MatthewJClark

The rumor I heard is that some of the former employees bought up the remaining parts, inventory and the rights to the equipment. There has to be something out there to fix these lamps. Any other thoughts? Matthew

Hey gang- I'm in need of some specific parts that seem to only be used on the Aurasoft 800 2.5/4k HMI. I need the cylindrical safety glass that encompasses the bulb. Any ideas where I can get parts or get the safety glass? Any ideas would be awesome. Thanks. Matthew

Thanks for all the great feedback. How did you guys deal with the long days in the summer with respect to sticking to a normal 10-12hr day? That always is a tough one with keeping things from going to long. I shot in Alaska one time and it was a tough call on which half of the day you shot since there were so many hours of daylight. In recent years, were you able to get much help from the State and local municipalities for support? I'm curious about what brought other filmmakers up to Montana? What was the draw? Matthew

Hey everyone- I know that many of you have probably shot in Montana and I'm sure most of us know that David Mullens has spent some time there on Northfork. I'm wondering what kind of experiences you've had working there between the quality of the light, availability of gear and crew and the in's and out's of the whole process. The reason I ask is that I've shot there a couple of times including a short film so I have some thoughts, but wanted to gauge, through your experiences, the feasibility of shooting there for a feature vs. shooting somewhere else. I hate to bring up Canada, but we all know that is an option. We'd love to keep the project in the lower 48 and more importantly, we think the job would be better suited for Montana (vs. Colorado, UT or AZ). I'd love to hear what you think and have seen up there and any thoughts. Thanks! Matthew Clark

I've done a similar kind of test with a Mitchell, Nikon mounted and a pin-hole lens cap. I shot a couple hours of timelapse as well as some table top stuff. I need to dig through my notes to recall the specifics, but I had a good experience. The refraction at the whole was minimal and actually interesting. The exposures were long even when shooting outside. I used 5218 with no color correction in front of "the hole." The results were interesting. I loved the lack of resolving power creating an interesting image that is kind of soft but still sharp. Clairmont Camera has a set of pinhole lenses for rent. I believe they are PL mount. Anyway, I've always wanted to try those. When shooting the digital pinhole work, make sure that your sensor is very clean. Every bit of dust will show up in the image. I've shot a bunch of digital pinhole stills and I end up doing a fair amount of photoshop retouching to clean up the dust. I do think, with the right pinhole and film stock, you could actually shoot some near normal images. You know, you could get close to 24fps and all. The sacrafice would be a bigger pinhole which means images that are not as sharp. I'll see if I can find my notes and possible post some stills from my motion tests. Shooting Pinhole is a very gratifying art form. -m

The whole line thing, in the original thread here, might not be a big deal since the "line" is the parade. As you bounce around, the viewer knows that the parade is moving down the street. The viewer probably will get the geography quickly (a parade being very iconic and all). I suggest the line will be easy to follow and won't be an issue. Go nuts, have fun with it. I don't think you'll make a bad move here especially once you establish the scene in the first shot. Good luck. Matt

What have other DP's been using when they shoot on Super 16 and need wider lenses? The wide zooms from Canon are nice, but between resolution and contrast, they woudn't match the Cooke's very well. I'd be curious where people are getting their Super 16 Cooke lenses from. I'm sure they look great, but Doug is righ...expensive and hard to find. Surprised more people haven't been down this path. Matthew Clark

If the hall isn't a day time interior, I'd go with a tungsten package. You can get more fixtures for the price and probably more overall output than the 575's you get. Tungsten fixtures are a lot easier for someone to loan or give you a deal on so easier to get the hook up. You can play with CTB to get the quality of blue you want. Choose 2K's or smaller and you won't have a problem with power. I've had good luck in schools with ample power, you just have to run stingers all over to extract that power. I love the 575, but it may be lacking in the punch or volumn you describe. Check the gym and theater at the school. Many times, those areas have more power and a way to actually get to it in a break out box or snake kind of thing. Some schools actually planned for power consumption in those areas for plays and events. Same goes for the hallway: use tungsten. Get the Kino, scrap the Dedo kit and get a pile of tungsten fixtures and a lot of flags and negative fill if you can squeeze it in. I like the look of Kino's with tracing paper on the doors or something heavy. You can get it in close and have it wrap nicely. The other thing to consider is messing with the White Balance to get some cooler tones. Something worth testing out prior to shoot day. Good Luck. -m

You an only record at DVCPro50 to tape. To extract the full potential of the camera, you have to record to the P2 cards. David is correct about only recording HD to the P2 cards. The whole system is wrapped around those cards. All you need to down load them is a laptop (Mac or PC) with a PCI slot and you can save the data to the machine in very little time. It is super easy. Same with your G5...you need a reader that accepts the P2 card via a PCI slot. You will also need to install the driver that allows the card to be "seen" by the camera.

Steve- Koerner Camera has two of the HVX 200 cameras. They'll soon have the PS Technik adapter as well. You can find them in both Seattle and Portland, OR. www.koernercamera.com Not sure about comparisons of the different camera systems. Matthew

One of the cheapest and actually more useful rigs I worked with was a pair of 400w jokers mounted on the hood. The hood mount was fabricated out of lumber (2x6) strteched acroos the width of the car. "Legs" for the rig were made out of 2" angle iron (~12"long), wrapped in gaffer's tape and then wedged into the hood seam between the hood and fender along with some scraps of duvetyeen as padding. The angle iron was screwed into the 2 x 6 and there was our mount...saftey-ed, of course. Power was run off a big inverter. The down side of the inverter with higher wattage fixtures is that there may not be enough output of the car's alternator. We made the actor drive every where in second with higher RPM's to keep the output high enough to drive the Jokers. I've used the silent Honda generators strapped to the roof and the rear bumper and that works well too. Having a rental car is always nice...just get the extended insurance. Then you don't have to worry about scratching the paint. We always tried to keep the lights out of the eye line of the actor so she could drive and think and act. An alternate way to do this gag is to pull the picture car behind a pick-up with a U-Haul dolly. The dolly keeps the car low, the actors don't actually have to drive and you can mount lights simply in the back of the pick-up. You can also still mount the lights on the car to keep them close if you have small fixtures. The camera can be mounted on a hostess tray or maybe operated in the picture car. The tow dolly doesn't cost much and is a whole lot safer for everyone plus you can carry some spare gear in the pick-up and a grip or electrician to help out with a re-rig or shaking everything up after a few takes. Be safe out there... Matthew

The new news on the Mini35 Adaptor from P+S Technik is that they will be out in March. ZGC, the US distributor, is getting them in then and will be available there after. I imagine that there will be limited supplies. Still wondering about scene files....anyone? Matthew

Has anybody posted scene files or "looks" on line yet for the new HVX200? I'm shooting with one next week and wanted to set-up the camera prior to shooting. I don't want some crazy ass look like "Amelie" or "ThreeKings" but a solid set-up that gets as much latitude as one can expect from the camera with a decent gamma curve. Tape to tape will be applied at the end of post. We'll be shooting with the Mini35 adapter and Cooke lenses...if we can find a PS Technik adapter for this camera. Are they making one for it yet? Thanks in advance for your help. Matthew

Just an update for the few of you interested in this topic. I ran the New Cinematography Electronics ("CE") iReader box through some tests with the help of one of my AC's. We also had the Cine Tape hooked up with the reader box. It is a bit more robust than the cMotion box. I liked the familarity with the CE box. It looks, feels and acts like their other products. There seems to be a little delay with lens action (either aperature or focus) and the output of the reader. You pull the focus and the data comes out about a half second behind. In all fairness, we saw the same thing with the cMotion box. Having the Depth of field information displayed in a graphic manner is probably the best function of the system. It is great having that feedback right there all the time with hyperfocal and depth of field range being easy to read. The Cinetape functions as normal in this configuration so nothing new to report there. The cMotion box is cool looking and has an interesting interface. On first inspection, the idea of a touch display and scaleability of the device with new software all seemed cool. After working with it a bit, we discovered that the touch pad was inconsistent. It didn't always react to input. There are hard buttons to work with to get around the touch screen. Seems like the cMotion box would be a good long term purchase since you can upgrade it and add on to it with different software. With the right software, you can also manage camera control including ramps and have wireless transimission of all lens data. That could be nice when the camera is on a long arm or crane. We found the cMotion box to be a bit "buggy" at times. It crashed on us and locked up here and there during tests. We never got a chance to use it on set during a shoot last week. We felt it would have gotten in the way of our hectic schedule. It is hard to say which system will be the one for us. We may wait it out a while before we make a purchase. Lots of new technology revolving around the i system is on the way to us this spring. Curious to see what will be laid out for us. For now, the technology seems to be a little ahead of its time. The cMotion is over engineered and doesn't hold up to lots of input; it just gives up and crashes. The cMotion box does have a better way of displaying the data in a graphic form...better than the CE display. The CE box does just the one function with an O.K. graphic display but overall seems robust and durable. I'm still curious to see if anyone else has some thoughts on this stuff. Thanks. Matthew

Check out "Laurel Canyon." There are a few scenes, both day and night, that revolve around the pool. Nice looking moments. I can't think off hand the name, but there were a few James Bond movies, early on in the series, that had some great pool action. mjc