Keith Walters

In the early days of photography, virtually all lenses were basically just high quality magnifying glasses with a moveable mounting so they could be focussed (usually the accordion-like structure made out of black rubberized cardboard that you see on vintage cameras). The "focal length" was simply the distance the lens had to be from the film plane to focus at infinity. So a "50mm" lens had to be 50mm (about 2 inches) from the film plane and so on. With layer multi-element lenses this distance could be drastically shortened, making the lenses much more compact, but the convention was retained, meaning a "50mm" multi-element lens would behave optically like a (much larger) 50mm single-element lens. The front elements out of binoculars are often surprisingly high quality multi-layer lenses. People sometimes use them to get extremely shallow depth of field effects (often to make people look like animated dolls and so on), by making a "camera obscura" type device with a large image area, and then filming just a small part of the image.

R Surely that depends on the size of the budget. In the past, when most digitally originated projects had to be released on film, the necessary video-to-neg transfer ate up most of the savings in stock costs, and you still had the same old problem: You were basically starting a 4-stage duplication chain with a master negative that only had about the same resolution as you would expect to come out of such a chain, but starting with original 35mm neg. Now, at least theoretically, you could show movies recorded on Blu-ray in cinemas and I don't think too many people would notice the difference, but as I understand it, the "Virtual Print Fee" Digital projector subsidization process prohibits that.

I've no particular opinion one way or the other whether you originate on film or video. But that's NOW, when there are digital cameras actually up to the task. But 15 years ago when we were being told that 1440 x 800 HD cam was indistinguishable from film, I mean give me a break.... Just in case anybody wonders (or cares,) I got the year 2015 at a meeting I attended in 2008. There were people from Deluxe USA there (when they'd just taken over the local processing House Atlab) plus a guy from Arri, and the discussion got round to why on earth anyone would want to buy a film processing outfit, when film projection at least was clearly on the way out. The details are a bit hazy now, but they brought up the notion of what is now called a "Virtual Print Fee" (they didn't call it that though). The notion was that for the foreseeable future film origination would still be a major player, but that the loss of revenue from print sales would be made up some sort of licensing arrangement on the Digital release files. They were still clinging to some variant of the old notion of directly beaming the movies directly into a hard drive built into the projector. So basically they would expect to get 2 grand or so for just pressing a button, instead of laboriously printing and developing 4-5 heavy rolls of film! Apart from the usual muttered questions about what they'd been smoking and where could we get some, when somebody asked when digital origination seemed set to overtake film (and only on big projects were origination cost was not an issue) the answer was "The middle of the next decade", which appears to have been pretty accurate.

It's just that about 7 years ago I predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2015: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=32990&do=findComment&comment=248470

That wasn't the question though. In the case of say, nine-digit-budget features that are intended to and and are likely to be exhibited in cinemas, (not just shown on TV or Direct-to-DVD/Blu-ray/Download), where origination cost or convenience is not likely to be an issue, what percentage are still shot on film? We are talking about probably less than 100 projects a year here. The very fact that David is working on a feature that is being shot on 35mm film means that there still must be a reasonable amount of film still being shot, as it would take quite a lot of such work to keep even one film lab operating in LA. Remember also that the main reason TV production switched almost exclusively to video origination in recent years was political, more to do with avoiding Screen Actors Guild contracts than origination cost. The Alexa also came along at just the right time as well of course. But the final nail in the coffin was the killing off of releasing features as film prints, which was where most of the money was. Processing camera negative has always been pretty much a sideline.

Certainly for TV work and smaller budget features, you are correct, but the bet was concerned with general cinema release productions, where the acquisition cost generally wasn't an issue. Nine-digit budgets might have hired a lot of people, but film labs would never have survived of that market alone. It also makes me wonder whether mainstream filmmakers are ever going to move past 2K Alexa resolution. 4K TVs appear to be as dead in the water as 3-D TVs were a few years ago, and most "HD" transmissions routinely under-utilize the capabilities of the transmission system. 4K cinema projectors are still pretty thin on the ground; most cinema owners are struggling to pay for 2K projectors. This is not without precedent; the DVD format has essentially the same resolution as the Wartime NTSC monochrome TV standard, and Blu-ray is still struggling to compete with that. I don't know what it's like in other countries, but here, only a small amount of rental library space (in the dwindling number of rental libraries left) is taken up with Blu-ray. The vast majority of Blu-ray players simply get used for playing DVDs. The way the prices are dropping, I suspect that in a few years there will certainly only be Blu-ray players available, but again, they will be used for playing DVDs. And it's interesting to speculate how many infrared laser diodes have been fitted to DVD and Blu-ray players over the years, that have now wound up in landfill, never played a single CD :rolleyes: Most people simply don't know that all DVD and Blu-ray players can play CDs (both standard and MP3)

Over 8 years ago a certain person who shall remain nameless (mainly because I can't remember his name :rolleyes: ) rather severely lost a bet that the ratio would pass 50% by the end of 2010 (or thereabouts). Even Jim Jannard got involved, talking about million dollar bets, and then suddenly pulled out. Is there some place that has this sort of information, or do you have to laboriously go through IMDB tech specs.

That is another option, but you'll find it's better to edit your own set of stills and then get those converted, as you can drastically reduce the file size that way.

I presume you mean an animated GIF. The freeware video editor Avidemux allows you to save video clips as a string of still images (either JPEG or Bitmapped). You can then use a separate program to convert your selected images to an animated GIF. I normally use Adobe Photo-Paint to convert stills to animated GIFs, as it allows lots of tricks to cut down the file size. However, there are numerous freeware packages available that can also do this, with varying degrees of efficiency. if you GOOGLE animated gif maker freeware you'll turn up lots of them, but I've never used any recent ones. However I used to have a freeware package about 10 years ago that produced pretty good results; I would imagine things have moved on from there. Be warned: use as few frames per second as is possible, otherwise your files will be gigantic :lol:

A lot of Reality (and "Reality" :rolleyes: ) TV shows now use a (to me anyway) somewhat irritating editing technique where just about every millisecond of hesitation in the dialogue is edited out, so sometimes it sounds more like you're listening to an auctioneer that a normal person. Is there a particular name for this technique, and is it done with normal editng software, or is it produced by a special package? (In the past when I have been forced to do this, mainly to sharpen-up an excessively laconic speaker, it always seemed to come out sounding unpleasantly "choppy", so I was wondering if there is some sort of software that smooths the transitions). I think about the only thing more annoying than this is the now almost universal blurring out of license plates, registered trademarks, faces of passers-by and anything else even faintly legally problematic. Countless millions of TV hours were broadcast in the past without needing to do this; what has changed?

Ah! He's made a third post now... http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?128659-Obsolescence-obsolete&p=1483103&viewfull=1#post1483103 He must have something special up his sleeve for NAB. He sure is the mystery man...

It's not necessarily VHS, there were also Betamax camcorders in the 1980s (not to be confused with Betacam, although a lot of people do). Also the Sony 8mm Handycam format came out in 1985, so it could just as easily have been one of those. VHS, Betamax and Video-8 have different head switching points (that twitching horizontal you see at the bottom of the screen) so an expert could possibly work out what format was used from that, depending on how much processing was done to the images in the TV studio, The style of the Time and Date characters is not really going to tell you much, since there was considerable variation of this, even with different models made by the same manufacturer. Maybe if you tried a search for 80s home movies on YouTube you might get lucky and spot somebody's video that has the same Timestamp layout, and then ask them what camera they were using.

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?128659-Obsolescence-obsolete He possibly is not entirely familiar with certain coarse British vernacular... :rolleyes: He's only made two posts since signing off forever in August 2013, This is a Sticky just called: "Weapon" http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?128488-Weapon&p=1473651&highlight=#post1473651 "We are at war with conventional thinking." No argument there, now or ever... Edited to Add: I didn't actually think of looking in the RED folder; Freya beat me to it :-)

Usually, the only projects that have made any money here are ones where the producers flat-out refused to accept any government funding. eg: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=54617&page=3&do=findComment&comment=370762

My wife just bought the DVD of this, thinking it was a TV series about something entirely different :rolleyes: I just happened to be walking past when she was running it and generally muttering in disgust, but I thought it looked interesting so I watched it. It's actually based on a 1958 Science Fiction short story by Robert Heinlein called: "All You Zombies" and it is extremely well done. What surprised when I saw the credits was that it was made in Australia, with financing from Australian Film financing bodies, which in the past has nearly always meant "unwatchable and/or commercially worthless crap". It does show that a convincing Science Fiction movies can be made with virtually no use of CGI or expensive special effects, and without it being painfully obvious that they didn't have the money for it. I appreciate they way they made the film look as if it had been made in the time it was written, rather than trying to adapt a 1950s story to the 21st century, which rarely works. Disney did much the same thing with John Carter (of Mars); the Martian aircraft looked very much like our Aircraft technologies from a century ago did, and which is pretty much how the movie would have looked if it had been made then. So they preserved Heinlein's 1950s notions of "Spacecorp", a commercial spacefaring organizations in the 1960s and 70s with "2001" style uniforms and so on. Another interesting thing is that was shot on an Alexa, but from Panavision.... Deutchland uber Alles (Springs) :D

So, where does it say they're going to do anything aboot it? Maybe they're just after some leads on good places to buy bootleg DVDs. Why should the fuzz be any different to anybody else....

What he said :rolleyes: From Day #1 just about all digital cameras have given users a live video recording facility of one sort or another, basically because it requires little more than a few more software algotithms, which cost little or nothing. After all, the first digital cameras were little more than domestic video cameras set up to capture individual video frames onto flash memory instead of tape. Although they've evolved enormously since then, the same basic principles still apply, except that capturing tull stills-resolution images at a normal video frame rate is still somewhat beyond the capabilities of consumer-grade battery-powered signal processing. So consequently only a small subset of the pixels is actually used, and so the optical low-pass filter is not optimized for video resolution, and so you get aliasing. I know the new iPhones are supposed to be able to capture 4K video, but I have a hard time accepting that the microscopic lenses they use could usefully focus that resolution. Nonetheless, several years ago I made a joking comment here to the effect that "by 2015" stills cameras with 4K video capability would be appearing in Aldi's "Suprise Buys" aisle. Damned if that doesn't look like it might be actually happening!

It is quite correct that many of the alleged disc faults are simply caused by excessive "thrashing" as the read and write heads are continually doing a "hunt-and-peck" job to reassemble all the data into the required contiguous stream for playback, or pigeonholing the data packets into widely scattered blank sectors. You should always start every day with a freshly formatted drive, mechanical or solid-state, and iny case, simply bulk-copying a fragmented drive onto a freshly formatted one will fix a lot of those problems like magic. For some reason people often seem to think they should use the original disc for an edit source and keep the backup for er, backup. That might be how it worked with film and videotape, but with digital recording, it's the other way round: Your "backup" is far more likley to be edit-friendly than the "original". Regarding disk reliability, most of the problems seem to be related to transport and handling. For about 5 years I had a setup with six low-cost Digital Set-top boxes with inexpensive 500GB portable USB hard discs, for doing lossless recordings of Digital TV transmissions, mainly to capture TV commericals for quality checking purposes. Because I never knew precisely when ads were going to be shown, I would simply let the things run for 12 hours or so at a time, and use a simple non-decoding editor to snip out the relevant parts of the Transport Stream. All I can say is, despite God knows how many hours recording they did, I've never had a single failure, either in the the physical drive or the recordings themselves. Yet I know of many people (mostly students) whose similar portable drives had a very short and buggy life, from being banged around in a knapsack. :rolleyes:

Well obviously you can't just directly use stills film; the take time would be severely limited if nothing else :rolleyes: But assuming the blank stock is still being made, could that be cut to standard MP lengths and punched with MP type perfs? And as far as Remjet goes, could the anti-halation problem be attacked with low-reflectivity pressure plates? But anyway, Polaroid film lives on after it was abandoned by Polaroid; I don't see why something similar can't be done for movie film.

Is there any particular reason why stills film couldn't be used for shooting movies? I know it's optimized for producing paper prints instead of transparencies, but that would be less of an issue with a Digital Intermediate. I know the processing chemistry is different too, but you would imagine that stills chemicals would be more readily available than those for movie film. It would also mean that pensioned-off minilabs might be able to be modified to handle longer strips of negative.

Those figures are based on the 1930s assumption that all displays will use interlaced scanning, and that people would tend to gravitate toward a viewing distance just past the point where interlace artifacts become visible. For all practical purposes, interlaced scanning is dead and buried for both HDTV receivers and cameras, yet our standards are still based upon it. What we generally have today is non-interlaced capture and display, routinely turned into pseudo-interlace for transmission/distribution. Broadcasters now tend to use the "Recommended Viewing Distance" as a cop-out for compressing the crap out of what they transmit!

I'm not much of a TV watcher, in fact about the only thing I watch regularly are some Tattoo-related 'Reality" shows shown here in Thursday evenings on channel 73. I'm not into tattooing at all, I'm just bemused by the cavalcade of freaks and weirdos wanting tattoos disguised that they have come to live to regret. What I find fascinating is that while the tattoo artists themselves look like something of an old-time Carnival freak show, they seem to be perfectly normal and rational people, while their clients are mostly freaks and weirdos trying to look "respectable". All that "impulse" ink they thought they were so cool and daring to get done 20 years ago has come back to haunt them.... However what I'm interested in here is the truly bizarre (and illogical) way these shows get censored in Post Production. In Tattoo Nightmares, EVERYTHING visual that could be considered even remotely offensive, is blurred out. Even barely recognizable nipples on girlie Tatts fer' cryin' out loud! And they seem to be terrified of showing even the slightest hint of butt-crack or other cleavage on the customers; everything gets blurred out. But here's the odd thing: They quite often get customers with obscene words tattooed on, and these are routinely "airbrushed" as well, but they don't seem to have any problem with them actually SAYING the words. So they're freely effing and blinding all the way through the show, and not a beep to be heard, But then in a similar format show "Bad Iink" they seem to have no problems at all SHOWING bums and tits (real or inked) but in that case, even the slightest hint of spoken profanity gets bleeped out. So, who exactly makes these decisions? Considering the amount of straight-down-the-barrel porn you can freely download (and for free) these days, who exactly do they think they're protecting?

Are you still extant? I thought you would have disintegrated when "th' boys" pulled Jim Jannard's power cable :rolleyes: So, still getting work with your low-serial Red One's then....? "The Baldlands?" Yep sounds like Jim's kind of film... Stephen Williams will be thrilled :wub:

As are 99% of other "Industry Related" Institutions As are companies who charge you $3,000 for a crap photo portfolio so you can "get acting work" I made about $10,000 as a Featured Extra in a series of local TV commercials; my outlay being emailing some photos to a casting agency. (A REPUTABLE casting agency). Yet I've lost count of the number of people who've told me about their 3 grand portfolios that never got them a single frame of screen time. Another one of the actors in the same ads answered an ad posted on the wall in the Danish Embassy, when they were looking for "Nordic" types. The idea of actually appearing in a commercial had never occurred to her. (Nor me, despite my many years on the other side of the camera). I mean, how many successful Rock guitarists actually read magazines like "Guitar Player"? SFA in my experience. A generation ago, acquisition and post production costs were a major impediment to a budding cinematographer, not any more. Why not just get a camera and start shooting? Where do you start? Well, have a look at something someone else has shot, and try to figure out how they did it. All you need for that is a DVD player and a notebook....

Yeah, but while it's true that you can now recreate a substantial part of the cinematic experience with affordable equipment in your home, the simple fact is that vast majority of the population can't be arsed doing so. For them their appetite for superior sound and big pictures is more cost-effectively satisfied by just going to the movies occasionally, rather than cluttering up their living rooms with oversized A-V equipment. I personally have a 55" TV which I can swing out from the wall, attached to a quality Surround sound system. However the attached Blu-ray player rarely gets used for playing anything but DVDs, and I'm the only one who ever turns the Surround sound system on :rolleyes: