Keith Mottram

if you've got the money, but worried about low light shooting then shoot d21 data mode with anamorphics.

so i watched this on my plasma the other day, having felt the need for something stupid. and the film didn't fail to deliver on that point. in the end it was unfortunately somewhat underwritten and ends on a bit of a damp squib. however what got me when i watched the credits was the fact that it was shot on a genesis. i think this is the first digital film where I wasn't aware of its digital origination. it featured a number of looks including b and w and none of them gave the game away. i'd be interested if anyone saw this in a cinema without knowing it was digital. keith

I must admit that I'm kind of confused how the kit side of things can be this much difference in any country. as stephen says you still need the same accesories you still need the glass etc. if you are going with like for like gear the premium is not 7.5x! rate card in london would add a few hundred a day for the camera. of course if you are shooting on an old sr1 with some old glass then you can get that for nothing (but if you are going down that route why not get a crusty 35mm), but shoot on a 416 with good modern glass and i have to ask what your producers are smoking to come up with figures like that.

This is a piece of string question, because there are so many variables. depending on how much shadows there are caused by the folds in the t-shirt the simplest way would be to 'pull' the black on the logo and replace with green, this could be done in DI/ Grade, or it might need frame by frame. I would try that first though, you'd also need to garbage matt the t-shirt otherwise you'd change all the other blacks in the frame. I would ask yourself whether you need to get rid of the logo completely or whether you could just significantly knock it back, if you are happy to knock it back then the grade/ garbage matt route will probably be reasonably painless- providing you have decent gear/ operators. keith

okay so two hours @ 9x = 18hours for conversion on a $4000 machine. so why cannot they get 9 machines running and have it done in a few hours. I know that I'm being a little bit blunt, but this is small fry for hardware costs compared with film dailies etc. and as for avid being done quicker i assume that is because they are making the SR dumps via scratch something that could be done in the same way for you if your editor is working FCP. this is either nonsense or a (low) budget issue.

Hi Tom, I'm claiming your full of crap! best, Keith

HQ stands for high quality, unless I'm very much mistaken and is a higher bitrate that SQ. So much better for mastering.

I thought it was dull, about forty minutes too long, with rubbish fight scenes, and due to where I was sitting in the idiotplex I couldn't understand a word that Batman said because of all the compression that they put on his voice. Heath was fun to watch, but not a patch on his turn in Bareback Mountain and I personally preferred Gary Oldman's performance. The best bits were when Christian Bale was allowed to act, as his turns as Bruce Wayne are fun. I really like Bale which is perhaps one of the reasons why I found it so frustrating. I wonder if the concept is to make him so wooden as Batman that there is no issues when the stuntmen have to take over. There was also no need for two face- I have no idea why the hollywooden men in tights films insist on more than one baddy, it comes across like a spinal tap amp up to 11 concept. Still Maggie was such a relief after watching the cruister's missus play his love interest in the first film. At the end people in the cinema actually clapped. In London. Which made the experience even more depressing. I am yet to be convinced that Nolan is some kind of genius. Momento was interesting. But his films leave me feeling cold, they seem clinical, and he is technically not good enough for that not to be a problem. And I still haven't forgiven him for Prestige's scoobydoo plotline. All in all I was left feeling depressed that so much tallent and money had been wasted on such a pointless film. Having said all that I am still keen on seeing it in Imax, to see how the Imax sequences look full frame.

the problem with the multibridge was that it died. just outside its warranty it started to behave irratically signals became dodgy and when you have clients going 'is that flickering going to be on the final master' there is only one option. i'm not saying its not possible to get results through BM, but all you have to do is take a quick glance at the cards to see why one is more expensive than the other. i for one am pleased that aja didn't bow to market pressures and cheapen their components to match BM's prices. A Skoda does basically the same thing as a Merc, but how many vintage Skodas do you see driving about? that's a pretty shoddy analogy, but if you need to be able to rely on something it sometimes pays to be a bit less frugal.

how many times is going with the cheaper one in a pro enviroment the correct choice? as for the un-professional spagetti style how about an aja k-box? that's what i use which has been very reliable- in the sense that i didn't throw it in a bin in the middle of a client session as i did with a multibridge. then again i wasn't that surprised having chucked one of their dodgy sdi-dvi boxes and a couple of their cards. i'm beginning to wonder if some of the people commenting here have actually used these products...

If you are going to do any work with analogue sources then I would really lean towards Kona as it has a superior analogue to digital converter.

I have used both for years and the major difference is reliability. Personally I prefer the software that comes with the Kona in the sense that I think it is okay, whereas the BM is a bit poop. As is the BM built quality. If you are really short of cash then by all means by a BM card, but I would never choose one especially if it is going to get used heavily. Konas are pro and BM are amateur. that is the way I see it, which might be snobbery but is based on throwing quite a few BM cards in the bin. The Konas also have higher quality converters and give more professional up and down conversion. So a BM is okay for pumping an image to an external monitor or the odd playout, but if it is going to get used proffessionally i would lean to a Kona 3 or whatever the PC version is. In fact I have already told the edit studio where i am working next to get rid of the bm cards in their existing macs and put konas in them and the new ones, when asked why i said reliability and that was that. BMs are super cheap for the money though...

will try and make it...

So i'm not going to sit here and hear that it's the editors fault. The editor has to do the best job he/ she can with the footage available. CU's are often used, because they are often shot. The reason is obvious the producers/ agency/ whatever has spent a large amount of money on the talent and they want that mug to be seen by everyone. The other predominant reason is that the continuity between cameras does not work and so a cu is used almost like a cutaway- ie you can then move to a different take more simply. So the answer is if you do not like the over use of cu's is work with a different team. use actors who hit the mark more often. or preferably shoot multicam, which will allow the editor to cut between shots that match. finally i got a note back from the dp on my show the other day asking why i wasn't using the beautiful close ups he shot! so not everyone is towing the party line here.

there are many different ways, depending on how you record your footage. if you shoot to dpx then you could use glue tools or something of its ilk and batch convert to qt's for edit in compressor, with a simple color correction applied within compressor. or if you record to sr you could play out into your edit suite with a LUT box to rebalance. Other options may be possible with s2/ codex toasters so it really depends on your recording end.

DPX files can be converted in a number of ways Blackmagic and AJA have tools which come with there cards, but the best tool is called Gluetools. as far as compositing goes use Shake or AE motion is a pain in the ass and is not designed for such work.

Anyone who thinks along the same lines as me are really good looking and date really hot birds... no where was i... okay the grand old history of desktop publishing, let me just take this sacred text off my rich mahogany bookshelf. aah yes here we go 'chapter 12: and now your mum can design magazine covers'. well thank god for that. now wouldn't it be better to admit that there is nothing new going on here. cheap editing systems and digital cameras have been around for a little while now. and what do we have on tv- vastly improved content or irrationally edited wonky cam. I don't have a problem with people learning a trade, just not sure if they can learn all of them at once. unless they are like keanu reeves in the matrix. And I also don't believe I assumed anything in my post, I merely spoke from personal experience. but please go ahead and make quality films on a laptop i am litterally drooling like an over fu**ed daschund for these gems.

Yeup like skilled operators. why drop $26,000 on a workstation that will never make its money back? especially when as Mitch points out you'd need the same amount again for monitors- and you still wouldn't have an optimum viewing situation without spending a fair few quid on your room. oh and then you'd want control pannels and for a film out a nice 4k projector. so why not take an edl to a post house? who are all these damn fools buying copies of scratch? then again i have no idea why anyone would drop tens of thousands of dollars on a camera that will never make them money. not knocking red just knocking this lunatic one man band concept. I mean i don't have an edit suite and yet i seem to make money from editing. conversely at one dumb ass point in my career I had an avid, and an fcp workstation. i shudder to think how little money i made from my own kit.

On a cinematography forum? I know people get their kicks in strange ways but I've never got or wanted to get wood on this site... even if some lenses give me the horn!

nearly all my posts over the last few years were fueled by drugs...

Driver is that really your name are you like Bono or Sting or The Rock? Seriously though if your aspect ratio is not 16x9, but you want it to be, then you should work out the matt in tk and then get a squeeze of that area to fill a full height anamorphic transfer. As for FCP it is format agnostic (to a point), but hardwear isn't so check, check and double check your system req's. best, Keith (currently waiting for an SR machine to lay off some FCP edited Live From Abbey Road)

think you missed my point john i mean i know this is a predominantly yank board, but surely there's still a place for irony. when i said 'If you haven't got talent then... well the bbc still employs people' i was talking about the people they hire in...

If you've got talent you'll get paid. If you haven't got talent then... well the bbc still employs people.

no that would be like switching from a platform with a ton of bugs and a hopeless operating system to a platform which works for the user and gives them the tools to finish their job on a stable platform. red sure isn't a mac. in fact it is deffinately a pc. and it is getting more and more like that with every crash and failed start...

are they still shooting dr who on vhs or have they moved up to betamax yet? seriously though well done.