Andrew Koch

Once you determine the ASA with a waveform monitor, any good lightmeter used for film would work. I personally like the spectracine pro IVA for incident readings and the Minolta Spot Meter F for reflectance readings (Unfortunately they don't make the spot meter F anymore).

Hey everybody. Let's try to keep this a civilized forum. There is no need to make personal attacks on anyone. We're all here to help eachother. At least that is why I visist the forum every day.

"it must suck for some.... hehe I just researched my state's permit requirements".. I'm glad you did the research. It sounds like your state's permit laws are much more lenient than the ones in Los Angeles? What state are you shooting in? "its best to know what you are talking about before saying it..." I told you what the situation is like in Los Angeles, which I know from research and personal experience. Then I asked you what city you were in? I never pretended to know what your state's permit laws are, that's why I asked (did you check your local city permit laws as well, some cities have their own rules in addition to the state). I think it is quite unfair of you to make this comment when I am simply trying to provide you with information. " ......seems like some people just dont want to see others excel" Why would you say that when the whole point of this forum is to help people excell. The only reason I wrote to you was to give you information that you could use. "and maybe you were too wide open(attracting to much attention) when you filmed your footage..." I wasn't trying to sneak in a camera or grab stuff without permission, so yes, people were aware that I was filming, which was fine because I had permits and pemission to be there. It's hard to hide an entire film crew, even if a very small one. I would get resistence becuase people assumed that since I was a student I didn't have permits. (Students get a bad reputation because of disregard for the local laws), Once I proved to them that I was legit, they left me alone. Since you are a student, you may want to ask your school about how they feel about your shoot? They may be of some help. Would this be the type of project that they would approve of? Remember, you are also representing your school when you go out and make a student film. If the security guard at the mall asks you what school you are with and you mention the name, would the school consider it a poor representation of them or would they support you? In the future, could you please be a little more respectful with your posts.

Hi Sean, When filming/videotaping, photographing, recording, etc, make sure you have done your homework about the legality of your shoot. Make sure you follow all protocol. If you are in a large city, especially in LA, you will have to get permits. In los angeles, you have to get a permit even to shoot in your own home (I have experienced this issue first hand). I am also a student and have had to deal with all sorts of challenges with shooting in public. I have found in Los Angeles that many people are hostile toward people, especially students shooting in public. I have had people threaten to shut several productions I worked on down. And we had permits, permission, and were quiet, appreciative and respectful. If people are going to have this kind of negative reaction to legitimate shoots, imagine how they will react to something that has no permission and violates someone's privacy. What city are you shooting in? Most of the lousy additudes from people about filming stems from bad experiences they have had with filmmakers behaving badly/disrespectfully. Some crews don't respect locations, leaving trash around, breaking things, being noisy, so the owners of a place will decide to never ever let anyone shoot there again. Please don't do anything that will make the struggle of filmmaking worse for all of us. What exactly is your project? Perhaps some people on this website can give you some advice on how to do your film in a way that won't create problems for you or other filmmakers.

I have found that the asa of the dvx100 is about 400 at odb gain in 24p mode with cinegamma, but like you said, there are various setups that could affect the asa. Here is how you can find out the asa of whichever video camera you decide to use. These instructions came from my cinematography instructor. You will need a waveform monitor and an incident lightmeter. 1. Set up even light across a video chip chart 2. Use the color of light appropriate to the filter (daylight, tungsten, or florescent) 3. Monitor the output of the camera to a waveform monitor. (Check the calibration/connection of the waveform monitor with color bars from the camera.) 4. Set the camera to the desired filter and gain settings. 5. White balance with auto iris on. Once white balance is set turn auto iris off. 6. Set the frame rate on your incident light meter to 24fps and 180 degrees (This is so you simply have a reference to film) 7. Adjust the t-stop on your video camera so that the whitest chip on your chip chart reads 100 IRE on the waveform monitor. 8. Measure the light on the chip chart with your incident meter. 9. Change the ASA on your meter until the stop on the meter reads the same as the stop on the camera. 10. This is the ASA of this camera setup. I don't believe any DV cameras have a fixed ASA. Various settings such as filter and gain will alter the ASA so you will need to do this for each different filter, gain combination. Once you have done this for a particular camera setup, you can use a reflectance lightmeter and waveform monitor to get an idea of the latitude of the particular camera. On the waveform monitor, images higher than 100 IRE will be clipped. Images lower than 7.5 will be black (i think in some cases you might be able to go down to 0, but as far as I know, 7.5 is black in NTSC broadcast). You can take reflectance readings of a subject. If you set the camera for middle grey, you can see on the waveform monitor where things start to clip or get crushed. However many stops over and under that is will be your latitude. (if someone could explain this better, please step in). Most DV has about 6 stops of dynamic range, but don't quote me on that. I hope this helps.

What format are you transferring to? If you are planning to do your own color correction, I would avoid DVCAM, miniDV or any other DV25 format because of the 4:1:1 color. This compression gives you limited access to tweak with the colors. BetacamSP, or even better, Digibeta and DVCPRO50 (not standard DVCPRO) all have less compression and 4:2:2 color, which gives you nicer images and much more flexibility with color correction as far as Standard Definition formats are concerned. I am also a student. The first short film I shot was a onelight and I regret it to this day. (The only reason I didn't supervise was that I was told I wasn't allowed by the school and I was too naive to believe otherwise). The colorist made arbitrary decisions about what it was supposed to look like, and there was no way to fix it on an NLE. I have found that, regardless of the quality of work, several post facilities have a tendancy to do half assed jobs when they know it is a student production. If the one-light is bad, it may not be fixable on your computer. For example: If the colorist cranks the exposure on an image to the point where clipping occurs, it is impossible to restore that detail once it goes to tape. If you are not going to be able to supervise your telecine, but plan to do the color correction yourself, make sure you have as much information to work with as possible. This means you leave a note telling the colorist to avoid letting the highlights clip and preserve detail in the shadows. This will result in a relatively flat image, allowing you to have access to the higlights and shadows while you are doing your own color correcting. Once you get it the way you want it, then you can crush the blacks and blow the highlights all you want. If you start out with crushed blacks and blown highlights, you will have a very hard time color correcting. Make sure you go to a post facility that understands your workflow. I hope this helps.

Hi, I am about to shoot a student film on regular 16mm. It will be telecined to D5 and matted to 1:85. The last project I shot was super 16 transferred to D5 with a 1:85 aspect ratio as well. The super 16 footage was 7205 250D and tranferred quite nicely. It was sharp as a tack and the resolution was phenonmenal. I only have acess to a regular 16mm camera for this next project which will be shot on 7229. Since this footage will have to be cropped more than the super16, am I going to have enough resolution from the film to make a sharp HD tranfer, or will it be slightly blurry. I would love to test it, but we do not have the budget for it. I am okay with the footage being a little grainy, my concern is will the reduced resolution be a problem. Has anyone done an HD 1:85 transfer from regular 16mm? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. -Andrew

I am a student as well so keep that disclaimer in mind, but here are some things to consider. A Dat would be a good way to go as a recorder. The less expensive ones do not have timecode, but this may not be necessary if you are syncing the footage yourself. (If you want to spend a boat load of money, you could use a timecode dat with a smartslate (also about $1k or more) and sync your dailies in telecine). If you are on a tight budget, I would recommend doing it yourself in an NLE like Avid, Premiere, or FCP. Another option is a fotex digital recorder. It records sounds as individual files to a flash card, which makes it fast and easy to transfer to your computer. The downside is the battery life is really short which is very problematic if you need to move around quickly. Are you transfering to PAL or NTSC? I don't know about PAL, but the next paragraph applies to NTSC. Keep in mind that when you tranfer 24fps film to video, the video is very slightly slowed down 23.976 to keep it compatible with the 3-2 pulldown. The raw audio from your DAT, however, is still running at the same speed. This will cause a very noticable sync problem. Within seconds, you will see a drift between audio and picture. To fix this, before you sync your footage, you must slow down your audio down by 0.1%. You can do this with a program like soundforge or protools. Make sure you get a really good condensor microphone for your recorder. A shotgun mic is usually your best bet if you want to get clean dialogue, because it focuses on what you point it at and does not pick up as much background noise. It helps to use the mic on a boom pole, booming from just above the top of frame, (as close as you can get) the mic pointed at the subject's mouth. Sennheiser and Audio Technica make good ones. I particularly like the sennheisers. If you are in particularly noisy(I promise, I have no affiliation with either company) short shotguns like the AT 4073, Senn 416, ME 80, and the ME 88 have a wider pick up pattern and are good for relatively quiet environments. Longer Shotguns like the Senn 815, 816, have a much more narrow pickup pattern and are good for noisy.reverberant environments, but they are harder to aim precisely at the subjects. If you use one of these, make sure you get some practice. Also make sure to use a windscreen over your microphone. I have never seen someone use a microphone completely naked, even indoors, but hey I'm a student. Make sure your levels are acceptable, just because it sounds right in the headphones, doesn't necessarily mean you are getting good levels (however, if the levels are good, but you can clearly hear that the sound is distorted or just plain crappy, don't accept that either). On a dat, a healthy level is about -12db for normal conversation. If people are yelling or whispering, it may be slightly higher or lower respectively, but with loud sound, be careful not to let the levels go to high or you will get unrepairable distortion (I believe the highest you want to go is like -6 or -3db, check on this, I am not sure) Camera noise is also something to watch out for. 100ft daylight spools are usually more noisy than core spools because of the metal. It helps to cover the camera with something like a barney, a special leather cover that significantly cuts down on noise. You may need additional muting, like a leather jacket. Sound can also come through the lense area of the camera, I believe there are special clear filters that can act as a sound muffler, but this may be affect image quality. I'm not sure about this one. If you can, get wildlines as often as possible, which will help reduce time spent in ADR. (I am not sure how that applies to documentaries, but oh well) Best of luck to you

I realize that most of the members on this forum are men, but I would be interested in hearing from more of the women about this topic. Several of my female colleagues are currently dealing with the same kinds of issues. If they have children, there will be the added issue of pregnancy (unless they adopt) which would make it difficult to shoot for a period of time. One of my friends is really committed to having a family with children in addition to a successful career as a cinematographer. I would love to here from some of the female professionals about how this would be possible. Thankyou Annie for your insights.

-"by daylight spools...you're referring to the kind of film like Fuji 64D for daylight? Or are you referring to the different kinds of mags that come off of the Bolex" Films like Fuji 64D or Kodak 50D are daylight BALANCED. Sunlight has a different color temperature than tungsten lights. Daylight is generally bluer than indoor, tungsten lights. So whenever you see film that has a D next to the ASA/ISO, that is refering to what type of light the film is balanced for. It has nothing to do with whether it is a daylight spool or not. A daylight spool is almost always a metal spool of 100ft. It is wound in such a way to allow you to load it in subdued light. I recommend taping up the mag after you have loaded it to prevent any light leaks, especially if it is an older camera like an arri s. I'm just curious, what kind of camera are you using?

Charlie said: -A 4:1:1 is the only cam I own. See above comments. If you only own a camera that is capable of 4:1:1, then how did you create this comparison of 4:2:2 and 4:1:1.

You are absolutely right. There are certainly cinematographers who are good directors like Haskell Wexler. (Medium Cool - Director, Cinematographer, Actor). I hope my post did not not come across as saying that cinematogrpahers should not ever direct or write. If it came across that way, I apologize. What I meant to say was that each role on the set is unique and has specific artistic and technical requirements separate from other roles (but still collaborative). A cinematogrpaher may turn out to be a great director, but not soley because he/she is a cinematographer. His/her ability to direct would have have to incorporate some ablities outside of cinematography. -Andrew

Hey guys, I might be a student and most of the people on this forum know a lot more than I do, but after reading this topic, I have to put my two cents in for what it's worth. With the exception of certain art films, I thought the most important aspect of a film is the story. What is this film trying to say? The audience connects with the story if it rings true. That is why truthfull performances are the bare minimum. I think it is unfair to say that many directors have an untrained eye. Some of them may not have a trained eye for a specific lens or film stock, lighting setups, etc... (however many of them do) But they might have an eye that can see into the soul of an actor and be able to help an actor tap into their subconsciousness in a way that even a cinematographer might not be able to see. I would never want to discourage anyone from trying something new, but the idea of a movie made completely by cinematographers sounds like a problematic one. What is your motivation for doing this? Is it that you have an incredible story and you want to tell it the best way possible? Or is it designed so that people will be able to shoot lots of cool stuff for their reels. I hope it is not the latter. I would say be careful. If you have someone write a script for this particular project, there is a risk that the script would be written speciffically so that the cinematographer gets lots of opportunitiess to get cool visuals when what you really want is a script written to tell a story that is meaningful and truthful. Another thing is that it sounds like an expensive endeavor. You would need an audience to get the money back. How many people are going to pay 11 dollars soley on the premise that it is visually stunning? (I know I would, but that's because I'm a cinematography student and I'd be curious, but I wonder about the rest of the world who doesn't share that interest). What I am trying to say is that people in film all have different talents that they bring to the project. Many of them do not have the training, expertise, skill, etc... of a cinematographer, but that's because it's your job to know that stuff, not theirs. This also means that a cinematographer might not be particularly skilled at sound mixing or working with actors. Let's not downplay the skills of others. I hope my post does not come across as harsh. You guys are all incredibly talented people and I have learned so much from you. I just thought I'd share with you my opinion from a student's point of view. -Andrew

I'm going to be an AC this weekend on a Super 16 shoot. I have only shoot regular 16mm. When calculating Depth of Field, is it different for super than regular or can I still use my same old chart. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks.