Albert Smith

this is just something I have been curious about. I've used dollies on a couple shoots. once a fisher 10 and once and once a elmrack cricket and in both occasions it was recommended to us to put the dolly onto a set of skateboard wheels rather then using its wheels. Is it just me or does it seem somewhat crazy that a dolly worth well...a LOT of money would be better off on a cheap...or well comparatively cheap... set of skateboard wheels effectively turning it into a giant weight....of course this is disregarding hydraulic features. I don't doubt the skateboard wheels are good...because they are and gave us no problems...but why arn't the standard wheels better?

those shots are actually in new york, wish we could have shot back home. Our transfer was done at optimus. great facility

I guess I did not fully explain this thought. Like I said it didnt seem to take advantage of the digital format. it looked "lower quality" but subtly so and it did not look purposeful to me. I am all for people trying new things, and I dont have anything against shooting a film digitally if its right, but to me films being shot on these cameras which in resolution and "quality" are trying to par (not necessarily look like film but in a purely technical way par up to) up with film they just dont look as good and the appear to be trying to be, and the thing is they will be but not for a little while. this maybe be off topic, but have you seen "CHE" which was shot red, It just looked poor. Its a hard debate because who is to say what looks good at all, but these cameras just don't have as much information in a frame as 35mm camera does so in terms of technical "quality" they dont seem to par up. I am being unbelievably redundant here so I will stop. Like I said those are just my thoughts. to the above poster, I'm sure the smaller camera rig helped but I have never even delt with a 35 rig and I can tell you that is just not true. Lost In Translation was shot on location in downtown tokyo handheld and often with out permits for example, and they always could have gone 16 which is considered "2k" as well...50d 16mm for those sequences would have been great I'm sure. This is off topic and I do not want to turn this discussion into a debate about the film, All I can say is I do think it was a bad film, I also think most movies are bad, ha, For what its worth I felt some of the direction of the action sequences was remarkable but thats about as far as it goes. I also thought the wrestler was one of if not the best films made in the last 5-10 years and am disappointed more people don't see that.

Contact info in reel. 480x270 http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08Cinema_low.mov 640x360 http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08cinema_med.mov 853x480 (full res) http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08Cinema_high.mov thanks.

ha. some stuff from the last year or so. s16,16, and alot of digi, of course of that its mainly hvx adapter. but cameras are just cameras. let me know what you thought. feedback appreciated the harsher the better. 480x270 http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08Cinema_low.mov 640x360 http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08cinema_med.mov 853x480 (full res) http://www.lookatrubbish.com/JakeZ/JakeZ_08Cinema_high.mov

I'm an amateur among professionals here but my 2 cents is this. Although Slumdog looked interesting, and it was diffrent, it wasn't very impressive in terms of its cinematography. Now regardless of your opinion on the look of the film, cinematography is about crafting light, It would be the same as if a film that didn't use any make up where to win a make up award because that is the look they wanted...I know, a bit of a stretch, but still. The complexity of the shots and setups in the dark knight is mind blowing. My personal opinion is that the film looked very digital, it didnt seem to take advantage of that look, all I thought was "ok this movie was shot on digital, it would have looked better if they had shot 35" It was never this is a look they could only get by using the digital format. Maybe I am biased by the fact I thought it was a horrible film, but those are my thoughts.

take the song and burn timecode into it in FCP or w/e editor make a little movie that you can toss on an iphone or ipod w/e and run playback off that and slate your takes with it.

it has a HUGE rolling shutter issues as it is a photo camera and not really made to be make films with. and it shoots in h.264... highly compressed not able to color correct it really with out major image degradation. people mark this camera as some kind of miracle thing because they here 35mm and full frame HD, but there is a major catch and there is a reason a red still costs 17gs.... the technology isnt quite there yet to make something like this...but I'm sure it will be one day.

The canon hg10 is significantly less nosier then the panasonic hvx and certaintley better then a dvx... granit the hvx is noisy too... We"re talking about consumer and prosumer video their all noisy... You said "especially on a 1/2.7 inch sensor" well it maybe a one chip but all the cameras in the prosumer range are 1/3inch so the consumer canons is actually slightly bigger... I really know nothing about stuff as technical as you explained all I know is what I see and the fact I can buy a 500 camera and get a picture that honestly in low situation surpassed the hvx is very impressive. The hg10s picture being so clean I know is partly a result of avchd and the image is getting softer but still far sharper then SD. Since the hv30 has the same sensor but is hdv results are somewhat similar. As far as tungsten light maybe color depth isn't as good is what your sugesting, could be, its not something that is very apperent if it is though. And "random flucations" never have heard of this but the rolling shutter on the cmos sensors can deffinetly not be cool... Don't try to do anything with strobe lights hahah.

what I have found is picture quality is better on some of the consumer HD cameras, but it depends what your doing. Some of consumer HD cameras have pretty large very sensitive CMOS sensors, For example the canon HV30/20 which has 1/2.7" chip which is slightly bigger then the xl2s and much more sensitive. This camera has suprised me a lot in low light as did the hg 10. I shot a little video for a friend on a hg 10 and after grading it, it looked like it could have come off an HVX200 ( a $5,000 dvcproHD camera). But in normal daylight shooting conditions I would say its a tough call. Regardless what you may gain in your image quality with the newer sensors you completely lose in manual controls on the camera. say goodbye to anything like scene files and full manual controls (not just aperture or shutter priority) are hard to find, although the hv30 does do true 24p which is nice...and for 650$ are so, WOW.

It would be crazy to upgrade now and not go HD. the little consumer canon hv30 although lacking fully manual controls, outputs a much better picture then a vx2100, and certainly better then a gl2 and it goes for $650 (the vx2100 is the same camera as the pd170 accept missing dvcam support and XLRS but if your running XLRS on a gl2 the same unit will work on the VX, althouhg like I said this is probably a bad route to go.) If you are looking to actually spend some money your options open up alot. the sony HDV cameras are pretty decent and pretty strong in low light, I'm not too sure about all of the options here though. Alot has changed in the low end video camera world in the last couple years, actually in the entire video world really, look into whats out there.

Yea, shinny board, thats something I picked up some use of during this shoot although I dont think it could have replaced that much, because it is still somewhat a pain to control, it could have saved some money. The generator really didnt run us that far behind, maybe for the first location (the stacked dryers in the open lot) it did but other then that I think in end using shiny board would have taken longer because I would have a whole lot more trouble controlling it. as far as filtration goes, na I dont think so....colored filtration isn't doing anything but offsetting white balance, there maybe some benefit to it over color correction as far as picture quality but past that I don't see the point. Im a strong believer in shooting a clean image and then worrying about it when you grade if you wanna do anything like that. Much of the video was shot with mellow ND grads though. Gus I'm not sure I understand your questions? are you suggesting I should have used different equipment or...? I did not produce the video there fore I cant really account for how it was spent and the shoot being 6months ago its hard for me to remember exactly what happened. I do agree, for $10,000 we really didn't make the most of it which annoys me. I can tell you though the lighting/grip/geny/geny operator did not account for the full 10,000. This shoot was also put together in a matter of 3 or 4 days which was another issue. Like I said though, it was a learning experience.... ...Its amazing how much I learned during this shoot. I only went to proper film school for 1 year and it wasn't for cinematography. There is absolutely no way if I were to do this shoot over I would approach it even close to the same way.

here some of my favorite stills and what I did This didn't happen at all as planed by we were a little behind and the sun popped back out as it was setting I decided to shoot right into sit slightly cutting the flare with the barn door on the matte box and then just blasted everyone in the car with light. 9light on the girls in the rear and 2.5k hmi with some CTO not far out of frame on mikey in the driver seat. also a 12x silk we used for some other stuff was there so so we have a little fill from that. 2.5k rear third key, 1.2k fill and 9 light on the girls, same scenario as car setup 9light from the right 9 light rear third on the left to warm him up a little and somewhat give the golden hour appearance and a 2.5k with a narrow in it giving a little edge on the dryers...but not much. 2.5k par outside the window in the rear third on the left 2.5k, 2 x 1.2k bounced off the wall frame left for fill....deffinetly needed some more light on the subject and could have watched the window reflections a bit more but overall this is my favorite still from the video for sure.

The original intention was to shoot this music video on RED, but I was slowly talked into going back to the tried and true 35mm adapter as much of the budget began being allocated to lighting. with a $10,000 budget it was kinda either lighting or camera. Lighting won. The director wanted all the day EXT. to look somewhat like "golden hour" and very fall, in addition he wanted the video to look somewhat "creepy" as the song entails it to be. We looked through alot of films and videos. Specifically I think the halloween films as well as select scenes from "Belly" gave alot of influence to the video. Going into this video I had never worked with anything larger then a 1.2k HMI, so it was most definitely a learning experience. I went to the rental house that we were working with a day early and they took the time to show me some things to help aid in my decsions. Orginally my plan was pretty simple, prey for an overcast day (which was forcasted) and get a 12 or 18k HMI gelled with a bit of CTO and there is my low angle golden hour sun. When I went to the rental house though I was actually talked out of this, and do still recredit it. The guy pushed a 9light on me pretty hard (which I did learn is a great light! but probably wasnt the best for what I was trying to do) and also noted that they didnt have a 12k par and only had an older 6k par with a HUGE ballast (the guy actually told me there is no such thing as a 12k par and pars only went up to 6k...this was only the start of problems with this rental house which will remain unnamed). Anyways in end to save money and to move faster I went with a 9light as well as 2 2.5k hmi pars and a variety of smaller HMI's. I shot most of the exteriors at the gas station and on the dryers utilizing the 9light alone which worked very fast and efficiently. On the 2nd day of the shoot while beginning to light the first Night Ext. I noticed a large problem....the HMI's were flickering I told the geny op who was hired from the rental house and he had a hard time believing me but then when I finally proved this to him he didn't know what to do, as it became night and all the daylight was gone the flicker became extremely apparent and we had to wrap early and move the end of production to another day. On the rescheduled final day the lights STILL flickered, however not as bad and I attempted to use it as an effect since we had no other possibility of shooting another day. I used the 9Light as side key for most of the night ext while using the hmi's gelled 1/2 CTO as backlights and backround lights. sorry for the long runon paragraph. heres the video, youtube "HD"

Hi, I am DPing a music video and I want one of the interiors to looks pretty soft and feel early in the morning the best way I see to do this would be to "smoke" the room...I think that is the correct terminology...we will be using a large HMI source outside the building to light most of the scene so I think the effect of the smoke could be very good. Im just curious what type of equipment is usually used to do this. the room is about 30ft x 25ft . thanks for any info!

Wow, thanks for all of that information. Sorry forgot to mention that, yes I am in the US, the shoot will be in Chicago actually, I have a decent relationship with one rental house in the area so hopefully they will help me out and the crew in running through some stuff for us, although my hope is my gaffer will be able to do much of that and keep everyone safe. The shoot is a low budget music video, under 10k, and we are very ambitious. The art direction and locations alone should be taking all of our budget, but we are pushing it, calling in favors etc to make something that is as unique as we can. This for me is actually the largest budget I have worked with and I have little experience with larger crews and larger productions so, it is a learning experience. But seriously thank you for the info all very helpful, I will be buying that book asap....actually i just found the whole thing online! haha awesome. thanks again!

awesome, great answers. Yes my hope is I won't have to worry too much but, I do know aside from an experienced key grip and gaffer the rest of the crew will be somewhat inexperienced and be working for free and I'd just like to learn as much as I can ahead of time. couple follow up questions. what do you mean by "for single phase, 208V for 3 phase" I don't have any experience with or have heard the term "phases" before. and then "These use 240V 100Amp Bates cable and draw power from 2 legs" so does this just mean its running off 2 separate outlets or sources to draw power or? thanks for any more information on this!

Hi, I have my first shoot (as a DP) working with lighting above the 1.2k and 2k range. I have used 1.2k hmi and 2k tungenston sources numerous times but this will be my first time lighting day exterior and day interiors with large sources. We will be using 1.2k, 4k, 6k and 1 12k hmi pars. I have a couple questions regarding working with sources this big as I have never worked with them before. gelling the lights....can you even put a sheet of cto infront of a source this big with out it being in danger of melting? how would I go about doing this? Stands, I often see condors or other cherry pickers used to get lights up higher....how high would I be able to get on stands? I dont need to get above 10 or 15ft. what kind of crew is generally needed to handle rigging up and operating 12ks...I'm having a key grip come on board with more experience then I have had, but would like to gather as much info as I can. power, what power do sources this big run off of 480? I have never delt with anything above 240, but I do have a gaffer coming in with a good deal of experience as well.

sorry to bud in here I'm not really any help, but why would front projection look any different then rear projection? in both cases there is a screen with a background plate on it

yea figured haven't made any calls yet, i have the footage in dvcproHD now too so no mxfs or anything, anyone should be able to handle the dvcproHD. Its looking like I need to find a post house with one of these guys. http://www.algolith.com/products/broadcast...n-hd/index.html

yea here is a still, ideally it would be easier if we could send out the footage and have it delt with so we don't have to run something on our system and work with it, just because it would cut into editing time. Still link: www.lookatrubbish.com/Picture3.png thanks again!

Ok, so I have some HVX footage with a good deal of noise....it looks as if the gain was turned on (in daylight) to around 12db. Does anyone have any ideas for either places that specialize in this or things I can do to help remove this awful noise so we can use the footage alongside other clean HVX footage. thanks for any info!! -Jake

...know where to post this...but ok. I am doing a project with rear projection (it is the intro to a snowboard film). the rear projection is a stylistic choice...meaning i want it to look like its rear projection were not trying to make it look like a green screen. so anyways we are shooting HD, but since much of the theme of the film has to do with film shot from the actual snowboarders in the movie on super 8 we wanted the backgrounds to match this footage so to accomplish this I thought it would be cool to have the backgrounds we use for the intro be super 8 film but then shoot it HD so the foreground and subject matter is still on video...kinda a mismatched look to give it some interest. Anyways since most of the backgrounds we want to project are also originating on video we need a way to make these backgrounds look like super 8...now of course there is some stuff you can do on a computer but it never looks right. So my thoughts are since alot of the backgrounds will be pulled slightly out of focus...and they are backgrounds anyways so quality and super sharp resolution isn't a huge priority why don't we just take our HD backgrounds project them onto a screen shoot them in super 8 and then have that telecined back to HD for projection. ..I know we dont have the money to actually do a video to film transfer...don't even know if anyone does that with super 8...so this is the best alternative i have come up with. does anyone have any thoughts about this crazy workflow haha, do you think that it'll work anyone tried anything like this before? I'm thinking the best way to retain quality would be to project small and as sharp as possible and zoom in tight with the camera...sound right? thanks for any information on this subject at all -Jake

A friend of mine created a very convincing day for night effect shooting in somewhat forested area so it was mainly shadowed but with beams of light from the sun shooting through and then in post just brought everything way down and left some contrast...worked well...I didnt question it at all....I would shoot tight and avoid anything bright in your background...wouldn't shoot the sky if you can avoid it.

thanks for the input but we will be doing this all digitally. I have been looking into powerful HD projectors,anyone have any experience with this...anyone? the choice of rear projection is completely aesthetic too...it is supposed to look like rear projection...the projection will be telecined super 8 to HD and will probably be pulled out of focus most of the time. we will be shooting it in HD.