Keith Walters

Oh well, I guess I've blown my chances of ever working on a US production. (Well, in the US anyway...) I'll never be able to own a Red because of my "Bad Attitude" either. I guess I've squandered all my opportunities, haven't I....

Yes, there is some of that, but the counter-productive policies of Actors Equity are legendary here. In any event, movies are still largely shot on sound stages, so there is no particular need for the whole thing to be shot in any particular country.

Actually, it was only episodes 2 & 3, although some Post work for Episode 1 was done here. There were also The Matrix movies, various flavours of Mission Incomprehensible, and the new Thor movie is to be shot here, amongst many others. Australia also lost a huge amount of well-paying work to New Zealand, largely thanks to the ongoing crackpot efforts of Actors Equity. But yes, an awful lot mega bum/seat interactions also came via Noo Zeeland. The hardest thing for Americans to get used to seems to be the fact that here, an electrician could ask a carpenter to hold a ladder for him, and not face union disciplinary action. That, and the lack of input from the Teamsters Union. Strangely, actors actually seemed to enjoy being driven around by whoever wasn't doing anything at the time, rather than some bloated union Neaderthal sweating in a cheap black suit...

Have you got an entry visa? You can't get into China without one, no matter how unlikely it is you'd want to stay there, and getting one can be an incredibly slow process, even in HK. Plus they take your passport for the entire time they're doing the processing. If you haven't got that sorted out yet, you need to get in touch with their consulate quick smart. My experience (with consumer products) is that it's far easier to get electronic products out of the country than into China. You wouldn't believe the trouble I've had getting dud appliances back to the Chinese manufacturers for investigation. We used to courier them to our Hong Kong office (where there are very few restrictions) and then get somebody to take them to China personally. I don't know why, but they seem far less strict with stuff carried personally than couriered or posted. And yes, they only take Yuan in China , but they will accept foreign currencies in Hong Kong. I don't know why they're so concerned about counterfeit foreign money, the Yuan look like they could be turned out on a half-decent inkjet printer...

The two circuit boards were clearly designed by the same person/persons at some point in their lives. I mean why would RED include mounting holes for the white connector shown on the DVS board, if they weren't going to use them? There are other small differences in the components on the boards, but they appear to have been designed with universality in mind. In other places there are solder pads where no chip is fitted on either board. This is not like a radio circuit where the layout is critical; two people given the task of designing circuit boards for the same system would likely create completely different (but functionally identical) designs. So the hardware wouldn't have been designed by RED, and certainly not by Jarred Land :-) (It's like the RED sensors; if they're really "bespoke" designs specifically crafted to the needs of cinematographers, then why are they all 16:9 and not 4:3 like the Arri sensors, which we know were designed for them by the Fraunhofer Institute).

Like a lot of films I suspect Tomorrowland suffered from the “Too Many Cooks” syndrome. Most of the movie was done is a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek fashion, but then we suddenly have these homicidal androids blasting unsuspecting people to pieces for no logical reason, which suddenly darkened the whole mood of the film. It’s like some ignorant executive-who-feels-he-must-be-seen-to-have-an-input decided that the film was too “juvenile” and they needed to throw in some extreme violence to make it more relevant to adult audiences. To me the effect was more like the way Bollywood producers will follow an extremely gory shoot-em-up scene with a bubbleheaded song and dance number.... I really liked John Carter, particularly because, rather than getting some hack writer to "modernize" they story, they made some effort to make it look like something that might have actually been made at the time the books were written, but using modern film making technologies. The most excruciating aspect of this project was that it was originally going to be called “John Carter of Mars” like the original book, but some un-named executive at Disney decided they should remove the “of Mars” part, apparently because Mars Needs Moms turned out to be such a stinker…. The Marvel people seem to keep turning out moneymakers at no great expense, at least the ones where the original Marvel comics people are involved (Iron Man, Thor, The Avengers etc). The ones where they lost control of the franchises (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four etc) have never done anywhere as well. On the other hand, their main comics competitors, DC comics, have had only moderate success with their characters, (Superman, Green Lantern etc). Batman has been the only real success story, but the movie character doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the original DC comics character.

100% agree. I don't know why it isn't used more.

Also, RED cameras are substantially cheaper then anything Arri makes, so more people own RED then Alexa. I did say "Big Time". Numerically there may be more Red productions that Arri, but where cost isn't really an issue, Arri wins just about every time. Clearly resolution (real or imagined) isn't a major factor. Naturally if somebody owns a Red camera, they're going to use it for their own productions But I don't think too many people who regularly make >$100 million productions actually own any cameras. and not enough time making the system higher resolution. Nobody appears to be particularly interested in resolution though. If they were, either fewer cinema release features would have been shot with Arri cameras, or Arri would have come out with higher resolution cameras. Arri have actually had "4K" CMOS sensor chips available for at least as long as the Alexa has been available, but they said nobody appeared to be particularly interested. (Well nobody who was likley to be actually going to shoot anything of any significance, which is pretty much where we came in, about 10 years ago). In any case, I think the real competition now is the Sony F65.

The colours on Red cameras have been vin ordinaire from day #1. The dye formulations required for the Bayer mask are ultra-critical; no amount of "downstream" digital processing is ever going to fix that, any more than it can give you "natural daylight" results shooting under cheap supermarkert fluorescent tubes. I've told Jannard & Co on two separate occasions how they could fix this, but all I ever got was ridicule and abuse. They still appear to be using industry standard dye colours, which are fine for CCTV and phone cameras, nowhere near good enough for serious cinematography work. And how many big-time productions get shot on Red cameras? And now many on the Alexa?

So do I. But just about all the movies we watch are rentals, and if you get the Blu-Ray version, you could only play it on that one TV, whereas with DVDs you have a larger choice of viewing areas. Sometimes I get the Blu-Ray as well, but nobody in my household seems to be able to either tell the difference, or care. Anyway I haven't thrown the Blu-Ray player out yet. I might be able to fix it, but they're so cheap now it's probably not worth the bother. Remember that there were once multi-Billion dollar industries based on 78RPM records and VHS videotape. Both formats took an extraordinarliy long time to die even when vastly better alternatives became available.... Just sayin....

My Philips Blu-Ray player died a couple of months back, but since virtually the only thing anybody ever used it for was playing DVDs, I replaced it a $25 job from Target. Not only does it work just as well, it fires up instantly instead of spending two minutes trying to understand why it can't find a network or WiFi connection (I mean this has gotta be a mistake right? How can anybody NOT want to take advantage of all that BD+ has to offer??!)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3237451/Sharp-sell-8K-TV-October-Screen-produce-images-clear-appear-3D-ll-need-133-000-one.html I mean, do we really need 8K TVs? I think the manufacturers have gone into pixel overload. The reality is, most digital TV currently being transmitted in the world today is either 576i/480i with an effective pixel resolution of about 650 x 350, and often less, depending on how much compression the broadcasters think they can get away with. This is basically the resolution standard the NTSC recommended in 1941! HD when it is transmitted is either 720p (1280 x 720) or 1080i (1920 x 1080 interlaced, which has about the same effective resolution as 720p). As far as I'm aware, nobody transmits 1080p, at least not ion a regular basis. From a standing start in about 2000, the TV manufacturing industry went from a rag-tag assortment of panel resolutions (often just 1024 x 768), before finaly settling down to a mixture of 1366 x 768 ("HD") and 1920 x 1080 ("Full HD") by about 2010. 4K screens made their debut a couple of years ago, but rapidly migrated to the "clearance" areas, replacing the 3-D "Next Big Thing" models that preceded them. My Samsung Galaxy S5 phone shoots 4K video, and it really is 4K. You can zoom in on details that are not readable in the normal 1920 x 1080 screen resolution, (like the "Sci Fi" versions you see on CSI and other overly-imaginitive and reality-decoupled cop operas). That is actually quite useful, since you can pull quite respectable stills (about 12 megapixel) from the video stream. Naturally a major limiting factor is the tiny lens, but it's amazing for what it is. The two main killers are the 1GB/minute memory requirements, and the fact that it really guzzles the battery power. The video is also a bit jerky on fast moving scenes, and generally everything works better if you throttle back to 1920 x 1080 But why the S5 particularly needs a full HD screen is another matter, since I can only just discern the individual pixels.even with a powerful magnifying glass. (You need a microscope to see them clearly, and it's interesting that the OLEDs are tiny dots with a large amount of clear space around them, so it would be possible to actually make the "see through" monitor screens currently beloved of the aforesaid reality-disconnected cop shows :rolleyes:) Meanwhile, not to be outdone, the current Galaxy S6 screen is 2560 ×1440 pixels; not 4K (yet!), but watch this space! So, after the complete crash and burn of 4K TVs, why do they think anybody is going to be interested in 8K? As it is, I know a few people with 4K TVs, and the only source of 4K video they have had (apart from the nauseating sample footage the manufacturers supply) was what I'd given them from my phone. The only software I have that can edit 4K is the freeware AVIDemux app, which can only cut and splice footage, rather like cutting film.

http://www.dailytech.com/AntiPiracy+Ad+Creators+Fined+For+Stealing+Musicians+Work/article25205.htm

Here: From the man himself: http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=29620&do=findComment&comment=221746

"Most movies are in theaters for a month to six weeks..." And for the bulk of the time, playing to near-empty houses. For popular releases, usually the cinemas are only full for the first few screenings. After that, unless the weather is particualrly lousy, for most screenings you're lucky to get 10% of the seats with actual bums on them. It normally picks up a bit towards the end of the run when people realize that they need to get in quick if they're going to see it on the big screen but that's about it. This mentality came about when everything was projected on film and it was such a chore to re-thread the projector and re-load the "Pancakes", that projectors were left loaded up for weeks at a time. Unfortunately the proponents of digital projection seemed to have done everything they could to make Digtial Projectors as inconvenient to use as film! There are lots of applications where cinematic projection of live video would make sense: Live presentation of major sporting events in other cities or countries, finals of Reality TV shows etc, where the presence of a large audience of like-minded fans would restore something of the original atmosphere.

Why is that fascinating? People have been printing much the same sort of thing for over 15 years, they would have to get it right eventually. Except that film origination is still being used for a lot of cinematic release projects. In Western countries very few release prints are made now, but they are still being made for special purposes. Kodak is the last remaining manufacturer of print film in the world, but they're still making it, so there is still a market for it. Also, "Celluloid" hasn't actually been used since about 1950, as it's extremely flammable; not the sort of thing you'd really want sharing space with a carbon arc lamp :rolleyes:

Tom's actually listed as a moderator on RedUser. He hasn't posted for a while; but this last post gives some contact details. http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?130960-Happy-Birthday-Jeff-Kilgroe!&p=1500943&viewfull=1#post1500943 You can just log into Reduser and send him a PM- Oh, wait a minute..... :rolleyes: But seriously, the link above will get you there whether or not you actually log in :-)

If the fluorescent tubes are mounted in enclosed "luminaires" with a sheet of glass on the bottom, you might be better off fitting sheets of colour correction gel on top of the glass. That way you can get them to more closely match any other light sources in the scene. Failing that, you can tape strips of gel around the individual tubes, but this is a bit fiddly as you have to make sure the seam is at the top, As far as I am aware, Kino Flos are just ordinary fluorescent tubes with more care taken with the colour temperature of the phosphors used. If at all possible, whatever you use, I would suggest you change all the tubes at once because unless the school has a regular lighting maintenance contract, you're going to find that the tubes have been fitted at different times, and will be different brands and have different colour temperatures, which is not obvious to the naked eye but is painfully obvious when photographed. Also , if the fluorescent fittings use old-fashioned iron core ballasts (most likely in a school) you're likely to have strobing problems, and these are likely to be worse as the tubes age. Depending on budget, you might be better off buying a carton of tubes from a hardware store and basically just donating them to the school when you're finished. As Phil has suggested, ideally you should get "Tri-Phosphor" tubes which are similar to Kino Flos but they are somewhat more expensive. If strobing is too much of a problem, another approach is to use LED-based replacements for the fluorescent tubes. These are normally just a drop-in replacement, but you have to change the starter unit at the same time. The good thing about those is that they are independent of the power rating of the ballast, and they do not strobe. They are a lot more more expensive of course. It's the sort of thing a lighting gaffer might consider having in his truck, perhaps with a range of slide-on correction filters.

There's lots of antiquated hardware still running out there. http://www.pcworld.com/article/249951/if_it_aint_broke_dont_fix_it_ancient_computers_in_use_today.html One of the many problems is, early computers didn't use microprocessors; their logic circuitry was made up of thousands of electronic circuit boards, with similar construction methods to what you find in radios and TV sets. That meant it was possible for technicians and engineers to modify the circuitry to correct bugs or make certain programs run more efficiently. The problem then was that if somebody then tried to run a program that hadn't been run for a few years it might crash because it wasn't updated to operate with the modified hardware. This problem was inelegantly named "Software Rot" and was a real problem when just about computer hardware and software were custom installations. (The notion of mass-produced software was a much later development that only arrived with PCs). So in lot of cases even if you can get a modern PC designed to emulate the hardware of an old computer, you can't guarantee that the system it is going to emulate hasn't been modified in some undetected way, until something suddenly falls over in a big way. Generally, it's often more practical to just pay somebody to keep the old one going. There are thousands of factory installations in the US and elsewhere where it is simply not practical to replace Antiquated computer equipment (in some cases dating back to the 1950s) because it would mean shutting down the entire production line for an indeterminate length of time. I know that Atlab/Deluxe in Sydney still used a punched paper tape reader to control the colour correction filters on their release print duplication chains, right up until they shut them down. They did actually have floppy disc based replacement modules available, but they never had the time to fit them, and they were also afraid if they did, something might go pear-shaped, and they wouldn't realize it until they'd sent out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of off-colour prints! The old puncher worked, and you could still get paper for it, so if it ain't broke... It's a similar story with old-fashioned Selenium rectifiers. http://cougarelectronics.com/ Even though Silicon rectifiers are far more efficient and more reliable, there is a huge amount of equipment (Mainly electroplating and Aluminum refining equipment) with huge transformers that were optimized to use Selenium rectifiers, and simply will not work properly with Silicon devices. It's more cost-effective to simply have somebody keep making selenium rectifiers, regardless of the price.

With a lot of classic Science Fiction written decades ago, the ONLY convincing way it can be turned into a movie today is pretend you are making the movie at the time the story was written but using modern equipment of course. That was one of truly great things about John Carter (of Mars). The Martian aircraft looked like a logical development of the sort of aircraft actually in existence when the original book was written. If I remember correctly (I'd have to watch it again) I think they explained Mars's habitability by suggesting that Carter traveled in time as well as space, back to when Mars had a more Earth like climate . It's incredible that by using a bit of imagination and rear projection, the were able to produce very convincing-looking iPad-like devices in 2001: A Space Odyssey, 40 years before anything like that actually existed. And yet, so many later productions of scenes supposedly set centuries in the future feature clunky-looking CRT monitors. The biggest problem with most Science Fiction is that it fails miserably in predicting the way Human technologies actually went. Until the1980s about the nearest thing to a cellphone anybody ever came up with was Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist radio, and only HE and his colleagues actually had those. The idea that primary school kids would be carrying their own personal all-in-one phone, camera, FM radio, solid-state music player, and whatever else they stick in there these days to convince you you need a new one :rolleyes: was never even thought of. One of my favorite examples of that was an old Issac Asimov short story written in the 50s but set centuries in the future, where a kid was complaining that he had to go to school to use a "real" computer with a keyboard, because with the one his cheapskate parents had at home, he had to enter data on punched cards! :D Disclaimer: No I'm not THAT old; but I know what punched cards are and how they were used!

Of course they can; the black areas at the top and bottom of the screen are a dead giveaway. "As for anamorphic being an answer to a question no-one asked, I have grown up with a love for 2x anamorphic lenses that I could never even explain until I was a teenager and began to discover filmmaking technically. Even as I child I knew I loved the flares, the barrel distortion and the odd 3D feeling the format gives to shallow focus shots. I really do wish that people would except that we have two great standard aspect ratios and concentrate more on what they are putting in that rectangle" Yes but the industry is not financed by people who love making films (or would like to). It's financed by billions of people who really couldn't give a rat's arse about that sort of thing. People who for example decided that the money they were spending on movie tickets might be better put toward buying a TV set, VCR, DVD player etc.

The only reason the studios went for 2.35:1 in the first place was: A. It gave audiences something they couldn't experience on TV B. There was little or no scope for increasing the height of the screen, but since in the early days many cinemas were converted drama theatres, there was usually plenty of scope for widening the screen by lopping off the "wings" (you know, the things wot understudies were always waiting in :rolleyes: ) Basically they went for widescreen because they could! The simple reality is, most lay people can't even tell the difference between 1.85:1 and 2.35:1, and even fewer punters seem to care. Anamorphic was just another in the long sad line of answers-to-questions-that-nobody-was-really-asking.... You know, like AM stereo, Quadrophonic LPs, the DCC tape format, the DAT format (as a domestic product anyway), stereo TV, 3D movies, 4K TVs, S-VHS and ED-Beta. The only difference was that with movies, the consumer didn't really get a lot of say in the matter. Except perhaps for not showing any particular preference for Digital projection over film prints..... About the only real advantage of 4K projectors is they make letterboxing more practical.

Region coding has nothing to do with the origination standard. All modern DVD players can play discs originated in either NTSC or PAL formats, and display the video in whatever standard the DVD player is set to output. As I understand it, DVD players sold in the USA are usually permanently set to output NTSC analog video, whereas those sold in other countries give you a choice of: Permanent PAL Permanent NTSC "Auto", where the output standard follows the origination standard, on the basis that images usually display best in the format they were originated in. This however, requires a TV capable of displaying both PAL and NTSC and automatically selecting the correct standard. Most analog TVs made since the mid 90s were capable of doing this, and all modern Flat Panel TVs can. I have seen numerous Region 4 discs that were clearly transferred at the 30fps NTSC frame rate. In the early days, there would have been separate NTSC and PAL transfers made, but that process seems to have been discontinued, since virtually all DVD players can do the necessary standards conversion automatically.

I can assure you, Atlab ran a gigantic operation in Sydney, and the processing chains were running 24/7 in peak periods. (I worked there for a while until I got a real job :-) There were two levels: the floor where all the film was processed with huge stainless steel processing tanks and drying rooms, and the basement level where all the chemicals were stored/replenished, which looked like a mini oil refinery. As I said, it was a huge operation, but of course in recent years it's dwindled to almost nothing, since all the money was in release prints. Panavision are located in the same industrial complex; is there somebody else here who can give an update on Atlab/Deluxe?

I'm not sure where you got that from. Most of the film prints shown in Australia were made by Atlab (now Deluxe) in Sydney. They also serviced a significant part of the South East Asian market. In the past there might have been some "recycling" of prints because movies released in the US summer break were not usually released here until the Southern hemisphere summer break (which is at the end of the year). The rise of online shopping in the 1990s and routine availability of mutli-standard VCRs meant that people here (and other places) were then able to get copies of movies on video long before local cinematic release, which cut into box-office sales. So when DVDs came out there was then an attempt to prevent a repeat of this by "region coding" of DVD discs and players, so a movie sold in the US would not play in a player sold in Australia for example. Most Chinese DVD player manufacturers simply ignored this, or made defeating it a simple matter of pressing a few keys on the remote, instructions for which mysteriously always found their way onto the Web :-) It was technically illegal to import region-free players into Australia, but I don't think there was ever a single prosecution.... The ultimate irony had to be Sony, who were one of the leading lights of the consortium behind this scheme. They were having a hard time selling their DVD players in Australia, because they would law-abidingly only play Region 4 discs, whereas the average "no name" supermarket player for a quarter the price would usually play anything. Then Sony realized that it was only illegal to import "region-free" players; there was nothing to stop anyone from selling them after they had been imported. So in Sony's warehouse they had to laboriously open up every DVD player and use a specially modified remote control to disable the region coding that their own lawyers had insisted on :-) Much the same thing happened with Blu-ray, and in fact most distributors don't even bother region coding their discs any more. So in the end, the only viable solution was for all US Summer release "Tentpole" movies to be released in cinemas virtually simultaneously around the world, so now we get to see them in the middle of our winter, where the kids only get a relatively short term break... The other problem with recycling prints is that the digital soundtrack (particularly the most popular Dolby "between the sprocket holes" version) has a very limited lifespan (typically around 100 showings). When there is a digital "dropout" the projector automatically switches back to the analog track, and if this starts to happen too often the projectionist will just switch permanently to the analog track, as that's subjectively less annoying than the constant flicking between digital and analog.