Hal Smith

I'm probably not much more experienced at shooting film and/or video than you are. When I shoot film or video, I'm the DP. I'm the guy behind the camera and ultimately what the pictures look like is up to me. I know how to listen to a Director and collaborate with them on their vision. I can read a light meter (or make damn sure my AC can), set up lighting, direct and manage crew, know how to operate my equipment, and I understand the film and video technologies I work with. I'm also am pretty decent photographer, I have some sense of how to translate what my eye sees and brain imagines into a flat picture on a screen. I also am a good teacher, if you're working with me and don't have a bunch of experience (but are teachable) I'll take the time to show you what you need to know. Am I Dion Beebe or David Mullen? Hell no. They've got hundreds if not thousands of hours behind cameras and work in environments that I've only seen pictures of. I don't have the length, richness, and variety of experience the guys with the ASC and BSC initials after their names have - and in truth I may not have one-tenth of their native talent. There's a whole herd of Cinematographers who are also every bit as good as the guys and gals with the initials, they just haven't been working on the right sets and locations to get those credentials. We're all DP's, we're just not all equal in talent, ability, knowledge, and/or experience.

Is this my best option? (the production has no budget) If I do use this monitoring method, then should there be any setup considerations? I had the brighness and contrast set at 0 or 50% if anyone is interested. thankyee Ben. Standard definition waveform monitors and vectorscopes have got pretty cheap ( I scored a good working Tektronix 520A vectorscope for $50). Look up a video engineer and ask their opinion. With that type of gear on hand you can really stay between the ditches when shooting video. I've started to use a waveform monitor on the occasional theatrical production archival tape I shoot with my Sony TRV-30. I no longer have to worry if I've got detail in the blacks or whether or not my monitor(s) are lying to me with respect to blowing out the highlights. It becomes a film shooting environment that way, my on-board monitor is for framing only and my waveform monitor is for judging my exposure.

Careful Captain, you'll have the PC police knocking on the door. On the other hand, Diogenes may have just found an honest man! :D My thought on beautiful women might be that it's easy to undervalue the contribution makeup, hair, and wardrobe artists make. I've met one VERY famous actress in a very informal setting. Minus professional mh&w she really wasn't all that gorgeous. She has a very thin face, easily fixed by using longer lenses for closeups, a rather sallow complexion, easily fixed with makeup, and a good body but nothing to drive a 14 year old boy nuts. What she does have off screen is presence - a way of being the center of any room she's in. In nude scenes in major movies the lead actresses often have body doubles. That's not only about modesty, many of them just don't look that good without their clothes on. They certainly have bodies good enough that a normally hormoned man would be crazy to throw them out of bed but not with the kind of perfection required to be shown 30' wide on a big screen. One actress who does look pretty good naked is Sharon Stone. Apparently she was nervous enough about making another "Basic Instinct" many years after the first. She says she got herself naked in front of a mirror and then had a female friend take a look at her before saying yes to the project. I feel she's a hugely under-rated actress - and she has to deal with the sex and body thing as result.

My personal Arri 2A is serial number 4937. It's a 2A that was later upgraded to 2C pulldown, gate, and pressure plate.

They're kind of like Mozart aren't they? They register so naturally in the soul that one gets the feeling that if God were to make films they'd look like your examples. By the way, "Northfork" is going to be on HDNet movies in April - now if I can only figure out how to get my AVID Express Pro HD to record it off DirecTV - "Northfork" in 1080i! :)

My choice was to buy an Arri 2. It is not too hard to find a good one. They're easy to hand hold with 200' magazines, for tripod work you will need an Arri 2 tripod mount, either a tophat or some sort of flat base adapter. There are a lot of accessories available on the Internet. To use the latest lenses you can get a PL hardfront installed, replacing the original turret, for about $1500 US. The earliest Arri 2's used a different film pull down mechanism, the later 2B and all 2C's cardiod claw is preferred by many. Without a blimp they are most definitely a MOS camera - when I run mine in the house all three of my cats run for their life.

Is there some sort of esthetic movement going on where producers want things to have an Internet video look? More and more I'm seeing pictures that stutter like mad and are very unsettling visually. IMHO that Internet look is pure garbage - we've got a motion picture technology that can produce pictures equivalent to gazillions of pixels per second - why does anyone think I want to see pictures with horrid amounts of compression, stutter, posterized color palettes, etc. etc.? Give me three strip Technicolor or give me death!

Thank you for the reply. I've attached the pictures that were on eBay - the BNC to ARRI two pieces may, or may not, be part of the hardfront. The larger piece with the ears will fit in the front of the hardfront, and the smaller collet outer diameter is an exact fit in the hardfront from the back side. This may or may not be accidental, it's unknown whether all these pieces actually went together originally. The larger piece with the flanges will actually pop into one of the the turret ports on my Arri 2A/C (it's a 2A with 2C innards).

Does anyone know of a link to a good, engineering level drawing of the BNCR mount system? I've got about half of a Cinema Products BNCR hardfront for my Arri 2 and need to know what's missing.

One fly in the ointment (vacuum grease?) would be the price of any fitting that has to go through the vacuum seal like a follow focus rig, battery cable, etc. If you think professional motion picture gear is expensive - try buying vacuum equipment - bring a very large credit card with you. And where would you put the vacuum pump itself? Turbopumps aren't too noisy but the forepumps needed to purge them, and that could possibly do this job by themselves, are ridulously noisy. The vacuum wouldn't have to be too hard, I suspect 1 Torr would do - that 1/1000 atmospheric pressure. It's not a bad idea but like many ideas has its own problems. In a studio environment you could remote the pump - the hose would have to be at least 1" ID to get a reasonably quick pump down rate. If your vacuum cage was tight enough you could probably take it out in the field and just pump it down every so often. Space gear has to have special lubricants. Normal greases will evaporate in high vacuum. Vacuum greases have a very low, almost non-existent, vapor pressure so they don't evaporate. Two clean metal surfaces in a hard vacuum will stick to each other without proper lubrication. Search around through some NASA websites with "Technology Transfer Program" links. Sooner or later you'll find some information about what they had to do to the Hasselblads that went to the moon. Or email NASA at Houston, there might be someone there with enough gray hair to remember the Hasselblads. Having said that, you do have me thinking since I've got an MOS 35mm and a bunch of high vacuum gear in the shop. My day business is building and fixing radio stations and I've got helium leak detector equipment for chasing transmission line leaks. Look around http://www.leybold.com for good information on top quality vacuum gear. A good place for professional vacuum gear at pretty reasonable prices is http://lds-vacuum.com/. They're kind of the Visual Products of the vacuum business. :) Edmond, OK

I've found that worldwide shipping through national post offices and their contractors is really quite reasonable. The shippers to watch out for are both UPS and FedEx, they gouge you. I have air shipped things back and forth to the EU via the PO's for about 1/4 to 1/3 of what the US Parcel RipOffs wanted for substantially the same service. There's something to be said for government subsidy of critical services. If UPS and/or FedEx ran the Internet, this post would cost me $9.98, just like the $9.98 that T-Mobile charges for one days Internet access at Starbucks. I used Starbucks once because I needed to test an Internet stream from a random location - now I know why you never see anyone on the web at Starbucks. Edmond, OK

The professional museum people are real concerned about long term archival. It's somewhat sad that in 100 years we may have Edison cylinders of Caruso that will still play and no tape or CD's of Pavaroti that will. In 100 years finding a working reproducer for video and audio tapes, CD's, etc. will be almost impossible even if one had media that would play given a working machine. Edmond, OK An afterthought: The fact that media and manufacturing corporations are putting profit over permanence will some day be remembered as a set of acts as rapacious as the destruction in antiquity of the Royal Libraries of Alexandria. We lost something like 98% of the Greek classics because of that tragedy. There are Aristophanes plays that we have ancient commentary about but don't have the original, Euripides' "Trojan Women" was the third play of an otherwise lost trilogy, etc.

David, Is this because the 24P is being played back at 24FPS on the set as opposed to the doubled 48 "flashes" per second frame rate that 24 FPS film is actually projected at? Or is it some sort of pull-down/pull-up artifact? Edmond, OK

I understand that John Pytlak used to work for the company that built stone plate duping equipment. :D Edmond, OK

My "day" job is radio broadcast engineering, I own my own company and do all sorts of engineering for about 12 clients in OK. Degree is an MS in Teaching of Physics. I'm a contract consult to the University of Central Oklahoma's 100kW classical music FM, several radio groups around the state, and sometimes I do work for cellular and power companies performing various RF tests. I build new studios and transmitter installations now and then for clients. I do theatre lighting design here in OKC with a small Equity company, and have been getting back into film after a long layoff. I shot a bunch of 16mm B&W ethnographic film in the 70's with an ex-wife, nothing you've ever seen - it's probably all lying around the University of Chicago in some archive. I've got to know a bunch of good actors here in OKC which got me back into thinking about film. I've got a short film in mind that in particular I'm writing for one very awesome actress who's definitely got "it". I shot some archival video of a production I lit that she was in and made of point of following her around quite a bit to see if she came off as charismatic on video as she does live on stage - she does. Ever been around an actress that has so much personal magnetism that it's hard to breathe when you're around her? Not sexual, something entirely different that has something to do with her possessing what could be understood to be a very powerful soul. Magic! I lived and worked in New York theatre a LONG time ago and actually gaffed for Pierre Gaisseau on some avant-garde dance I had done the stage lighting for - I've never seen the footage I lit but it was for "New York - Sur Mer". That was quite a trip for me, the performances were originally in Judson Church with barely enough equipment. Pierre tried shooting there and then announced he was going to borrow a studio to re-shoot it in. The studio? The old Screen Gems studio somewhere in west midtown Manhattan. I walked into that studio and about fainted when I saw all the lighting equipment lying around and hanging off the grid. Basically I told the union types what I wanted and they rescued my way-in-over-my-head fanny. Edmond, OK

Aha! Generally found in most studios, most definitely in an ADR studio, there's a magic box available called (Tah Daah!) a de-esser. Yep there's a processing function called a de-esser, it detects the excessive amount of high frequency in esses and rolls off the high end dynamically. A lot of dedicated mike processors have them, not necessarily expensive ones only. The DBX 266 mike preamp and processor has a pretty good de-esser in it, that box is my favorite bargain basement mike proc. I suspect you've got pretty good ears - trust them. A lab full of high end audio analysis gear isn't as good as the billion dollar sound processor the good Lord installed in our heads. I've got some pretty decent audio test equipment from companies like Audio Precision and Hewlett-Packard/Agilent but I have learned to trust my clients who have golden ears and really listen to them. Edmond, OK

Yes, HD and "warmth" are very related. Maybe with some additional high end rolloff to kill the higher frequency overtones generated by the HD. I vaguely remember that variable area optical sound tracks (RCA/RKO system) were recorded with a moving mirror on what amounts to a d'Arsonval moving meter mechanism. There would have been all sorts of problems with mechanical resonance, overshooting, etc. in such a contraption. Who knows how many kinds of novel distortions would get introduced by that system. If they're still using that technology I'd be real surprised, there are many ways to produce a variable area optical sound track today that wouldn't use moving parts. Another thought about optical tracks, the playback system on projectors is probably still pretty much ancient technology. I suspect very little development has happen since magnetic tracks, DTS, etc. have become pretty much dominant. I'm not certain about the SW "New Hope" esses. Given all the digital technology and toys Ben Burtt had available to him (MK I Sound Droid, etc.) that could be anything from badly overdriven sibilance fixes to a deliberately manipulating the sound to catch the viewer's ear. After all, isn't that line the overarching plot of ALL six Star Wars features?

Look into the Tascam TDRS DA-88/SY-88 and DA-98 digital recorders. Eight channel recording with SMPTE time code and video sync lock, built-in on the 98's and with the SY-88 card in a '88. I know DuArt can resolve TDRS tapes with time code and there's probably more that can handle them. They're not portables, they're 7" high rack mount machines. But obviously they'll work just fine in the field if you've got AC available. The current DA-98HR model is AES/EBU in/out, the earlier ones are balanced analog line level in/out. There are outboard adapters available that convert one or the other to the TDIF connector on the back of the machines. I scored a good used DA-98 off eBay for 10% of what a DA-98HR costs new. They have a built-in head life counter, I'd try to get one with 500 hours or less on the heads that's been in an air conditioned studio, etc. I'll get your Specta manual scanned early this evening. Forgot to mention, they do require outboard mike preamps, either a wireless system or something like one of the small Mackie mixers will work.

Transparency in reproduced sound is mostly a combination of very low noise floors and low intermodulation distortion. Purely harmonic distortion (HD) isn't a big problem in reproduction, the distortion products generated by harmonic distortion are in exactly the same mathematical relation as the natural overtones associated with timbre in musical instruments. They "hide" in the natural overtones, another way of putting it is to say that HD products are more musical. The sound will be somewhat different depending on the amount of HD, many people would describe it as being "fatter" with HD present. The problem with an excessive noise background is obvious, the noise masks or hides the subtle characteristics of sound. But intermodulation distortion (IM) is another story entirely, in IM the distortion products are the sum and difference products of the various frequencies in the sound, as a result the new frequencies are NOT in any harmonic relationship to the original sound - they're brand new frequencies and very unnatural and unmusical. In practice any non-linearity of amplication or mechanical transduction between sound and electrical signal will generate both HD and IM, the amount of each determined by the transfer characteristic of the non-linear stage. If you imagine a gamma curve for sound, you'll be close to the concept, perfect sound requires an absolutely straight transfer curve line. Aphex manufactures a product called the Aural Exciter that introduces new distortion products on purpose, they've become somewhat passe' around radio stations and a little digging might find one pretty cheap. They're between $200 and $800 new depending on the exact model. There's also a TDM software Aural Exciter plug-in for Pro Tools in the $450 range. The different character of recorded esses is somewhat due to the fact that sibilance is quite loud, it often gets clipped because it overdrives the microphone preamplifier (if not a later stage). Clipped esses basically become a white noise burst hence the distinctive sound. One more thing, due to the higher noise and distortion product floors analog recordings usually do have a fair amount of compression added somewhere along the way. With much sound the dynamic range is great enough that without some help the sound would be in the noise one minute and overloading amplifiers the next.

That's kind of what I was thinking, 28 FPS shot and then projected at 24 would give normal walking, etc. a slight floating on air look to it. Do you agree? Edmond, OK

The plot thickens, be sure to post what Rosco tells you. Edmond, OK

Have you got a buddy who has intelligent stage lighting? I used a pair of High End Cyberlights, one in red, one in blue, to sweep the stage for the bombing scene in "Driving Miss Daisy". One of my more brilliant ideas, I got several audience comments that when the lights came up for that scene the hair stood up on the backs of their necks - not a word of dialogue and they knew what was happening. Edmond, OK

Unfortunately, Tim doesn't host manuals on the Forum because too much storage is required. He lists links to other sites with the data. But that doesn't stop me from directly emailing it to you. Hal

I've got a Combi-500, the batteries are for the small Cadmium Selenide sensor in the center of the large sensor. My low light sensor is dead and I've read posts that say they're all dead by now and Photo Research can't supply replacements. But the large sensor still works great in mine. The batteries are for the low light sensor so the meter will work fine otherwise, the original batteries are Mallory RM625 Mercury cells which are no longer available. I saw replacements somewhere that were REAL pricey, probably modern small silver cells with a miniaturized add on voltage regulator for the RM625's 1.34 volts. You could safely test the low light sensor with modern hearing aid cells, if your meter comes up working you could Google for the substitute cells. If you're at all handy with a soldering iron I'll design you a simple outboard regulator that will use a 9 volt akaline cell regulated down to 2.68 volts. I've got the original Combi-500 manual. My email address is in my Forum profile, send me an email with where you'd like a copy sent. I'll scan it later today and also email Tim Tyler to see what's involved in posting it on the Forum Edmond, OK

Duly noted. I was mad at just how far off topic this thread was getting, not so much at you personally. With respect to Santo's original post, the door looks very unevenly lit to my eye, a full stop from top to bottom maybe? Edmond, OK.