Saul Rodgar

I'd personally use 5201 almost exclusively, in fact I have done that with stellar results. It gets so bright up there with the light reflected from the snow, I can't think why I'd use 5207, except if I could only take one stock, or if were filming slo-mo / narrow shutter, early or late twilight or during a storm, of course. Personally, I don't like heavily NDing the lens if I can avoid it, but that is just me. The filtration choices recommended above (Pola, UV, grads) are what I'd use.

If you are filming on snow, make sure to measure the sunlight reflected from the snow as well as that is coming directly from the sun. If you are filming with lots of contrast in the picture and your (spot) light meter has multi-zone metering or average exposure mode, or even reflective exposure mode on an incident light meter (and you know how to use it) then do that, it can't hurt. You want your negative well exposed and with proper density, without crushing blacks or blowing highlights. Filming outdoors with so many levels of gray can be tricky, particularly if you are doing camera moves, even simple panning can be tricky sometimes due to exposure changes, back lighting, glares, flares, etc.

Totally separate. The SR, and all Co-Ax mags keep feed and take up separated. All you'd loose would be the feed side, unless they also opened up the take up. All that feed, though, is unusable.

Ditto. Always helps to put tape on loaded magazines' latches. And along the surface where the door and the magazine meet. That way no one can accidentally open them up without going through the process of taking all the tape off, at which point they'll hopefully realize what they are doing is wrong. I've seen even really experienced ACs goof off and open exposed take up side mags without tape on. ;)

Dunno if there is a thread about this camera. Couldn't find one. Peter DeCrescenzo had posted about this on one of the GH1/2 threads, but I think now that the camera has been formally announced, it deserves a thread of its own.

http://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/af100/feature04.html

http://www.dpreview.com/news/1010/10101505panaaf100.asp

The camera looks interesting, like an over sized HVX200 minus the lens. The first link claims no aliasing or moire artifacts due to OLPFs and the like. It has HD-SDI out, which is very be nice, since the camera records AVCHD at rather modest 24Mbs in the highest quality (PE) mode, which translates to 12 hrs of footage onto a 64gig SDXC card. :blink:

Price point is certainly attractive- under $5000!! -especially considering that the 3D small sensor camera offering by Panasonic is a mere $22,000:

http://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/3d/ag-3da1/index.html

Panasonic also makes a 3D lens for the GH2 that costs a fraction of the 3DA1. This lens is usable on the AF100 too. Which makes no sense to me. Also very attractive is the AF100's capability to use pretty much any 35mm still and movie lens under the sun (with adapters).

The variable frame rates are nice, at full 1080 24P native, among many other formats. So is the WFM on the built in LCD monitor. Hand held work with it seems a bit of a challenge given the size and design of the camera tho.

Exciting. It looks like the big manufacturers are responding to REDs challenge (minus RAW recording, obviously). We'll see what Canon and Sony come out with in the near future. No word on any link to any footage from the camera yet.

 

 

More movies just means more movies -- more crappy ones but probably more good ones too.

I disagree on a purely empirical basis. Obviously I can't see every movie shot on HD out there, but of what I have seen, 99.9% is garbage. Obviously that is also subjective. Anyone else that saw those same movies could say they were awesome.

There is a Ravi Shankar documentary movie shot in the late 60s, when there was a huge explosion of Indian music and culture in the west. In it he talks about all these people who went to his California school to study classical Indian music. Trouble was, he said, almost everyone expected to be able to master a raga, in all its complex, nuanced and difficult nature in just a couple of sessions. My take on the HD / RED / HDSLR is that a lot of people (spurred by companies ads) come to filmmaking the same way.

I get it all the time. Someone hires me wanting to spend a couple of thousand dollars, say, but expecting results that compare with movies that cost millions. "Why not?" they say. "We have a RED," or what have you.

A race to the bottom, that is what it is.

 

 

So you cannot blame indie filmmakers for the absolute garbage films Hollywood has been spitting out. Those are 50 million + films, with A-list actors, unlimited film and gear, etc. It's their own fault that their movies suck. Some kid with a Canon 7D is not causing Hollywood to put out crappy major films.

 

How exactly was there a "democratization of the multi-million budget movies"?? You still need tens of millions of dollars to make them. How is that democratic???? Can the average person pick up an ARRI 435 and go shoot a 5 million-dollar film?

I am not blaming anyone, I am saying all those people are crowding the field.

And what I meant about the "democratization of the multi-million budget movies"is that there were a lot many more multi-million dollar features being produced before 2007 than ever before. Sure, not everyone got to shoot one, but more people did than ever before. And a lot of viewers stayed home in spite of that.

They used to shoot major historical events with 35mm Mitchells (albeit B&W, when amateurs had color 8mm).

 

Then, with the arrival of television, 16mm became the norm. Color reversal was arguably a big improvement over B&W neg., but now major historical events are often shot on cameraphones. Tiananmen Square was, I believe, captured on either VHS or 8mm analog videotape and physically smuggled out. The famous "photo" of the man standing in front of the tank was an enlargement from a field of that tape.

 

 

It's absolutely better to have a major event captured on a cell phone, or VHS, than nothing at all, but with the "democratization" as Tom calls it of the film/video industry, this merely seems to have the effect of diluting the budgets for real PROFESSIONALS who will lug 60 lbs. of gear around, if need be, to get the shot. I do not think an "industry" composed almost entirely of underpaid individuals, working another 9-5 can do the same job as dedicated pros, eeking out a living, but being able to pay the bills without a waiter job to boot.

 

 

Look at the events in the newsprint industry. Laugh all you want at the printed page, but those papers, for 50c a day, are what FUNDS a lot of the AP/Getty guys and the big city papers that are then linked to Google for everyone to read for free.

 

Have any of you started to notice the huge drop in writing quality that we're seeing hitting news sites? I was shocked to see a blog entry listed with a major headline on Yahoo News, my goto source for casual reading.

 

 

I think the same phenomenon is eventually going to hit broadcast TV next and even Hollywood entertainment. There's only so much water and the pool, and I'm afraid that it's going to get to the point where there are a bunch of guys splashing their feet in puddles.

Well said. Thank you.

Your claim that going to the movies these days is a dreadful scenario points at the fact that because there are so many more movies being released these days -all competing for a smaller pool of viewers and therefore appealing to the lowest common denominator in order to do well at the box office- they are not as good as they used to be. In a way, there was a democratization of the multi-million budget movies, so to speak. Which by your implicit admission is not necessarily a good thing.

More movies= higher number of crappy movies.

And the pen and ink analogy is not so valid because film making is always been a group effort, while writing is generally done by a single person. If a novel were comprised by a chapter written by a separate person, I think there would be far fewer books of note out there.

More later, running late for a shoot.

This saddens me. I love the '12 stock, V3 200T or not. :o

Isn't reduser the site for waffle like this?

 

Since when did soundbites from a company's PR unit replace independent testing?

 

Up until now precious few serious features have been shot on RED, but somehow a product yet to be even released will make it "game over"?

 

Of course David is right that digital acquisition will eventually replace film as the dominant medium for major feature productions, but what I don't understand is the apparent relish some people display in pronouncing the death of film. Don't they realise this will reduce their options? Don't filmmakers want as many choices as possible in their range of tools to create their work?

Of course, Dom. The thing is what RED sells is really the idea that any person with enough money to buy their cameras will be able to shoot footage that rivals and surpasses (or so they claim) the footage they cannot afford to shoot on film. Just like the DSLR makers did when the digital revolution started in the still picture world. Which is fine. They are, after all, running a business.

RED's pursuit of its niche in the market has never been a "giving you more options to shooting film," but rather an implicit and sometimes explicit "we are the future and film is dead." By that analogy, the new digital warriors are set rule this industry. Which is also fine, and quite possibly, true before too long.

Would Steven Soderbergh be able to continually serve as his own cinematographer if he always shot on film? Arguably all these guys who either cannot afford or are not capable of exposing film by themselves are drawn to this rivalry mentality, partly because it empowers them. Which is fine too. But most never get past that rivalry point.

Would Baraka or Koyaanisqatsi (to mention two movies that are almost purely if not entirely non verbal, visual narratives augmented by a soundtrack) be as impacting had they been shot on digital cameras by a single guy on the back of a pick up truck? Would the films by the great directors and cinematographers in history be as highly esteemed if the acquisition format had been digital while everyone else were filming their own "skeleton crew, low budget digital masterpieces?" Or would they be forgotten footnotes in history books? Impossible to know, perhaps.

What I am trying to say is that until the age of the blockbuster, and because film production tends to be more expensive, there used to be more care about getting it right, whereas digital is cheap so people can crank out a movie a year with very little financial burden.

Nothing wrong with democratizing the art and the experience of cinema, of course. But at what expense? Now almost everyone seems to be making an HDSLR or RED feature film, whether they are feature worthy or not. By most statistics, attendance to movie theaters is significantly down from 30 years ago, HDTV, BlueRay, home theaters and a million movie releases competing for fewer and fewer viewers are slowly choking it.

We shall see, as time goes on and digital takes over, whether (digital) technological advances in (and it inherent democratization of) cinematography and movie making mean actual advances in the craft itself, or they merely translate to more dross to sift through to find the true gems.

There is a great picture somewhere on the net (that I can't sadly find now) that depicts the curve of historically and / or artistically significant photographs proportionally diminished when digital pictures arrived. In other words, the more accessible digital photography was to the masses, the percentage of significant photos proportionally plummeted.

Is this what awaits cinema?

This year is worse than last for me, and last year was bad. Amazingly, I have managed to scrape by without having to get a regular 9-5 job yet. Things do not look promising this winter, which is always the slowest time for me. So who knows . . .

Anything useful to add Saul?

I dunno, maybe telling the DP (or you, if that is your role) to put his foot down and tell the clients to do what is appropriate, i.e cut corners elsewhere and book a CC post facility.

By the sound of what Jordan describes, the processes involved are either too cumbersome or pretty iffy to perform on set. Maybe there are other ways to do this, but why must the wheel be re-invented?

But hey, it is your gig. Do as you see fit.

Chris: Cool. Technically, I suppose a CMOS sensor with higher power charge (dB gain) should be pretty noisy. I tested a 5D mkII (in native ISO) with underexposure and it was really noisy. A side-by-side high dB comparison on CCD and CMOS same size sensor footage would be nice to get a hold of. But it wasn't a high DB gain. Should do a test soon. Thanks for the info.

It isn't that the sensor is too big for the camera, it is that that particular lense is not suppose to be used on full frame sensor cameras like the 5d mark ii. This particular 18mm lense is for ANSI super 35 and normal 35 image format and would work better on something like the 7D. Only the CP.2 lenses with focal lengths from 21 - 100mm work without vignetting on the mark ii and are made for full frame cameras. If you need to use this lense without the vignetting problem put it on a 7D.

Yup. The 5D mkII is a full size sensor camera (6 perf 35 mm) and your lens is designed for APS-C size sensors, which are closer to S35mm aperture. Some extremely wide angle zooms (18-28mm) designed for the APS-C sensor will vignette on the 5D at the widest setting, but will be fine closer to 22mm. Still incredibly wide angle, IMO.

Anyone who doesn't wanna CC in post is just asking for trouble IMHO. Why have CC on set when they can do it later, are they even saving anything, money wise? Or just making it harder for everyone involved?

Oh, do I love dealing with clients. Trying to save some $ later, they put US through hell on set. :ph34r:

Next thing you know, they'll want to have a final edit done finalized on set by the time production wraps. With score, VOs, fx, CC to boot. :rolleyes:

Sorry to rant. Good luck.

Chris: My apologies, I was referring to the PDWF355. Can't keep the model numbers straight . . . :(

http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-broadcastcameras/cat-xdcam/product-PDWF355L/

Adrian: I hear what you are saying about a camera's low light capabilities (high db gain) practicality vs picture pleasantness. Nice to have if one really MUST use it, but cringe inducing at the very least, as far as I am concerned.

The 355's pickup is CCD versus CMOS on the 350, which are significantly cleaner sensors. But the 355 also goes all the way to 48db gain (not 20db, as I originally claimed). Because of that and the dirtier nature of the CCDs, it makes for nasty looking images at anything over 20db, IMO unusable for 99% of broadcast material, short of Dirtiest Jobs.

I'd be curious to see what 48db of gain look like on CMOS cameras tho . . . ;)

It is a good workhorse camera, physically neither too light nor too heavy.

It is 1/2" chip camera, and while the adapter to use 2/3" lenses on it is not terribly expensive, there is a field of view conversion crop.

I really like that it does variable bit rate encoding, unlike HDV, which is constant. The latter creates really annoying artifacts sometimes (whip pans, running with the camera, etc).

They record onto pretty pricey proprietary XDCAM disks. BUT, one can recycle a disk seemingly forever. That I know of, there are no dropouts if the disks are continually reformatted and used again and again and again, unlike tape.

The menus can be a bit confusing at times. The image on higher gain (it lets you pump it up to +20db, I believe) will fall apart terribly (of course) which is annoying. Why would Sony put that as an option when it creates SO much image noise? Etc. But all in all is a great camera system.

I find that real time (component out) down conversions from an AJA / Black Magic cards look really good. I do this often to deliver HD material to SD broadcast stations and record to DVCPro 50, Betacam, etc.

You may want to post the right aspect ratio version (the image is distorted vertically) for best effect.

And it is hard to judge a movie by its trailer, as paradoxical as it may seem. A trailer is supposed to entice viewers to watch the whole film, whereupon an opinion is formed.

Since you worked hard to complete it, you should move forward with it regardless of what people say, there are always going to be things that people will point out that cannot be fixed unless you started from scratch. So just move forward with it and let it find its place in the world.

Good luck.

I think that is a square wave HMI, which are usually safe at any speed without the need for compensation. Here is a bevy of information provided courtesy of Guy Holt:

http://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=47803

Yeah, that is normal with some front barrel (not internal) focusing lenses. I have an Angie 10-150 T2.2 that does the same thing. It covers S16 at 10mm when focused 7' to infinity. Nice lenses for the money.

The first picture is definitely physical damage. In my experience, the way the yellow and red (plus the crackling) show up on the image indicate damage to the emulsion layers and into the base. An experienced retoucher can very likely reconstruct it in Photoshop from the frames before and after.

The second and third images are more puzzling, since the spots are semi transparent, and dirt usually shows up as opaque when projected. It can still be retouched out by a good PS artist.

The consensus around here is to overexpose 2/3 of a stop to tighten up grain. 1/3 of a stop overexposure is hard to notice. For fast Fuji 16mm stocks I tend to overexpose at least 1 full stop. While I like grain, the grain on fast Fuji 16mm stock tends to bother me more than that of equivalent Kodak stock. You, of course, are free to do your own tests and choose whatever works for your project, which is the best way of going about it.

Interesting. I personally think that the RED is better coupled with "sub-prime" glass to give the HD ultra sharp and plastic-like image more character. Of course, one can add lots of filtration to a very sharp glass, but I like to start with "imperfect" glass for HD anyway. The very thought of super sharp native RED images makes me shudder.

Abel Cine Tech has a videotap for the LTR54 available for rent. It is a replacement for the viewfinder and handle assembly that includes an incorporated videotap.

I couldn't find it on your website, how much does it cost to rent? Thanks.

Abel Cine Tech has a videotap for the LTR54 available for rent. It is a replacement for the viewfinder and handle assembly that includes an incorporated videotap.

Nice, I didn't know they had those for LTRs, how well does it work? I would assume it also works for the LTR7? Does the camera need to be sent to you to install it?