Vincent Sweeney

Advice would be much appreciated on this! I exported a 2 minute scene from a 1080 ProRes HQ timeline, and made it into the same ProRes HQ 1080 file. Filters had been applied and rendered out fully in the timeline. It's pretty obvious that the new file, when played back, has a contrast and saturation shift. The shadows were bought up and are slightly milky/more grainy, and the color has faded slightly. I assume this is pretty common when dealing with FCP. Is there a known fix or am I doing something wrong? Why would the codec-matching exported file not look exactly the same as my timeline footage?

My most recent budgeting for a feature showed, at the time, that Alphacine had the best deal. Postworks does make deals but they are involved in a lot of medium/higher budget stuff. I dont know what Cinelabs is up to with HD these days but try calling them too. Would love to see your work on BluRay or HD streaming Joe! Brian, the 5D has never been appealing to anyone who was being really honest with themselves, and I bet you would regret using it (or any slr). There are so many better options.

Interesting but how is it going to be projected/seen?

Check the criterion DVD/Bluray. Lots of info there, including Fisk commentary, among others, and an interview with Haskell Wexler.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/kodak-reorganizes-as-two-business-units-sues-apple-and-htc/ More on the Apple suing and reorganizing, and selling of the gelatin side of things.

Tree of Life Bellflower Drive Harry Potter

http://thebuibrothers.com/blog/2012/01/killing-tv-lighting-4k-and-10-bit-canon-c300-late-night-chat-with-rodney-charters-drew-gardner-and-lan-bui-part-1/#more-2837

Ran across this short Variety article. Caleb Deschanel on Emmanuel Lubezki http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118047769?refcatid=13 Will try to do that Jason.

Interesting how all the "I loath/hate Arri, Arri sucks" posts from Jim suddenly have been erased. Maybe if he had offered to fix my sunglasses and answer warranty/parts questions, he would find more peace in life. ;)

Jesus... Stay away from the hacked toys and DSLR's in general unless you need to hide a camera. Don't invest that kind of time and money into this without a proper video system. The AF100 fits perfectly with your budget. Opinions on quality will go on forever but in the end, they are all discussing very small differences that no one will ever notice. Don't get caught up in hype, techno-babble and the back and forth on internet forums which seem to be mostly formed from emotional ties to gear that a given person bought into. Buy what you need and sell it on ebay before you start your edit.

AF100, without a doubt.

You should be posting your questions in the camera support section of the forum

Points/experiences taken.

Yeah I think it had one scene shot on 35mm in a club that had strobes, which no CMOS can deal with. I just saw it an Arclight, which is a top-notch theater, and it looked great overall although it was a slightly soft considering. I assume (hope) it was a 2k file or projector. Only one or two pieces of it stood out as a video-ish looking in color but overall the skin was rendered better than I was expecting.

That's why I added the word can. The three times I have seen it on other shoots so far, it's been built up quite a bit, esp. with so many adding ext recorders and extra power. The two I had my hands on were still waiting on batteries, handles or remotes to ship to make them work fully as intended. The first one I saw had just been shipped and had to be plugged into the wall to operate. I hope they have caught up on all of that stuff. I'm curious if you have had many issues with their stuff on your TV shoot? I do far less cam specific work than you but the few projects I have done on red's stuff, I've had one issue after another; erased shots when trying to play back, overheated twice on a short film in a 75F studio, froze up several times on a feature and wouldn't boot up after a few tries, etc.. Has the Alexa ever done any of the same?

Chris, no I think I was talking to you about "Plan 9" actually, which ended up on the F3. Their budget was even more insane than mine. I went with Cinefilm in Atlanta on their Spirit. It's a nice one-stop shop. It's been a good while since this was there but I assume they are still processing. I went into more detail in the questions, talking about the ideas that some people seem to have about film costs and how I think it relates to the "old days" when it was more complex. I see little difference with digital now; you add a shipping step in the process but that is it. How shipping film, once, makes things "so complex" makes little sense. Interestingly, after just watching lots of F3 and some red footage, I had to go back to my film for dealing with the endless delivery process and I was a little shocked jumping back to the 16mm footage. Those images really do exist in a different world from digital and the end product seems like something else entirely from what I was getting used to. Sometimes nothing else will serve.

Thanks. It was all processed at Cinefilm in Atlanta. The best-light, edited Prores file was simply put into Color and graded from there in NY at Contact DI & Post. You can spend a lot more doing it other ways but the benefits are slight in my view, esp. for this type of film. Yes Sean Gullette was the star of Aronofsky's "Pi". He was in "Happy Accidents" as well, among some others. Hopefully I'll be able to use film on the next (larger) film as well!

Hey thanks Adrian, although you may have to catch it on Netflix or OnDemand, etc. The theater play will likely be very limited. LA and a couple on the east coast so far. Yes Jon, it was edited in Prores. Oh make sure to join the facebook page! blueridgemovie.com The teaser has been on IMDB for a while but a real trailer will come soon.

Kodak is finally publishing an quick interview I did with them on my feature Blue Ridge (Thank you Kodak). The film will be coming out in early 2012. Limited US theatrical but hopefully a saturated digital/VOD deal... finally! I thought I'd post the link here but will follow up with more soon in the "On Screen" section. Some names and info I had hoped would be included were edited for space. http://motion.kodak.com/motion/Publications/In_Camera/Q_and_A/vincentSweeney.htm

You should call up all those top-tier DP's that are shooting "jokes" and show them the light man!

If not, Pro8mm likely will.

That news has been around for some time now. It has nothing to do with the camera choices a director and DP might make. The only thing it affects there is what it might do to the production of film itself since lots of the money made comes from making prints for film projection.

Great screening and Q&A, although too short. I was expecting a little better projection at that theater however. The more static FX shots always give away the projector wobbling, which they had plenty of. The print was a brand new one. He confirmed their next film will be mostly 35mm too, although he was excited to be able to use a digital cam for some night/dark scenes they are planning as well. He also mentioned the new one he just finished with Alfonso Cuaron called Gravity. Apparently there are some very long takes coming. It's his first digital film (Alexa)

It's definitely not a "99%". I can site enough issues with the cameras I've worked with alone to put that idea to rest. I'm still hoping for rock-solid refinement soon though. I love the fact that they will overcrank so high and that it's a US made product which might bias me a little by itself, just not yet, in their case. I want to feel good about their product but just like with the F!&@$ KiPro mini, which I was an early user/tester of and thus ended up hating the thought if using it again, I can't deal with questionable reliability and have to hold off. When people publicly complain after the makers of a product fail to get their job done, others seem to overreact way too fast. I guess most are either arm-chair filmmakers or are too emotionally invested into their material possessions. Bloom made a name for himself in the video circles with fragile DSLR HD so I don't know how a cumbersome raw workflow (for the video side of it) fits into what he was doing already. If he really wanted it for the stills side of things, I bet he would have kept it, but why do that if you have a bunch of 5D's laying around? Isn't it a much better/practical stills camera? Unless you really need to shoot 100 of them each second? The Alexa can do a lot more than ProRes too.

That doesn't sound like the case after reading the post. Did you even read it? And what accs. don't fit other cameras that the epic would use? Just curious which ones you mean in this case. Also, the size of the Alexa is pretty small in reality. People seem to think there is a huge size difference but that isn't the case after you build the Epic moderately, of course it can be smaller. I can't find it right now but some ignorant, non-camera knowledgeable writer recently posted a tech article about all the new cameras and he showed the Alexa with a huge Optimo 24-290 zoom on it and was talking about how "large" the camera was, while the epic was pictured with a prime and nothing else. They do take batteries and need plates and monitors and maybe more, depending. People also seem to forget (or don't mention) that one reason the Alexa has a little bigger body is because it needs room for processing compressed files that are ready to edit without add-ons. There are so many users of Epics, reds, F3's, and so on, that have to use add-on recorders to get the kind of files that many producers need. The Alexa will spit out 444 Prores or Avid files instantly.