Matt Sandstrom
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Posts posted by Matt Sandstrom
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i did something similar a while ago, and i must say those jokers worked wonderfully. i put four of them in chimera lanterns, on 6 meter stands hidden behind trees. great "sourceless" moon ambiance.
/matt
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other lights such as security lights for the house or landscape lighting for the yard may help you light your background so that you can keep the girl underlit as she approaches, but you can still see her against her background.
yes, that's exactly what i was going to suggest, and practicals like street lights, city scapes and christmas lights work well to create backgrounds as well. perhaps a faint and soft cross light would help give the silhouette some shape. i'd use neutral color on that one and go crazy on the background.
/matt
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i don't really like 7218 either in "low light low key" situations. the blacks just get grainy and i've found that underexposed 7217 is actually less grainy. if you light everything though (which doesn't necessarily mean high key) it looks great. and if you really need 500 asa i like 7229 better. i haven't shot it myself but i've used it on a couple of shorts and promos i directed. much better skin tones and very clean shadows. (maybe those dp's were just better than me though) ;-)
/matt
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For someone who's new to shooting film, shooting stills seems to me to be a good way to learn how to correlate what your eye sees with what the film reproduces.
yes, so do i and it helped me a lot when i took up cinematography that i had been working as a still photographer for many years. but that's exactly why i think shooting a stock that's as close as possible to your motion stock is a good idea, as well as printing back in order to see how under and overexposure changes the look. the fact that underexposure makes the film darker and overexposure makes it lighter should be obvious even to someone new, and i doubt you will see any more than that if you try to learn by shooting slides. ;-)
/matt
Since you will eventually have your work color timed optically or telecined by a colorist, you are just trying to get the exposures of the various parts of the scene to the correct relative levels.so how would you know this if you shoot slides, which are much more contrasty and not timed to a correct medium level. i don't say we're in a disagreement, but i'm using this quote of yours to stubbornly continue pushing my point. ;-)
/matt
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I'm not sure why you guys are suggesting these things. Using slide film would be useful to determine whether your light meter is working and whether you're using it correctly, but it won't tell you anything about how to expose your film to get the look you're after. /matt
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"anamorphic is a 35mm format"
"full width ds8 is the same as 16mm"
"the lens wouldn't cover the film"
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wow. extremely well informed and helpful people on this board. :-)
anwyay, the easiest way of testing this technique if going to video is to mask half the gate in a 16mm camera horizontally, shoot a roll of double perf film, flip it over, shoot again, then do the same in telecine. for those of you asking for the point, besides being a fun experiment, if you're shooting 2.35:1 it also saves 50% on film and processing compared to cropped 16mm or super-16. telecine costs will be slightly higher though since you have to set up the masking and flip the rolls over. not more than a few bucks though.
/matt
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Actually the auto exposure of the prints could be very beneficial. On a one light "all" you'll see is that less exposure yields a darker image and vice versa, while if you print them back you'll see how the colors, contrast and grain structure changes with exposure. These days you seldom have to worry about getting an ok exposure, but you're still working with the look. /matt
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As strange as this may sound, a 1200w HMI is not 1200w. In a perfect world and in theory, yes it should work and it most probably will. 1200w/120v=10amps. However, I have seen some that draw 19 amps. Crazy I know.
i don't have the laws of inductive loads fresh in mind, but surely that changes the simple formula slightly. in that world, a va and a w aren't necessarily the same thing, since the voltage and current aren't in phase with each other. i'm no electrician either, but my high school major a long time ago was electricity. ;-)
/matt
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leds can be very bright, especially the white ones, so yes they will flare the same way as any light source of the same strength in the frame would. how much depends on your camera/lens/stock/aperture and so on. one more thing to remember is that white leds often are something like 7000k so they will look very blue on tungsten film.
/matt
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I beleive if you were to aquire footage in HDV and have the camera itself downconvert that HDV to DV via firewire, then the footge will look identical to if you aquire it in DV and captured via firewire.
that depends on how you define identical. it may very well look exactly the same, but it will have gone through another generation of compression, so it can't possibly be "techically" identical. it's also very possible that scaling raw ccd data is more efficient that scaling an hdv frame. i don't know but it's not unlikely. it's certainly possible that you would get slightly better quality from shooting in dv. i'd still shoot hdv for future proofing but if this is for a client who wants sd and that you're not likely to hear from again, i can't really see the point. "possibly" better quality, less risk for dropouts, the ability to use the tape in a dv deck, are definitely the pros. the cons are few.
/matt
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I've shot a little bit of 5222 and I've always found it a little flat for my taste - developed normally you'll get a lot of tones of grey
i know what you mean, but i don't quite agree. the contrast is low, sure, but so is the latitude. this emulsion seems to capture a pretty narrow range, which would normally result in a contrasty picture, but presents it in a very "grey gamma". this is very easy to fix by printing to a more contrasty stock or just boosting the contrast in telecine. i have a feeling that processing it differently would just reduce the latitude and increase the grain even more and still just give you a low con negative. but while i've shot plenty of this stock i've never experimented with pushing...
/matt
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i've run one 800w redhead and one 575 hmi on a 2k honda, which worked as long as i switched on the redhead first. the other way around caused the hmi to die.
/matt
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if you know you'll never need the hdv you should probably shoot in dv. the quality will normally be exactly the same, but you reduce the risk of nasty dropouts as well as some of the aliasing and banding you get when you pan fast in hdv. but i agree the extra res is good for post processing, so editing and grading in hdv and downconverting as a last step is probably the best advice.
/matt
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use the interpret footage function in your post software and tell it the 25fps file is 24. simple as that. audio can be a problem though. the best option is probably still to just shoot, edit and post in pal, then convert the final product.
/matt
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you can also use the sun as backlight and key with a reflector. that doesn't always look natural or right but almost always much "better".
/matt
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are you honestly talking about cineframe24? while i won't question your aesthetic preference, this look might very well be what you want, i must question your eyes if you say it looks good. the artifacts are more than easily noticeable, especially for those of us in the pal world who aren't even used to regular 3:2 pulldown.
/matt
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oh, your use of the terms was fine, it was me who wasn't sure i understood. :-)
i'd say on video it's even more important to switch bulbs. i mean you can white balance to them, but that will throw your kinos and any daylight off instead, and with video these things really show in my experience/opinion. especially since you're making a "comedy" that's not supposed to be so "dramatic".
/matt
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oh, i read the question again and i know i know what you were asking. the answer is lowel rifas. wonderful. i have a feeling another swede on this board will soon back me up on that one. :-)
/matt
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is it a set or on location? maybe i just don't get the terminology right but what "source light" would you use on a set? if there's light from the windows as well as standard overhead fixtures i suggest putting 950 tubes in them and then use the kino kit you mention for fill. that should work fine. did the same for a hospital location recently, though we also had a 1200 hmi to create a consistent sun. very handy. we used ambient sunlight too though, which doesn't vary as much as direct sun does.
/matt
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you can use my world famous incredible super duper "black and white" plugin to mix the channels whichever way you want.
http://www.mattias.nu/plugins/
there's possibly one reason to shoot black and white though, and that is compression. having no color will leave 50% more bits for the luma channel. i haven't tested what difference that makes but if you use a filter on the camera it will also be encoded directly to luma assuming that the in-camera black and white function operates in 4:4:4, which could also mean a slight advantage. just test all options and i'm sure you'll figure it out.
/matt
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funny, i didn't realize you were in ljubljana. i just came back from croatia where we shot some second unit stuff for our feature. split, pag and pula, the latter very close to you i think.
/matt
Ringlight
in Lighting for Film & Video
Posted
i beg to differ. things are called different things in different areas of the world. here in stockholm that's definitely a ring light. :-)
/matt