Chris Keth

Sorry to tell you, but with that lens you'll have to get marks by eye at the focal length of the shot and pull strictly by those marks. You'll probably just have to redo them for each setup. The distance marks mean nothing and are too close together and the lens isn't even totally parfocal.

If you join as an operator, you will be able to work 30 days as a director of photography before you will have to rerate your position in the union and pay the rerate fee.

I take it you're joking?

Not at all. Why would I be joking about that?

For anything intending to be kept for any length of time, I should think that film is the natural choice for picture format. Perhaps you should get a nice super 8 camera and lots of film.

Worth it means different things to everybody. You'll clearly not make any money so perhaps the questions to ask are: Is it a script that provides promising scenes and inspiration for you? Is it a situation in which you will do good work?

Sorry the nikon mount iscoramas are actually 1.5x squeeze factor.

 

See this thread for more information Anamorphic for Canon 5d mkII

I think 1.5x is preferable to 2x for DSLR work and here's why:

You're already recording 16:9 so the 1.5x makes it 24:9 which is 2.667:1. You'll already crop the sides by 10% to get to scope aspect ratio.

If you use a 2x anamorphic adapter, you'll have to crop out about 33% of your frame to get scope. That's just a huge waste of resolution, in my opinion.

Demand a full prep.

+1

If you don't get a full prep, more time will be spent on set getting eye marks and doing more takes for focus. Tell them that.

Thank you Toby and Robert, I appreciate the response and the advice I will definitely look into the local 80 workshops and interning as a grip or swing. I work on the grip and gaff team a lot on student 16 and 35mm features at my college currently but I will look into more larger scale shoots.

Step one: Quit calling it the gaff team. There is one gaffer, one best boy electric, and a few, several, or many set electricians. Collectively, they are set lighting or electric.

Thats hilarious David, yet a great idea. Unfortunately my character is going to be wearing prosthetics so that would definitely not be an option.

If the actor is completely in silhouette, why bother with the prosthetics? Seems like a massive waste of time and money.

If you can't trust yourself to hold a lens without smashing the front or back element because there are no caps on it, whether its a master prime or a nikon still prime, you probably should move to the production department where you can drop all the stationary and bits of paper you like.

Exactly. You can also proactively do things to prevent accidents. For example, I carry lenses with two hands: a hand cupped over each end. That way if I get bumped the worst that happens is I get sore fingers and a smudged front or back element.

Or use waterhouse stops:

 

True, if you can find lenses that take them. I've never seen a lens made for a motion picture camera that takes waterhouse stops. I have 3 or 4 other lenses that do, but they're all well over a century old now.

I've noticed that the iris apertures of some older lenses form a star shape as they open, perhaps to facilitate this effect at larger apertures?

Possibly but I think that's more likely a practical matter. If you want an aperture to be round, you need many, many aperture blades. I have an old lens for 8x10 with 64 aperture blades and it's round as can be the whole way down. The problem with that, is one of delicacy and space as the lens gets smaller. The shutter on that 8x10 lens is 5" in diameter. There is plenty of space to work with. It's much more difficult and expensive to manufacture an iris mechanism of that quality when the iris is only an inch across, for instance. The other problem is that even if you can make it, it's so delicate the lens must be overly babied to avoid being in for service ever other week.

Pretty cool, eh? I love the staging to take advantage of the columns and those big, hard (I assume arc) shadows.

Not sure those things exist. As far as I know, the only grip "certification" that exists is the good word of a reputable key grip.

How many backups did you make? Were you working from the same drive as was storing the backups?

I've never been sure about that myself. Diffraction around the edges of the iris blades, maybe?

I'm certain diffraction is the culprit, or at least part of it. I think what makes it show more at closed-down stops is that there is less light allowed through the iris to drown out the diffraction star. It's a physical phenomenon that always happens, but I think at larger apertures we just don't see it because of a greater quantity of light allowed through. There is probably also a measure of pinhole effect where the diffraction stars are concentrated in a smaller area than when the aperture is large.

Slow shutter speed will also create the same effect, but then we are talking shutters like 1-30 seconds... Obviously not so great for motion, but doing timelapses might work well, if the lens doesn't create the effect.

Perhaps you're thinking this because you've seen it most often in long-exposure photography? It happens when the iris is closed down pretty far which is done pretty often for that type of photography, even at night.

Hey Chris I PM'd you but it says you cannot receive any new messages.

I got your e-mail and forwarded the e-mail I got about the custom RBQs. I love mine.

In my opinion, it's a combination of all the things you mention- and more- coming together seamlessly until you don't think about the film being cinematic, but rather you have no other choice but to let the story pull you along with it wherever it goes.

For an internship, I suspect you should limber up your wrists. You'll be cleaning a lot of cases. ;)

I haven't been impressed by the camwave. I used 2 on detroit 187, where we had big 2-handheld-camera sweeping masters and the focus pullers were often pulling off the wireless signal, and they get noisy very fast. If you need an HD system and can afford it, the best of the current crop I've used is the boxx meridian.

The teradek cube seems like a promising idea, too, but only when they figure out how to cut down the delay times. It's very attractive to me to be able to give each department an IP address and some instructions and have them all able to see picture on an ipad or laptop when they want.

I did it with p-cam.

There's an amount of trial and error there. For example, the field of view question meant I gave the FoV calculator the subject distance and then plugged in focal lengths of common lenses until the vertical field of view was as close as possible to 2.0m. Just the same, once I had that lens and subject distance, I plugged that an T4 into the depth of field calculator portion and it was much more than 1m of depth of field. So I opened up until the depth of field was close to the value you asked for.

It's faster to do than to explain.

You want a 65mm lens. To get 1m of depth of field, though, you won't be at a T4. You'll be a bit closed from T1!

 

There is. It's called p-cam and it's available for the iphone.

Ooh, massive grammar failure and too late to edit. I meant to say, "There is a tool like that. It's called p-cam and it's available for the iphone."

You want a 65mm lens. To get 1m of depth of field, though, you won't be at a T4. You'll be a bit closed from T1!

There is. It's called p-cam and it's available for the iphone.

Over the last ten years I've filmed on three continents using a variety of cameras utilizing multiple formats with a large number of lenses including fixed prime and zoom. I have a certificate in cinematography....I said "fastest" and meant "best", but that doesn't explain your hostility as I took your response to be.

Steve

That's all well and good but you shouldn't be surprised why you got that reaction. Somebody who purports to be a professional, working cinematographer should know a simple technical question like "which lens is fastest: X, Y, or Z?" Hell, to not know that would imply that you might fall for the old "go get a bag of f-stops" trick.;) If you meant "which lens- X, Y or Z- would be the best all around choice for_______________?", you should have stated the question thus. If you really didn't know the answer, you can admit it. We're all here to learn something, whether we're just starting out, a long-time professional, or (me) somewhere in the middle ground.

For the record, I would have probably preferred the 5.7-57 T2. I've rarely wanted to shoot wider-open than T2 and that's a great range of expressive focal lengths for 16mm or Super 16.