Keith Walters

Well it's not generally known, but 4K panels were originally developed to produce 1920 x 1080 3-D displays that didn't require "active" glasses. By covering every other RGB triad with spots of so-called "Retardation Film", half of the triads will have their light 90º polarized with respect to the other half, so you can use the same cheap passive glasses they use in cinemas. I have seen samples of sets that use this technology with 1920 x 1080 "retardation" panels for 3-D and it does work surprisingly well, considering you're only getting a 540-line image. Haven't you ever wondered why they bothered with 4K screens in sizes under 50 inches? 4K would really only be useful with really big panels (100 inches or more). Screens can't practically be much bigger than that, as you wouldn't be able to get them through most domestic doorways!

In those days the film speed was so slow that all you needed was subdued lighting. In fact most photographers would simply wait until night time and do the processing under the light off a single candle. Until the 20th century most film emulsions only responded to blue light which is notably lacking in candle flames (and 19th century carbon-filament lamps). The early films were, however, much more sensitive to ultraviolet. which is why you had to keep them away from sunlight. I used to use Fuji Orthofilm which is an orthochromatic film (no response to red) for making printed circuit board negatives. I worked under a red safe light (just an ordinary compact fluorescent wrapped in red gel) but if somebody blundered into the darkroom at the wrong moment, it didn't seem to affect the negatives if they closed the door immediately.

On the subject of simulating an arc light, I've often wondered whether you could use a cheap electric welder and carbon rods. Ironically when I was recently testing a grid-tied inverter fed from roof-mounted solar panels with a 110V DC output, I found the output current from the solar panels had precisely the right characteristic to produce lovely long arcs between the connecting wires. With a pair of carbon rods from AAA cells I could actually produce an arc "flashlight" that drew only about 20 Watts! A more practical approach might be to use a high-intensity LED flashlight with its lens removed with some arrangement to make the light flicker. Because it's a point source, it produces the hard shadows characteristic of an arc light. A bit of smoke machine fluid of a portable hotplate set low would probably suffice for the smoke. (In an emergency you can use car brake fluid which has almost the same composition and is easier to get). One method I've used to simulate lightning is to run the current through a coarse (metal-working) file and drag a piece of bare wire along the rough surface to make an intermittent contact. Technically you need a blue LED, but white from a cheap flashlight still looks pretty convincing. You could always put blue gel on it of course, but if you're working under tungsten balanced lighting it's going to look blue anyway. To produce the softer pulsating effect of an arc light you could try replacing the bare wire with a carbon rod from a discarded dry cell. Ideally if you're using a CMOS camera. you'd want some method of partially smoothing out the flashes to avoid rolling shutter effects. If I'm ever asked to do that again (and am given sufficient notice) I'll try make up some sort of random electronic modulator.

When I was at Panavision Sydney they occasionally had "Garage Sales" where I once picked up a Japanese anamorphic adaptor for 16mm projectors for next to nothing. I had no idea what I was going to do with it, but the price was right. Next thing they were asking if they could have it back because it turned out they occasionally had clients who actually wanted that barrel distortion "look"! Obviously there was a lack of communication somewhere....

Apart from commericals, that sort of production was pretty much rental houses' bread-and-butter. I occasionally used to have to go on the set of US movies being made in Sydney, and I often used to wonder who the hell watched that rubbish, until one of the production guys explained to to me. It seems that cable TV companies in particular have a voracious appetite for anything that is "new". Basically if you have anything that is not obviously the work of amateurs, is reasonably watchable and is about 90 or so minutes long, you'll find someone with a programming hole that needs something like that to fill it. Each slot doesn't pay a huge amount, but there's an enormous number of such holes to fill, and it all adds up. I generally found these sorts of productions more pleasant to visit, because if you could come up with anything that helped them get the job done more efficiently or produce a better result, they were almost pathetically grateful. Too many beginners want their first production to be another Citizen Kane. If they set their sights a bit lower and tried to make something that looks more like one of these schedule stocking-fillers, they'd have more chance of getting a foot in the door with one of these "McDonalds" producers, which would provide a possible pathway to more prestigious work.

Which is pretty much what word processors did for book publishing.... Same ol' same ol'; the people at Sundance et al are perfectly well aware that there are young people out there with refreshing new ideas and the drive and passion to make them into interesting and even financially viable movies despite the limitations of their budget, but who can't be arsed trying to rise above the logjam of mediocrity, ineptitude, execrable vanity and knuckle-dragging stupidity that characterizes most wannabe film makers. I had 15 years at Panavision and Cameraquip, sitting through some of the most nail-screeching-on blackboardly-awful, über-cliched, abysmally-acted, cretinously-written, putridly-directed, and moronically-edited GARBAGE, that people inexplicably managed to scrape together the finance and resources to produce. Earth to Wannabes: A student film is meant to demonstrate to interested parties that you have the talent, industry and skill to rise above the limitations of the media that you can afford; it's not meant to expensively document your utter incompetence, insufferable vanity and complete indifference to reality.

Not necessarily. Remember Deckard explaining to Rachel: "Those aren't your memories; they're from Tyrell's nieces..." Could the same technology not have been used to copy the memories from Deckard's brain, for some nefarious purpose? I was always expecting that the "Tyrell" who was killed by Roy Batty would turn out to be a replicant decoy.

As a general rule, nothing picked up by a microphone from a loudspeaker is actually going to sound much like the "real world" version when heard through the cinema or TV sound system. As David says, you generally get the best results by making a "clean" recording of the person speaking with a high quality boom or body-worn microphone, and simultaneously making an "ambient" recording of the same audio coming out of the loudspeaker, capturing the room reverberation and so on. Mixing those together in Post will then give an on-screen rendition which sounds much more convincing. The same principle applies with rock concerts and similar situations. An audio feed from an on-camera microphone mixed with "clean" feed from the mixing desk gives pretty convincing results; neither signal on its own sounds any good. I can't emphasize enough the importance of good sound in your productions. Good sound is often what makes all the difference between an amateurish production, and one that looks like it might have been done by professionals using amateur equipment.

Actors have agents; and, maybe it's different in this country, but I don't recall anybody else in the actual film-making part of the industry ever talking having an agent. They would normally just wait for the phone to ring.... There are a few places that run a sort informal "Yellow Pages" for industry people but that's about it. "What you will find is that the agent will happily help themselves to your hard earned money, that I can guarantee." Which mucho applies to the talent side of things too :rolleyes:

"And why doesn't Best Buy even sell plasma anymore?" When flat panel displays first came on the market Plasma was all there really was, and the first ones were ludicrously expensive, very unreliable and gave a pretty ordinary picture compared to even run-of-the-mill CRT TVs. The first LCD panels were even worse with noticeable image lag and terrible off-axis viewing. However, around 2004-5 the quality of LCDs improved dramatically, to the point where for the average consumer there was no longer any discernible difference between the two technologies, except that LCD displays were generally much brighter and full-HD panels could be manufactured in smaller screen sizes than was possible for Plasma. Sony abandoned Plasma displays in 2006. Because of the enormous amount of investment that had been poured into Plasma panel infrastructure, the manufacturers trotted out all kinds of BS to try to extract a little more life from the technology, but as far as the average consumer is concerned, LCD was more than good enough, and the TVs were much thinner and lighter. Unfortunately, Plasma panel factories can only be used for making Plasma panels, and so none of the manufacturers ever made any money out of it; the big push to justify Plasma was more an effort to minimize losses. They simply had no way of knowing that LCDs were going to improve so much in both quality and price, and how fast this was going to happen. (In the 1990s, most manufacturers assumed that in the 21st century Digital TV was going to be largely based around CRT TVs, with flat panels as the "Top Shelf" option for people with more money than sense. This is why so many Digital TV standards were based around interlaced scanning, which for all practical purposes, no longer exists....) "So why exactly are you guys up on plasma and down on LCD?" There is always going to be a certain mentality keen to assert that they have some sort of superior cognitive powers that allows them to discern qualities not obvious to us mere mortals, but they're the same sort of people who claim that their music listening experience is magically enhanced by ridiculously expensive speaker cables that you could use to start a truck motor with. (I've had people pointing at MPEG artifacts and claiming that was a characteristic of "inferior" LCD technology. The only thing it proves to me is that, yes, it does indeed make you go blind... :rolleyes: ) As for OLED, this has been over-hyped somewhat. It's significant that Samsung have now abandoned large-screen OLED research, after years of leading the field with their AMOLED phone displays. While OLEDs are theoretically capable of an infinite brightness range, in practice, most OLED panels are based on existing LCD driver technology, which usually only has a 6-bit dynamic range. (That is, 64 brightness levels). The major difference is that OLEDs can switch completely off so making the screen completely black, but that doesn't really seem all that important to the average consumer. Also, Quantum Dot LCD backlights now give almost the same colour gamut as OLED, but without the risk of the OLED organic polymers degrading over time. But again, for most people, ordinary white LEDs are more than good enough.

It's funny that virtually no manufacturer gives you what would be an extremely useful feature: Audio line output jacks where the signal level tracks the level set by the volume control. A few sets have a stereo earphone jack that does this, but that's very much the exception; most of them have fixed-level headphone out. It makes an external speaker setup vastly easier to use, and particularly with modern wafer-thin TV designs, even the cheapest and nastiest stereo setup is going to sound a hell of a lot better than the microscopic. internal speakers. Actually just adding a sub-woofer of any size often makes a significant improvement. (Strictly speaking, they're really just "external bass drivers"; you can't actually hear the output from a true "Sub-Woofer", you can only feel it :-)

That means one of the 5,760 digital-to-analog converters along the top of the panel.has died, and it's unfortunately unrepairable. I still find it unbelievable that a 1920 x 1080 panel has 5,760 soldered connections along the top and another 1,080 down the side, soldered onto metallized glass. The flexible PC Board tracks they solder on are barely visible with the naked eye, and yet they manage to get them all aligned and soldered into place, and they work year-in year-out with remarkably few failures. And a 4K panel has 11,520 + 2160! When LCD TVs first came out I was wondering what the actual panel service life was going to be, and it greatly exceeded everybody's expectations. The only thing that was more incredible was the way the prices plummeted in just a few years I've repaired quite a few LCD TVs that have been given to me "for parts", and ironically, it's rarely the panel that's faulty; it's nearly always just a few dollars worth of parts in the power supply module. :rolleyes:

Drives are generally only fragile while they're spinning. Once power is removed, a spring-loaded assembly pulls the read-write heads off to the edges of the magnetic discs where nothing is recorded. I've seen portable hard drives treated quite shockingly, but oddly enough it's usually only the USB connector that suffers. On the other hand in my garage I've got some workbenches I made from the 12-layer plywood 6 foot x 3 Foot panels that they used to ship hard drives in to PC assemblers in 15 years ago. They were bolted together with these huge 3/4" black bolts, and you'd think any old crap bolts would have done for that, but these were top-of-the line products, real works of art! The drives themselves were sandwiched in several layers of bubble wrap; they were clearly determined those drives were going to arrive in prime condition!

Sure enough, you're right: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?125596-NASA-Dragon-on-Dragon-ready-for-launch-to-the-International-Space-Station&highlight=space+station The camera was delivered just on 2 years ago!! I'd thought of RED, but I can't quite get my head around this sudden reticence to announce their achievements. I'd sort of imagined that if if was them, they'd be blasting it from every rooftop, like they used to announce every 2.5 seconds of RED footage that had been used in every 2-bit TV movie, or every low-budget Bolivian Used Car Sales commercial that used a RED One as a "B" camera and so on :rolleyes: For the first time in their history they do something really significant and newsworthy, and all of a sudden they pull the "Quiet Achiever" act..... Edited to add: Hang on, reading right through that Reduser thread, they only delivered the camera to NASA 2 years ago; it was only delivered to the Space Station recently Matthew is right, up until now it's mostly been Canon C500s. More here, but still no apparent excitement about it: http://www.red.com/news/nasa-space-act-agreement

Does anybody know what camera they used for this? I saw a couple of shots showing the camera rig, but you can't really see the actual camera body.

I can't a post about this by anybody else here: We seem to be straying ever further from Geo Lucas's myopic 1999 vision: http://www.slashfilm.com/star-wars-episode-9-will-be-shot-on-65mm/ My personal vision is that the Next Big Thing is going to be lightweight wall-sized screens that can be rolled up like an old-fashioned home movie screen. At the moment, screen sizes bigger than about 65 inches are at about the limit of practicality; anything much bigger that that will need some means of stowing it when not in use. Clearly they want to future-proof their franchise as much as possible.

(Duplicated Post)

Unfortunately practical low-cost video tap recording systems are rather thin on the ground these days. "Back in the day", that is up until the early 21st century, you could easily get VHS and Video-8 monitor recorder combos for not too much money, but that market is now long gone. Rental companies used to make serious money modifying them for film set use (underscan, 4-pin cannon power etc). When I was at Panavision Sydney, we would routinely quote 16mm production packages where the video tap and recorder cost considerably more than the film camera (less lenses) itself! Video tap recorders were only ever intended to allow directors and other interested parties to get an idea of what was actually recorded and how well it was framed, they were never intended for assessing focus or general image quality. Colour taps were good for spotting inconsistencies in lighting colour balance; otherwise they were often a damned nuisance when ad clients were on the set. They often panicked because they thought that the tap colour was what the final result was going to look like! Nowadays most TV is now digital, and recording is done by simply saving the incoming digital data stream onto a USB drive or a hard drive built into a PVR. The nearest thing you can get to a standalone analog recorder is to use a USB Analog video capture dongle with a laptop. However, I've never seen one of those with recorder software that works anything like a VHS or Video-8 Deck. I was actually fooling around with some "endoscope" cameras that plug into my phone. They do pretty easy recording and playback, but I'm not sure how it would go as a video tap. The company I now work for have for some time been trying to source a cheap digital TV modulator that would allow you to record onto a digital set top box or a TV with built-in USB recording. The best we can do so far is this one, which at US$169 is still too pricey for our application: https://www.aliexpress.com/store/product/Genuine-Satlink-Meter-WS-6990-1-Route-DVB-T-modulator-AV-HDMI-Terrestrial-Finder-Meter/207828_32677531012.html?spm=2114.8147860.0.0.RH7iY4 We can get a better bulk price, but it's still not better enough. (By the way, the site's description is FUBAR; it calls it a "Satellite signal finder"...) Also, they quote in US$, but that device definitely won't work in the US; you need an ATSC modulator for that! A few years back the TV market was being flooded with 24" full HD sets that used a power supply "Dongle" instead of direct AC power. Consumers didn't like them overmuch, but most of them would work fine from both 12V and 24V camera batteries so they were popular on film sets. We're trying to source some of those for the R/V market, and if we could get a cheap Digital modulator, that would make an excellent 21st century replacement for the old video tap setup, particularly one that accepts both analog video and HDMI input like the one above.

The best thing is to set up a Google Imbedded Search: https://cse.google.com/cse/manage/create?Get+Started=Customize+Your+Own+Search+Engine This actually creates a custom search engine on Google's server, and they give you a block of JavaScript which has to be added to a web page. Here's the JS code they sent me from one I did just now: <script> (function() { var cx = '011089263614666430763:y7i94vttdhs'; var gcse = document.createElement('script'); gcse.type = 'text/javascript'; gcse.async = true; gcse.src = 'https://cse.google.com/cse.js?cx='+ cx; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s); })(); </script> <gcse:search></gcse:search> You can make a simple web page on your desktop by pasting the following into Notepad (Simple Text on a Mac): <Head> </head> <body> <script> (function() { var cx = '011089263614666430763:y7i94vttdhs'; var gcse = document.createElement('script'); gcse.type = 'text/javascript'; gcse.async = true; gcse.src = 'https://cse.google.com/cse.js?cx='+ cx; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(gcse, s); })(); </script> <gcse:search></gcse:search> </body> And then saving it to your desktop as any name followed by ".html", for example Cinematography Search.html When you open it you'll get a largely blank page with a single search box at the top. Type your search terms into that and Google will look for everything it can find related to those terms on this site. The company I work for recently received a nasty letter about using a trademarked word to describe "clone" products that we sell. The embedded search found 11 instances of its usage on our website that our IT department failed to pick up. It's a far better search engine than most websites use, and Google let you embed it for free, but there inevitably seems to be a "turf war" with IT departments that don't want to admit to their incompetence :rolleyes:

Best trick is to use Google search but add a site identifier like this: "master class" site:cinematography.com That will restrict the search to the site named. Or used the advanced search option: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en where there's a box you can add the website name. This routinely finds things a site's own search engines can't.

None of that had anything to do with the problem I was having. You have to know where to use quotes in handling Windows paths, but it's not rocket science. If you really want to be bulletproof, don't use any more than 8 alphanumeric characters for file or folder names. That way, the Windows and "DOS" versions of the names will be identical. Anyway enough of the PC bashing. The simple reality is, there's a bloody sight more Windows machines out there doing a vastly bigger range of jobs than any other format, so it's not surprising that things fall off occasionally. There's also a huge amount of custom-written business and industrial software that has to run on every new generation of Windows, or Microsoft will very quickly find themselves of a job. Almost invariably, alleged software compatibility problems turn out to be due to slackarse computer manufacturers not wanting to update their drivers. I've still got DOS software from the 1980s that will run under Windows 10; OK the hardware support is long gone, but it shows Microsoft know what side their bread is buttered on. You're lucky if Apple software can bridge two generations of operating system, which is why it is still a minority platform.

Aha! The click and drag bit only works if the source file is in the same folder as FFMPEG.exe This batch file works with files dragged from anywhere: cd C:\- FFMPEG ffmpeg -probesize 5000000 -i %1 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -qscale:v 11 -vendor ap10 -c:a pcm_s16le -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -chunk_duration 500000 prores_output.mov pause (I've got it in a folder called "- FFMPEG"; the minus sign makes it float to the top of the folder list). Bit of a bummer; I was thinking I could compile a "suite" of Batch files for common output formats, and just distribute it as a zip file. That way you'd have a first class converter system that you could update by simply downloading the latest version of FFMPEG. Not a total show-stopper I suppose; you'd just have to have everything zipped into a folder called FFMPEG, with instructions to copy it into the C drive root directory. Actually, this might be a better approach : ffmpeg -probesize 5000000 -i %1 -c:v prores_ks -profile:v 3 -qscale:v 11 -vendor ap10 -c:a pcm_s16le -pix_fmt yuv422p10le -chunk_duration 500000 %1.mov That way, the MOV file is created in the same directory as the source file, with the same name, but with .mov added, so picnic.mp4 becomes picnic.mp4.mov

That's what I did, but the batch file still isn't finding it. But if I force the same command prompt window to stay open, and type in FFMPEG followed by enter, it then runs. Perhaps there's something in the Win 7 setup.

Phil: I tried doing what you said with FFMPEG. If I try to run the batch file it comes up with the message "FFMPEG is not recognized as an executable file or batch file" (I had to add a line "dir/p" to keep the command prompt window open) But if you type in "ffmpeg" from the same command prompt window it runs, although it complains that you haven't entered any parameters. I had this problem before but I can't remember what the solution was. However it never occurred to me that you could simply click and drag files onto the batch file symbol; I just used to spell out the paths in full.

So far there have been no reports of anybody actually exploiting Quicktime like that. What Apple were actually saying is that if you don't use QuickTime they suggest you uninstall it. But you could say that about just about any program...