Patrick Neary

Hi-

I don't qualify as a weather worn vet by any means, but...

when you make a serious mistake in a professional setting it could very well impact your career (and not in a good way) so you should feel bad.

The way to deal with it is to not make mistakes. Good luck with that!

Hi, I am looking for a 16mm Oxberry movement.

Hi-

Don Erkel has some, he can send you his email equipment list:

Industrial Photographic Equipment Company

E-mail: eyepec@aol.com

28703 Trailriders

Rancho Palos Verdes, CA 90275

happy hunting!

I don't see why the mirror geometry would necessarily be a big problem. The close edge of the mirror is near the perfs, and it's at a 45 degree angle to the film plane on both an SLR and a traditional side shuttered film camera such as an Arri II-C or any of the Panaflexes, etc. If anything, the circular edge of the motion picture shutter requires it to be out a tad farther than the straight edge of a still shutter.

-- J.S.

the big difference is that the slr's mirror doesn't sit in that 45-degree plane, it flaps up to the ground glass/viewfinder screen at every exposure, so anything in the way is going to get smacked! (usually to the mirror's detriment...)

I believe that is a Mitchell BNCR.

a BNC, note the finder.

Hi-

Did Sony change their specs or something? HDcam has always been 3:1:1.

Well, in theory, the focal length is the actual distance from the front tothe rear element. A simple ruler will show what the true focal length is.

Hi-

I believe it's more like the distance from the optical center of the lens to the focal point.

fixed

(what's fixed?)

Threading a Mitchell builds character. (And it's really not that hard) :)

Not that it would matter since video taps are basically a framing guide.

Yes but it always seems that most of the people huddled around the monitor don't understand that.

This blog also discusses these unique animation stands:

 

http://deneroff.com/blog/2008/03/04/willis...ptical-process/

(apologies for diverting the thread a bit here....)

Thanks for that great link- I've seen pictures of Lotte Reininger's vertical stand before, I like how it looks like it's made out of telephone poles and railroad ties!

I had been messing with an old Automax 35mm camera to mount on a vertical stand; the placement of the mag on the back of the camera seems better, weight-distribution-wise, than the top mounted mag of the mitchell, plus it's about 20lbs lighter, but I don't really have the expertise to rig the motor electronics for single frame (the wiring/electronic guts had been removed, so just the power and clutch wires from the motor remain) I should probably just 'bay it.

A Lathe bed idea seems simple, maybe with a glass plate to hinge and snap down over the art to keep it flat?

The 200 ft. mag is roomier than the 100 ft. ones.

 

I recently got a Mitchell 16mm with a Tobin time lapse/animation motor. I want to use it for cel animation because it has pin registration and the rackover allows me to accurately line up the camera. I do eventually want to get a 35mm Mitchell as well. I have a lot of 35mm short ends sitting in cold storage I want to use. Because of the weight of the 35mm camera I may have to build a horizontal animation stand like the kind used by the old Fleischer Studio.

Hi Herb-

Do you know if or where there are any pix of the Fleischer stand? I'd be curious about rigging something similar. Do you know how they kept their art flat? Did they use a vaccuum similar to a pre-press plate camera?

And Topher, why don't you modify a 16mm projector? It seems like a much easier modification, and those things are both very cheap and very plentiful!

Hi-

It's a moot point now because the lab determined that the film jumped a roller during processing, they took care of the problem and I've got a very nice HD transfer (with a kind of electronic "wet gate"), sans scratching.

I'm not sure what cameras you're referring to, but a Mitchell is not going to be more prone to scratching or suddenly develop bad registration because it's running single frame. There's a reason these things were the go-to machines for effects and stop-motion work since the dawn of time.

Just for my own edification I threaded up the Mitchell in the most heinous ways I could think of, with upper and lower loops mashing up inside the camera body, passing on the wrong sides of the mag rollers, you name it, and I could not get the camera to scratch the film.

Hi-

I just had a short 35mm project transferred to SR, and the lab gave me both an uncompressed QT along with a proresHQ file. Comparing both side by side, the prores looked to me to be just the slightest bit grainier, and a tiny bit more saturated, but the differences were negligible.

I didn't have to do any greenscreen or major CC with the footage so I don't know how well the two would stack up under those conditions, but I assume the uncompressed would handle it better.

The dire "You've been warned" bit above is complete BS.

Thanks Herb, that's exactly the kind of "field technique" I was looking for. That and a field of view calculation should get me pretty close, and then exposing a few frames of still B&W film should dial it in nicely-

Thanks!

Unfortunately the rackover idea doesn't work with a single lens model. :)

Hi-

I'd like to fix an eyemo to a small animation stand and was wondering if anyone has found a clever way to line up/frame and focus through a single-port Eyemo? As you know the pressure plate only pulls back a small distance from the gate, so it's difficult to get any kind of prism or mirror or light source in there.

Once it's set, nothing needs to move so it can all be locked off.

There must be some old signal-corp trick out there somewhere?!

Hello again!

 

I have another question. If i have a nikon mount lens, is there any way (perhaps by way of an adapter ring) to mount it on a PL mount camera? Is there such a product as a nikon to PL converter/adapter?

Hi-

There are two Nikon to PL adapters I'm aware of, one is just a tube (no glass) that acts like an extension tube, so it's only useful for macro work, the other has glass and is something like a 1.6 tele-extender, which is useful if you're adding it to a longer lens already, not so useful on a wider lens, and you lose a stop and a half or two stops.

He answered with this email. I believe he is wrong on a few points...

wow, he kind of struck out on all points there. :)

Seems to me there is no reason to buy it if your going to defeat the purpose of having it.

Hi-

If you ever plan on shooting with HMIs, or under any kind AC discharge lighting, you need a Xtal motor.

With 3D becoming so widespread in the coming years,...

That's quite an assumption. (I mean people in general who are assuming that)

3D is still a gimmick and pain in the butt for the viewer (my experience at least) I know I would hate to have to put on grimy, used, ill-fitting 3D glasses for every movie I see in the theater.

Plus more film is never a bad thing...

And think of all the money you'll have to spend on ADR, those cameras are loud.

Ask your rental house about top speeds on their 35-3, it varies with model and motor- they should also have shoulder-mount 400' mags for the 35-3 (which is still a great, meat-and-potatoes camera by the way.)

Hi-

I would love to know the reasoning behind the extensive "dutchedness" on the "John Adams" HBO series, it seemed like a bizarre stylistic choice and very distracting.

Thanks for responding Dominic!

The scratches are numerous and essentially continuous across 3 separate rolls of film. What seems particularly telling is that the scratches are very consistent where the rolls join, so that they just continue from the end of roll 1 to the start of roll 2, etc.

Although one can never be 100% sure, I took great care to scratch test the Mitchell and mags (they're mine) before shooting, as well as with each mag change. There were three separate rolls run through two different mags, and I've never had any kind of problem with the camera before, and certainly nothing this egregious.

When the transfer house noticed the problem I loaded up the camera with the remainder of (unexposed) roll #3 and ran off 20-30 feet and the film was pristine.

That and seeing that the scratches weave a bit during their run makes me think it happened at processing or during the prep for transfer (some prep!), both of which happened at the same facility. I still haven't heard back from them, so I'll wait to see what their assessment is.

If the lab takes responsibility then I may push for an IP and retransfer.

What kills me is that the film made it through the lab and prep with no-one there noticing a rather outrageous problem. Believe me, you wouldn't have to look very hard to notice this mess.

Ooof.

Does anyone have a recommendation on any good scratch removal techniques available in or for Final Cut?

I had three rolls of 35mm go to telecine last week with corn-rows furrowed into the film, spread nicely across the whole frame and running from head to tail; the entire project (an animated short). They look to me like base scratching, or maybe very shallow emulsion scratches because they tend to disappear in dark areas (and show up in light areas) and they don't really have any color.

(I don't know for sure because the film was sent back to the lab where apparently it's such a high priority that it's been sitting there since monday and no-one has bothered to look at it yet, but that's another story...)

I tried a FC filter from Mattias Sandström, but the scratches weave just enough that it doesn't really work, plus there are so many to deal with that the filter would have to be applied half a dozen times or more to each clip.

At any rate, my gut feeling is that the months of painstaking work are down the flusher, but I'm cutting it anyway hoping I can mitigate at least some of the damage with a plug-in or some kind of filtering. At the worst I can turn it B&W and just call it "old film look" but I'd really rather not.

So any AC who constantly relies of DOF charts rather than focusing on a precise spot is asking for trouble.

Hi-

I've run into a similar situation where the AC consistently sets the focus to hyperfocal, regardless of what we're shooting- the best example being a wide establishing shot where nothing is closer than about 50' away, and yet the Ac sets focus at 8' or whatever based on the chart.

It makes no sense at all; you're just insuring that now everything will fall on the very outer edges of what's "acceptably sharp" rather than focusing on what's important...

Here you go:

http://www.sci.fi/~animato/s16/s16.html

have fun!