Mark Kenfield

Two Area48s on a triple header, fired through diffusion, are a close match in output to a 2000w blonde doing the same thing.

I think I bounce between the sharp 'a' ('Arry' like 'Harry'), and the soft 'a' ('Ar-ree' like 'Barley'). Weirdly I do the same with France, Dance, Prance. I'll go hard or soft on the 'a' depending on the sentence I'm using it in.

I don't know why.

I'm just difficult I guess.

Call Me By Your Name wasn't at all afraid of direct sunlight. I suspect a large part of the look was achieved simply through appropriate time-of-day scheduling, to ensure that the sun was coming from the right direction, at an appropriate intensity. With fill light provided when necessary.

They're lovely pieces of glass. But they're enormous. The biggest of the three is over 6kg! (that's almost the weight of an Alexa camera body). Still, there's a few out there in the world if you want to work with them. And with the super lightweight cameras these days, it's not such a big deal if the lens adds a couple of kilos.

UK craft service:

 

 

 

A wonderful reminder that my parents made the right choice by choosing to emigrate to the colonies!

It's all about balancing your exposure. If you have a low-light scene, and your pyrotechnics are 5, 6 or 7+ stops brighter than the ambient light level, then you're going to have them clip out.

You need to lift your ambient light level (or at least the level of your key light) to bring it within say 4 stops of your pyrotechnics, in order to hold the detail in everything.

I can switch the optical viewfinder on my Alexa Studio from right eye to left in about 10 seconds (and from spherical to anamorphic in about 2 seconds). You can also rotate the image in the viewfinder to whatever off-axis angle you need.

It's brilliant for all those times you stuffed into corner or some other odd cameraman yoga position.

Transferwise is marvellous. The best way to make an international money transfer without getting totally reamed.

Werner ist wunderbar! Without him I don't see how we could have pulled my last S16mm film together.

I thought only the F5 and F55 did XAVC Class 480, isn't the FS7 limited to the original Class 300?

Beautiful stuff Lee. Wonderfully atmospheric.

Balancing the camera for 4500k and then using a gold bounce on skintones, can work quite nicely for pushing a really heightened, saturated look. Super blue skies and bronze skin.

Cheers fellas, I'll drop you a line when I arrive and we'll tee something up.

And don't worry, you'll be safe. Us Aussies always travel with our knives! :D

How fast are the lenses you'll have? And what's the highest ISO you can comfortably rate the camera you'll be shooting on?

Those two questions will have a big impact on how small a lighting package you can get away with.

Still no SDI port for monitoring (not even mini SDI). That makes me sad on a camera, that otherwise seems to address most of the issues of the original. But perhaps the new 5" screen is really good, and bright enough to use outdoors.

The 4/3 sensor leaves me a little torn too. Sure we'll be able to speedboost it back up to something approximating S35mm (and that's great). But a high quality, functional S16mm camera that could take advantage of compact S16mm glass would have been nice.

Hey folks,

I’m making my way out to LA for the first time next month. Doing the ASC Masterclass from the 14-18th of May, then have a week of meetings after that (I’ll be in town from the 13-27th).

It’d be great to put some faces to names while I’m over there, and I’d love to pick people’s brains a bit about the ins and outs of life and work in LA (I’m pondering a move).

So if anyone’s about and fancies a beer/coffee/chat, please let me know :)

Cheers,

Mark

Title didn't post for some reason. Mods, please delete.

Hi there,

 

I'm a filmmaker looking to lens a short film within the next few months, and I'm on a mission - to find a gifted cinematographer who's experienced with working on 35mm celluloid. Where would be the right venues to come across a talented individual like this who understands the finer points of working with actual film as opposed to a digital toolkit?

 

I have the script for my project, entitled "Kiefer + Gianna," attached to this message. It's a love story that takes place on a Santa Barbara County vineyard, exploring how passion can grow as one's knowledge of wine grows deeper.

 

Any comments, leads, or advice are all welcome. Thanks gang!

 

- Jeff

Hi Jeff,

I'll be over in California in May and possibly June, am very comfortable working with film, and love wine.

Feel free to have a look at my work on my website: www.dreamsmiths.com.au and if you like what I do and a May/June timeframe works for you, feel free to shoot me through a copy of the script. I'd be keen to have a look.

Cheers,

Mark

Hi guys and girls,

Selling a Profoto 1.2kw HMI. It's a bug light, the same concept as Joker HMIs, but this one accepts the huge range of Profoto lighting modifiers.

It's paired with Profoto's Cinereflector Lite kit, which provides two options, both a faceted open-face zoomable reflector (very similar to an Arrimax reflector, or the K5600 Beamer reflectors) which increases your output by a stop. And also a parabolic reflector, which combines with a full set of lenses (wide to spot + diffusion + fresnel), and a full set of scrims to give you full HMI PAR functionality.

It's been a workhorse for me, being a bug light it's hugely versatile. And with Profoto's bulletproof reliability, I've never had so much as a hiccup with it, strikes first time, every time.

The ballast is power factor corrected, and universal voltage 120v-240v. So it's happy to work anywhere in the world.

The power plug is currently Australian standard, but that's easy to swap out for your local plug.

It's surplus to requirement now, so moving it on to a new home.

Price is $3100 USD + shipping

Cheers,

Mark

 

I agree - if you are working in a conventional single-camera situation with a focus puller.

 

If you aren't, and most people aren't, it's much less clearcut. Cinema primes can actually be a profound negative if the operator is pulling.

 

Again, I don't disagree, and I fully recognise all sides of this debate, but it's very important to realise that not everyone works in the same circumstances.

That's a fair call and an important distinction. My advice is tied to the perspective of a DP working with a camera team. For solo operators, requirements are different.

For me personally, if I only had a choice between those two options; a functional cinema lens with middling image quality, or an autofocussing stills lens with superior image quality. I would choose the functional cinema lens EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Image quality is obviously very important to the art of making images, but being physically capable of creating those images in the first place (which requires manual control of the lens, and the ability to make precise, and often repeated focus and iris pulls) supersedes all other criteria in my mind.

Inferior image quality may yield a less pleasant optical rendering of a particular composition, but it won't (in and of itself) change the nature of that composition. By comparison, not being able to precisely control the lens to repeatedly achieve the compositions and focus pulls that you need within them - WILL violently compromise your work.

 

It is not 4-perf 35mm.. I'll give you another chance! :D

 

Hmm... too sharp for 16mm. Is it 4:3 Alexa with vintage glass, a healthy amount of diffusion and some REALLY good film emulation?

Gorgeous stuff Miguel! I think it's some of your best yet.

4-perf 35mm?

And who's your 1st AC? I want to pinch them from you - some of those push-ins are ridiculous! :p

A good light meter can outlast a career. It's an essential tool for the job, so my recommendation would be to save yourself the time, energy and money exploring alternatives. And instead just get your pennies together ASAP and make the investment. You only need a few hundred dollars.

It seems like a great camera, but I find it a bit confusing that the Venice only has 10-bit internal, which is a bummer especially for gimbal work. Unless I'm not understanding something correctly, it seems the internal data rates are the same as the FS7 Mark ii.

The Venice is probably a bit heavy for much gimbal work, certainly you'd have a good work out without assistance, more a Steadicam type

I actually have a sneaking suspicion that the Venice might make an excellent gimbal camera. Firstly, it can be stripped down to the bare body quickly and easily. Secondly, the body alone is only 3.9kg. The internal NDs save you having to add matteboxes to the camera to control exposure. And I have an inkling, that Sony might eventually enable some autofocus capabilities through the e-mount - which could be a real boon for gimbal work.

Obviously leaving the R7 recorder off the camera will help keep the weight down, which will leave you with just the 10-bit internal recording. However, the less-compressed "Class 480" variant of 4k XAVC is robust enough to function as a mastering codec. So I don't think anyone will have issues intercutting that with X-OCN or Raw from the camera.