Chris Keth

You'll want cleaning equipment, a tripod, perhaps a french flag and/or a mattebox. You might want at least a basic filter set with a polarizer, a UV, and perhaps a set of diffusion filters. A changing bag is very handy, as is a good lightmeter (which I assume you probably have already).

I generally idolize Roger Deakins and Conrad Hall.

Ditto, since it's a still just do it with a long exposure. You might want to bring a flash or a flashlight to "paint" in some light on the tree to balance things out a little. Experiment.

Only if he projects it. I meant that he should do that for transfer to video, then he would have a more exact frame-to-frame correlation.

That is quite the treatise, Bob :P When I've had to do it (for student films, but we try to be proper), the slate had Production, Production Co., Director, DP, Scene, take, camera roll, sound (sync, MOS, etc) and date on it. Then the shout was just "scene one apple, take one." Always use a word with the letter at the beginning that is pronounced, so don't use "Know" for K, etc. As for lettering and numbering, if you have to do that, too, here how we have been taught. Numbers for scenes, usually with a location change marking scene changes. Letters for shots within the scene. So "1 Apple take 1", "1 Banana take 1", etc. Subsets of any shot (say if you were shooting a master then decided to get another take, but only of the entrance) would go "1 Apple 1, take 1" You always slate in the order lensed, starting with 1A. Don't use any numbering system that the shotlist or anything uses. That's about all I can add.

Well, the thing is that sampling rates don't apply to film frame rates at all. That just amounts to the quality of the audio. If you're going to final cut, I would just shoot at 30 fps (or 29.97 if your camera has the capability, I'm sure some do) and record the audio any way you want to. Slates would help sync it in final cut. Assuming a quality, accurate audio recorder (that will keep speed absolutely constant) the sync shouldn't creep over time, but you could definately sync every shot and it should be rock solid.

I've shot with some switars our cage has for the bolexes and they were fine lenses, in my opinion.

Who let them light the set like that? That's just dumb and irresponsible (and possibly expensive..?). To key well, don't you usually light the background a stop and a half or two stops UNDER the subject?

Find a high end camera place nearby (like B&H in NYC) that deals in prosumer and profesional video and ask them if you can try both. Take a take and shoot a little in the store. You can go home and check it out at your leisure and watch the results. Make sure you check things like the auto features, focus, etc, as well as manual features if you should ever want to make a short with it. We can tell you our preferences (I'd get the pd-170, personally, for most of the same reasons as Greg), but you might like something else.

If you do use a backlight, you can gel it with a little of the complimentary color to whatever screen you use (gel it a little magenta for a green screen, for example) and that can help reduce spill, don't get carried away though. Just a little color.

I know it sounds like a bad idea, but I can still hear. I'm not doing anything where I'd miss a cue or anything. It's just something about hearing it all muffled that it's not as funny to me. I can ignore what's funny about the line or something. I have no clue why, don't ask me.:D

Angular field of view is just how wide a swath the lens can see. It's listed in different aspect ratios because that will affect it. So the 5mm listed there will see just under 90 degrees horizontally and a bit under 60 degrees vertically. I'm not positive but I bet the MOD from image plane is just the minimum focus distance. Then the object dimensions at MOD would be the size of the frame at the plane of prime focus when it's focused at minimum. So, focused on a card placed at the minimum focus distance, you would see a 59.8cm x 33.6cm part of it for the 16 by 9 aspect ratio. The MOD stuff is kind of a guess, but they don't list minimum focus so I bet it's a good guess. :D

Man, you DID do about everything to desaturate the colors. :blink: Today I DP'd my first shoot. It's for a class that's our first experience shooting sync-sound film. We had 6 hours total to shoot and we finished in 5, where the other shoots for that class (everyone directs their own, as well as crews on everyone else's shoots in different positions) have all gone overtime. We shot Kodak 7222 200 speed B&W processed normally. I cinsistantly underexposed by about a third of a stop to darken things up a bit. Being DP for the first time on a crew (small, but a crew) was a really cool experience. I enjoyed it a lot and I really want to persue it further. The script is a short scene with 2 cops interrogating a blind man suspected of being a peeping tom. We really only had two major lighting setups. First was the table that I hung a 60 watt frosted vanity bulb (the kind with a 6-ish inch diameter) bare. Then I rigged 2 1k PAR's on c-stands about 7 feet high so each one would roughly spot the person across the table from the light. We wanted to let the backgrouns, which is a fairly ugly studio, fall into darkness so I left the lighting at that. I was all prepared to soften those lights a little bit but the director and I decided a hard tough look was appropriate. The second setup was supposed to take place in the observation room beside the interrogation room. Since we don't have time to build sets for this class, we implied the window and hung venetian blinds and put one of the 1k PARs through it to make a very strong blind shadows motif on their faces, then I put a 600 watt openface with a double and a single overall scrim to make just a slight backlight. I'll post pics when I get them. I'll probably get the production stills tomorrow.

I believe the series is derived from the area of the circle inside the aperture. The numbers are formulated how David said, but I think those particular numbers are used because each larger number is representative of half the area for light to pass through the lens. For example a 55mm lens at F2.0 would have a diaphragm diameter of 27.5mm. This yields an area inside the diaphragm of 593.957mm^2. The same lens at F2.8 would have a diaphragm diameter of 19.64mm. That yields an area of 303.039mm^2. That gives a ratio of larger area to smaller of ~1.96 (where theoretically we should get exactly 2.00), and the margin of error could easily be due to my hasty rounding-off of numbers.

You might be able to get in contact with someone from the local SMPTE chapter.

It'll look a little warmer, but not drastic. I think that's probably about the smallest color temp difference that you would notice, in all honesty.

The lens isn't marked for focus distance?

16mm

Isn't 50mm a regular lens for a 35mm size frame? So ~25mm would be regular, right...? I haven't shot enough to know offhand, I just know what I was told...

15mm would be a pretty wide lens for 16, 10mm would be getting really wide and a fisheye in 16 would be under 10mm, getting more and more distorted the lower it got. On ebay I've noticed some good zeiss m42 mount lenses in the 10-15mm range that end up selling for a couple hundred. Really good prices on great glass, actually.

Definately not this. A k-3 sounds like a small jet airplane when it runs...that and it'll only run 20 seconds or so on a wind.

The way I have found I like best is to set a keylight either by footcandles or my meter. Say I'm shooting 200 speed film and I want to shoot the scene at a T4. I need 100 footcandles for that so I'll establish my key so it's sheding 100fc on the subject. Then I'll set everything else a combination of by eye and metering as stop over or under 4. Then I can tweak it a little bit at the end so I can shoot right about T4 and go. Seems to work pretty well.

Not necessarily, DIs have a lot of uses that don't just take the place of hard work on set. There is a lot that would be dumb to use a DI for (I'm too lazy to put a Wratten 85B on the camera...) but there's a lot you can do with the advantage of immediate feedback. anything you do can be viewed in a few seconds, so if you're doing some radical look, you can alter it right there instead of doing it on set (if the looks even possibly photochemically) and possibly ending up with something the director hates and you still had to pay lots of money for.

I mean an incident meter. I have been wanting something different for a while, this is kind of just incentive :)

What speed were you shooting at? It's pretty easy to accidentally change the speed on that camera, especially since you load it by running the film at 8fps through the sprockets. I'd check that you metered properly. You could have the wrong slide in, or you could have turned a dial wrong, it's fairly easy the first time out with that meter.