Gordon Highland

Correct. If it's two lavs, then that's fine cuz they'll likely match. Lavs (aside from being a bit tinny for me) tend to be omnidirectional as a necessity, so they also pick up quite a bit of extraneous things compared to a hypercardioid shotgun on a boom that has a nice full voice tone with lots of rejection. And you gotta listen for interference on the wirelesses (i have some great Lectros that rarely drop out), clothing rustles, etc. There are lots of tricks to prevent these things, but they're just kind of a pain in general. The tone difference isn't a HUGE deal, just annoying. Record them on separate channels if possible to make an EQ pass easier. If you're a larger production with a sound mixer in addition to the boom op, it's far less of a problem and can be compensated for on set. It's always good to work with flexible people, whether you're the DP or the boom op! You can have mad skills, but often the easygoing team players get the first calls.

As someone who spends about half his time doing sound, I gotta chime in. When I see extraneous headroom in the frame it drives me freakin crazy, cuz it means i can't get the boom in close enough for a good s/n ratio. especially when it's a height discrepancy between actors and the director made poor blocking choices. i'm not shy about warning him, either, even though i may get overruled. i don't like mixing a boom and a lav cuz they don't sound the same (plus a certain amount of laziness), and i don't get much time for audio post. anyone you talk to will prefer a boom. when i'm shooting, i'll usually frame/block the shots with some compromise to accommodate sound. but sometimes the visuals are just more important, and some things can be ADRed. i used to work with a sound guy (USED to, won't call him anymore) who was awesome and someone i learned a lot from, but if he didn't like something he would sometimes deliberately drop his boom into frame for an unusable take. i finally pulled him aside and had to explain that it's MY decision as to what's good and what isn't, and even if he or an actor botched something, wait until AFTERWARDS to tell me, because I usually know what kind of coverage i'm going to cut to and thus not everything has to be totally perfect in every take. on the other hand, sound people can also be pretty helpful with continuity if you're on a small crew; they usually know the dialog pretty well and what physical business and nuance the actors are(n't) doing from take to take. i've found the majority of people look most flattering from a 3/4 angle and about chest height, camera tilted up slightly. a little eyelight. those nose shadows can be a real pain sometimes, but the most common complaints are shiny skin and wispy hair.

This is actually quite common, and I do it a lot, myself. Although in this case it's not experimental, it's for bandwidth/design reasons. I'll have a spokesperson introducing various multimedia elements off to one side of the screen at something like 300x400. It's a pain to shoot, though, especially when it comes to limiting hand gestures, because in my case I'll often shoot on white or black and then that blends seamlessly with the surrounding multimedia white or black on the rest of the page (looks like a chromakey) and you gotta be sure a stray hand doesn't "disappear" in the middle of empty space when it gets cropped. With Flash8 you could use an alpha channel and actually have it overlap the multimedia. Thanks for the ESPN clarification.

Most of the ones I've seen have been for novelty at a trade show or something. It's not film, but "Around the Horn" on ESPN uses a series of four (satellite interview) plasmas on their sides so the host can see them all simultaneously. I assume they're shot this wasy as well, but it could be done as a DVE in the control room instead. We never see the screens close enough to notice the resolution loss if so.

The DVX accepts miniDV tapes. That's it. When you're done editing, you can use/rent/hire another deck and any required hardware to lay it off to whatever mastering format you want. While there's no quality upgrade in doing this (less, if anything), the larger tapes are more robust with redundant data and better suited to hold up through frequent playbacks. But you could master to anything: DigiBeta, DVCPRO50, DVD, etc. Find out from the festival or whomever what the preferred screening formats are.

Those are all wonderful points. I think the short answer may be that video, and even film, doesn't respond to light in the same way our human eye does. Colors shift and become exaggerated, the contrast or balance is usually too extreme to capture, etc. So even natural light is not really "reality" when reproduced on tape or film in the viewer's eye. So what we do is 1) technically control the light and dark parts of the frame to make it appear as natural as possible on your chosen medium so that it's NOT distracting, and/or 2) enhance the mood desired in each scene to draw attention to certain elements, whether it's beauty, tension, etc., and/or 3) simulating or matching a time of day or year or historical period. Also, the amount of time to plan to shoot for has very little to do with how many lights you'll need. Size of the location, desired aperture, and ingenuity of your crew are more important factors.

I often let it overlap the dialogue because it masks some of my edit points where the background level changed or I added gain to certain shots. You don't have to use the ambient track at the same volume; even a little will do, and you don't have to layer it over the other track if you don't want; you can just splice or crossfade it in to fill the silent holes. Most of the time my ambience gets augmented with some effects or ambiences from my CD library that are more interesting and realistic than what I recorded. Also, when the room tone track was recorded alone, it's possible it may have been boosted with a compressor or some type of gain makeup, or mic placement.

I've seen "Spinal Tap" probably 25+ times. "Boogie Nights," "Fight Club," and the original Star Wars triology at least 10 times each. Never gone to a theatrical release more than twice. I imagine what you're finding is that we're talking more "comfort food" here than actual cinematic magic. A friend of mine puts on "The 'Burbs" nearly every day as she's milling about the house. So no "It's a Wonderful Life"rs yet? Huh.

Every Groundhog's Day they have a 5K or 10K run through there. I know the "Gone With the Wind" original is there, not sure what other gems. It's novel at first to be sure, but a very odd place to spend any extensive period of time. Great for cost and climate control, poor for morale! I've got some stories. . . my boss was a very eccentric character. He actually LIVED there when times got rough, built a loft right above his office. T'was very creepy to see him climb down a ladder, yawn, and wish you good morning. . . in '99 he built a fully-functioning self-sufficient "Y2K shelter" for four in what used to be our studio. And that's about when I had to quit, after spending most of a year creating his stupid survival video. Directing a spokesperson demonstrating how to deal with your own human waste was the definite nadir of my career (knock wood).

Oh, ok then; so we were on the same page. I thought you meant "progressive download," which is a term used in the compression process and a selectable option in Squeeze, etc. It's sort of the opposite of streaming. You get consistent quality playback because the clip gets buffered before it starts playing and will stop as needed instead of just beginning instantly and dropping the frame rate to maintain realtime play. Life got much better when I started shooting progressive scan, AND I prefer progressive downloading most of the time. I haven't experienced any problems with odd % pixel scalings in the 24p world, but I really had to watch it with interlace. Most of the time I'm doing 320x240 @ 15fps or 12fps. 12 is too few frames in my opinion, but if I have to hit a target (<200Kb/s in my case) I'd sacrifice some temporal resolution for spatial resolution ? in other words, fewer frames that look cleaner each, rather than smoother action that was blocky and pixellated. That's just personal taste, though. I have no experience compressing to H.264 yet.

One of these famous vaults is right here in Kansas City (sorry to pimp my town, but we don't have a lot of Hollywood ties). We have a lot of underground limestone caves that have been mined, and they're used as industrial business parks, mostly for warehousing. This one in particular is practically right underneath an amusement park, and is also home to the USPS's Stamp Fulfillment Center where they store, process, and ship all collectible stamps (I made a video for them), something like $300 million inventory. The temperature and humidity are ideal for storage of films. SubTropolis I worked for six years at a production house in one of these caves. I often wonder what that's done for my lungs with the diesel dust from all the eighteen-wheelers rolling through (fresh air is pumped in from the surface). I had to scrub out our video decks every few months. No cell phone signals, underground parking. . . but it kinda drives you crazy after awhile.

That's actually 1/4 the resolution (307,200 pix vs. 76,800 pix), half as wide AND half as tall. It also probably goes without saying, but when it comes to compression for computer mointor viewing, progressive-scan sources look far better than ones that originated as interlace. I know that's not what you meant by "progressive," but still worth significant mention. Hey, as bad as some of this compression looks, you might appreciate that I have to deliver some of the crap I produce en masse to cell phones in MP4 at 48Kb/s (176x144 @ 8fps)! Ugh!! I'll get to triple that data rate next year when EV-DO is more widely used.

I used to have this problem, too. I believe it might've had to do with the install order. Did you install FCP before DVD Studio Pro? If I remember correctly, I THINK it has to be the other way around for Compressor to work properly.

Why not just shoot the rest of it on DV for consistency so you don't paint yourself into a corner with the storyline? Also depends on how you want to release/distribute it. On the web, most would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. DVD, maybe you could Magic Bullet or Filmlook your DV footage and shoot the new stuff in video 24p or 16mm. I personally think 35mm is probably too big of a difference unless your story really motivates that difference in a logical way, and like you said, that's a pretty major Citizen Kane-sized flashback!

Yes, you use the app Sorenson Squeeze to create the Flash video, but you can create an MOV or WMV with the Sorenson codec as well, so they're not really the same when you consider what's required to play them. FLV, SWF, MOV, WMV, etc all require different players on the user's end, yet are created with the same tool. And to Adam's point, there are very good reasons why people don't have the latest version of Quicktime on any particular day. QT is in many ways the backbone of my media workstation, which is running like 15 different apps that rely upon it. But I'm not necessarily ready to upgrade every piece of software i have just to be on QT7 now (which I'm not). I upgrade to QT7 and suddenly ProTools doesn't work, or maybe an older version of Final Cut Pro, or I gotta go hunt down a bunch of drivers or something. I know that's not literally the case for all apps, and it's less of an issue in the post-OS X world, but it's a major problem if the business day stalls for something like this. Also, some people work for large companies (or even small ones) where their system image is mandated or administered elsewhere, and they can't just make these upgrades indiscriminately (for good reason, including quality control). At my day job, my encoded clips go out to about 60,000 employees, and if I do them in Flash8, only a handful of people will see them, and they're probably the ones sitting next to me. Bandwidth limitations are what really chap MY hide. . .

One problem is that not a ton of people are on QT7 yet, so I personally would avoid H.264 unless you know exactly who your audience is. I stick with Sorenson3 for this reason for now. Actually, if you're looking for the widest compatibility, forget both of them and create SWF movies, cuz Flash Player is on more browsers than either QT or WM. I like On2 a lot, but it requires Flash8 Player (too new for many people) and right now I can only do single-pass with it. But it's extremely efficient when it comes to file size.

It's already getting huge festival buzz. :P But seriously, I admire "out there" cinematography. I remember seeing Aronofsky's first two movies and being very excited about them, and now I can't wait to see what he did with "The Fountain." But for most of us, as far as reels are concerned, I'd rather see more consistent, competent work ("mediocre" as you might say) from a DP in a variety of situations to demonstrate depth and flexibility (int, ext, day, night, large/small locations, etc.) more than flashy work, because frankly, if it calls attention to itself it's going to take the viewer out of my story. And the director should be the one composing the shots and selecting coverage anyway, so I don't care about that so much; I'm looking at lighting mostly.

Correct, with the SDX it's pointless to capture higher than 8-bit, unless you go SDI straight out from camera head which is 10-bit for compositing or whatnot. Storage-wise, if you shoot 24p, capture over firewire and remove the pulldown it's only like 5.5 MB/sec. Avid now supports this as well as FCP. I don't capture to it, but I often edit from a regular ole portable Maxtor firewire400 drive with no problems whatsoever using this mode. For SDI and analog video i use an AJA i/o into FCP with no problems either (8- or 10-bit off of a second S-ATA drive in the Mac).

Are you seriously a freshman? Wow. I watched "The Pursuit." As an exercise, the coverage and shot choices all looked appropriate and motivated, and the edits felt in the right places to me. Overall, I thought it was very good, especially because most of those things take more experience to learn. Visually, the only thing I would've changed is that the ext post office shots were in shadow and would've looked better at a different time of day. One note, the compression is really bad; you should reduce the frame size or increase the data rate. Nice job!

I've always done 29:15.

It can work. I use the zebra modes for everything critical, but then often compose with the flip-out LCD (and its brightness ALL the way down). if you don't care about aperature, in a pinch, you could also walk up and fill the frame with skin tone, get the auto-iris reading, then pop back over to manual, step back and recompose your shot. This is not very good cinematography though, cuz it only accounts for the subject. Best for news/doc stuff.

Or, light the scene with the desired contrast and production design elements after talking them over (and turn your monitor or VF to B&W if that's what you're working at), but I still would not actually record the signal as black and white. Just. In. Case.

Shoot in color. You can change your mind later, so why limit yourself? And "video" B&W is often not really the look people think it's going to be (basically just 0 chroma and flat-looking), so you can crush or adjust the curves or whatnot in post anyway, or desaturate as a "creative" solution on a case-by-case basis for any mixed color scenes you're unhappy with. It's not really like a film stock that has its own inherent character, so give yourself the most flexibility. I'm approaching this less as a shooter or viewer, but like an editor! :)

I don't get it. Your name pops up, and it finds one film. But how do you play it from there? I see no further instructions. I tried two different browsers. Can't log in, obviously, even if that were the case.

that was pretty neat! it was much more impressive when i found out afterwards it was all in-camera (guess i don't read so good sometimes). i also really liked the sound work, which i assume was all post. flamenco kung fu, huh? ;) the shaky cam really bugged me in several of the shots where it was unmotivated. during the action sequences and from subjective long distances it worked well, but not during the quieter times when one person was just looking at another.