Patrick Neary

Bolex made a 3D attachment for their cameras, I suspect it's a bit hard to find these days.

If having R&D plateau is a requirement to achieve art in motion pictures, then maybe we should still be shooting silent, hand-cranked black and white.

hey, wait a minute, that's not a bad idea...:)

I don't know about their acting skills, but he'll save a ton of money on craft service!

"ok everybody, hop on!"

wow, you're going to be able to start production on "Microcosmos-II: even closer shots of bugs" !

That is one hard-core macro set-up. You'll be able to shoot close-ups of a flea's eyelashes. The hard part comes with exposures, in that you'll have to compensate with longer and longer exposures as your magnification goes up. Your depth of field will also be zilch, even closed down to f16, 22, so focus is extraordinarily critical. There are easy to find charts for determining exposure compensation though, and maybe someone will chime in here.

I occasionally use a macro bellows set up for stills, and it's great fun, but very challenging.

Hi-

Another good tool is the "Black Cat" exposure guide (Blue Moon over in St. Johns has them) or there are a few online night/time lapse exposure guides as well that tend to be very accurate even though their method, kind of like the old "cloudy bright" picture guides, seems simple and archaic. The thing about longer time exposures is that you can get sloppier as the exposures get longer, in that 1 second more or less in a 30 second exposure isn't going to have the same impact as plus or minus 1/2 a second in a 1 sec. exposure!

Remember to add any reciprocity correction if it's called for.

Hi- even easier to find a screw-mount to c adapter(I've got one around here somewhere), just search on flea-bay or places like B&H, they're very cheap and easy to find!

here's a link to illustrate:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1169...for_Pentax.html

what i want to know is where's the Space:1999 reunion movie.

**ah, not that relevant**

Hi-

You can get an inexpensive, screw-on adapter that will allow you to "convert" those lenses to Nikon mount (or just about any other stills camera; that's one of the great things about m42 lenses), and thereby mount to a nikon-fronted RED, or Arri or Mitchell or whatever. Ira's right though, the lenses you have probably aren't real cherries, but keep them and test them, they may have a certain aesthetic quality that you like.

well now that you put it that way I hope I get to see your film.

Not a problem for you then. Eye focus is eye focus.

No, he uses that time-honored professional AC technique of a blade of grass and a bush...

who is timing your project? Are they relying on a waveform to time your film print? :rolleyes:

It's pointless getting into that sort of discussion on forums like this.

For every poster who actually understands the physics and electronics involved, there seems to be half a dozen complete fruitcakes who come out of the woodwork...

Having watched this forum's descent into almost complete irrelevance over the last couple years, I'd say that there are significantly more than half a dozen fruitcakes.

I know CP16s are some of the harder cameras to convert to S16, if not near impossible. I don't really know about U16, though.

Hi-

Visual Products has been converting CPs for several years now, and apparently Aranda does as well. I can't speak to the difficulty of it (only those guys can) but it doesn't appear to be near-impossible.

what are some concerns/issues that I should be aware of?

Be aware of the amount of time it takes to run cable, set up gennys and rig big lights (especially on condors); you have to balance how much you want or need them with the size and speed of the crew and the time available in the schedule.

Fuji doesn't make any big cinematic rolls any more so I'm going to get the 100ft rolls of velvia and have them cut in half for 16mm.

If that's your plan then field processing is the least of your worries.

It should make very interesting noises while running through your 16mm camera.

I would be in complete support if these DSLRs had anything that any one of the real, working movie cameras don't have. They don't.

so that kind of begs the question- just what exactly is a "real working movie camera" anymore? :)

Why...

so that you can take a really nice small compact mobile lightweight camera and turn it into a really big awkward heavy immobile cumbersome pain-in-the-butt camera!

This is digging up past posts, but there actually was a conversation on here about a Cinematographer that lit everything by eye, and another that, according to legend, determined stops by looking at an assistant's dilated eye.

There was a thing called a "monner-meter" (or something like that) that was essentially a mirror you checked your eye's iris with and matched it to a scale printed on the meter. How I wish I had one of those!

Some friends shot a feature "Sammyville" with Howard Wexler and they said he rarely if ever used a meter.

oh good god I wouldn't fly blind on a commercial! it's more about recognizing that if your meter suddenly says something that seems off, it probably is.

And I still bring along my 398 too!

Really though, try just shooting off the hip- even better find a $5 box camera, load it up with 120 film and just go shooting, no meter- I promise you'll get the best stuff!

Hi-

Stephen's point is a good one though- if you're experienced enough to be shooting anything remotely commercial you should probably have a pretty good idea where your exposure should be without a meter.

It's a great exercise to load up a still camera with negative film and shoot a roll just exposing what feels right- I think you'd be surprised not only how accurate your eye is but also how exposures fall into more interesting places on the negative. The other thing you'll find is just how resilient color negative film really is. :)

Even with all that, I feel fairly certain that 2-perf origination with 4K scans would look like 1st generation film all the way out to those lovely Barcos. Factor in 30 fps origination and that image could look pretty damn good. Better than a 4-perf, fourth generation, optical print, I hazard. What do you think?

oh for sure- Watching the last "Superman" digitally projected, I was really struck by how much better some of the film-originated previews (these were also digitally projected) looked compared to Superman, which was missing that nice organic quality and color you really only get with film. Plus the wide shots in Superman just fell to pieces, the definition was horrible.

Here's something; I saw an HD documentary screened digitally here in portland awhile back, and it was obviously shot at 60i, but something about the projection took away that typical "game-show" look, and it really looked quite good, not video-y (as far as frame rate at least) at all. Maybe something about the technology of projection, or the fact that it was on a big screen, but it most definitely lost that nasty 60i feel and look somewhere in the pipeline.

I'd suggest picking up a copy of Film and Video Financing by Michael Wiese. It'll introduce you to the basics of acceptable business practices.

acceptable business practices 20 years ago...

As it ages, and fogs, you have to expose differently in order to get your images above the fog density; essentially over-exposing and then correcting the now milked shadows back to black.

That's normally good advice, but not with these two reversal films. Overexposure would exacerbate any fogging issues.

I'll second the Dwayne's recommendation for the Kodachrome too!

Irrelevant senior rambling:

Someone at Boeing probably got a big bonus once for suggesting that they film everything with long pitch film even if it was going to be printed. Supposedly this was a cost saving in not having dual inventory. This likely led to all of their prints being somewhat unsharp and unsteady compared to how they could have been. You'd think that selling multi-million-buck gadgets would make them want to get their film prints as good as possible.

Ha! I know where at least some of that stuff ended up!

I remember going into Boeing surplus one day (this would have been back about 1982 or so) and there was an enormous pile, like a pallet-load of 400' loads of B&W 16mm right by the cash registers. I bought 2 of them and discovered that they were the long pitch stuff and I didn't have a 16mm camera anyway, so who knows what I ever did with it... They also had 2 odd 16mm flatbeds in there once. I kept hoping to find an arri stuffed back behind all the airplane parts, but never did. :(

Another time they had a complete cockpit/nose section from a 727 sitting in the yard outside, I heard someone bought it for a garden house. geez, Boeing surplus was the best, I wonder if it's still up there?