Paul Bruening

All I know for certainty is that Jessica Rabbit is... VA-VOOM! She's not bad, you know. She's just drawn that way.

John or Stephen, One of those tiny little countersink, phillips screws that hold the flange to the board was stripped. It's the same screw that holds the flange to a Nikon camera. Do either of you know the bit size to make a new hole and tap size to run some new screws into this thing? I can do the countersink with the bits I have. I have an old Canon body to steal the screws from. I just don't know the proper bit and tap sizes.

Does the camera have an external microphone input?

Bad credit's better than no credit. Use my name: Paul E. Bruening. I think it would be a hoot to see my name under about 5,000 production titles on IMDB. "...the hardest working man in the industry!"

Hello John, Have you decided on 2-perf or not? There are conversion kits still floating around for Mitchell NCs. Konvas are pricey to convert to 2-perf. If you're going to stay in 4-perf I'd recommend Konvas. Either one will have to be blimped for sound. I've got Mitchells and love them. But, if I could start all over, I'd probably go with Konvas.

Well done, David.

Looks like building a set might be cheaper than this. Do you just need the room or will there be shots all around the hotel?

Specifically, the 1M with built-in governor.

As I understand it, The gray bodied 1Ms have a governor in them that regulate speed on the spring motors. Do they do the same for hand cranking or does the operator have to monitor speed while cranking?

This brings up a very interesting point, Tim. When I factor in a similar float number to my Nikon FFD of 46.5mm I get 46.48mm which equals 1.829921".

Hello Annie, May I ask, must you do things that are collaborative like movies? At your level of sensitivity collaborative activities are automatically challenging. I get the impression that your sensitivity is wasted in a group effort. I could see you more comfortable and better expressed in a solo art like photography. You would not have to suffer the grunts and shoves of random others in a solo art.

Fries 35R3 (Mitchell GC) using Fries's Nikon lens board. Nikon's F-mount's FFD is 46.5mm. I got the Artus shim stock pack yesterday.

I did the conversion between 52mm and 51.98mm. The difference comes out to .0008". Does this mean that you put the FFD somewhere into the film's layering by nearly .001"? Is that to favor the middle layer of emulsion?

I'm using a piece of string and my left pinky fingernail. I've got a depth micrometer that measures in .000". I have to get online to do the conversions back and forth to metric. I went to a machine shop supply store in Tupelo and got a set of parallels that were already the proper dimension in thickness and film frame height. I used my Dremel cut-off wheel to cut it to the remaining dimension (the metal was so hard that a hack saw just skated around without cutting). I took great care not to bung-up the surface. These parallels are rated to .003" tolerance. I drop it in, replacing the pressure plate, and roll the spring clip onto it. Then I wedge a bit of popsickle stick into the clip to make sure the parallel doesn't rise off the gate during measurement. I've got a lot more of this parallel material left over if one of you could use a chunk. I don't know about other cameras, but it dropped into place on my Mitchell perfectly.

Thanks, fellas, I can't even count all of the times ya'll have helped me out with information. I just emailed Artus for a price quote on the plastic shim stock pack. Should I just pick the single sheet that best fits or should I stack them to get the precise shimming?

Hey fellas, The FFD on the 35R3/Nikon F-mount is supposed to be 46.5mm or 1.8307in. It reads out to 1.827in. or 46.4058mm. How much variance is tolerable? Should it be dead-on? Should it actually go a little deeper to expose for the middle layer of film? We're only talking about 3.7/1,000 of an inch. Who sells individual sheets of the plastic shim stock that I'll need?

Control has got to be the number one reason. DI gives a project powers that are difficult to impossible in an all optical route. The big categories include: Color timing (color grading), image adjustment (gamma, brightness, color replacement, texture, anything a bit of software can do to change the "look" of the image- far too many to list, here), composites, motion tracking, CGI, and easier access to the new projection mediums in varying and evolving file types and formats. The resolution/quality topic erupts here every once in a while as it should since it is an important concern. The folks with a technical, mechanical, mathematical or scientific bent lean in favor of talk about resolution and related. I listen to their talk since I know far too little about that kind of stuff. The folks with an artistic bent tend to talk about aesthetic qualities. The technical folks kind of just put up with us. I'd suggest you do some searches through the site. We could pile up 1,000 posts regurgitating what we've already covered related to the resolution/quality issue.

I used to have a girlfriend who faked her formats.

Phil, You and Keith had thrown out some numbers that were the digital equivalents of analog sound. I have done a little math on the DG5 system. 2400 steps X 24 fps = 57,600 steps or samples. That part is better than even CD sound. How would you then rate the equivalent "bits" for mono, stereo and Dolby's surround thing (2 tracks with each side carrying variations- a form of 4 tracking). Assuming I can work out the track imaging and associated challenges, I'd like to be able to state what kind of digital equivalent sound I can produce. Something like, "It can do the equivalent of 16 bit 57,600."

You two should go bowling.

Sorry, if I misrepresented my point. I wasn't attempting to put David down. I had thought that, maybe, I was hopelessly out of fashion here in BFE and using an outmoded phrase.

Can you do contact lenses for 3D? Sure, they'd be a pain in the butt to deal with just for a movie. But, wouldn't they be a better experience for the viewer from an optical standpoint? Another issue- how could you manage the polarization orientation of the two lenses? If you could, the lenses could orientate the same angle for getting around and re-orientate for 3D product participation. If you could work that out, then people could leave them in all day and everything media related could be 3D, magazines, newspapers, TVs, billboards, posters, movies. The contacts would take some kind of cue from the product and spin to the correct angle. When you looked away from the cue or the product's occupation of your FOV fell below a certain percent, the lenses would return to matched angles. If they could spin anyway, they could operate as sunglasses, 3D glasses and normal optical correction. Nano motors running off human electromagnetic fields turning the micro-thin polarizing lenses on top of normal contact lenses? Maybe, Jannie Oakley can take this and run with it (cutting me a piece of the pie, of course). ;)

Hello Rob, It is common and practical to rate film at an equivalent digital resolution number. It is necessary so that people can make decisions that lead to profitable product. However, it is a bit more correct to think of it this way: Film is a pan-resolution image. The grain clusters/dye clouds vary in size. Some are tiny. Some are comparatively large. Therefore, the issue is not, "What is 35mm film's equivalent digital resolution?" It is more like, "What digital resolution will satisfactorily represent the film's images?" For the most part, producers are using 2K for that representation. The decision has a bit more to do with the practical aspects and costs of computing than quality obsessions. In the scan research that I have performed I found that it takes something more like 64K to capture some amount of those smallest grain/clouds. Even then, the tiniest 5% of grain/clouds were only represented with a pixel proxy version of it. They would require about 256K to be represented by a differential cluster of four pixels each. Of course, who can sustain a resolution of 256K in the current digital and computer environment? So, in effect, all digital representations of film images are a collection of "pixel proxies" (pixels that collectively create a reproduction of the original film image but rarely accurately demonstrate an individual grain/cloud). Pixel proxies of a particular resolution are chosen on a "good enough" basis. I agree with David that 2K isn't enough from a quality basis. I'm in the 6K downed to 4K camp. But DP's don't often get to make this kind of decision. Producers do. They look at the cost difference between 2K workflows and 4K workflows. Then they look at the quality differences. They often choose 2K.

May I offer some perspective on the original question? Humans are a social creature. We're only a few notches above our tree swinging ancestors. We retain much of that pack behavior running as undercurrent within our civilized self-awareness. Movie production is a high stress dynamic. It serves the producers well to manage the aspects of social harmony and tension within the production group. Elements of similarity improve harmony, therefore, productivity. Elements of difference improve tension, therefore, the energy to feed creativity. For example, let's hypothesize a group dynamic: If all of the crew is composed of white males, all tension based on race and sex is avoided. Yet, by careful hiring and management, a creative tension can still be fostered to the benefit of the final product. Actually, creative tension can be managed better since the group will not fall easily into racial or sexual hatred. Again, theoretically, if you want the best product then this is the model you would follow. Yet, Hellywood found that the inclusion of women was necessary from the beginning. There have always been tasks that women were better suited to, whether from natural ability or social training. As well, the social harmony could be improved amongst the men in the group when women were included. I can't really account for in this forum what role the inclusion of women had in mating behaviors. Though, we all know that mating behavior does occur amongst crew members. Women have always been valuable to the success of movie product. Hellywood also inherited from the stage industry the inclusion of homosexuals into aspects of the production. Homosexuals are notoriously creative and hard working to the point of utter self-sacrifice. They have always been valuable components to the success of stage and movie product. So, the basic group model of white males, by necessity, had to accommodate females and homosexuals. The tensions that that caused were tolerable because the contributions of those two additive groups outweighed the discomforts caused within the group. Let's consider a further dynamic. Add a significantly different racial group. What do those tensions contribute to the product? Is that racial grouping necessary to the success of the product? Is there something that any particular racial group can do that makes them essential to the product's success? Back to the pack thing. As a better-monkey, humans can accommodate gender variations and sexual dynamics within their grouping far better than elements that challenge their basic monkey pack nature. The differences between racial groups in the USA are dissolving. But, the differences are still great enough to make the production's group dynamic split along racial lines. That split makes it almost impossible for a producer or director to manage the group's energy when that energy can't form between racial splits. I HAVE OFFERED ALL OF THIS AS THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE. I AM NOT DEFENDING ANY POSITION. I AM NOT TRYING TO PISS ANYONE OFF.

"Wheat."