Matt Sandstrom

to me it's all about intensity, absolute and relative. today was dark, rainy and overcast here so i had all the lights on in my apartment, and the outside looked very blue and the tungsten lights very warm. i assume that's because they were both low intensity. sunlight always looked white to me, as did 1000w halogens. when my brain is in doubt though i think it handles it the way you say. ;-) /matt

well, that would be track pitch. the width is the same in all three i believe. /matt

the number of minutes has nothing to do with the resolution. it only depends on the track width. hdv uses the same as dv, dvcam uses wider tracks for robustness. /matt

of course, i haven't given you any at all. as a matter of fact i haven't even mentioned any shot at all. how did you know? ;-) /matt, not chris

for what? if you are indeed trying to light an entire white wall evenly and strongly that wouldn't be my choice. are you sure you can't/won't explain further? /matt

are you finishing in 60i or 24p? if the former just use the normal 60i preset, which is what you'll get from the camera, or use cinema tools to remove the pulldown and edit in 23.98. you'll need to transcode to a codec that supports 24p though, like dvcpro hd, uncompressed or i think apple intermediate. hdv doesn't. i hear it's included in the latest update though, which i don't have but you can always check. /matt EDIT: yes, it's included in the update. only for 5.1 though and i'm using 5.0.

yes, that's exactly it. a smaller ccd always needs more light and more pixels sure doesn't help either. and don't forget that the digibeta is a professional camera while the z1 is basically an advanced toy. don't be afraid to gain up some on the z1 though. the extra resolution makes the added noise much less of a problem. this is the setting for the component (composite?!?) output and does not affect recording. there's a similar setting that decides whether recording is done as hdv or dv though. /matt

another option is to gel the windows with cto and shoot on a tungsten stock. the main advantage is that full ctb on a tungsten light cuts its intensity by around 2 stops while the cto will only cut the daylight by 2/3. /matt

i think a big part of that look comes from the need for *lots* of makeup under such lighting. people more or less had an entire face painted on top of the real one. and make sure you use heavy diffusion for all female closeups. /matt

ok, part of the confusion comes from the fact that european outlets make no difference between the connectors. in some countries, like here in sweden for example, there are even two ground connectors so not even grounded plugs have to be put in a certain way. as for the safety issues of grounding the neutral, i'm aware of that. i was trying to explain that it doesn't apply *in this case*. sorry for the confusion. /matt

sorry, i read my first post again and i realize i expressed myself clumsily. the categorical statement made it sound like i meant there was never a neutral wire. there is obviously, just not in this case, which is plug in one phase ac. please don't use my advice the next time you install a washing machine. :-) /matt

well, there's a wire called neutral, but when wiring a circuit for plugging into a wall socket its function is no different from the other wire. in ac the current alternates in both directions, hence the name. the reason it doesn't matter which way you plug in an ac appliance is not that it works both ways but because there are no "ways". *all plug in circuits have to assume that the "hot" wire can be either of the two* /matt

there's no "neutral" in one phase ac. after all you're free to plug things in both ways. and either way why would it make a difference which side of the bulb the dimmer was on? this thread is getting more and more confused with each post. i'm surprised so many filmmakers are still alive. :-) /matt

what kind? /matt

i've always simply used full cts. simply because i always have it and it always looked good. i never tried to match light though, just simulate. /matt

in my opinion/experience it has low latitude but still fairly low contrast. it's a gamma thing. it all depends on what you print it on. /matt

oh, i didn't realize you changed the light level, that sounds better. ;-) anyway, better approaches would probably have been to either keep the aperture at 4 and bring the light up 2 1/2 stops, or keep the lights and open the aperture. no need to change both as far as i can tell... /matt

of course i do. it compresses this stream just as it would any other stream. the recorder part of the camera doesn't care what the camera part is feeding to it. it's just a sequence of frames either way. no frames added, none dropped, no change in the gop. this is so obvious i'm sorry i didn't realize it was a question. /matt

wait, you had a lens that *increased* the light by two and a half stops? did your mind slip or am i missing something? if anything i would have assumed that adding glass would require you to *open* the lens a bit. never as far as two stops and a half in any directions though... /matt

not really, that's assuming you got a 180 degree shutter. many cameras have 150 degree shutter, which results in a shutter speed of 1/60, and many have variable shutters where you can change the angle and thus the shutter speed to whatever you want, as fast as you like and dows to almost 1/24 after which you'll start seeing the streaks from the pulldown. oh, you mean when you go slower than the frame rate? as a matter of fact that *does* change the frame rate of the video, it's just that frames are duplicated. there's no other technical possibility. variable frame rate video and hd cameras fo the same, and then you remove the duplicates in post. i just realised that there's actually the possibility for a camera to create full frame rate long exposure but that would require a ccd which you can start reading from again when the previous frames were still being read. or it could be done all in the dsp, using frame blending, but that would create artifacts. this is definitely something i need to research the next time i have one of those cameras... /matt

well, as the name indicates it changes the shutter speed, which is how long each frame is exposed. the frame rate indicates how many frames are shot per second but says nothing about how long each is exposed. the reason you see more res is probably because there's less motion blur. this will also create more sharp detail, which means the electronic sharpness is applied more, making it look even sharper even though resolution doesn't increase. /matt

hmm, no offense but how did you manage to write 14 posts without reading a single one? i think this question has been addressed twice in the threads fitting on this page even. :-) i would have given you a short answer had there been one, but aside from "stay far away from cf24", there isn't so i suggest you check the old threads. good luck. /matt

pro mists and lo-cons do other things to the image as well, like introducing halos, glow and flare, so it's more a question of whether you want that look. other things to do in front of the camera to make the image softer is to add some atmosphere, like smoke or mist. a trick i often use to create the look i think you're after is to light the background a stop or two over, then throw it out of focus with a long lens and large aperture. nothing smoothes the look as much as easily in my opinion. as for film stock i really like the eterna 250t. very smooth and low grain, and with enough latitude to work even in low light. unlike kodak you can "push" fuji stocks in printing or telecine without getting weird color shifts and such. in my opinion. the best kodak stock for a soft lo-con look in my opinion is the expression 500t (5/7229). /matt

yes, i know what you mean. makes perfect sense. it's not quite what i'm talking about though. when i shoot film i like to really use all of that latitude so i often, for example, overexpose the key by two stops, fill 8 stops under, and let the background go another 2 stops under that. if you shoot this with a digital camera you will get a half almost burnt out white face, an almost black half, and all on a pitch black canvas, hopefully crushed but often just noisy. no matter how much photoshop work you do you can never get a look that's even remotely similar to the smooth shadows and subtle detail you'll get on the film. it's just not there. i think the current trend of lighting by monitor and/or digital stills makes people fill way too much and not take advantage of all the film emulsion has to offer. /matt

how do you handle the fact that digital stills have less latitude / more contrast than a film print? if you light to a ratio that will look low key and contrasty on film won't it look "blown out on black" on a digital still? maybe the more expensive digital slr's do better? i haven't tried them. /matt