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Stephan Schuh

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    Cinematographer
  1. Hi! Next month I am going to shoot a lot of boat stuff around Malta for a german comedy movie. I´ve been on water before, but we would like to get really stable shots this time, because it´s 1:2,35 and for the big screen. So far I have found two options for stabilizing the camera on boats: - Libra- or Scorpio-Remoteheads with electronic gyro stabilization - a gyro mount called Gyro-Pro by Peace River Productions (or the gyro mount mako-head) A remote is pretty expensive because it comes with at least one operator and I like to avoid cables and electronics if not neccesary (especially on water). The Gyro-Pro seems fine for me, but it´s not so easy to get to Europe and I guess there are not many units available anyway. (The rental is working on it.) So does anybody know other ways of shooting boat to boat stuff? Thanks for your replies! schuh Germany
  2. Hi Bernie! Thanks for your reply. Do you know what the 4 Volts are needed for? Can I feed the 8 Volts only and get the camera running anyway? (I assume that the 8 Volts run the engine and the 4 Volts probably the lightmeter or auto iris/zoom control on the R16 automatic.) With the Super8 Beaulieu that didn´t work, the 4 and 8 Volts also need to be "balanced" in some way. It didn´t work with just feeding 4 Volts to one cable and 8 to the other because the two voltages share the same ground. It would be nice if I can use a simple 8 Volt Battery because I have some for my ARRI ST already. Best regards from Cologne/Germany! schuh
  3. Hello! I just bought a beaulieu R16 and want to hook it up to an external battery. I already found out that it is running on 7.2 volts or up to 8 volts. But I can´t find a description of the polarity of the three pins in the plug. Is there also the same problem like with the 8mm Beaulieu, that the battery is providing two different voltages? I tried to power it with self built extrenal batteries and there was no way I could get it running because of this. Thank you for your reply! schuh
  4. Hi! I have just taken a look on a couple of zooms and primes on a projector. Canon 8-64 is still my favourite and looks quite sharp above 2.8 and a half. The Canon 7-63 looked a bit worse, although it is the newer Canon Zoom. If you don´t shoot wide open, the resolution is generally good, even compared to Zeiss Ultraprimes. Flaring and distortion are the major problems of zooms in general. At 16mm focal lenght the distortion of the 8-64 is at its worst. At 12 and 20 mm it is tolerable. Not much you can do about flaring. If the lens is in a bad shape it is getting worse. So check that your Zooms are nice and clean. Of course the Ultraprimes have a better performance at the edge of the frame, but they are expensive and make shooting slow. Ah - and the 8-64 is hardly breathing, I think even less than the Ultraprimes. I wouldn´t shoot on them for 16 unless it is getting really dark and you want to use them wide open. Best regards from Germany! Schuh
  5. People running behind a tracking vehicle can be difficult to focus on an open lens. But sometimes you can still look at the monitor and see how tight the shot is and guess how far away the actor is. Shooting a close up on a swing is one of the worst things to focus. The movement is not linear. The girl on the swing slows down while coming close to the camera. This is when you have to rack focus faster because of the lens design. The opposite happens on the way back. And it keeps repeating. A good opportunity to add more light to get a decent f-stop. schuh DOP
  6. I think that in a lot of cases focus is the responsibility of the DOP as well. Some shots can be really hard to focus, others are easy. As a DOP you should be aware of that and give your first assistant a decent f-stop on difficult stuff. As well you should fight for enough time to do proper measuring, marking and rehearsing. On most productions assistants get rushed a lot. Sometimes it is better to pull some NDs an get more depth of field. A soft focus will not get you better separation from your background. An "out of focus classic" is "breaking the waves" (Lars von Trier/Robby Müller). They had serious technical problems at the beginning of shooting, but some people thought it was a creative decison. I don´t think that a shot that is slightly out of focus can help you tell a story. It is only destracting. If you want to use focus as a creative means, you better put things really out of focus. Regards from germany! Schuh DOP (I remember a soft close 2-shot in "Spiderman", that even made it into the trailer.)
  7. Which video format offers the better image quality: 8bit uncompressed or 10bit with a little bit of M-JPEG compression? I want to digitize Betacam SP tapes for DVD mastering. For this I want to use a Decklink PCI card and do the conversion to MPEG2 by software (multiple pass) and not by hardware. My harddisc space and speed is a little limited, so I would like to use a lower setting than 10bit uncompressed. 8bit would be possible without compression, but of course the color resolution is then limited. But DVD standard is only 8bit anyway. With 10bit I will have to compress the signal at least by 1:2 with M-JPEG. What do you think will look better on DVD? Which format is better for the MPEG2-encoding? Can you see a difference at all? :blink: Thank you for your answer! Best regards! schuh
  8. Hi! If you shoot wide open or stop down for fire is a question of taste. If you stop down a lot, you will loose all the light from the fire, but you will get nice red flames. I´ve seen a night-scene in a war movie, that was entirely lit by the explosions and flames and it looked great, despite all the flames being white. Sometimes I use a simple solution for explosions, if you want to break them down into different shots: The close shot on a long lens is stopped down, most of the time on slow mo, to get a really red fireball. The wide shot is on a rather open lens, so I get all the light and reflections from the fireball, which is white in the center. But that is O.K., because it is only a small part of the frame anyway. If you put too much light on a night shot with fire, it might look like a bad day for night shot. As far as I remember, "Gangs of New York" looked pretty artificial. (Nevertheless I am a Ballhaus-Fan). <_< I doubt that you get stronger reds by shooting on daylight-stock. Fire is already as red as an adittional full orange gel on a tungsten lamp. So it reads red on tungsten film already, you can still warm it up in the grading. Í´ve shot a test with flames with and without a choclate filter, and there was hardly difference in color visible. It can´t get more red than red. Merry Christmas from Germany! Schuh
  9. Hi John! On the projekt I´m working on right now, I´m using fluorescents a lot as practicals and as key light at the same time. I get the same smearing effect when a tube passes out of frame, but that´s just the normal flaring you would get from any light source. It`s only really bad, when it´s just out of frame, because the light is hitting the bad part of the lens, which is not used for creating the image. That´s what I think. It´s really bad with 16mm lenses like Zeiss primes and Canon Zooms, I think it was less with Cooke S4. The only solution is to get the tubes out of frame as fast as possible when you pan. In the frame there is hardly any flaring visible, becaus a fluorescent tube is not as hot as for example a light bulb. Best regards! Schuh
  10. Hi Mike! That´s good to hear. I´m still wondering if the majority of the program-picture-quality will get any better through HDTV. Game shows will look the same on HD or SD. A lot of people watch telly on average TVs with really bad settings of contrast, color and brightness. A THX-like standard for consumer TVs would be more of an improvement than HD. Nevertheless HD-Recording offers far better images than Digibeta, even for SD-Television. Thanks for your reply! Schuh
  11. Hi everybody! Of course HD is better than SD. Theoretically. I´ve been to a Panasonic HD-Presentation in Germany and everybody went "Oh" & "Ah" looking at the new flatscreen displays in the lounge. In fact they were only SD-PAL-flatscreens. PAL is pretty good already. And a lot of the appearance of sharpness comes from the quality of the footage itself. And that is pretty lousy in most of the programs on TV anyway. I wonder if a porn-consumer would bother if the flick was shot on HD. And a lot of people buy big screens to show off and not to get a better image quality. I doubt that HD will create a larger market for quality images. In Europe there is only one HD channel and no plans so far to start adittional ones. German pay TV is airing most of the movies on Low-Res and high compression and gets away with it. Only sports and a few movies get full PAL on pay TV. Best regards! Schuh
  12. The description I´ve read compared lenses of the same focal lenght or angle of view. The difference was just the diameter of the lens itself. (In combination with snorkles, you often use smaller size lenses.) The question is: Can lenses with the same focal lenght, the same angle of view, on the same format, at the same f-stop and at the same distance have a different depth of field, only because their construction is different? Thank you for your answer! (I think it´s hardly possible. Could it be that a very small lens has a slighty different angle of view than a larger lens of the same focal lenght? This would mean that you could get more depth of field at the same angle of view. But this sounds a little strange to me as well.)
  13. In a description of a snorkle-lens like the revolution I´ve read that the small lenses they use offer a greater depth of field than regular size lenses. This sounds to me like complete bullshit, because DOF should only depend on the local lenght and the f-stop and not on the size of the construction of the lens. So what´s true? "Vielen Dank" for your answer! Stephan (Germany).
  14. Modern cine-lenses like Cooke S4 and Ultraprimes work as regular Lenses as well as they focus to macro range (or rather close-focus range - macro starts with 1:1 as far as I remember). There are, or at least used to be, differences in the construction of lenses for extreme macro work. I remember from my time as a photographer´s intern, that you should use a lens on a macro-bellows the other way round, meaning the front lens facing the film. Nikon bellows offer converters for turning the lens. The reason for this strange habit is probably that in the macro range, the optical path is inverted. The distance from object to lens is then smaller than the distance from lens to filmplane. Special extreme macro lenses perform better on this "invertion" or are already inverted. Modern cine-prime-lenses are only close-focus-capable because they have a floating lens element, like all the zooms have. This results in stronger breathing of the image while focusing, something that was hardly visible with old primes. Although this is sometimes a really big pain in the ass, I wouldn`t work without primes like S4 anymore because of their other advantages (less flaring, more definition etc.). "Beste Grüße" from Germany! Stephan
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