Mike Simpson

Looks burnt. Fire the electrics.

Actually adjusting the ASA on the red seems to affect the image, but in a pretty counterintuitive way. Adjusting the ASA shifts the dynamic range of the camera and can help preserve highlight detail or reduce noise in blacks. You can check out the red forums for a technical explaination, but the jist of it is you essentially increase the ASA in order to increase highlight detail, but at the cost of added noise in the shadows, and vice versa. So on bright exteriors where you are worried about highlights clipping, you can increase the ASA to, say 500 or 800, and essentially the dynamic range shifts. Lowering the ASA provides helps reduce noise in the shadows, so in low light situations, lower ASAs might actually be more useful. The whole thing seems counter intuitive to me but that seems the be the results of testing over on the red forums.

I had this issue come up when I called the rental house trying to get a set of lenses. The were skeptical, but the owner of the SR2 tells me that he has put both lenses on his camera no problem (I will find out in two weeks for sure). You will probably want a bridge plate for support though. Cant speak for the SR3.

lol that cant be true...

Ive shot on a couple different CP16 s and overall they seem pretty solid. They were originally news cameras and designed to be serviced in the field so everything should be pretty straightforward. I doubt you will have any issues. Ill try to pass along some advice from when shooting though, since the camera isnt really designed for film work some things are just nice to know beforehand. First, threading the camera is a bitch. Its not just that there are like 12 rollers to loop around, but the loop is really picky, and you dont always get immediate response about a tight loop. Ive had the camera run for sometimes a whole minute before it just tightens up and starts grinding. Also, it could run fine but you missed the loop by a sprocket, and you'll never know till you see the flicker when you get the footage back. Checking the gate is somewhat lame too. You basically have two choices: roll for 2 or 3 feet, open it up, advance the film, roll for another few feel afterwards (which gets super annoying and can waste alot of film) or you can stick an orangewood stick into the front of the camera and push the shutter to the side. The viewfinder is both really tricky to look through (I always feel like I cant see when my eye is snugly against the viewfinder), and very prone to light leaks. Its like a black hole or something. I tend to just keep my head wrapped in a blanket, especially when I'm outside. When the camera runs through it flips the emulsion over. I still dont understand why it does this. They are pretty easily modded to s16. I think thats about all I can remember right now. Goodluck!

Your resume doesnt really do much on its own. A good reel is better, but even that is limited by who you can get to watch it. Your first priority should probably be meeting other people in the industry, which with your experience probably means PAing, or you might be able to grip or 2nd on really low budget stuff. Id say at least 75% of the jobs I do I am referred to in one way or another. If only PAing drives you crazy look up the local film school and see if you cant find student projects to shoot to try to work on your reel and keep your creativity flowing. When I was in school there were alot of people who would work on our films and not be enrolled or anything.

And that really makes a bigger difference than the extra distance you get from maintaining the same intensity by spotting and moving back?

Maybe this should be a seperate subject but its somewhat related so Ill just ask. I was having a similar conversation dealing with a 4k thru a window yesterday, and we were trying to get the hardest light possible with a 4k fresnel. The window was about 5ftx5ft, the actor about 10 ft away from the window, the wall another 10 feet from the actor. So I asked for the light to be backed up and spotted in so it was hitting all of the window but not much more. My question: The gaffer told me I should flood the light out to get the as hard as possible. This seemed counter intuitive to me, and Im having a hard time wrapping my head around it. To me, it seems like I should spot the light in and back it up as much as I can while keeping the exposure good to get the hardest shadows. He claimed it should be as far away while full flood and maintaining good exposure. Anyone else run into this before?

From what I understand, for the scenes without any effects, it was HVX and alot of times just given to the actor. Heavy effects were the f23 and low light was the genesis.

why not?

Thanks for the replies guys. That seems about how I expected it to be. Michael: Im not really very printer saavy. How could i go about insuring that it is printed "actual size" for the specific groundglass? Is this something I could do pretty easily on my home printer or would i need some kind of fancy printer and/or software to make such a small precise little rectangle.

I would assume you shoot at 12fps or whatever framerate, then you try to duplicate the frames via a slow motion effect, although Ive never tried this so I cant speak of the quality.

Hello, Im shooting on an sr2 and, because of the nature of a few shots, it will be really hard to operate with just a marked monitor. I really need to see the 2.40 markings through the viewfinder. Does anyone know where I might be able to find a 2.40 groundglass for an SR2? If not, does anyone have any suggestions for a relatively accurate way to mark my current ground glass?

The look isnt really stuttery, just movement tends to streak and blur. You dont actually watch it back at 12 frames. You basically end up duplicating each frame to fit it into a 24 frame timeline, which if I understand your question, would achieve the same result.

A guy here in town had a fireball ignite from (presumably) dust particles settling on the hot as he was tieing in. This is someone who is a licensed electrician, and who does many many tieins. He lost his vision for (luckily only) 20 hours or so. Doesnt seem worth the risk to me.

Shooting at 12fps then transfering to 24fps will result in sped-up motion. Any change in speed (fast or slow motion) is the result of shooting at faster or slower frame rates, then watching them back at 24fps (or 30 or whatever the final frame rate ends up being). Just imagine a timeline. If you shot 12 frames every second, then watched it back at 24fps, every second you shot would turn into 1/2 a second of final screen time, and thus everthing would move twice as fast. Shooting at 12fps, then transfering at 12fps does not result in any change of speed. Essentially you are watching it back at the same speed you shot it. However, the big reason to do this is for the blurring effect. Since you are exposing each frame for twice as long, movement inside the frame tends to become very blurry. If you ever experimented with pans in photography this is a similar idea. If you are panning with a subject, the subject should be relatively sharp (because they are staying in the same place in the frame) but the background should experience blurring and streaking. There are some nice examples in the intro to Chungking Express. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIXW-d9DyA . Im pretty sure these are a much faster frame rate than 12fps. Maybe 6 or 4, but thats just a guess. Goodluck!

I use a really big, but pretty shallow bucket. Kinda like an oversized painting bucket. Works pretty well. I think ill try to combine it with the cardboard rolls idea though. I keep all my gels clipped with bullets and it never fails that the bullets are pulled off when someone is in a hurry and the bucket turns into a mess by the end of even a short shoot.

Ive had his idea for a while as well, but ive been thinking of it less as a problem as much as an interesting new technique. It also doesn't necessarily need to be as grandiose as creating a new format. A beam splitter into two cameras (much like the trick shots in 300), or maybe even trying to improve on the idea behind the genesis and varying the light sensitivity of the sensors on HD cameras would yield useable results. Ill be the first to admit that HDR is generally over the top and pretty awkward feeling, but done well it can have a nice surreal effect, and I could definitely think of uses for a version of HDR in film. And really if that is a look you are going for, HDR is actually fairly easy to apply and (although I dont know enough about post production to say for sure), I imagine if you were after such a look it would be much more efficient, and probably cheaper, than trying to achieve the look in a DI, or thru cgi, etc. Its pretty hard to say something like this would be a total waste of money. I would say something like Transformers is way more of a total waste of money =p

I think they are different =( Kinda remember having issues back in school, but I could be wrong.

I thought it was pretty interesting, even without the music.

Thats a pretty rough light kit. Have you considered spending your money on lights rather than film? Film looks great and all but you dont wanna spend all your money on it and not have the equipment to expose it. I feel dirty for suggesting this...

Great work. Its nice to see some more objective feedback of the camera. Whether or not its a great camera, its here and people are using it so its nice to get a good idea the hangups before getting on set.

Michael Bay everywhere! Check out this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWhBU1Nd1rM

I think what is most important is working as a dp. I have plenty of experience in camera, and take AC jobs where I can, but I try to spend most of my time working as and promoting myself as a DP. If you are looking for the most financially stable position for starting out I would suggest g&e since in purely mathimatical terms there are more jobs than in camera but if that's less important try them both.