Phil Connolly

I'm a former QC person and it would be easy to life the levels on broadcast, you'd just need to run it through a legaliser to keep your cheeky 100% under control. That said in four years of QC, I don't think I ever rejected footage for being too dark, as long as it looked good and was in context with the programme. Underexposed was another thing, I sent back lots of clearly underexposed and noisy footage that had been pushed in post. The main reason's shows failed QC was normally: - Audio Problems - Text out of safe/typo's on titles - Epilepsy Triggers - Non professional shooting formats used - eg too much DV/HDV - In complete clock details - eg typo's on contract details - Illigal Luma/Gamma - Too much noise - eg fake film grain effects etc.. Generally the actual cinematography/grading decisions don't tend to result in QC fails. Its more about how the tape is lined up. Audio is usually a bigger area of problems then picture. Epilepsy is a major issue in Uk and many channels have a zero tolerance policy with flashing images and it can be very difficult to make a film conform.

I'm pretty sure the DSR-PD150 doesn't offer a proper progressive scan mode. Your stuck with de-interlacing in post.

I agree with the comments about not having long discussions over talkback - one thing you can do is if you are asked a yes or no question over talkback is nod or shake the camera. So the people in the control room can see quickly on the monitors your response - for example if the director asked prior to a take - "cameras are you set" its easier to see all the cameras nodding on the monitors rather then hearing five or six people (or more) simultaneously talking on talk back. Always bring a pencil with you, as you will often be working off camera cards, these are a list of shots for each camera. Very often you will have to make adjustments to shots during rehearsals. Make a note of these on the camera card, or you will forget. On a longer show with hundreds of shots you probably wont remember that shot 59 is now 2 shot and not a CU. Its your job to remember the director may just call the shot numbers and not describe the shot - this is very true during music performances, shots happen very quickly and you have to be on it. Sometimes music performances are scripted eg the shots are worked out in advance, otherwise they are "busked" with the director calling shots as the see them. On a "busked" or as directed section, try to offer interesting shots and check what other cameras are doing so you don't repeat shots. In most studios you can switch the vision mixers(vision switchers) output into your viewfinder, so you can check whats on air and how that effects your shot. Pedestal operating can take a bit of practice, very often you can find yourself having to dolly, pull focus and jib at the same time and you tend to run out of hands. Depth of field in this situation is your friend, you may not have enough hands to pull focus, so find the focus for the end of the move and use a wider lens.

Its going to be much easier just to source prop's - rather then try and cgi them in. Or you could take this route: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjhBf4vlTw0

Animation is good for showing visual storytelling: The Snowman Les triplettes de Belleville/Belleville Rendez-Vous The Illusionist The Wrong Trousers And in live action: The opening sequence of There Will be Blood A Few Dollars More and The Good the Bad and the Ugly Lots of good sequences in the Indiana Jones films - the opening of Last Crusade is great. Broken Blossoms

Your PC should be fine to edit the material as long as you have a recent editing package that supports XDCAM footage, such as the current version of Avid media composer. Filesize's arn't too bad - an 8GB card for the camera gives 28 min's of footage - so storage space isn't an issue. There's no option to have auto focus on the F3, and auto exposure is generally a bad idea. I think you will struggle with the camera as its quite a step up from handycam type's. Keeping shots in focus is going to be tricky. If you still want to go down this route - I would try and get some training prior to shooting. Maybe the hire company can give you some test time with the camera - or volunteer on a shoot using an F3 as a camera runner/trainee - to get an insigh. I would second the comments about the glidecam. We have one at the university, you really need to spend a several weeks practicing with it, just to get something half usable. Most of my students fail to get anything usable off it. If you have any stedi-cam/glidecam shots its much better if you hire an owner operator. I've been playing with our glidecam on an off for a few months and still struggle to balance it.

You might get away with it, its been done before. But its risky. The EX series can produce nice images and without colour correction they would probably be fine. I used to work in QC for a broadcaster and we had a few studio shows shot on the XDCAM 35mbs format under controlled lighting and it was fine. Main issue is you nearly always need to colour correct a documentary and if you unlucky with bad lighting conditions - the EX material can fall apart quickly. If the documentary has already been commissioned then you have to shoot it in the format they require, its part of the contract you sign. If your producing on spec - then just try to make it look as good as possible. The broadcast rules are often exempted for purchased films - since there's no option to do anything to anything to fix it. If the commissioning dept like your film they will over-rule the engineering dept, as long as its not too bad looking and the sound quality is good. One example in the UK was Super-Size Me. Shot 4:3 NTSC 60i Mini DV, standards converted to 25p PAL and cropped to 16:9. It looked horrible nothing like broadcast quality but it still got shown, because the content was good and there was no way to improve it.

Thanks for the responses - I guess I'm going to have to go and see a demo or shoot some tests. Right now it looks like my main contender for the shoot. Shame the higher end sony 3d cams won't be out in time. The shoot is going to need some close ups - but its mostly about architecture, so a lot of shots are going have objects in the 9 to 20 feet range. So DOF shouldn't be too much of a problem But it would be nice if I could get away with the occasional MCU on a person without resorting to a mirror rig. I'm also looking at using the polecam 3d for some shots and that could get me a wider IO when needed. And the DOF of the panasonic should match the polecam with 1/3 inch Toshiba mini-cams quite well. I might be going the homebrew approach for post production - so I'm guessing mirror rigs would make that much more challenging - in terms of alignment and CC. If anyone has any recomendations of FCP vs Avid in this area let me know.

I'm budgeting for a possible 3-D production, the budget levels I'm working with might be too low for a standard dual camera mirror rig. The Panasonic 3DA1 looks like good cost effective option but I'm worried that it might be too limiting and I'd rather push to do 2D well then 3d badly. Just wondering if anyone had used it and had anythoughts on the general image quality - does it hold up in 2d? And what the 3d effect is like - can you do close ups or wide shots? If the project goes any further I'll try and shoot some tests - but wanted to know if I could even consider this camera while seeing if its do-able in 3d for a limited budget.

Scary stuff - Health and Safety on student shoots is a nightmare to deal with. I am teaching film production to Undergraduates at the moment and health and safety is a very difficult to police. I do as much as I can, demand risk assesments up front, give health and safety classes and attend the shoot where possible. But its always a worry that they might do something silly when your not around or submit missleading paperwork. Its a difficult task to not overly micromanage a students project - while still keeping the students and contributors safe. Student productions are about making mistakes in every area but health and safety as the consiquences can be terrible. I've been plesently supprised with the students attitude to Health and Safety, is quite good, as long as they giving the right information up front and made aware of the consiquences if they flount the rules. That NYU story is very sad, but so massivly avoidable - once your dealing with crane's, big lights and generators - the level of supervision has to be increased and the qulifications of the Gaffers/Electritions need to be vetted by the school.

Lots of Kino-Flo's now have built in dimmers - which is even easier. Otherwise ND filter's would work fine - they could fade over time, but I imagine that might take a while to do so. I've never really had call to use ND's on Kinos that much generally options to switch off tubes/dimming and position give enough control for most applications. I've only had to resort to ND's either where the tubes are being used as praticals and I don't want then to clip. Or in cars/night ext's working at low light levels.

The AJA Ki Pro Mini recorder a good option, its small - records 10-bit 4:2:2 pro-res HQ. So its going to give great quality with easy integration in post. It costs less then the nanoflash as well. The high bit rate for pro res is around 220 Mbit/s - so its going to be very robust and a bit step up from the 35Mbit/s internal codec. The rolling shutter on the EX3 is pretty minimal - much better then the DSLR type cameras. Its fine for handheld work and only really noticable on whip pans - where everything is usually blury anyway.

Blimey Richard that's a bit premature - ever since film came out people have been pronouncing digital as dead or dying. Sure over the next few years - digital's going to be used less and less, there's still a bit of life in it yet. But I think there's going to be a place for digital over at least the next 10 years for high end projects and digital loving directors such as Chris Nolan and Spielberg. As much as the film crowd try, they still can't get the look and feel of digital - I know with vision 3 kodak are getting close to nailing the digital look - but its still not there yet. The highlights on film are much too smooth - film just can't get that hard clipped hightlights the way Red does and the skin tones on film just aren't there yet - none of the skin tones are orange or dull enough. I'm sure film will get there, but its not there yet - sick of these film fan boys who hang around on Panavision-user who overly hype the death of digital. Digital has a great history why rush to move on so soon - I'd be happy for film to take over digital but not until the quality and reliability are there.

The Brazil references in the ministry of magic sequence were quite fun

If your composing for 1.85:1 the difference in negative area is very significant, super 16 is about 55% larger. So on a 2K scan your going have a very noticeable increase in grain and drop in resolution. I guess this could be minimized to an extent by using the slowest possible stocks for the reg 16, but its still going to be pretty noticeable. If you are going to do this I would probably not try and match the formats as they won't inter cut that well, but maybe heighten the differences - make the different textures look intentional. I few years back I shot a project that mixed D-20 HDCAM SR, Super 16 and Super 8 - non of the formats matched but the end result looked ok - because the different textures looked intentional. I used film for flash backs and dream sequences and the HD for real time sequences.

The trailer looked interesting in 2D - not sure what version I'll see either 3d or 2d. My current local cinemas all have not very good Real-D installations - dim images with noticeable ghosting. I quite like dobly 3D - but its very rare in the UK, everyone seems to use RealD.

Alex, your right every re-compression is going to degrade your footage. Which is why you don't want to stay in the XDCAM EX codec. The EX codec is a long GOP codec and as such any time you manipulate your footage - that can either be a cut, a fade, a dissolve, titles added or color correction your have to make the change and then recompress in EX format. If your timeline is set to XDCAM EX - you are having to recompres the footage to that codec all the time. So you can keep you footage in the EX format during colour correction but its a very compressed codec and will degrade the image a lot more then working in a better codec. So the advice to go to ProRez is good, but you have to transcode to ProRez before you colour correct. If you'd colour corrected in the EX codec then exported to ProRez you would have no real benefit quality wise. The best way to extract as much quality out of the EX cameras is transcode to uncompressed as soon as possible in the edit process - so all you manipulations to the footage occur to uncompressed footage. If uncompressed is too big to work with then ProRez is a good middle ground.

Depends on the shot - but the normal approach is to roto round the solid edges - removing the motion blur where the background shows through. The motion blur is then put back in during the compositing stage - if done carefully it does look convincing.

A 2 minute short could mean anything and could cost anything from $100 to $100,000 - depending on content, production team, cast script etc... The price of film is pretty easy to budget, work out your shooting ratio - get quotes, same with labs etc... No one can really help give an answer because the question gives no real information other then shooting format and running time. To be honest shooting format is not the most important thing when it comes creating the budget of a film anyway and typically should only account for a percentage of the budget. If you overspend in the camera department your going to cut corners in other areas. Also you can't compare the budget of your film easily with that of others - as all films are different and different people are able to get different things for different prices. There are no short cuts to writing a budget: breakdown your script, produce a shooting schedule and start getting prices and put it all in Excel - plenty of good budgeting templates and guides on the internet. Other the other approach to budget is start with the amount you have to spend and work backwards and come up with the most cost effective way of shooting you film for that money the best way you can afford. That approach means you don't up front decide on 35mm but work out if 35mm works on your budget - based on real quotes rather then guess work.

Hmm not sure there are any PC based Vision mixers that can accommodate 10 cameras at the same time. This situation would require a dedicated hardware solution eg: http://www.creativevideo.co.uk/public/view_item_cat.php?catalogue_number=grassvalley_indigo-hr This would allow you to switch between the different cameras and route their signals to the projectors - also to apply simple effects. You might be able to find a cheaper solution on ebay. But a 10 camera multi-cam rig could get expensive to do properly as the most the more affordable vision mixers (switchers) only have 4 or 5 inputs - and the larger ones cost more and require genlock. That said you can do a lot with only 4 cameras if you have good camera operators giving a nice range of shots.

Sure it would be a good B camera in that situation, but its limiting the market. I can see myself renting this camera, but I'd need to use it as the A camera so I'd probably have to rent a nano flash as well. It would be great if I didn't have too, money spent on cameras is less money in your pocket. In the past I haven't minded the 35mbs codec too much - as I've got good results, but I'm currently working on EX 3 documentry shot under less then ideal conditions and the grade's been quite hard work, the image can fall apart very quickly if your not careful - it would just be nice to have something better in the low budget area.

That looks really interesting especially it the bundled lens's are any good. But I think Sony are really dropping the ball with the choice of recording codec - the 35mbs Mpeg codec can look pretty decent, but for any serious jobs and the majority of HD tv projects your going to be forced into using an external recorder. The 50mbs 4:2:2 XDCAM HD codec would have been a much better choice, making the camera more flexible. I guess Sony are either top slicing the market and a 50mbs version will turn up once people have paid out for the 35mbs version or they don't want people using this camera instead of their high end stuff. Still it could be a really nice option for modest budgeted work, basically a 35mm Ex3 which is no bad thing. The EX series have been my go to cameras for the last few projects I've worked on and the option to have a lower DOF would be nice.

Good luck with it - I def shoot some tests with the 7D make sure your happy with the focus pulling challenges it presents. On a micro budget feature the main challenge is working fast enough while keeping the quality up. You don't have any large lights so the sensitivity of the 7d will help you out. I'm guessing your at Staffs Uni - so you could also have a look at using their HPX-500 - perhaps not as cinematic as the 7D, but if you schedule is tight it might be faster to work with and you'll have less focus pulling mistakes.

I would either gel the lights or use a camera filter. Who cares if your breaking the film schools stupid rule's, your aim is to make the best film possible. Better to seek forgiveness then ask permission and most filmschools should encourage a bit of rule breaking. I'd have thought lighting gels don't count anyways - your possibly going to want to put something on the lights anyway - scrims, diffusion etc... even if you don't use color correction. I never had any problems when I 'broke' the rules at film school - eg using HMI's when the project allowed red-heads only. Its your job to be pushing at the boundaries - the filmmakers that obey all the rules are usually the less successful. Your only priority is to make a good film - everything else will be forgotten if the films good enough

Your 2 options with a DVD master are 4:3 or 16:9(1.77:1) anamorphic, nothing else the format supports these two ratios only. To get other ratio's letter boxing is required Normal practice for a 2.39:1 cinemascope film is to make 16:9 digi-beta with a 2.39:1 letterbox in the 16:9 (1.77:1) frame to get the original composition. 1.85:1 is very similar to 16:9 (1.77:1) so 1.85:1 films on DVD are usually mastered on 16:9 dvd's with either a very slight letterbox, just a few lines - or the frame is just opened up to 1.77:1. If your film is 2.39:1 cinemascope i wouldn't make a 1.85:1 dvd as its quite a big crop and is going to mess up your original compositions. Most people are fine with a 2.39:1 letterbox. Just make sure its mastered as 16:9 anamorphic with letterbox- rather then 4:3 with letterbox.