrade offers all the way back to when I had XPress DV in a student version. When MC3.5 came out they offered me a bargain upgrade that included upgrading me to the standard commercial version. That gave me full commercial support for three months after I upgraded to ease me over any glitches. I would recommend jumping on Avid right away. With FCP-7 pros starting to jump ship for Avid they'll have less low price competition and may be tempted to start upping their prices.

On the subject of trying to get a movie made: Hunter Thompson in a Major League Snit (Oscar nominated, bankable stars attached and this Dartmouth graduated airhead couldn't figure out how to find some money.) It finally got made recently with a $45 million budget by a different company, releasing in October. Johnny Depp stayed with the project, Ms. Sorenson did not.

Netting the back of a lens on a DSLR can help to tame moire. It's effectively an OLPF since its behind the lens and the relationship between the focal length of the lens and gauge of the stocking doesn't change. Any of the stockings used in the past to net lenses should work. Personally I've been using the Frau's black LEGGS stockings and if I ever get the time (Ha-Ha!) I plan on experimenting with some of the more traditional stockings used for netting like the Diors, etc.

4.5 foot-lamberts is slightly more than one-quarter the traditional industry screen brightness standard of 16 foot-lamberts for film projection. It's my impression that digital IMAX 3D projection is brighter than 4.5 foot-lamberts. "Avatar" looked pretty good at my local AMC D-IMAX, it could have been brighter but it wasn't dark like the Real-D houses I've been in. Anyone know what's IMAX's brightness standard?

This attitude sets you and your peers up to have to figure everything out for yourselves. No one with years of education and experience (which is exactly where those initials after people's names came from) is going to commit self-abuse by mentoring someone who is resentful of the time, treasure, and just plain hard work the mentor spent to gain their professional knowledge. ASC membership is by sponsorship, it's an acknowledgement by one's peers that one has attained that level of expertise that makes them a worthy member of the fraternity. I've had the occasion more than once to have a one-on-one conversation with an ASC member. Every time I've walked away having learned a good deal more about the art and science of making a picture than I knew before that conversation. My day business requires a great deal of technical, engineering, and scientific knowledge of a very specific area that took me over thirty-five years to attain. From time-to-time I've given that knowledge to members here and on a couple of other sites. Most the time my two cents worth has been received well but over on a different forum I got flamed for a post where I proposed an accessory for a particular camera's power supply. I had prototyped the circuit, tested it on my camera, drew up a schematic which I attached to the post...and a snot on that forum attacked my design because he personally didn't see the need for it. He seemed to miss that point that accessories are things you may, or may not, need depending on how you use YOUR camera. It is indeed one of those forums discussed earlier in this thread where rude people are allowed to hide behind handles. (PS: Unique thread, 90% of the posts are by Sustaining Members!)

There's nothing more embarrassing than an errant post. I know, I've done it myself enough times. :( Having a complete Dolby A/SR/SRD system in my home theatre out in the shop is why I've learned as much about Dolby as I have. I started with a half dead CP-200 that even has the accessory chassis for playing 70mm magnetic tracks, fixed it thanks to Dolby support who gave me(!) a service extender card, got a SRA-5 with the SR cards in it off eBay, found a cheap DA-10 SRD decoder on eBay, got incredibly lucky by buying a box of miscellaneous theatre sound gear cheap off a guy here in OKC that had a brand new, current model CAT 702 SRD reader hidden at the bottom of it. I've since retired the CP-200 and I'm using a simpler, much smaller CP-55 that I modified per Dolby for split surround. I'm using five JBL 12" control room monitors for speakers and 750 watts or so worth of power amplification in the system. The weekend I finished it all I ran my print of "Master and Commander, Far Side of the World" for my daughter-in-law and her hubby. I cherish his comment: "It sounds like a real theater". It should...it's all real theater gear except for my JBL's which are physically smaller than what theaters run, but then the shop is only 1200 square feet.

His posts talks about Dolby Stereo which I assumed to mean he was talking about analog A or SR tracks. I doubt if there are any festivals out there that require Dolby Digital, AKA SRD for submissions.

Modern "Dolby Stereo" soundtracks require Dolby SR processing which is a specific companding system. You need Dolby gear to do it correctly. Dolby SR is a surround system, if you have a Left-Center-Right-Rear produced master, A Dolby box will encode it correctly for theatre surround sound reproduction. Everything Dolby is a very controlled system with very precise requirements for track preparation, etc. I have seen the basic Dolby SR encoding processors on eBay for $200-300. That gear assumes you're sending it Dolby standard level tracks to encode L-C-R-S correctly to two tracks (Lt and Rt in Dolby nomenclature) for film sound tracks. The basic matching SR decoder will cost about the same but I'd want a theater processor and monitoring system to quality control tracks, that's what the big boys use in their re-recording studios. The simpler SR processors like the CP-50 have been going in the $300-400 range recently but they may or may not have two CAT 280T Dolby SR cards in them, a lot of them will have the older CAT 22 Dolby A cards. The "official" way of switching between Dolby A and SR in the older boxes was to have an SRA5 accessory chassis with two CAT 280T's in it but there's nothing wrong with manually swapping out 22's for 280T's as needed. See my recent post at: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=52793&pid=355574&st=0entry355574 for more information on theater reproduction. There is a treasure trove of information on Dolby's gear and proper recording and playback setup on their website. http://www.dolby.com/professional/services/index. If you register at www.film-tech.com there's a large collection of manuals there for the older Dolby gear. Dolby tracks on release media requires their professional license. I suspect Dolby has some sort of free or very cheap limited license for festivals and student projects. I also suspect if you sold a short to HBO with unlicensed SR tracks on it, Dolby just might come looking for you.

In addition to what Phil has written: Theater sound systems are divided into two parts: The first is the "A" channel which is everything required to read the analog or digital soundtrack off the print, decode it if a digital track (Dolby Digital, DTS, or Sony SDDS) or dematrix and decompress it if a Dolby A or SR analog optical track. Ideally all the output of all of them is at a standardized audio level. The "A" channel is followed by the "B" channel which is everything associated with level control, equalization, power amplification, and speakers for a given house. When a house is "tuned" by Dolby or THX what they are doing for the most part is adjusting the "B" channel. All they should have to do with the "A" channel is adjust the mechanical and electronic adjustments directly involved with the soundtrack reader(s). Dolby Digital systems are designed to automatically fall back to the analog optical soundtrack if the digital system isn't working or has too many errors (I believe DTS and Sony do the same thing). Given what you've described, I strongly suspect the problem with the house that was playing "Tree of Life" was extremely poor maintenance of both the "A" and "B" channel. Loss of full surround and so-so sound quality hints at "A" channel issues where the system had fallen back to the analog SR track (all modern prints have a Dolby SR track on them) and the optical reader wasn't set up correctly either. Given the house's crappy attitude about maintenance the "B" channel could very well been misadjusted and had a busted speaker as well. I speak with some knowledge, I've got a home theatre setup out in my shop with a Dolby Digital system using a CAT 702 reader and a DA-10 digital decoder and an analog CP-55 modified for split surround. My projector is a Simplex SP portable with an LED and stereo solar cell optical track reader. By the way, a properly set up Dolby SR sytem can sound very good, it's noise reduction and audio processing math is very similar to the math underlying digital audio like MP2/MP3, etc. Ray Dolby is one smart cat.

Hi Phil, Thus it has always been: Story, story, story. "Casablanca" wasn't intended to be a classic, its production values were so-so and when it was made Bogart and Bacall weren't the superstars they became. But it had a good story and killer cast chemistry and became one of film's greatest classics.

Back in high school, my best friend's dad was in the business of distributing sexploitation films, promoted as "educational films", and often screened as road shows at drive-ins. Of course in my youthful judgment, the man was a sleaze-ball. In my disdain I failed to take notice of the fact they lived in a quite nice house, dad drove a Cadillac, and dinner at their house was always a table full of good food, prepared by their live-in maid. I doubt if any of the films he showed could claim "C" status...but the people who made them made a few dollars and a lot of teenagers saw things on the big screen that they definitely didn't see down at the Roxy. I'm leaving names out on purpose, the father in later life actually became a highly respected diplomat!

The project I was the Producer of record for that the "Dailies" took two weeks to get to Chicago from India for processing...and were pitch black. Followed by my frantic telegrams to India saying to get the gear to Delhi to see the heck had gone wrong. I could say something catty about the ethnicity of the camera involved but there are members here who would take offense...and rightly so.

What lab(s) do you use? They're obviously more than willing to do custom chemistry. Can they process short lengths of ECN2 shot in still cameras?

I'll take 'em, PM on its way. Nice addition to my 7D...I've been trying to get my Pentax lenses on it but can't find an adapter that's any good, the Fotodiox allows lenses to wobble around.

3M makes an adhesive remover available in quarts and gallons. "General Purpose Adhesive Remover" #089848 I've been using it for years to strip adhesive residue off of electronics equipment. Like all such products it's best to test it on painted and plastic surfaces. Auto supply stores often have it and I've seen it at the home box stores. It's pretty stinky, it's best to use it outdoors and dispose of any used rags and paper towels to an outside dumpster. Use it inside and you risk finding yourself extremely unpopular with any woman within 50' of where you're cleaning the C-Stands.

Hi Bill, What's that button do? Circuit breaker?

I'm familiar with KEM's editors, not Moviola's, but maybe I can help. It sounds like the servo system is not getting speed feedback. Have a look underneath the film drive capstan and see if there's what looks like a small ferris wheel on its side. That will be the mechanism that sends speed information back to the servo. It will be either magnetic or optical. If optical, look to see if the light source or photocell has a lot of dust on it, if so, clean it. If magnetic, the sensor coil may have gotten loose and is no longer as close as possible to its rotating wheel. If you can find a schematic set somewhere on the web, let me know and I'll have a look at them.

Phil, Could it be that there's a licensing issue underneath the ubiquitous use of FAT32 for cameras? FAT32 might be free and conversely NTFS, HFS+, one of HP's file systems, etc. have to be licensed.

The stagehands I know (and have hired) here in IATSE 112 OKC have found that they have trouble getting movie and television work because the working practice and lingo is so different between stage and film/video. They have been able to get on large features like "Twister" a few times because they need a lot of hands but that's about it.