AStar

Use digital still camera and a laptop. Most digital cameras come with software that lets you set the stop, light balance, shutter speed, and interval of the pictures taken. Depending on the quality of the digital still camera, you can vary the interval down to pretty quick like every 5 sec. You can probubly get a faster interval, but my old laptop that care enough about to leave in the rain and sticks will not grab the shots much faster. You can then import the still image sequence into your favorite NLE and render to DV. Since you are working with still frames, the color space is better for correcting and the image size generally far exceeds DV, so you can zoom in on the frames without image degredation. You can also fit a 1280x720 frame size inside a 1600x1200 image size(I use a cheap camera,) so you could render out to 720p HD, if you wanted to. I have found that powering the laptop and camera for 12-24 hours the biggest problem when doing remote location timelapse. I created a simple extended run power supply using a DC/AC inverter and a car battery that runs my setup for about 48 hours. ~aaron

Anyone know some sources for a pnumatic dolly rental? (Something like a fisher11 or Peewee) Looking for alternatives to going to those manufacteres, even private sources that might have gear to rent.

Who has the best price in the Hollywood, Burbank, OC area for buying tape stock like HD, D-beta, DVCPRO, Mini-DV, you get the picture. I know a few...but was wondering what place you all use. Not looking for some cheap internet rate, I know how to run google. I am looking for opinions on who everyone uses.

One way that come to my mind is to do a lock off on the frame and shoot some normal footage and then some long exposure footage of the same frame. Then have your editor do a very quick (only frames long) dissolve between the differnent frames. This way you have control of how long you want the overexposed (flash) material to be on screen. You could ramp into the flash or the flash could have a longer decay into changed material. The white leader idea is a very simple plan that you could augment by replacing the leader with some subliminal messaging like Death, Evil, Murder, or overexposed shots of the killer thrown out of focus, whatever. The slo-mo flash idea might not work, since most flashes last only 1/500 to 1/50,000 of a second. You would need a frame rate in the tens of thousands to capture it slo-mo, something close to the bullet high-speed. A

DVCAM is only higher tape speed and not better quality. The signal is simply written over more tape are area, which reduces the amount of information lost when a drop-out occurs. You could look at it like this, LP mode is written like this //////////, SP like / / / / / / / / , and DVCAM like /__ /__ /__ /__ /__ /__ / . There is actually more slant on the DVCAM mode, but you can see how much more info loss there would be at LP mode if an error occured.

Pretty sure the XL2 will be the camera peeps want to over the DVX. The lens is just to short on the DVX IMO. I just hope they have as good or better image controls then the DVX has. I mean you dont buy a $5k Canon Still camera and have the settings dumbed down. For the love of god let me screw myself with jacked up settings if thats what I want to do.

I actually have a different philosophy to add to that. Powered speakers generally have the amp sized to match the drivers (speakers) in the box. Mackie's studio monitors are a good example of this. In my opinion, even when buying components, most people buy the lowest cost solution or a compromised solution when it comes to audio gear. With systems like these, most of the distortion people hear when the sound levels get high is the amp's inability to supply the necessary current to drive speaker. When an audio amp can generate the voltage for a sound level and not the current (amperage,) what you get is garbage definition of your audio, and normally it is the low end that suffers first. So make sure you really match the specs on both the amp and the speakers if you go seperate. Four HR824s', an HR626 and a HRS150 make a fine active speaker surround system. Can you tell I am a Mackie fan??? ;)

Oh...dam didnt scroll down far enough to see that...hehe

Anyone have a brief list of things to watch out for or avoid while using the SDX-900? I am shooting a short drama on one soon and have read the Goodman's guide on it, but was wondering if anyone experianced with the camera has any useful insights. Anything to do with setup, detail settings, gammas, back focus, operation, audio, ect, ect. I read the previous thread about auto knee and it was helpful. Aaron

Does anyone know where to get some footage on D-beta, dvcpro50, or even BetaSP; of a crash test facility testing? I am looking for a small 2-door black Honda shot in Side view in either real-time or high speed. Optionally the footage could be car driving away from camera on a high angle shot or interior of car with black hood crumple. Any help would be appriciated. Aaron

Check out Sony's DSRPDX10 - small like GL2 and has native 16x9 support.

See now Bob is a thinking man...and a smart man.:) Warm and dry are good things that improves everyone adittude toward the project. No one likes to be cold, wet and hungry, especially when making little or no money on the project.

Baraka Unforgiven Blade Runner Elizabeth LOTR series Big Libowski Dark City Blare Witch - for the best use of no or limited light on a scene. The flashlight stuff was great. Japan Animation - they seem to capture in the animation cinematic styles that are easy to see what the key elements are that make it a good frame.

I second the day for night. From there maybe look at a high speed stock, most 500 speed stocks can give you about what you see at low light levels with a tad of pushing. From there you might concider low wattage fixures (sub 1000w) and look into using DC inverters hooked to a running car or portable generators rented from an equipment supply. IMO...A couple of 150W china balls on inverters can do wonders to create that kinda sourceless light.

Check out Vegas Video by Sony. This software has amazing flexiabilty and import and exports to almost any format. Apparently good enough for Sony to buy the product from Sonic Foundry the original maker. I use Avid for straight editing and vegas for effects, titles, and some sound work. Vegas has a non-traditional interface for editing that is very much like handling phyisical media. It has a lot of the same compositing abilities as After Effects and you can drop photoshop media on the time line for titles and it understands its transparencies. You can edit non-standard media on the same timeline and it will do its best effort to give you a realtime transition without rendering. For instance you can drop DV, quicktime, and window media on the same editing timeline with no conversion. Another useful features I still use it for is exporting to web sized media, which allows for export to all popular streaming/download formats and you can alway launch another instance of VVideo to render another format simultaniously. I have used other apps for compression to the web and none accept so many input formats as Vegas Video. Everything I wrote is not BS and I don't work for Sony or sonic foundry. http://mediasoftware.sonypictures.com/

That makes sense since firework create white light by burning phosphors, which burn extreamly white, not sure what the color temp is but obviously must be in the 5600k range. My question is, since arial flares (like battle field lighting flares) are basically fireworks using the same technology, would this also hold true for them.

Of course this all depends on the size of the window and your resources to alter it. I would try Full CTO or CTS and then look at what that gives you. If you want more color try an additional layer of amber, straw, plus green, or something you like probubly not in a full level. I stay away from layering CTO levels since orange light is not generally that attractive.

Does anyone know of good places to find used lighting gear and grip equip? A

Magic Bullet Software I have used the Magic Bullet Software and it does a very cool job of creating a film look. The software looks at your video as if it were origenally shot on film; by de-interlacing the footage, performing a reverse 3:2 pulldown, then adding color filters and other aspects to the image based on prameters you select from thier library of settings. This plug-in was orgenally created to assist people doing high end compositing and solve other post production problems that come from using consumer DV footage. One thing to keep in mind is that by using the Magic Bullet and then going back to DV tape, you are going to recompress all your footage which is already compressed 5:1, so you might increase your compression artifacts in the final footage. This may or may not be a problem for you, depending on how good video gear you are displaying on is. XL1 in Frame mode might be better then using the magic bullet unless you are going to film or a higher end video format. A

Magic Bullet Software I have used the Magic Bullet Software and it does a very cool job of creating a film look. The software looks at your video as if it were origenally shot on film; by de-interlacing the footage, performing a reverse 3:2 pulldown, then adding color filters and other aspects to the image based on prameters you select from thier library of settings. This plug-in was orgenally created to assist people doing high end compositing and solve other post production problems that come from using consumer DV footage. One thing to keep in mind is that by using the Magic Bullet and then going back to DV tape, you are going to recompress all your footage which is already compressed 5:1, so you might increase your compression artifacts in the final footage. This may or may not be a problem for you, depending on how good video gear you are displaying on is. A

http://www.adamwilt.com/24p/index.html This shows the main difference between the Standard and Advanced modes of the dvx100. Also more information on the capture rates/modes. One thing I alway keep in mind is that the "DV" codec is not flexiable like other computer video codecs. The bitrate that DV runs at is a constant and connot be change, so look at it like a filmstock, you can record what you want to it, but the imformation will recorded to file in the DV formating. This is because video compression is handled by a Digital Signal PRocessor that is pogrammed to do only one thing very well. So all image processing needs to be done before it hits the DV DSP, comformed to DV's 30i (or 60i depending how you look at things) standard, and is output to tape. When footage is recorded to tape in Advanced mode, it is the NLE plug-in that mothodically removes extra "blank" information from the DV data stream. It is only recently that JVC has started to include a new file format that can be written to mini-dv tape with its HDV camcorder.