Paul Bruening

Hey Nick, There's a guy around here that wrote a book about it. Brain... something.

Well, fellas. I fixed it gooder'en new. I used a special, high-tech tool. It assesses, measures, drills, taps, shims, adjusts and does the job in excellent time. It's called a, "Paul Scaglione." He was great as was all the gang up at Visual Products. They've got this great facility tucked away in this little Ohio town. After fixing Frankenmitchell they took me to lunch at the local Chinese food joint. Thanks to everyone here who valiantly tried to help me do something that was (obvious to everyone except me) way over my head. Paul Scaglione-

It's every motion trick in the book.

You're talking bad about exactly the kind of instruments that built these cameras in the first place.

I've run out of cheap ideas, then. Oh, well.

My thinking is that the point to a correct FFD is that the focal plane is at the right point and there throughout the lens's focal travel. So, if I'm using a light and projecting an image backwards through the lens, I should get a sharp image through the lens's range (excluding this overstroke thing that I've just learned about). This is sort of like a poor man's way to check the focal plane utilizing the fact that I've got these cut-out pressure plates from my scan rig that I can use. If it works it works and is worth a try.

A bargain! The buyer will make the price of the camera back in film savings on the first feature.

This flipped microscope isn't as good as I'd like. It's darkish. Since I've got this see-through pressure plate and some small mirrors, couldn't I put a piece of trailer in the gate, emulsion forward, bounce some light through it, project the image through the 35 or 50mm Nikon lens onto a measured screen and check the focus against known marks on the barrel? Wouldn't that confirm film plane focal accuracy? Then verify ground glass against that? Oh, and Matt Duclos collimated all these lenses. I'm going to assume they're trustworthy.

I agree, Phil. Even using the render farm formula I'm going by, a 2,375 TB sized movie with no significant FX could get by with about 3X storage or 7,125 TB total production storage (1X for scans, 1X for minor CG and trial renders and 1X for final renders for film-out). With 12 TB SATA 3.0 possible on a moderately priced 64 bit quad core mobo that comes out to 594 mobos with 6 X 2 TB SATAs per with a total of 3,563, 2 TB drives. 594 mobos at around $800 per rig comes out to $475,200. 3,563, 2 TB SATAs at $120 per comes out to $427,560. Add in all the networking, cables, KVMs, racks at around $150,000... (we'll worry about the power feed, AC and electric bill later). You could cut the number of mobos by putting 4X SATA port cards in fewer mobos. But, my thinking is that all those mobos are going to be needed to do these whopping render tasks, anyway. $1,052,760 to grind out a "fully as good as film negative" DI. Now, to solve the scan and record at 256K challenge.

Tim said pretty much the same thing, especially about Nikon lenses. He called it, "Overstroking." I've checked and all of these Nikons overstroke. All ten of them. Matt Duclos collimated them all when he put the focus gears on them. I'm going to assume they're all set-up correctly.

For kicks, I did some math on that. I took an image I had on file. It was 4,000 x 3,000 in .tiff format. It weighed in at 34.4 MB. When I jumped it up to 256,000 x 192,000 pixels it weighed in at 137.3 GB. If a whole movie was made with 256K res in a 2 hour length using that image statistic: 173,000 frames x 137.3 Gb = 23,752,900 GB. or 2,375.29 TB. just for the storage of initial scans. That doesn't account for any work files. If it was a CGI heavily involved movie, it could easily multiply the storage requirements by 10 or even 20 = 23,752.9 to 47,505.8 TB. That's a whole bunch of 5.25 inch floppies.

It's the light they give. Especially, when compared to the sun. They are the brightest, closest color balanced, broadest spectrum, flicker-hassle free light still around. If only their antique characteristics could be re-engineered with some automation... well, and the rods thing.

This is strange. I put the 300mm lens on. Then I loosened the lens board screws. I set the lens to infinity. Then I moved the lens and the board together, riding on the screws. The lens acquires focus when the board is about 1.5mm away from the front of the camera. This doesn't make sense. That would put the FFD in the 48mm range instead of the specified 46.5mm for Nikon lenses. What gives? What obvious thing am I overlooking on this?

Darn! All the lenses over-focus. They go beyond infinity. At the infinity, end setting on the focus ring the image blurs quite a bit. Backing the ring towards the other end sharpens up infinity. Do I have too much FFD or too little?

I flipped the works on my microscope so I could read a piece of processed B&W film negative @ roughly 18% gray through a see-through pressure plate. It's out of focus about the same through the film as through the viewfinder. Here's what's happening- all lenses focus beyond infinity at the end-infinity setting. Does that mean too much flange focal distance or too little? Strange, since the FFD measured right on the money after shimming. As well, critical focusing came out perfect on all lenses in the 4-8 foot range tests. It's the infinity end of the lenses that stinks.

Using them outdoors was my principle interest. Competing with the sun is a real, "Sun of a bitch." (Sorry, couldn't help myself.) I still don't get why they can't be modernized. Lots of outdoor equipment has boards and sensors regulating them. The Asians are doing dirty industry like mad. Can they make the rods and sell them to us or is the rare earths restriction on manufactured product as well? Somebody over there has to be making welding, cut-off rods. They're the same idea as light producing rods.

Thanks, Chris, I'll check infinity on all my lenses tomorrow when there's daylight. I'm going to go ahead and shoot a test roll for critical focus while I'm at it.

Holy smokes. Is this a question without a known answer?

Thanks, Mike. I just shimmed my Fries 35R3's lens board. The critical focus is perfectly on the money when measured from the film plane. I just had to make sure I wasn't goofing the reference point up.

When you measure for critical focus do you measure from the film plane or from the outermost element of the lens?

Wouldn't it be nice for those big arcs to come back. Wow, what lovely light they made. Didn't someone here recommend a computer regulated arc system? Linear steppers can push the rods. Sensors could manage the arc quality and uniformity. Gaffers would only have to change out the rods and the computer could tell them how soon that would have to be. Low maintenance, lovely, daylight exterior light. Build the distribution rectifier into a Yaris, hatch back car and drive it up to the best distro point. Plug the AC lines in from a distant (therefore quieter) 3 phase (Y-wired?) genny. Sure sounds easier than all that complex AC lighting management at every usage point.

I've been really studying Once Upon a Time in the West. Strangely, for the first time, I've really noticed this shot. Maybe, it's because I've finally got a really good quality DVD of it. That storm in the background in the buttes is amazing. Does anyone know any good stories about how long they had to wait for that storm or was it one of those lucky accidents?

Do the job properly? Heck no. I did it the backyard engineer's way. I filled the hole with JB Weld. Let it cure. Drilled it out to a smaller hole. Ran a longer screw with the same threads that I pulled out of another camera body. It works great! Man, that JB Weld is really good stuff.

"Stay gold, Ponygirl. Stay gold."