Aapo Lettinen

The "FILM IS DEAD!" guys don't usually know the format very well and/or haven't shot on it at all. Otherwise they would see better the big picture and would see the advantages and disadvantages of each format much more clearly, so they could understand why a format would be perfect for one production when for some other it isn't. This is very typical with the fanboys, as well as the bashing of any other camera system and format because they want to justify their expensive purchase for themselves by claiming all the time it to be the best camera in existence :P It's like trying to explain to Blackmagic guys why it isn't wise to shoot cinemadng all the time with the cameras (some productions really really need prores) because it is "the best format you can shoot with them, "OF COURSE WE ARE USING IT FOR ALL THE SHOW" :blink: (yes, I truly hate cinemadng format. such a impractical and vulnerable format and unnecessarily difficult to back up, monitor, rename and verify <_< )

the worst thing with digital imaging is that you are completely dependent on electricity. if you are recording with the camera or backing something up and you have a power failure you will almost always lose something. I never work without UPS for this reason and I'm starting to be a little tired to drag the darn thing with me everywhere :wacko: There are couple of other companies making MP film but not color negative

fuji stopped couple of years ago, you can still get some of their stocks from clearance sales but mainstream productions generally want to use fresh stock so Kodak is the only option

film processing is a little bit difficult to do quickly if you're not near a lab. for example in Finland there is no local labs anymore, the nearest one is in Sweden and it takes couple of days to get the material there, processed and dailies made. For most people it seems to be too difficult and time consuming and when budgets decreased globally at the same time when the newer generation digital cinema cameras saw daylight (sony>red>arri>red>sony>etc) it was a big advantage to be able to cut some of the lighting budget and processing costs from the budgets with digital you generally also have better monitoring possibilities. you can still screw up big time with the original materials when backing them up so it is generally not any easier than in film era (some productions relied the dit work for unpaid interns at the Red One era but it took a year or two before they realized that it is STILL a LITTLE BIT more than simple copy paste work despite you can do it on your laptop without changing bag :ph34r: )

I can for example run about 2000 - 2500 ft of film through a Konvas 1KCP with a single 7.2v 5300mAh battery. The camera draws ZERO power when on standby so practically I could go to shoot a short film with taking only a SINGLE SMALL BATTERY with me, no backups at all, no matter whether I would spend a day or a week shooting that thing B) I can't do that even with GH4 despite it draws only couple of watts of power because the camera draws power also when on standby (compositing the shots etc time consuming work when the camera must be switched on) I love both film and digital and I think you really should use both :) Just avoid their weaknesses and use their strenghts for your advantage :lol:

I think that the quicker workflow is the best advantage of digital imaging and the reason for possible cost savings associated to digital. also the reason why most of the productions shoot digital nowadays. Productions will shoot approximately the same amount of footage anyway, film or digital, and despite being relatively cheap to shoot, digital video is NOT that cheap to post process and back up for extended time period, especially if you are using work intensive formats, for example Red or CinemaDNG. There's quite much work involved also with digital, and it is exponentially more expensive to post if one is shooting large amount of raw material because of the "free shooting media"... You can shoot digital with a bare camera and lens and battery, yes. You can also have enough cards so that you don't need a computer for back-ups, you can just store the material on cards and back up when finished shooting. Film cameras draw generally considerably less power however than a digital cinema camera because the camera body is using power mainly only when the motor is running and maybe for video tap and just a little bit for glow markings. If you are shooting in wilderness for example you can maybe manage even for a week with a single battery because the camera is only using power when it is actually running, not for viewing and compositing the shots. If you are shooting with for example Epic it is just better to bring a generator with you, it will probably weight less than a cart full of Vlocks and block batteries :rolleyes:

For me it's practical to shoot film when i'm shooting small amount of material during long time period so it's very unpractical to rent a high end digital cinema camera for that purpose. Wiht film you also need only one camera and you can change the look by changing film stock and processing. For example, I can use five days for shooting a 130ft roll of 35mm with Konvas and it costs about 150€ for me including processing etc if I also add some € for the camera body and lenses. If I would like to shoot the same days with for example Amira it would cost me couple of thousand euros. So, it would be complete maddness to shoot all my material on digital, it's just not cost effective all the time

if you compare cinematography to "vimeography" you know what I mean, "vimeography" is much closer to photography than cinematography

I think it's more about balancing the all aspects of the image and compared to the other shots than about simply following the rules... in photography the golden section and the rule of thirds, for example, are more important than in cinematography I think

could the 25fps masters be somehow related to dialog dubbing which is done in most european countries (except Finland and few others) ? I have never ever even heard that a drama movie was converted to 25fps in Finland and then made a 25fps cinema release, they always shoot and do the post at 24.00fps and make separate TV masters with sped up pitch corrected audio in Prores and if needed, hdcam sr and even Digibeta in some instances (plus screeners etc. dvd media if needed). It's exactly the same route with foreign (mainly American) movies: 24.00fps for DCP and 25.00 for TV and dvd. The audio speed+pitch change is not a big deal really, the sound posts do the 25fps version by default when mixing audio for a movie, and the framerate change is just a 2 sec metadata change for the image. If a movie would have been made entirely for television and then later decided to do a cinema release it would have been shot 25fps here. I'm also working in couple of documentaries which are made for cinema release but are shot 25fps. Documentaries seem to be the only exception here to shoot 25fps for cinema, but because they are mainly intended for TV and dvd/bluray sales anyway it is fully understandable

In finland they are almost always showing movies 24fps in cinemas and speeding up for tv, only for documentary films a 25fps theatrical release could be possible

But would probably make a very good film if someone would really do it :) You can ask to see the screenplay, if he has prepared this for 15 years I think it would be very interesting to read :)

Seems like a bit over invoiced yes for a documentary production which has no professional producer or production company behind it. Something like 100k budget I could maybe believe

I was referring to the common practice of comparing the copied folders against each other in Finder or Explorer to see how many bytes the folder takes in the drive and how many files there is in the folder and use this information as a confirmation that the copy was successful

example

you don't actually necessarily need specified programs for calculating checksums, for example in MacOS you can use Terminal for that (for md5 checksum calculation type md5 ,add space, drag the file to the Terminal window, press Enter ) -- I get different results all the time when comparing folders against each other. When comparing the files themselves the byte counts match but it is WAY too time consuming to compare every one of them manually

one thing about byte comparisons is that it usually does not work when you have drives with different file systems

one thing which is absolutely critical is to have a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for the whole DI set, especially if you are using it with a generator (and it is absolutely mandatory if someone else is also using the generator because of sudden voltage drops) . It has saved the data maybe a hundred times during our production when I have had to use a generator which is shared with for example Catering and the were using lots of power irregularly. This way you can also stop the generator without affecting the transfers when you need to add gasoline or move the generator for whatever reason

I have a following system for card labelling: 1. 2nd AC attaches a tape to the full card which has the card name on it 2. when I have done 1st copy, I will take the tape out and attach a blank tape to the card 3. when I have checked all the copies and they are OK, I will write "format and reuse" or similar text to the blank tape (if there are couple of blank labelled cards on the table I always double check the card before writing anything to the tape) 4. then I will attach the original card name tape to the case of the 3.5" hdd so everyone will know that the card is backed up there 5. I will bring the original card back to the 2nd AC personally and take the 3.5" drive with me when doing so, so if someone nukes my DI set we won't lose the data forever I only do one checksum verified copy first because I want to check the other two copies manually. maybe being overly paranoid, I don't fully trust even checksum verification :D Checksum verified copy takes at least 2x the time compared to a simple copy so if is also a bit more time efficient

I highly recommend always doing chechsum verified transfers for important material. When you know the checksums of the original camera files you can check all the copies and see which ones are correct or not. I use Double Data for epic and alexa material, usually I transfer the material from the camera cards using source and destination verification and when the transfer is complete I will do two normal copies to separate drives (first copy goes to raid array, I have another raid array for secondary copy and the third copy goes to 3.5" bare sata hard drive via docking station. I check the second and third copy manually and also compare the source and destination md5:s which the double data stores in text files next to the copy. After the day I clone the 3.5" drive in docking station two times and verify all the copies with DD using the checksums from the original transfer. I make two LTO5 copies of the material weekly and can then reuse some of the 3.5" drives, the raids have to be reset every five or six days and then I need to have three more durable copies of the material. When I have to leave the dit set during the day I usually take the 3.5" drive with me. The biggest risks with data are electrical problems, thefts and fires on set. Everything is ups powered so I can use the system with generator without problems. You can never be overly paranoid about data, if you are sloppy you will run into lots of problems and destroy everyone's work

I usually buy only gear that is impossible to rent from anywhere around me (like Konvas, Krasnogorsk and Bolex cameras) or gear that I use all the time (like GH4, H6 tripod and few basic lights). It is usually not a good idea to buy very expensive specialty equipment like Phantom unless you already have the customers or you want to start a mid size rental house with multiple cameras. Otherwise you just have to lower the prices way below those the real rental companies would ask because you don't have all the inventory the customers need and they have to rent some of the gear from other places. I'd say one usually needs one usable quality video camera which is small and versatile (like GH4 or BMPCC) and usually a stills camera for scouting and tests. It is ideal to have a lens set which fits to them both (or if you are using a dslr you can maybe manage with single camera). If you're not using some piece of equipment at least weekly it may be better to rent it when needed, then you can also change it to other type of equipment if the production demands it. For example buying a full set of Compact Primes is complete madness if you only need them twice a year. It is much cheaper to rent for example Master Primes or anamorphics and you still save quite a lot and don't have to pay for full time insurance and fear that someone stoles the equipment, etc

I think you should still charge at least SOMETHING for the gear. It's a matter of principle, you should be on the set because of your skills and not because you happen to own a piece of equipment the director and producer want for the production for free :blink:

in my country market is saturated with Epics and Scarlets but most of the features are shot with Alexas. I think the main reason is indeed that it is much cheaper to post process Alexa material, Alexas are only slightly more expensive to rent than Epics. Epic is something a drone operator or a smaller production company or owner-operator would own here, especially if they are shooting commercials.

I'm DIT:ing a feature at the moment and it is mainly shot with Alexa XT:s using 3.2K Prores. We use Epic Dragon and Epic X for drones and cable cam because of the form factor and weight but the Alexa Prores workflow is so much simpler and easier (easier to verify the files, quicker offline rendering, you can watch the files even with Finder preview, more robust filesystem, no segmented files, etc.) that I can't imagine doing the whole film with Epics, especially because we need 2 cameras almost half the time. Yes, the workflow matters that much, it's not simply the look of the camera or techical specs like resolution and frame rates. It can cost the production even tens of K:s more if you are using a difficult codec for the show and thus need more post production budget and time for preparing the material for editing and other post. That's why everything is not shot with F65 16bit RAW, it just costs too much to backup and post process the material, even if you get the camera body for free... One thing to consider is the Alexa Mini, I think it will replace quite a bunch of Epics as a drone cam just because the workflow is easier and it matches with the alexas most people use for rest of the film anyway

you can get surprisingly good results with using only reflectors/bounces/mirrors/flags to shape the natural light. If they make this impossible with poor scheduling it is best to just walk away. You can bring your own lights if you want (make sure they help you with logistics, it's the least they can do) and build simple reflectors from scrap very quickly if needed. No lighting at all is very bad for reel material in most natural light situations (you get black eye sockets etc) so at least a simple reflector is almost always needed