Joshua Reis

Lots of good feedback here. In regards to camera technique, a lot of the old westerns were shot day for night. DPs would underexpose by one and half to two stops. Some would also use an 80C or 80A filter to give an overall cool cast to the image. Polarizer will help darken the sky

In order to photograph stars at night, you will probably need to be somewhere around a 30-40 second exposure at f2.8 with 1600 asa. I would look into purchasing an intervalometer for this type of timelapse or long exposures. Most DSLRs are limited to 1 second exposures. However you may have a manual bulb mode which you could time with a stop watch, but your risk shaking the camera.

Hi, the Red One MX , Scarlet, and Epic approximate a Super 16 gate when shooting in windowed 2k mode. I have shot a handful of projects using a Canon 7-63 and Canon 11-165 Super 16 zooms without any vignetting. I think the Scarlet makes a great 2k candidate because of its low cost and ability to push 60 fps at 4:1 Red Raw. I think the Epic will go around 240-300 fps in 2k? It depends on the aesthetic style that one is going for,but 2k Red mode can look "soft" to some people since its effectively using 2048x1080 pixels prior to debarring. However, its my understanding that the pixels will be smaller with the next "6k Dragon" sensor upgrade so this issue should be resolved with the extra pixel downsampling. I read somewhere that a Super 16 "window" model on the dragon sensor will be somewhere around 2500 to 2800 pixels wide resulting in a sharper 1920 by 1080 deliverable? check it out.

12 hour days is the norm. 10 hour commercial days are out there. However, 14 and 16 hour days is becoming more common for music videos.

I think very few people graduate and are able to immediately make a living as a Cinematographer. You may be able to make some money shooting some things here and there, but the majority of my friends who are now DPs started off working as grips, electrics, or camera assistants. I myself camera assisted on the side, while I saved up enough funds to buy an Arri SR1 camera (this is before theres were dslrs and F900 or Varicam were the only options) and go out and shoot as much as I could and build my reel. I think the key is to find a way to make a living that enables you freedom to pursue your dream financially and schedule wise. Some people get locked into jobs with rigid schedules and are unable to take a day off a day or two to shoot a video or short film that comes up you don't want that to happen. Also, working as a camera assistant allowed me to gain familiarity with different lenses and camera techniques employed by different cinematographers whom that I worked for. Not to mention, you will begin to build those professional industry relationships that you will rely on throughout your career. Best of luck. Joshua

Hi Jonas. Is this distressed look a grainy film quality or is more of an analogue quality from like VHS and a weak broadcast signal? Or is it through digital noise and compression artifacting? It sounds like you and your creative team already know what you guys want. Sounds like it might be a good idea to grab a DSLR like a canon 7D and shoot some experiments and create your own unique post recipe (workflow)? Maybe the look can be accomplished all in camera through selections such as lenses, filters, and underexposure as you suggest? Might be a bit of post such as shooting clean, then laying off to VHS and adding a lot of analog signal enhancements like sharpening edges and increased sharpness? You might even discover that the Alexa may be overkill for what you are looking to do. Also, are you shooting with available light? You might get some interesting aesthetic pushing the digital cameras to 1600-3200 asa and using baltar lenses with heavy chromatic aberration. Its all about experimentation. Best of luck.

You can certainly rate the film at 200 asa to give you a little more safety from under exposure risk. Might be a good idea to shoot with manual iris and use a hand held incident and spot meter to judge your exposures. The camera exposure meter doesn't know what you want to expose for within the frame.

Hi, a lot of movies have been shot on a Red One MX, so I will use that as a benchmark for comparison with the Scarlet. I'm sure many of us have seen Social Network, The Lincoln Lawyer, and other films which have all been shot on the Red One MX. Both the Red One MX and Scarlet MX can shoot 4k at 24fps 16:9. The Red One MX uses Redcode 36, which I have been told is about 8:1 compression. Redcode 42 is about 7.5:1. The Scarlet can shoot 4k 24 fps at 6:1 compression, which Ii'm told would be a Redcode 50. So with this purely technical comparison, you can see that Scarlet should hold its own on the big screen like the Red One MX. However, I will note that the Red One does have the advantage of a 4.5k mode for framing 2.40 widescreen using spherical lenses. This is something that the Scarlet does not offer. So thee Red One still has some advantages over its newer Scarlet sibling. However, the Epic is a whole other ballgame offering 5k mode at nearly three times the data rates.

If shooting with tungsten sources on the MX daylight balanced sensor, I typically like to shoot at a lower Asa such as 500asa instead of the native 800 for cleaner results. If there is a lot of skin tones, I like to employ an 80C filter and balance to 440k to eliminate noise and gain in the blue channel.

If shooting 5k, all of your still glass will have a 1.3x crop. 4k is a 1.6x crop. Might be a good opportunity to try the Zeiss CP.2 primes in the EF mount. Pulling focus on still lenses can be very difficult and still lenses also have the fixed f stop increments. I guess it really all depends on the style that you are going for and if you will have amore run and run approach. Will you be working with mostly long lenses or going hand held with wide lenses. In my experience, still lenses can capture images that are just as sharp and gorgeous as some of the best cinema glass out there, but they just are not designed to be used in motion applications.

Yes you can mis super 16 and standard 16 SR mags and bodies. However, it is not recommended to mix high speed and standard speed SR mags and SR bodies.

No. Choosing camera assistants is made through referrals, a resume, and possibly a brief phone interview.

It depends on what you are creatively and aesthetically trying to achieve, but a good start might be to experiment with different camera filters. Experiment with different lighting styles. Try a different approach with your camera work mixing up shutter, f stops, focal lenghts.

Will you be shooting a lot of handheld or will the camera be mostly steady and locked off? The reason that I ask is that HDRX requires the blending of two separate exposures so that your normal exposure and second "under exposed" image may not exactly line up since they were exposed at different durations in time. The Epic camera compensates for the second exposure by narrowing the shutter. For example, if you were shooting with a 180 degree shutter, the HDRX or second frame would be at 45 degrees if the camera was set to expose for 2 stops under. Many post facilities have different processes to solve this issue, but in my experience it requires some manual and time consuming attention. HDRX works great for wide landscapes and static compositions, but can get tricky when there is a lot of movement within the frame. I'm sure this will change over time as new software comes to release. As long as the sky doesn't clip, you may be able to chroma key? Or you can intentional under expose to save the sky, but then increase the key lighting to your subjects? Even though you don't have access to an Epic, you could shoot some stills with a 7D or 5D and perform your own test? You could manually bracket and find what works best for you?

I have always been pleased with Fotokem for color negative. However, I don't think do do reversal or cross processing.