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Michael Palzkill

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About Michael Palzkill

  • Birthday 04/16/1987

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  • Occupation
    Cinematographer
  • Location
    United States

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  • Website URL
    http://www.mikepalzkill.com
  1. I shot a short film this past winter on a JVC HD200 with the Red Rock adapter. We shot it at 720p24, then captured it at 1080i30 in ProRes. Along with the interlacing, it introduced the pulldown effect you're talking about, which was very obvious. After a lot of trial and error, we finally found a solution that worked great for us - I think it was either on Creative Cow or an Apple forum. We took the sequence from Final Cut into compressor and threw the Apple ProRes for Progressive Material (either the regular or HQ - your choice) setting on it. Not sure how it works with other settings. From there, go into the inspector below where the file/settings "main" window is, and go into the encoder section (second box from the left). There, change your frame rate to custom and in it, put 23.976. Once you're done with that, go one box to the right (frame controls) and turn frame controls on. Then, where it says deinterlace, change that to reverse telecine. As far as I can remember, and just looking at the settings, that's all we touched. Obviously, if you do this ProRes, the file you'll end up with will be much bigger than you want, but you can then compress it down to DVD size for whatever you need. Not sure if this is the "best" solution to your answer, but it might be worth a try. It worked great for us. Hopefully it'll work.
  2. Someone actually sent me a link the other day about iPhones/iPads generating timecode. Pretty nifty. http://blog.abelcine.com/2010/05/11/generate-timecode-with-your-iphone-or-ipad/
  3. It really is about preference. My roommate has an LG LCD, which I actually really love. It does have the 120HZ option, which I similarly despise when watching most thigns, but it can be turned on and off. There's two custom options, one which I've tweaked for television/movies and another which I've tweaked for sports (which has the 120HZ turned on) . But different people will say different things. One of my friends swears by his Samsung LCD, and I've talked to other people who love Plasmas. I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that Plasmas tend to run hot and can burn images into the screen if left on pause for too long. There was an ad in craigslist a little while ago for someone either giving away or selling for very cheap a very large Plasma because while he was away for a weekend, one of his roommates put some porn onto the tv and left it there for a joke, and when he got back it was burned into the set. But the technology is constantly changing. LED LCDs are starting to become popular and look freaking great in my opinion. OLEDs are also in the future, but probably not for a bit. Understand what you want to use it for, and if it looks good to you, then it's probably fine. Like others have been saying, a lot of those specs don't mean a whole lot. Do check for directionality though. The image could look great straight on, but like total crap off to the side. Another reason I like my roommates LG. Hope that helps and sorry if it's a little all over the place.
  4. I have access to quite a few rolls of the EXR 7293 stock, and was just wondering what opinions people had on it?
  5. Others can probably answer this better than me, but I think that to answer your question, it varied. In his book on the French New Wave, Richard Neupert states: "New Wave filming techniques depended on more than shooting quickly on location, however. They altered the conventions of their shoots, looking back to neorealist techniques, but combining what they learned from Rossellini with what they could learn from new documentary filmmakers such as Jean Rouch. Jean-Pierre Mocky, whose first feature, Les dragueurs [...], was one young director who urged everyone to 'eliminate all the dead weight the cinema drags behind it,' which meant not just heavy over cliched stories, but also 'tradition of quality' production norms. Mocky urged new directors to follow his model and shoot silent, like the neorealists, and put the sound together later in the sound studio to save time and money. New Wave directors did shoot silent when appropriate, but some also follow documentary practice, using new lightweight portable magnetic-tape recorders for sync-sound on location. In 1959, the Swiss Nagra III, a new fourteen-pound version of earlier models, became available; it caused an immediate sensation within the cinema verite community and was adapted right away by some New Wave directors." That was probably unnecessary, but in going along with the rest of the thread, I thought I'd do it. In answer to your question. Some filmmakers did it, some didn't. I don't know if they shot sync-sound with the film you are looking at or not, I haven't seen it, but this part of the book I quoted came to mind when I read your post, so I thought I'd reply. I'm sure others probably have a better answer to your question, though.
  6. I have some more to add...I just finished a paper tonight on a Truffaut film for a class, so it's on my mind. All of these filmmakers were heavily influenced by novels. They were also aware of the Italian neorealist movement. Andre Bazin, was kind of a mentor to a couple of the filmmakers, and he has his own personal theory about what cinema should be if you are interested in reading about that. Though, the filmmakers that were influenced by him, went away from his ideas pretty quickly. Not that they were bad, the french new wave filmmakers were just big on doing things their own way, I guess. It's also important to know that what they were reacting against was the 'perfect' French studio films that came right before them. And even more than that, they were against the screenwriter as the chief artistic person on the set. They really stressed the director as the author of the film. Which to some extent is dying today, because filmmaking is obviously a collaborative art. Stylistically, these films were known for their long takes, moving camera, jump cuts, SELF-REFLEXIVITY (eg. looking at the camera, zooms, etc, anything that draws attention to film as a medium, meaning that they were very aware that what they were creating was a reconstruction of reality). This is in opposition to the invisible, illusionistic, Hollywood style filmmaking. But as I said in my previous post, they use a lot of traits from Hollywood films. As others said, John Cassavettes is a great American example of French New Wave style. If you're looking for directors, there's: Malle, Chabrol, Resnais, Varda, Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and Rivette. Just a list of some. Malle and Chabrol were kind of pre-cursors to the movement, but the others all played a large role.
  7. You should also look into Henri Decae. He was cinematographer on a few "pre" new wave films: Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, and Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes. He also shot Truffaut's 400 Blows if I'm not mistaken, which is a major french new wave film. I don't think this is completely accurate. Cinema-verite is exactly what it stands for, 'truth' in cinema or however you want to translate it, and I do not think that the French New Wave filmmakers were doing that. I think cinema-verite, I think Jean Rouch and documentary filmmaking. I think French New Wave, I think Godard and Truffaut, very 'modernist' to some extent. Very well aware that what they were creating was a reconstruction of reality. Cinema-verite tries to mimick reality. It's trying to capture reality as it is. But yeah, the French New Wave directors were influenced by 'everything.' The 'initial' filmmakers, Truffaut, Godard, etc, began by writing about it, and they loved Hollywood films by Hitchcock and Howard Hawks and the sort. So you'll have a lot to draw from when trying to create a French New Wave style.
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