Sakari Suuronen

Has anyone tested the new Panasonic AVCHD camera? It seems to be really interesting new little camera with loads of potential.

Awsome film. Did anyone notice any similarities between this and Rolling Thunder? I have a feeling that The Coens studied that movie carefully.

Do you have the same settings everywhere?

There's this Log And Transfer window in FCP6. You don't need any plug-ins. They just changed the name. Hook up your cam through firewire to your computer. Some people also use the Duel adapter. Hope this helps.

Guys, check out Western Digital Mybook Pro 500gb. I've heard that they're pretty realiable and not that expensive. I'm shooting a doc at the moment and I'm storing my footage on those.

Check out FAMU in Prague.

A bit off topic but those of you who have seen Track 29 is it widescreen or fullscreen? Thinking of getting that on dvd but I'm a bit paranoid that's in the wrong aspect ratio. There was nothing about it in imdb. I had to send this post cause I jsut finished Don't Look Now for the first time. Awesome movie.

Shame that the color sampling is 4:2:0. Still, it looks interesting.

I was really impressed by this also. Seemed to me that Longley used a lot of faster shutter speeds in the film. Maybe he has to do it because of the latitude of the camera? Would be interesting to know. I always thought that you can't get good results in uprezzing SD to HD. Boy was I wrong.

Liked the video a lot. Fun idea, looked professional. I Liked the editing very much. Also, very interesting bassline. Good work.

I've been playing with the HVX200 in 720p and I'm a bit surprised about the noise in low light situations. I've been shoting wide open and definetely without any gain but the noise is really striking. Are there any basic camera settings to get rid of the noise? I've been testing the camera for documentary work.

Hope you'll be doing a commentart on the dvd, Richard? Might be a good idea to unify the text plates? (I mean the look.) I think you had three different colours there and it's quite a lot for 45 seconds.

Yes, you can move in a picture using Final Cut Pro. Go to the "motion" window in FCP, zoom a bit using "scale", then take your desired composition and set the first keyframe. Then go to the end point of the movement. Same thing: set the scale then the composition (set the "center point") The add the last keyframe and it should work. If you left click your mouse, there's also a possibility to "smooth" the movement. It works in some cases. FCP is not the best possbile tool for this kind of work. If you have any chance doing this in After Effects I'd go for AE. I just scanned my photographs with the best possible resolution. It worked just fine.

There's an awsome book about Ed Wood called Nightmare on Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, jr by Rudolph Gray. Check it out. Also, Jess Franco's Vampyros Lesbos is a great, really interesting film. Tarantino took some of it's soundtrack in Jackie Brown. I've heard that the early works of Franco are way better than the lasts one's...

According to apple you can't run Color on a Macbook Pro 15" because of the monitor. 17" should be fine but it would be intresting too see some actula test results. Mac Pro is a bit out of my budget...Still the news are great and I'll seriously have to think about upgrading. BTW: can you buy the actual Final Touch control table separate for Color? I didn't notice anything about it in the apple pages.

Hi! I'd doing this "talking heads" kinda style commercial in a couple weeks and I was thinking if you guys have any tips how to light faces. There's going to be four different colored backrounds (the colors are not confirmed yet) and basicly the subjects are sitting in a chair and talking about their experiences in a medium close up. The feel is going to be upbeat, fun and colorful. I'm thinking of doing some sort of contrast between the different sets but it can't be too radical. I'm thinking of putting the tungstens on a dimmer, keying with a 2K, using some fill from the opposite side, possibly one of the dedos I would use as a kicker with some color gel. I'm hoping that we can have all the different backrounds ready so we can switch the backrounds as fast as we can. We're doing this in one day and once again, we have no budget for anything fancy. We're shooting on a DVX100, M2+ Canon 1.8 85mm and the lighting package is going to be something like a 2K, some 300W and 650W's couple of 4 bank kinoflows and a set of dedos. I just got this gig and haven't had any time to think about it so I haven't had the chance to made any plans yet.

That's great. Congratulations!

I did a quick search but didn't find the answer, so in F stops, how much is 3db of gain and does it double when the gain is 6db and so on? Is there a simple formula calculating this? Do gain levels vary with different cameras, say DVX, HVX, XL2 or even the F900 or the Viper? Is 3 db of gain always the same amount in F stops?

The King Crimson part was stunning. Really enjoyed the cinematography. The movie didn't provide any solutions in it's word only hope. At first I was bit disappointed about the story but later on I've noticed myself thinking about it quite much.

Insanely off topic, but people interested in Tesla, there's an intersting documentary about he's inventions in google video.

I've been reading up about Alton in the past couple of days. Definetely gonna check out those movies someday. Man, you guys are so lucky to get a 35mm screening of the Big Combo.

El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando & Lis are being released on dvd in the future. In the meantime you can check out Santa Sangre. I't available at least in region 2 by Anchor Bay. Haven't seen The Last Movie by Dennis Hopper but I'm under impression that there are somekind of similarity to Jodorowsky's films. Not much but some. I read somewhere that when Hopper was editing Easy Rider Jodorowsky was consulting the editing at some point so maybe Hopper had some influence from Jodorowsky to his next film The Last Movie.

Sorry to bring this up...but in case someone has missed that you can check out El Topo and Holy Mountain in selected cities..... http://www.abkcofilms.com/ Take the Jodorowsky ride. You will not be the same.

If I understood correctly, the Genesis problem was kind of a vertical stripes in some of the night sequences (with Val Kilmer)? I liked the color quite much and the first act was to my surprise surprisingly good. Scott has heavily tone down the visuals comparing to Man On Fire and Domino. To me, after the first act the story was full of holes and it appeared childish... I was really annoyed for overusing close ups. I'm not at least surprised that I didn't like the story but it was a real big improvement from Domino and Man On Fire. Still, for comedy's sake, I'll hope they'll make a sequal to this named Deja Vu 2.

Did you mean this? http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ Remember, that there are loads of good places to shoot in scandinavia that virtually deserted. Check out also Estonia and maybe other baltic countries. If you do a little scouting you can find deserted places with a soviet "feel". Hope this helps.