Aapo Lettinen

I meant that one would want to use friction adjustment knob INSTEAD OF using a hand directly on the film roll. Sorry for the typo :) Personally I often split directly to 100ft daylight spools and then wind them back to another daylight spools to get the winding correctly. One could also use a metal spool as Tyler mentioned. OR one could wind down to another core using a platter for support on one side. That is a bit trickier but is useful if you want to first wind everything on reverse roll and only then start to split it down. I prefer leaving every daylight spool a bit short instead of doing one shorter one. You may get couple of feet variance between spools but that is pretty much as accurate you can do at home

you will want to avoid static discharge when spooling down camera negatives in dark. The static flashes will make very weird marks on the film resembling blue streaky flashes coming from the film edge to the picture area. So you may not want to use the kind of gloves which create large amounts of static (for example nitrile gloves have been bad in my tests) and will want to use the rewinder friction adjustments instead or using a hand directly on the film spool to maintain the desired friction when spooling down.

you will need to spool from 400ft on core B-wind EI roll to 100ft B-wind EI daylight spools. I assume that is a 16mm winder? it should have square center axles where you can fit daylight spools. For attaching a core to it you will need a core adapter like the ones in Arri SR magazines. You will need to get the perforations, the winding and the emulsion on the correct side so you will need to wind it two times. If you attach the 400ft on core to the left, you can wind either all of it to the right side or some specified amount of it if you want. Then remove the left side core and the adapter and attach a daylight spool there and wind back to the left side the amount you want. You may want to make a measuring tool which you can use in the dark which tells you where the outer edge of the film should be on the daylight spool to have 100ft there. You need to wind either cross-cross OR straight-straight from spool to spool so that you will maintain the correct B-wind and emulsion in. if using 2R films you could get by with single passage if you don't mind the keykode numbers running in the wrong direction but with normal single side perforated film you will need 2 passes to get it right

And of course I made a crappy YouTube video about this procedure as well :D How to shoot stills film with a movie camera

absolutely... there is lots of differences in many areas, especially the grain texture. part of it is that the colour negative does not technically have "grains" anymore, they are just coloured stains on emulsion layers on the places where the original grains used to be before they were bleached away. additionally they can be on 3 to 6 separate layers (some films have double layers per colour channel, one with high sensitivity for shadow detail and one with low sensitivity for highlights) , this makes the texture look totally different from the b/w negatives which have one or two layers of real grain forming the whole image instead of the 3 to 6 layers of colour stains stacked over each other. There is also something special in home processed films which can't quite be emulated easily. the additional benefit with home processing is that one can really get creative with the developing and try different approaches easily. the disadvantage is that there tends to be more scratches and dust, and also more variance between developing batches than with lab processing. This limits the applications for home processing (like the length limitations and drying challenges do as well) but it is a great experimenting tool and can be very useful for special projects or limited segments/scenes on a longer project.

Orwo UN54 and 74 are also wonderful stocks for diy processing though I have sometimes managed to get emulsion cracks due to using too cold water with it. The double-x is also good but I don't personally like the texture and shadow detail much though have only tested it with two developers and it could probably be possible to get more out of it if experimenting a bit more. At the moment I use Fomapan 400 negative film on 35mm bulk rolls and it has very nice retro look. They don't sell it in 16mm but I would try Orwo if you can get it from somewhere for reasonable price

positive (reversal) stock has lovely colours and contrast when projected on film but it can be a real pain to scan to digital to get most out of it. the contrast is difficult to handle to most scanners and you will get less room for any adjustments during scanning or post prod. this is specifically on motion picture stock. I have not done much still work but as I have understood the photo negative scanners are much more capable than most motion picture intended units so the stills scanner would get much more out of the similar contrast slide than a MP scanner could in reasonable time and effort. Additionally you could use considerable amount of time per frame when trying to get the best out of a stills frame whereas moving image has much more limitations in this regard. It can be nice to be able to watch the camera original directly on a projector but realistically speaking no one really uses that option nowadays unless for home movies. It has no value on any kind of distribution application which is why reversal has never seen much use on MP use in the first place. Negative is much easier to handle and duplicate and it enables sound work and much safer editing. When distributing digitally the negative enables digital grading but if using reversal you pretty much need to nail the look in camera because post adjustments are extremely limited and you will lose even more of it if the scanning is not top notch. I personally like the look of Fuji Vivid stocks but they have always needed more telecine time for being higher contrast (more adjustments needed on telecine/scanning) so that the transfer has been more expensive. On low contrast stocks like Vision line or Eterna 400T you could almost transfer one-light with only couple of adjustments per roll if having very hot highlights or dark shadows. It just costs more to transfer because of the time needed. Reversal is much more demanding and the lower end scanners can't even handle it properly without crushing everything

You can't substitude a steadicam with a gimbal. Sometimes they can be used for same type of stuff but the results and feel are different. One of the problems with small gimbals and lightweight setups is that they don't remove the perspective + parallax shift even if they otherwise stabilise perxectly. You will notice this extremely well when being close to subject. It can even make the shot unusable whereas the mass/inertia balanced system (steadicam) might have a better change depending on the shot. Ideally you would use a dolly when shooting precise stuff or very close to subjects but whatever tool can be used if it produces the results you like. I use the AK4000 gimbal with mirrorless and dslr for lightweight stuff and steadicam or full sized Ronin for everything else if dolly track is impractical due to logistics

when considering a camera purchase I use to divide the budget in half. max.50% for the actual camera and at least 50% for lenses and accessories. That tends to work for low budget pretty well if you don't have all the accessories beforehand (all the needed lenses, support, monitoring and power) . helps to balance things out ? You may want to look carefully the lenses you would like to use. For indie films you can go either with modern lower end still zooms/primes or you can use vintage glass (some of it is affordable and good quality, I recommend trying Nikon AI-S primes and Pentax Super Takumars and SMC Takumars for starters if you are interested in low budget indie glass. both of them have very good mechanics if they are in good condition... by my opinion some of the Takumars can have almost as smooth focusing as real cine lenses if they are in good mechanical condition)

true... digital post of film captured image can get very complicated on some projects whereas digital post can be very simple sometimes on a good day :) the film scanning technology affects the final image and post prod pipeline considerably and it needs to be planned carefully which stuff to correct where to maintain efficiency. For example if you need to expose differently, develop differently, scan differently or just grade differently to get the desired shadow or highlight result. Film has less correction headroom in post than current digital capturing if you want to maintain consistent look and texture. Yes film highlights can be surprisingly flexible when trying to get details out of them in scanning but the shadow correction range is minimal and you will affect the grain amount /texture of the image considerably more than when doing similar adjustment on current low noise digital raw materials

film has challenging logistics if you need fast turnaround and shoot lots of it per day. learning to use any camera is pretty easy and should take from 5 minutes to one day depending on what it is and how much experience the user has from similar systems. Post workflow needs to be known well no matter which format is used. For most modern uses the digital is a simpler choice and young people tend to expect the wysiwyg and unlimited undo buttons

The challenge is that digital changes very rapidly...like two or three times a year. With film the technology is more constant so that it does not take lots of energy away from the art...though alexa has been a digital constant for couple of years which is why dps like it

Digital gear is totally OK as long as you don't trust ANY of the marketing claims by the manufacturer. Film gear is totally OK when you personally have tested it and you personally know that it works correctly. Otherwise it is probably faulty and you need to retest to make sure it works before shooting anything with it

Digital gear has lots of camera specific stuff you need to know. The good thing is that it generally works OK after you have went all the menus through once to setup it. And most of the time you will see in the monitors if there is something wrong with the camera. With film cameras there is also camera specific stuff but they are generally much simpler gear with less adjustments you can touch and which can go wrong. The challenge is, you have to do everything by feel and by audatory clues, you don't necessarily SEE if there is something wrong with the camera but it sounds a little different and you need to know how it should sound like in different situations and how to troubleshoot it. The nice thing about film cameras is that you can fix and service and customise them by yourself if you are handy enough and have the proper basic tools. If a digital camera has a malfunction you are totally screwed and helpless

Maybe if you have a customer who requires hd image and the use of 2/3 lenses is most practical then it might make sense. Aa a comparison you can get a Red One MX with couple of 640gb drives and the original display for about 1500 bucks or so. For general use that would make much more sense I think and would be much cheaper and more multipurpose glass could be used. Being 10 years old technology I don't know how many working hours it would still have but the F23 is not new tec either...

It's not your thread anymore, we changed it to one of the early seasons of The Big Bang Theory :D

Robin is out of the thread... but he will be back... like Arnold.... he'll be back...

Tyler, you said you scuba dive as well. Remember what you need to do when being 140ft underwater and you start to feel anxious. Your breathing rate starts to go up, you know you will start to panick soon and feel you won't get enough air from the regulator despite it is working fine? Focus on the breathing man. Stop, breathe, think, then act. You may not drown on internet forums if hastily panicking around but you sure will get into lot of problems. Consider it being a serious entanglement hazard...you surely would rather swim around watching pretty corals and colourful fish than roll up on someones fishing nets all the time (without even having a proper cutting tool with you?)

as I have understood (and also personally experienced) , the drones and gimbals tend to be most troublesome pieces of camera equipment on field. And anything wireless is unreliable, especially if it monitors something. Most of the wireless technology in general is crap anyway so I am just happy if a wireless device of any kind happens to work correctly even once in a while...

I have seen an Alexa Mini trash a Cfast card's partition table badly. probably happened during unmounting I believe. On all the other productions the Minis have worked fine as far as I have heard

I am used to cleaning dslr sensors, it has always been clean-by-yourself-or-don't-go-shooting-at-all choice with them so there was not any alternatives. Additionally the only local company cleaning dslr sensors charges a lot for it (it is a 5 minute job after all) and they are not open at weekends when you most badly need the sensor to be cleaned... It is relatively easy to do but you have to be really careful and can't hurry it for any reason. And if there was some streaks left you have to do it again. the swabs cost some so it is annoying if the first run was ALMOST perfect but not quite and you have to waste more of them. You will not want to do this on field though if your shooting situations are like on those photos, huh... in the middle of the operation someone would pour the soda directly on the sensor. No need to clean it anymore after that. ideally, if you clean the sensor by yourself, you would check it at home beforehand in safe environment and clean if necessary and on the field you just don't open it and definitely don't want to start clean it there. Imagine a sandy beach with wind blowing the sand all over the place and salt water spray in the air. You would not want to start to do sensor cleaning there either

just watched this video and it somehow felt to relate this forum pretty well Lake Peigneur Drilling Accident

I have never heard anyone splicing camera negative pieces together to shoot a longer roll in camera. The splice could create lots of problems in the gate I think but additionally the film lab would probably be very annoyed if giving them a tape spliced roll to develop. Basically they would probably need to search the entire roll through by hand in the dark and replace all the splices with more sturdy ones so that they would not risk them breaking in the machines and ruining the whole developing batch. If you are shooting sync sound the daylight spools have the disadvantage of potentially making additional noise from the metal flanges. for MOS footage they would be fine

the original one. And the one edited by me containing the same opinion but just told nicer way so that it does not offend people and is clearly your personal opinion, not a stated fact which has to be challenged. You can say the same things more nicely if you just want. This applies to the other people on this forum as well including me. It is the common problem of internet forums in general, it is so easy to write insulting stuff without even realizing it and then read it couple of hours later to find out how harshly you really said it.

"compressed air" is always some type of liquified gas on these applications. if using real air you would either need enormous amount of pressure to get enough of it to a OK sized bottle (on scuba tanks typically around 3000 psi) so on spray bottles you will always use some type of easily liquified gas like propan/butan or some kind of fluorocarbon gas compound which only needs couple of bars to turn to liquid. I think one of the very rare non-staining compressed air bottles I could obtain here, a local hardware store product which I think was tetrafluoroethane...some kind of non-flammable fluorocarbon nevertheless and did not leave residue. that was great stuff but useless in cold temperatures like all the other compressed air cans unless talking about REAL AIR like a scuba tank based solution. You can't liquify real air in room temperatures, that is impossible. You need to store it under great pressure in gaseous form in high pressure tanks like scuba tanks OR you need to store it as cryogenic liquid at about -200°C like is done in space rockets. The spray can products are always something else and that is usually either something flammable like propane style gas OR some type of fluorocarbon product