Hal Smith

How cheap is real cheap? I've scored sheet metal 500 watt fresnels off eBay from time to time for around $25, and good quality 1kW cast aluminum ones for around $100. There are imitation ETC Par's on eBay going pretty cheap, that's not a Parnel, the eBay ones come with a set of three lenses for focus changes. I've got some experience with real Parnels, I prefer a true focusing Fresnel, the Parnels don't have enough spot to flood range for my taste. Edmond, OK

Interesting, I've been told that the non-cling was being phased out. Who do you buy your Rosco from? I'd like to call them and see what they say. Edmond, OK

I buy a lot of Rosco from Production Advantage and some from Norcostco in Dallas, it comes rolled up with tissue paper and (including heat shield) has never come "bunched up" or marked. Talk to B&H's customer service, they owe you. PS: you may have noticed that some of Rosco's gels are now manufactured with built-in static cling. Rosco tells me that's so it can be applied to windows, etc. without any additional tape or support. My jury is out on the static cling - it makes some things easier but picks up dust like mad. Edmond, OK

Yep, "Pearl" , not "1941".

There is a concept in US copyright law called "fair use". It covers the topic of this thread, IE: just how much of copywritten material can be used and quoted without obtaining rights. Fair use varies by nation, what's legal in the US isn't necessarily legal in the EU, etc. Wikepedia has an article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use. Googling "fair use" AND legal will pull up a bunch of references to "fair use" law. Edmond, OK

It was too "pretty"; cast, costumes, settings, and special effects. We have actual film, both Japanese and American, some even in color of what Pearl Harbor really looked like. No-one knows what an invasion from Mars might really look like but I suspect you'd have to look under quite a few rocks to find an American who had never seen documentary or news film of Pearl. "MIB", "War of the Worlds", "Encounters", "Independence Day", etc. all can fly because they aren't instantly compared in the viewers sub-conscious with the real thing. In a funny kind of way all the space invaders movies have created a mutual mass consciousness of what a space invasion would look like. I bet if the real thing ever happens it won't look like anything the human race has envisioned, but something very (to not coin a phrase) alien. Edmond, OK

I'm too late for this project with this advice but B and H Photo sells new Sekonic L-208's for $94.95. They're a pretty decent little incident/reflected meter and you can expect a brand new meter to be pretty much on the money (if anyone reading this post knows of another relatively inexpensive new incident/reflected meter please chime in). They don't have cine speeds per se which means you have to calculate actual cine camera shutter speed, not a difficult task and great for learning what's really going on with the relationship between film frame speed (FPS) and shutter angle. Shutter speed = (1/FPS) X (shutter angle/360) You might look around for an old Spectra Candela or Combi meter on the web but the problem there is you might get a good one, and you might not. If there's at least one known good meter at your school you could chance it on an old Spectra, if it's a bit off you could just lie to it by offsetting the ASA scale. The advice to use a video camera is good advice but I have had some problems with predictable exposures shooting under difficult lighting situations. My Sony miniDV supposedly has a quasi-spotmeter mode but it gets fooled real easily by strong stage lights, etc. I've resorted a couple of times to manual exposure watching highlights. Next time I use it for a project that matters I'm bringing a waveform monitor along so I can directly judge video exposure value. Edmond, OK

STOP IT - JUST PLAIN G*D D**N STOP IT! THIS IS A FORUM FOR CINEMATOGRAPHERS AND THEIR INTERESTS, NOT FOR SOPHOMORIC MENTAL DIARRHEA. :angry: Go find yourself a hate use group and get this C**P off this Forum. Or at least leave this kind of dreck in the Off Topic area.

Thomas, Thank you. Is a "high quality deinterlacer" a DIY project or strictly for a good post house or lab? Sincerely, Hal

Back in my crazy sports car racing days my buddies and me all raced English cars. We referred to Japanese cars like the 260Z's as being made out of "fish heads and rice paper" and called them rice burners. We weren't being racist about it - just having fun with the whole concept of Japanese sports cars. I lived in Chicago where there are a lot of ethnic European groups who always were grousing that nothing was made in the USA like in the "Old Country". My buddy Cliff Kabamoto had a lot of fun talking about how good the cars from his folk's "Old Country" were - yes, he was talking about Datsuns and Toyotas. I'm not certain if "Japanazoom" is very respectful of the country the cameras came from. In truth the Japanese did one heck of a job of building inexpensive 8mm gear for the masses. Most of them may be pretty much junkers by now but they're all 30 and 40 years old and have never been to Alan Gordan for a tuneup. I suspect a lot of our revered Arri 2's, etc. would be junk by now if they hadn't spent their service lives being used by professionals who take good care of them and send them to professionals for service. Edmond, OK

How do the contributors to this thread feel about shooting 25fps PAL HDV if planning for a filmout? What's involved in converting 25 fps PAL to 29.97 fps HD and/or SD NTSC if one also wanted to have that route still available for distribution? Yes, DV25 is DV25 no matter how it gets recorded! :)

Do I risk making a gender and/or sexual preference faux pas by inquiring as to whether you're also considering re-doing your hair and makeup? :) Edmond, OK

Always wipe the head drum with the cloth in the opposite direction the head travels. If the drum rotates counterclockwise (every one I'm familiar with rotates CCW) wipe the drum clockwise. That way you're moving the cleaning cloth or stick past the heads in the same relative motion as the tape. This is important because the head is designed for that motion, heads are quite fragile and don't take kindly to being stressed from the wrong direction. Humidity is the culprit in most head clogs - tape stores best under similar conditions to film, not too hot and around 50% relative humidity. I don't know about an F900 but many video and digital audio recorders have humidity sensors that shut them down if they sense excessive humidity (the infamous "dew" light on older Sony's, etc.) Panavision's caveat is probably based in having got a few F900's back from rental with broken heads. The downside of using cleaning tapes is they're abrasive and take a bit of life off the head when used. On the other hand it might not be a bad idea to take one with on a gig - losing an hour or so's worth of head life versus losing a day's work sounds like a pretty good tradeoff to me. :) Edmond, OK

Point of fact: the blacklist was a lot longer than three people. I think going from a successful Hollywood career to having to struggle to make ends meet counts as being destroyed.

Damn Guys! Play nice with each other. If you have a strong political or religious belief - channel all that energy into a movie.

Standby gang, they're negotiating with a potential USA distributor. Edmond, OK

At the risk of starting a "flame" thread - where did you hear that? An RCA is less than an inch long. A pretty good estimate of whether or not an impedance "bump" will create a problem is that anything less than 1/20 wavelength long doesn't create any problems. An RCA plug is 1/20th wavelength at 590 MHZ. The component video channels coming off an HD camera wouldn't have any frequency components anywhere near that high. If you use RCA's wired with 75 ohm cable I would never expect the slightest problem. However, that does not include using RCA plugs wired with audio cable. Now you've got all sorts of potential problems including mismatched cable (not close to 75 ohms) and possibly imperfectly shielded spiral, not braided, shielding, both of which can create impedance discontinuities much, much longer than one inch. Now you do have the potential for significant video standing waves in your system with all the ringing and streaking that goes along with that. The first thing I'd check with standing wave problems is the termination at the end of the video line. There aren't that many video engineers left who really understand why you must terminate a video line once with an external 75 ohm terminator if the equipment itself doesn't terminate the line. That is automatically the situation with loop throughs - a line looping through multiple pieces of equpment terminates once at the far end of the line. Prosumer gear often is internally terminated, if you use tee connectors to loop through gear with internal terminators you load the line down too much - two pieces of gear internally terminated at 75 ohms tee'd together will load the line down to 37.5 ohms. Now you've got standing wave problems plus video that's getting excessively loaded down and no longer at standard voltage levels. If you have to drive multiple terminated inputs with one video line, use a video DA, that's one of the things they're for. Edmond, OK

One reason could be a bad experience in the past with a spoiled brat DP who fought them every step of the way on equipment and then spent a week trying to figure out how to run what the production did rent for him. I can hear a producer who had "been there, done that" saying "why not just advertise for DP who owns his own kit, he'll be familiar with it and not be continually bellyaching about not having Panavision's latest, greatest, and most expensive to play with. We've all worked with spoiled brats, right?

Funny, I work an occasional stand-by gig for the IATSE Local 112 here in OKC, usually a monster strike of something like "Movin' Out" or "Peter Pan". The Union has trouble now and then putting together a large crew on Sunday night so they hire non-union standby hands to cover. We get fed if we work past midnight which is pretty usual for a big Broadway tour that has a Sunday evening performance. The local caterers, who would be your craft service crew if you filmed here, put on a great spread. I am pretty low fat in my eating habits and I can easily stuff myself on baked fish, salad, veggies, etc. Oh yeah, there's plenty of beef brisket, desserts, potato salad, etc. there on the table for other's tastes but I'm more than happy. Talk some more Producers into filming here folks, the food's good! If you're curious as to why an Engineer with a good radio station consulting business, a budding Cinematographer, and a fairly slick stage Lighting Designer and Programmer pulls call for the Local here? Simple, the Call Steward asking me is the guy who more than once has saved my bacon by getting me crew at the last minute when I've gotten into a time jam and needed union help. He also tries to assign me the hands I request for my gigs when I can put in a call 48 hours ahead. I owe him big time. I make a few bucks, hang with the IATSE gang, and get fed. Such a Deal! A couple of times I've worked for a crew chief who's one of my favorite hands and has worked for me a bunch of times. We both have a lot of fun with the role reversal. Edmond, OK

That's why I thought there might have been something in HUAC and McCarthyism to pique Kubrick's interest. He'd might have even show the anti-Communism side of the story somewhat sympathically, after all there really was a big bad Russian Bear hungry for territory, influence, and conquest. If you juxtapose rational anti-Communism against a left wing who maybe hasn't really thought through the dangers posed by the CCCP, and then place an insane politician right between them I think you've got the makings of a pretty good, but not conventional, story about McCarthyism. The more kindly you treat the two sides, the more monsterous McCarthy and his henchmen would appear. And I think that type of conflict might have intriqued Kubrick. I watched the first part of "Full Metal Jacket" tonight on HBO (unfortunately in SD). It looked somewhat "bleached", very low contrast. Is that what it looks like projected photographically? PS: I was watching it about 6 feet wide on my JVC DLA-G11 which makes things look pretty good without fiddling - the low contrast was either HBO or Kubrick. Edmond, OK

An ETC Source Four with a 19 degree lens barrel (nominal 15 degree beam) in it and an HPL 750 watt lamp will project a pattern with an intensity of 400 foot candles from 25 feet away. As noted in the other posts, there are four shutters which can cut the beam to almost any straight sided pattern - the shutters not only move in and out but will also rotate sideways quite a bit. In addition the entire front of the fixture with the lenses and shutters will rotate +/- 180 degrees. Source Four 19's intensity drops off about 7% per degree from center, that needs to be kept in account in using them, one can trade off peak intensity and field flatness some with the lampholder adjustments readily accessible on the back of the fixture. A Source Four can get light into and behind tight places that open faced and Fresnels with barn doors and flags can't because of their limited pattern shaping. For instance, you can throw back light through a doorway and never touch the door frame or flare on the ceiling, etc. but still fill the entire opening with light as the sun would. Source Four's have pretty much taken over the Leko business in big time theatre. You go to a Broadway show in NY and 80% of the conventional fixtures being used are S4's. Edmond, OK

I fully expect a film to break out one of these days that was shot on prosumer equipment (miniDV or HDV), and will gross $50 million. Why? because it'll have a great, involving story and be well shot, acted and directed. I love those great big silver based images too but many stories survive quite nicely on a crappy little NTSC televisions. This miniDV/HDV epic obviously will have to be shot very carefully within the limitations of the medium but isn't that the professional Cinematographer's job description - to get the best pictures possible within the project's constraints? Edmond, OK PS: Retired CIA agent Bob Baer, author of "See No Evil" that "Syriana" was based on, was on NPR a couple of weeks ago. He was bemoaning the fact that he was too old and married to hang out in bars and use what has got to be the greatest pick up line imaginable: "George Clooney won his Oscar playing me in a movie" :)

IMHO Kubrick could easily have made a movie where the political violence and insanity of the McCarthy era would have been exaggerated to the point where it turned stomachs. Joseph McCarthy ruined many peoples lives merely because they wouldn't submit to his insane political agenda - you have heard of the "Blacklist" haven't you? Edmond, OK

I think I've just figured out what's been bothering me about this thread's controversy concerning whether or not producers are "artists". A good or great producer isn't so much an artist as a muse - they encourage and nurture the artists but aren't artists themselves. Edmond, OK

How many footcandles do you need in the lit portion of the venetian blind pattern? How large a pattern (H X W)? You might be within the performance parameters of an ETC Source Four Ellipsoidal with a Gobo in it. If you can give me the requested information and an idea of what kind of shot you're planning, I might be able to help. I lit the final scene in a stage production of "Driving Miss Daisy" with an S4 and a blinds gobo projecting across the stage to the table where Hoke is feeding Daisy (and a very low key general wash with a bit of eye light for Daisy and Hoke). When the nurse wheeled Daisy in through the pattern the effect was breathtaking - the director of the production was an Emmy winning TV producer, he flipped when he saw the "look" for the first time in tech rehearsal. We don't use gobos projected by lekos all that much in movie making but they do have their strong points. ETC just came out with optional lens tubes for Source Four's that have improved optics specifically for gobo and image slide projection. Look at http://www.rosco.com/us/gobocatalog/window.html to get an idea of what's available. The other gel and pattern companies also have libraries of window gobos. Edmond, OK