Keith Mottram

have known some people to have done it and it might help with corporate clients, but never really considered it myself- after this many years if i need a fu**ing certificate... btw i am featured on apple's site at moment as part of a profile on live from abbey road. check my moves etc. a few journalistic inacuracies but its nice for my inner geek! apple pro page keith

finally saw this on dvd last night after hearing good things about it. and i thought it was average at best. hated the bells and whistle transitions flashing through time and wasn't a fan of the pace- it looked like they had recooked the script in the edit suite. the script was a grammatical nightmare of b movie, family drama, tragedy... and as for the cinematography where do i start- dodgy dutch angles, mismatched hand held, pointless shaky track shot, half the time it could have been a student shooting it. and the look oh god it was just awful. my guess is that it looked to punchy in its original form and then rather than do a decent DI they decided to time the print. some of the shots looked as soft as 16mm as well. still great cast all acting with aplomb and some great dialogue. a real shame really.

Actually Max I've got to kind of disagree- how many places you can get 120 film processes now? There were dozens and dozens of places in London alone a decade ago (I actually used to work in Joe's Basement), now there is Metro and er, that's about it. I slightly exaggerate but it really is a tiny market now. I do think this new camera could be interesting (cue sharp intake of breath) especially when it is upgraded by P+S to have an optical viewfinder. I'm just waiting to see if they have done anything with the new sensor/ shutter to see if there is an improvement on the weird motion/ milky look of the red one. I also find it interesting that people seem to think that the Epic is for proper films and that the Red One is for indies. The rental price for an Epic will be a hundred or so more than a Red One (which, I'm sure will go down, but is rediculously over priced currently- people are chucking around rate card prices of £350 a day!). I mean why would you go for a red one over an epic? I'm quietly hopeful about this one, especially if they can implement an anamorphic centre cut/ viewing option. As for the Scarlet well my pocket dvcam has packed in so it would seem an ideal replacement for the family videocam....

okay, now i know i'm going to open myself up to some bashing here, but the last shot in particular (the kitchen one) has a really plasticky cg feel to it, as does the shots of the jars on the conveyer belt. not saying that it is wrong, just that the texture is weird to me. is this a shutter issue? also skin tones do seem creamy - and i dont think it's a grading issue which is also in my opinion not pleasant. then again all this could be compression, but i doubt it. thought the early location shots were nice, but again the grade went in the wrong direction for me. on another note had a look at the thread for this on reduser and am interested by all the calls for anamorphic option to be written in to future software upgrades. from a personal level this would be a really exiting development.

looks like your best bet will be a red then phil..... ;)

found it d21 heaven... i'm in heaven...

Hi what is the link at arri.com website?

I personally don't. And I edit professionally. I don't want my assistant fu**ing around with one lights or any other post stuff. I want him to be assistant editing. I want him logging, pulling selects, prepping. I also don't want anything that will slow down the functionality of my suite. So no proxies and no custom sizes. I have no problem with tapes, they work, I have had problems with P2 and every other form of digital media. I would never do a Red show without a huge amount of additional support and if there was any kind of deadlines looming this workflow would scare the heegeebees out of me. I can see Red as a great tool, but I would turn it down flat from an editors perspective. And I am working currently with about £50K's more FCP than the average Red user- my system can handle 16 streams of dvcproHD so I am sure it would be okay. But I would never chose to work with these R2D2 files, not on a paid job anyway, nor would I ever leave a computer working through the night on the assumption that I could work in the morning. No professional editor ever would.

Tyler I stand corrected, last time I was in a feature grading suite the colourist was never happy with his projector and so worked mostly from his Sony (because, and i paraphrase, 'the projector is too dim and too low contrast'...). This was a couple of years ago, but at one of london's top DI places so everything from the lighting to the projector to the baselight was the best. two years is obviously a long time in the world of post... As for LUT, obviously they are geared to workflow, but I meant that you could use an Arrilaser LUT for Color in the same way you could use it for a baselight. I all for perfect enviroments, but with a few exceptions technically you will get the same DPX out of an apple based system than you will with a system costing a hundred times the amount. BTW if the CRT is too bright/ high con cannot this be changed with a LUT?

Or maybe they can afford to spend all the time on set making sure everything is just right, then hire the best colour timers in the business and blah blah blah... besides batman could have done with a DI in my opinion. which it of course did in a manner of speaking prior to being transferred to digital formats. DI's could well save an indie production a lot of money. I could produce all the versions I need - DVD/ Bluray, HDcam, Filmout all on an eight core (with color) with a calibrated Sony CRT hired in. Which would cost fu** all apart from the scanning and would be done with the same LUT's in the same colour space (in some case better- some top end suites still aren't in floating point last time I checked). As for a projector they're for clients anyway the grade is always on the CRT (which is about £350 a week to hire). Sure a good colourist is essential but a load of money and a spotty kid delivering you sushi is not...

would have thought the best option would be to shoot s16 with hawk v-lites (with 1.33x elements inside). cannot wait for these lenses.

I'm confused as according to IMDB Red was only used for effects shots can anyone confirm this? Because it is mighty interesting that Wanted is touted as a red film- after all never heard of star wars being called vistavision film etc etc...

man I feel like such an idiot, pj was of course the director of murials wedding, getting my hogans confused...

Okay so I haven't posted for a while, been busy with 'A' work and 'B' shitty baby nappies. but when i saw this i had to put fingers to keys. Jim, how pissed were you when you wrote that? Looking at the list I just wasn't sure which you were having a laugh with and which you weren't, I am consequently now worried about testing a red in case it gives me leprosy. And number 8 is a mystery who are the other 800 acronyms? I assume PJ is the guy who played crocodile dundee and DD is a porn star, but why on earth would you want to associate yourself with Nazis? I mean I know they had great scientists and were very technologically advanced but still... oh and last thing I heard the 18-50 was a rehoused cola bottle.

Max, do you know if v-lites being made for scope 16-9 chip cinematography aswel? vantage's site seems to imply this. it could make digital cinematography a bit more interesting- from there website "they are modularily structured and support both classical and upcoming film and sensor formats" keith

atonement's nomination is a complete mystery to me. it looked dull with some scenes being below tv standard- and some of the most horrible looking flares i can remember for a long time. it should also lose for having the most pointless 'look at me', teeth grindedly shite, amateur hour stedicam shot of all time. the only reason i can think of that people rate this film is because its english, so the brits can pat themselves on their backs, and the yanks can go "ooh they really know how to make costume dramas those limeys". it made no sense and even stole the bookend from titanic. utter bollocks.

man i've been away for so long and i've really missed... what have i missed... jeesh more rumours, discussions of non working products and sniping from people lurking in the shadows of cinematography.com (and quite possibly the industry me thinks)...

twat!

lets be honest even if this was shot on a 10K camera or 70mm it would still be a load of cheasy poop. good story, good lighting, good direction then we' be in a better position to discuss. but this is horse dung with flies on top...

i'd convert it in a different programme to be honest. shake is good for simple conversions. keith

Hi Rolfe, It is Pro Res only, though that is not necessarilly a bad thing if you do not mind 4:2:2. pro res is an excellent codec in my opinion and i have mastered a number of hd projects with it, in fact i would not use another codec unless there was a need to work in 4:4:4. I'd forgotton about this and obviously it would seriously 'pimp' up an imac or mac pro, but if you are going to spend that kind of money your moving into a different ball park, professionally speaking. I am hoping to use an IO as part of my 'onset' kit on a feature i'm scheduled to edit next year. keith

just caught this. go for the macbook pro if you want an all rounder (ie home office, bit of simple dv editing, bit of writing etc), the imac will of course do all this on a bigger screen, but without the benifits of portability. if you want to edit 10bit hd then you'll need a lot of accesories and cards which will not fit in an imac or a macbook pro. so then you buy a tower. which tricked out will massively increase your budget. which is why i have a laptop and do all my editing at post houses/ production companies. good luck keith

Lance, with a proper control panel, a tangent for example, and a colourist who has learnt color or is is a fast learner you can get great results. from recent tests i'd suggest conforming and then converting master reels into dpx files then chopping up in color with edl cut lists- this gets the best fps (damn close to realtime with the right hard drive set up). good luck, keith

I can't be bothered to say it to you every day of the week, but you are quite simply a twat.

Followed this link on to reduser and there is a shooter posting about problems he's haveing with the camera crashing or something. this caused the production to lose footage, but another poster (shawn) thought this should be left off the boards... this pretty much sumarises the attitude of reduser, but in defence Emanual and another did say that negative reporting should stay on the site..... i was going to say that this would be similar to the policy the kremlin has ('the only news is good news') but i think it's time to drop that line of red gags. keith ps never seen so much handbag swinging over a director before on this board. personally i thought the limey was a pretty darn fine piece of filmmaking.