Mike Simpson

Could be that lens too, or a combination. Have you shot with any primes?

1. Cons are pretty numerous. The out of focus area tends to look a bit grainy and wierd. Overall softness and more extreme softness around the edges. Vignetting. Noise. Light loss. Overall dirty look from the artificial grain the adapters try to create. 2. I think the P&S adapter is hands down the best. The letus is decent, and the newer brevis is also decent. I wouldnt touch the redrock or movietube with a stick. 3. There is definitely a light loss. Im not really sure why the movietube is so big and ridiculous, the brevis and redrock are more simple designs. 4. 35 adapters can actually look good, but the final destination of your film should play an important decision on if you decide to use one. When blown up it looks like someone dragged the film through the mud to me. The image just doesnt hold up. If you are showing on web or SD I doubt too many people will notice. Ive had alot of people ask if the adapter stuff on my reel is 35 and vice versa when the see it on the internets =p And yeah, search if you want more information.

Id be interested in hearing your rates as well. Shoot me an email.

Ive spent about 2 months in a different country 3 times this year. Been crazy for traveling; I feel like I'm gone more than I'm home. I imagine I would feel pretty guilty or at least bad if I had a family.

If you can even get one of the cheap wireless units it will change your life. I always push for at least a bartech. its really irritating trying to make tiny adjustments (say on a closeup when an actor is just leaning forward and back) on a loose ff.

Old Bolex's have little slots for gels. In school we would cut out NDs, B, and O for them, but it was a pain in the ass, and I dont doubt the previous posts, but the lenses were bad enough on their own that it didnt matter much =p Also the camera was designed for it, so the gel would actually sit behind the lens. Taping a gel to the lens or mattebox sounds like a total nightmare.

muslin is pretty thick. It takes some serious light to really get through; even if you pop it overhead and have direct sunlight pounding through it will probably feel like shade. Youre better off using it for bounce. Hi-lite's nice, but sometimes looks a bit artificial. Try it out first if you can, and any other diffusions you might be thinking of. Ive seen visqueen, bubbblewrap, and even nearly transparent trashbags taped up and stretched out into 12x and 20x frames. One of the most irritating problems when shooting day exteriors is dealing with clouds. In general when you start shooting you need to decide if it will be cloudy or sunny in the scene, and by the end of the day its usually more of whatever you didnt choose. Have a plan if clouds suddenly roll in, since you will go from high contrast to fairly flat (although in general the plan is usually wait or bring in lights, which I'm not sure you will have time/money for). I also never go outside without a few ND grads. They are amazing. Polarizer is great too.

yeah you have to just link photos. try flickr too.

Pretty cool I suppose.

Thats why you need to shoot 16x9 and crop the sides to 4x3 =D Letterbox...ish!

im so jealous. How did you go about getting such a clean cutout? That must have taken forever!

I think it looks pretty good. Im most impressed with the light sensitivity i suppose.

how about a gold reflector? =D also I remember NC straw having a subtle gold feeling but its been a while since ive used it.

if youre looking for a very generic way of shooting it, then the soft frontal fill, harder backlight thing is probably the standard formula. I dont know about making the HMI flicker though. Theres a great movie called Goodbye Dragon Inn thats is all shot within a movie theater and there is a wealth of ideas there.

Thats the best thing about ACing. The irony. As you get better you starting working bigger budget stuff, and get access to the tools that make the job easier.

In theory they will look the same. However, there is some inaccuracy in markings sometimes. But probably more importantly, there is a spot on the 10-100 that will look just like 50mm prime (it just might be more like 52mm or something). The difference is that primes are lighter, and tend have smaller aperture settings. A good example is canon's still photography line. canon makes a 24-70mm zoom. Its max aperture is a 2.8, but its very sharp and looks great. However, the 50mm prime opens to 1.4, so you can get alot more light out of it, and if they are both set to 2.8, the prime is sharper. This will be generally true of most prime/zoom relationships.

i have no complaints about the L758Cine. Its really a great meter and does everything I want it to. i even asked it to light for me once and it did.

It was really only a matter of time before still cameras started functioning as video cameras. I think its mostly marketed towards journalists to capture something on the fly, but I could see the 5D being a legitimate low end video camera for at least certain types of projects. I think its safe to say the shutter and the AF/focus options would be the real deciding factors on if this camera can function in filmmaking. Motion seems like it could cause problems if there really is a a rolling shutter issue (but they seem to have taken that feedback from the D90) and I wonder how the camera would respond to motion, both within the frame and the camera itself, but I'm more interested in how it could handle focusing. I assume that (by listening to them; I have no real basis for this), the motors in the lens are designed for quick snappy focusing, not so much slow and/or smooth focusing. Maybe that bluetooth follow focus thats been in development would solve the focus issues though. Its definitely something to keep an eye on. Even if it doesnt work so well for filmmaking its still an amazing dslr and im pretty sure im gonna buy one.

it makes more sense if you can look at a lens with distance markings too. Lets pretend on some lens I am making up some Fstop gives 1 inch of depth of field along the distance markings (i mean if you were to actually measure on the lens how far apart two distance markings are). So on the close focusing end of the lens where 3 feet and 4 feet are an inch apart, you have 1 foot of depth of field. But towards the end of the lens, 15 feet to 40 feet might be an inch apart, so then your depth of field is much greater (25ft), etc etc.

lol

Are you trying to get rid of all of the spill? Or just limit it? If you want 0 spill you could just do blue/greenscreen. If I saw an actor standing ithat super green room with no green on him at all I would probably just assume it was blue/greenscreen anyway =p

well I dont have any unprocessed footage off hand, but I can show you some stuff that I processed and tweaked exposure a bit. If you take a look at my reel: www.mike-simpson.com there is some train station stuff pretty close to the beginning. There was a 35 adapter involved, so if anything there is more noise here than the camera would be clean, but I dont feel like its anything too different vs. the camera alone. We shot at night and I was really trying to push the camera more than I ever had; I think usually the fill side was at least 3.5 stops under. I really just wanted a tiny bit of detail and eyelights. Past like 4 stop (aprox, I dont remember exactly) stuff looked too noisy to me, and I just crushed it to black. If you're really curious about more specifics I bet I have some notes I could search for.

Yeah im pretty sure those lenses require light compensation too. I know most switar lenses do. If you want to get rid of the grain overexposing a bit would help. And the difference between 16 and s16 is pretty noticeable too.

The mirror thing could work but it seems like it would be more work to control the light, soften it, etc. Usually these rigs involve a snoot or blackwrap to really keep the light focused on the table. Kinda just depends what you want. Theres really a ton of ways to do it. But as far as those two options go, its not something that is incredibly time consuming either way. You could always just try both. If the effect you want is the light overhead, id try that first. You could also just rig the light to the ceiling or run some speedrail across the table to attach the light to if its a heavy unit.

Thanks. Its a mix, 35, s16, 16, (all to HDCAM) and a few HD formats, mostly varicam, and a chunk of red footage. I did H.264 through compressor; a modified version of the LAN/Intranet thing. It took a number of exports tweaking settings to look the same online as it does on my monitor. Basically I think I had to add a bit of contrast and a bit of sharpness to compensate for the compression or whatever happens in the online world. It was just a matter of exporting like 20 different options and comparing them all and actually fairly frustrating =\ And yeah its a big file. Theres a smaller one around too but I dont have a link on the website at the moment.