Gordon Highland

Yeah, as I've gotten older I've become more conservative in an "I'd rather be alive and wrong than dead and right" sort of way. But if companies are so worried about damaging their trademark, they should uh, stop putting their giant logo on every effing surface of the planet. Legally, though, even if you don't feel you're "passing judgment" on a trademarked logo in a frame, it's still a good idea to avoid it, because the company may see it otherwise. Maybe you're not literally suggesting that Hitler endorsed Coca-Cola, but cleaning off his coffee table before you shoot him there would be the better plan. Take Chris's advice and explain its importance to your subject.

Sometimes I don't have the luxury of shooting the master first, though I would certainly prefer it, technically. Often we're under heavy time constraints so I'll begin with framing up singles of whoever knows their lines best (don't tell James Lipton). If someone's got some heavy technical jargon or a long monologue, this gives them a chance to go over their lines many more times off camera, while still getting a feel for the interaction with the other actor(s). Then by the end everyone knows their stuff inside and out through repetition, and I'll get the most usable master in just a couple of takes, with less time and media wasted all around.

Yes, 29.97 interlace is always what's recorded on the tape itself, and thus it can be captured this way also and edited accordingly with no additional rendering if you want. And it has that same strobey film look that comes with pulldown. The additional frames are removed during capture (if you choose, and if you're using "advanced" pulldown) to get to 24 progressive. The SDX is the same way.

I used to be an airport security screener and it would always amuse me when someone would go to great lengths to practically berate me about hand-checking all of his camera gear (it's no problem, just when they're a-holes) outside of the x-ray machine, inside which there's virtually no chance for damage. Yet he'd then walk through the metal detector (which IS magnetic), and set it off as a result of film canisters in his pockets. Heh heh heh. Happened several times.

Eh, after looking at these over time, I think it tends to be more like 50 seconds per page. Features, i mean. As you said, though, some variace depending on dialogue versus action and the writer's economy of language. I'm sure on episodic TV with staff writers and not spec, they can predict these things with a much greater degree of accuracy. There's also less exposition; we know what the main characters and locations look like from week to week.

Assuming you don't mean editing actual 4K-res film scans, if you're talking about editing offline at a lower res, most of today's laptops would suit you just fine. If you're of the Mac persuasion, Final Cut Pro on pretty much any laptop they've made in the last several years will work. I have a simple off-the-shelf 12" Powerbook (pre-Intel) that handles DV50 with ease. On a PC, Vegas is extremely popular, as is Avid Xpress DV. Either way, in the laptop world, you'll probably want to invest in a portable Firewire800/400 drive, both to not clutter up your system drive, and to make porting the footage easier. Not wise to color-correct on a laptop, but you can always hook it up to a deck/camera that's connected to a monitor.

Ah crap, did i just get all the math backwards in my previous posts? My brain hurts. I'm think I got the on-set playback and post-production sync mixed up. You ultimately want the song at its natural speed in the final version, right? 100% at 24fps? So when you shoot overcranked in slo-mo, you need to speed up the song on set by the same percentage, not its opposite. So sorry, guys. Arrrgh!

Well, undercranking makes the action appear fast, and overcranking makes it slow, so apply the same percentage that you deviated from 24fps (100%) to the music clip speed. < 100% is slower and > 100% is faster. 24 divided by 33.33 equals 72% speed, right?

You could burn your own CD after using a workstation to change the speed. So if 24fps is "normal," then 12fps undercrank results in 200% speed of the song to maintain playback sync, and that's what you tell your audio software/plugin. Or 60% speed for 40fps, etc. At low speeds, the samples will break up and have a stuttering sound when done digitally, but it shouldn't be a problem for performance. Make a disc with several different speeds and label the tracks with their respective frame rate.

Isn't that Gary Busey in there, maybe 2/3 through? Maybe not, but sure looked like him.

I'm on a calibrated monitor and the black level could come up a little I think. You do have a sizing issue; you'll want to squish it horizontally a little more in your compression program, I'd guess about 10%. Probably the difference between square vs. non-square pixels (use a multiple of 640x480 instead of 720x480). Nice-looking shots! I'd have probably started with some of the more dramatic stuff that we see later. And as good as the cinematography may be, unfortunately reel-watchers tend to gravitate towards celeb content, so you might move that up also.

I think the biggest thing is to light it for B&W. Yes, you can turn down the chroma on the monitor, but as the other poster mentioned, you'll probably want to do a lot of post correction unless you like that flatter look. I'm not a fan of simple desaturation; I don't think it looks quite right, and prefer to adjust the gamma on teh R,G,B channels individually to get the right combination. Not sure of the look you're going for, though. Here's a chessy extreme example I had to throw together one afternoon. Just two hard lights and a lot of post processing (the crappy audio sells it, i think). Link

I wouldn't change much at all. For good contrasty B&W I think you did the right thing with lots of edge lights. Some of the shots it looks like the players might've stepped out of their backlight, but I thought it was a good look overall.

So. . . do you have something to share with us? We'd love to see what it looks like!

I feel exactly the opposite, personally. Although a theater experience can be good for the self-esteem sometimes. (So can an 11pm trip to Wal-Mart.) But it's an amusing theory, and I wish that studio execs applied that logic when it came to greenlighting more intelligent, demanding films. I felt 25% dumber while watching "What the #$%@ Do we Know?," however, yet smarter afterwards. Who knew quantum physics was sexy?

To me, pretty much all broad comedies play better on the big screen. It's one reason I don't go to the theater much, or at least try to go when they're not busy. I hate being cued where to laugh by the audience (in all the dumbest, lowest-common-denominator places) and being the only one laughing when something is genuinely funny. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose. Anyway, I've seen several of these on TV later, feeling odd cuz I remembered them being much funnier in the theater, where groupthink was alive and well and contributed to a sort of exponential comedy factor or something. Or maybe I just wasn't as surprised the second time. Pretty much anything in 2.35 plays better at the theater. I also learned it was a bad idea to take a date to see Todd Solondz's "Happiness." :ph34r: That did not play well in the theater. But I loved the movie in the privacy of my own home. They should've had that epileptic japanimation warning at the header of "Domino." I agree, though, it was fun.

It's not specific to Final Cut Pro. You'll see it in any desktop editing application that displays every pixel of the frame. Some cameras seem to have less of it than others. This isn't based on any technical knowledge, but it seems that digital cameras have less of it than analog cameras. If I shoot Betacam for web, I find myself cropping 6 or 8 pixels off each side, and 4 off the top and bottom, but only like 2 side pixels for a DV cam, with no crop at the top or bottom needed. Your mileage may vary.

It's called overscan, and you needn't worry. On a regular television that will get cropped off (to varying degrees depending on the set); you'd only see it if you hit the "underscan" button on a professional monitor. However it is there as part of the actual complete video signal, and why you see it on your desktop. If this clip is destined for viewing on computers you'll want to simply crop it off in your compression application. If it's for television viewing, ignore it. Many consumer/prosumer camera viewfinders do not do a very accurate job of giving you the whole image.

It's like at my job when they claim to be "challenging me." No, they're not, they're making excuses for being cheap while dropping their problems in my lap. <_< Wal-mart specifics aside, I'd be interested to see those results. Granted, Steven usually has very liberal budgets and some of the best crew in the biz, but he actually works very very fast, too, and I admire his confidence in that regard. I'd like to see some well-known filmmakers take on one of these 48-hour film fests that have become so popular with the kiddies. Well, that's not fair, but put them up against each other, I mean. I've never entered one, because like I said, those aren't the kinds of "challenges" I find beneficial to me personally (I shoot at light speed and with limited resources all week long, so why stress myself on the weekend?). I want creative challenges, not logistical ones.

Did you check out the featurette on the DVD? A lot more technical than most, with some good info. I thought the movie itself was not very good, but visually stunning. His poor editor and assitant editors. . . good lord!! Six cameras rolling all the time, he said, and I really dug some of the creative framing that I'm sure that allows. "Man on Fire" was very similar to me. There's lot of shots of them doing hand cranking. I know they used lots of low frame rates printed at low frame rates for smearing (the featurette had lots of shots of slates). They said the exposure really got away from them sometimes due to shooting reversal. I didn't see much in they way of artificial lighting. Tony loves his grad filters, although I don't remember seeing as many of them as usual. And of course, I'd pay to watch Keira read the phone book for two hours. . .

Tony Scott uses six all the time. See "Domino" and "Man on Fire" for examples of this. His coverage is pretty unique (he seems to find a way to use all of it), and sometimes the kinetic editing style works geat, and other times it beats on the viewer unnecessarily. I understand using a bunch of cameras for a one-time-only stunt, but for normal filming, one does it for me. Maybe two if you want to give the actors some freedom and maintain perfect continuity.

You can move the paper further back or back up the camera and zoom in to throw the bkgd out of focus to reduce the imperfections. These are also exaggerated with side lighting, so moving lights closer in line with the camera can help. If your subject doesn't have much white in it, you can smooth out the background whites in post by selecting only the whites and then blowing them out, leaving the other colors and luma ranges intact. I do this all the time. I don't normally use backlight when working in white studios. Does the background need to be pure white? Backing off your lights or irising down will give you a greyer tone that can be more appealing sometimes (especially if it's uneven or with a little pattern), and then light your subject with more punch to pull it away from the background. If it does need to be pure white, use the zebra function on your camera set at 100% and add light/iris until zebras show up evenly across your background in the viewfinder. Then set the zebra back to around 75%, don't touch the iris, and light your subject until just a little zebra appears in its highlights. Most product shots look best with harder, directional light from one side to "model" the surface textures with shadow.

I liked that a lot. I was a little unclear from your post, were the windows in the car shots composited, then? Especially nice work on the love scene, good choice of angles and well-cut. And the girl even LOOKS like Samantha Morton!

Do you mean the DVX100 or the HVX200? I don't have personal experience with this, but I imagine the HVX200 would be the easy choice because of 4x the bandwidth and true 24p. If it's the DVX100, that's trickier. Its resolution is a lot lower but its motion rendition is better. I am not a fan of HDV at all in general, but I'd be tempted to lean that way. Same bandwidth but with high-definition (haha) versus standard-def on the DVX100.

Also, between takes or during high wind speeds, you could spin them 90 degrees so they're parallel with the ground and won't catch much wind. Sort of the opposite with a microphone, you point them straight down in wind to minimize air noise.