Aapo Lettinen

We were mostly talking about the operating style affecting the whole visual style. The camera and lens and accessories choices affect always at least the operating style in some way and that way the overall visual style. Maybe we have just different definitions of the "visual style" of a movie or alternatively you are changing yours from post to post. I don't know how experienced you are in filmmaking in general (google could not answer on a quick search) but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about in the previous posts. If this is just about wanting to always having the final word (or final post in this case) then please post anything you want below so you'll have the final word on this thread no matter how true or false that would be :) I'm sure everything beneficial for the OP has already been said and I have some work to do so have a nice day and be sure to make the final post to this thread if thats meaningful to you :)

1. film cameras affect visual style based on for example the film gauge, lens mount, weight, form factor and viewfinder optics and mounting options. On digital cameras you need to factor the sensor, image processing and recording format as well. They affect the visual style in both "technical" and "practical" ways. 2. you can't puchase or rent lenses if you spent all the money you have on the expensive camera body and basic accessories. there is not any money left. that is exactly what I was talking about, read the posts again 3. every lens has its own imaging characteristics both by itself and by combining it with differing size shooting mediums (sensor sizes/film gauges/manual cropping in post) . they have practical usability limitations as well in addition to the technical characteristics which will both affect the shooting style a lot. One lens has bad mechanics, one has slow aperture, one does not focus near enough, one is bulky and heavy, one flares too much or in a wrong way... combined with for example a oddball sized camera sensor you will have lots of potential problems in hand you are not able to control well enough without switching the camera body or lens or both. Even if you can make it work with only single body and one or two lenses it may not be practical at all in all situations. Every practical limitations or advantages of a camera system will affect the shooting style and schedules and budget. Often it will become so problematic that you will need to change to different camera system and lenses to be able to maintain the style. OR to use significantly more resources like time and money and work to make the non-optimal camera work for the project. You can take a two Alexa 3D mirror rig for example and try to make it work for small indie gimbal and handheld movie. then claiming that equipment choices don't affect the visual style at all?

marrying yourself with a single camera system and single limited lens kit mandates you to adapt every one of your project to suit that camera and lens kit. Not the other way around like it should be. and pretty limiting if we are talking the entry level gear like pocket4k and plastic kit zooms and not high end cinema cameras and lenses... Though the last couple of years most of the cinematographers seem to have confined their visual style with single camera system (always shooting on Alexa) and the lens choices may even be the same from project to project. That may be perfectly reasonable for a seasoned DP (and the producer probably chooses the camera body anyway) but if you are just starting out you can't limit yourself with an expensive camera purchase so that you are financially unable to test and try anything else for a long time. People often fail to see much logic or reality in my postings especially if their opinions differ from mine. That is perfectly fine and there is no real truths about these things, only more or less valid opinions battling each other for nothing ?

One thing is that you learn the most efficient way if you continuously stay just a little bit out of your comfort zone and always try new techniques and different shooting styles and projects. If one locks himself to one single camera system and lens and style then one gets comfortable with it very quickly and the learning process slows down or even stops. If the system was expensive there is no money to update to try new things and then the gear starts to limit the progress rather than speeding it up. One option is to purchase lots of different camera systems and lenses so that you are basically a rental house for low end gear. That is very expensive and will require continuous updates. The other option is to just purchase the bare minimum which records any kind of image so one will outgrow it quickly but it leaves financial resources for renting better gear. If shooting other persons projects one can make them pay the rentals so that one can use high end gear basically free. This is ideal for indie projects I think. The third option is to find out what gear you can borrow for free or for very small price and then just try to live with other persons schedules to pick up whatever is available at the moment. You may not be able to do this forever but you may not need to purchase anything by yourself at first. You will learn a lot because needing to use different gear on every project. There also tends to be much more cameras and lenses than persons experienced enough to do anything serious with them so something should always be available.

I use Zhongyi Lens Turbo II speedbooster knockoff with GH4, it is pretty well working though does not have any electronics so only mechanical lenses are practical with it. I know a person using similar booster with the BMPCC4k so it should work with it. Much cheaper adapter than Metabones, here the Zhongyi is around 180 Euros when the Metabones is 800 to 900 Euros. That is basically your only option if wanting a speed booster with that low budget. It is not as good as metabones but should work ok for you. Will still make the budget very tight... you will run out of memory card space and batteries and lenses very quickly. AND whatever you do the onboard monitor will still be required to be able to shoot efficiently with the camera... it will make the awkward Pocket4k pretty usable system and will help with most of its flaws but you might need to get your budget to 2500 or 3000 to get a usable basic package if wanting the pocket4k. one of the reasons I did not purchase the pocket4k (it was also hopelessly out of stock when I would have needed it for paid work) was that the oddball sensor size does not allow very wide angles when using old lenses (because affordable old wide angles are either super slow speed or otherwise crap OR very expensive) and if wanting to use affordable Lomo lenses I would have needed to make a PL mount to Micro4/3 speed booster adapter by myself which would have been challenging and would have limited lens choices usable with PL. These are very tough decisions and may take lots of time to weight all the options to see which would be the most practical or at least the least horrible choice. If you don't have any lenses yet it makes it a bit easier because not needing to worry about compatibility, you can just purchase whatever the camera allows to use...

There is a huge difference in choosing a camera for a learning tool or choosing a camera for actual (potentially paid for) cinematography use. The bmpc4k would be pretty nice for low budget projects and even some level of paid work but if the more expensive camera limits your lenses and monitoring options and accessories it may not be the best learning tool. Of course it may be possible to use some cheap old manual glass and cheaper chinese speedbooster with it but it is still pretty expensive and that sensor size is honestly very limiting if you want to use affordable manual glass or reasonably priced PL glass. I would still want to have the good onboard monitor as a bare minimum accessory. By my opinion those cheap-o plastic thingy lenses are not good for any kind of cinematography learning. Can be handy for stills and as a backup but not very usable for narratives or any other use than low budget doc work..

As said it also depends on how much extra work like online and mastering the deal involves and how the graphics are delivered or if the client adds the graphics afterwards to clean master etc. -not a real quote- ...I quickly estimated for example that I could probably do good basic grade and masters and online for that type of 15 to 30min project for about 3k or 4k if the graphics would be delivered by customer readily made in psd files and the playout correctly made in intra codec, project in xml and the original edit project as a backup. All the needed materials (most raw formats also possible) delivered and final mixed soundtracks delivered by customer in 24bit48khz wav files ready to go for mastering. No changes to picture lock, no vfx, no audio work included nor graphics like end credits and only rec709 output in prores444 or xq. Unencrypted dcp possible but quality or working not quaranteed. Delivery time 2 to 3 months if working on my spare time (thus cheaper and would be nice to try a different kind of project for chance). I'm not a pro colorist but doing dailies grading about 4 hours a day and the rest is other picture post work and mastering so should do ok quality end result. Over half of that estimated price was online and versioning and mastering btw, that's how much hidden work there tends to be in addition to the actual grading work even if graphics and audio is done by the customer. Estimated total work time about 1.5 to 2 weeks if 8 hour days not knowing the project at all. -not a real quote- I'm sure someone local can work out something similar, there must be some cheaper end guys in NY who can do good deals for you :)

I haven't tried this but would it work to wet the grass thoroughly so that the surface would cool down a little when the water evaporates and the fog could maybe then stay a little longer?

if you don't need to be there by yourself it would be much cheaper but that is not ideal when doing narratives... though then it would be possible to outsource the grading job anywhere, even to another country. Even I could give you a quote for the work and handle it from here, I have Resolve and some experience and fast interwebs ?

when grading you are paying for the talent and time needed and the grading suite they have built for you to rent for the time needed. so if you can manage with a less experienced colorist and have easy material which is fast to grade (or you can live with small imperfections to speed up the grading) and you don't need full projector setup for cinema grading but a nice calibrated display would do you could save a lot. easy online will lower the costs as well. But it can vary a lot based on what you need and where the end product is meant to be used. here it could be for example between 400 and 2000 euros a day to grade a short film or a commercial depending on who does it and where and how experienced colorist and what gear he uses. If you can do the grade quicker it will lower the cost and a bad colorist is slower than a good one so you need to balance the things to find out the best option for your specific project. If your project is going to end up mainly to DCP release I would choose a mid range colorist and ask for a good quote and if you can do something for the project to be able to grade it quicker to lower the cost. If you have shot RAW footage for example it may lower the costs if you debayer it by yourself and render to low enough contrast log prores444 or xq for grading so that the raw adjustments don't need to be figured out and tested by the colorist so less work for him/her. It may also lower the cost if the grade can be done on their spare time in longer time period so couple of silent hours here and there when they don't have higher paying projects and clients working there. it will take longer to get the final product but the price could be much more reasonable for you

If I were a film student again I would take a good onboard monitor over a camera body every day. They tend to be more difficult to borrow and more useful than camera bodies and the blackmagic is worth nothing without good lenses and a speed booster which are expensive. So I would purchase a good monitor first (daylight viewable, scopes, hdmi and sdi) and then consider my camera options again with rest of the money

Are we talking about 2000 bucks for only the camera body or 2k for the whole package? Because you cant get the pocket4k with decent lenses and accessories for 2k... How about building your kit backwards so that you can figure out how much budget you have and how much extra is needed? 1. Pick a decent onboard monitor with batteries and cables and arm 2. Pick a decent tripod set with fluid head stable enough for your kit. Add a basic 15mm baseplate and rods for your camera 3. Pick at least two of the lenses you want to use and the accessories you want like mattebox and filters. Maybe follow focus if needed 4. Pick the memory cards or other media to last for 1 day shoot. And a card reader if needed. 5. Camera batteries 6. The camera body with cage I bet you ran out of money when choosing the second lens if your budget was only 2k...

Yep it is mandatory to consult the person actually doing the vfx. But you still need to know how do the tracking for the different style of shots if the vfx person can't be on the set to supervise the vfx shoots to ensure that they are done correctly. Yes it is usually (though not always) possible to get somewhat good or at least usable results even if the vfx plates are badly shot but it will require A LOT more work. Basically if a well shot vfx shot could be finished in 1 hour in post the badly shot one can take anything from 5 to 20 hours to do. Even 100 hours or more if one has really screwed up on set. The challenging thing is you may not know whether you have screwed up or not until the post persons tell you so much better to plan these things beforehand to save everyones work :) in the case of vfx the fix it in post may mean saving 10min on the set but doing 100 hours more work in post to fix the shot... if talking about two dimensional tracking one needs at least one tracking point for being able to track pan and tilt and one additional point to be able to track roll (rotation). Then it is possible to track a flat background plate or other element to the same distance than the marker was on set. Longer distance than the marker can usually be somewhat faked manually. if you have a flat background plate which changes its angle during the camera move (2.5d tracking) (like a text which is projected on a wall the camera passrs horizontally) then you normally need at least three to four markers depending on how you do it in post. This can also be done with planar tracking which tracks the surface texture and shapes of the area pointed to it instead of using normal point tracking. Planar tracking generally needs a large enough distinctive plane it can follow which has surface texture on most of the area so for example a normal wall with wallpaper might do but a featureless piece of greenscreen may not. Planar tracking is often used to fix shots where the point trackers were incorrectly placed and thus unusable. 3d matchmoving is needed if you need to attach cg elements to the camera move so that there is very noticeable perspective/parallax change and the cg elementd need to replicate that change too. You have to basically track the 3 dimensional path of the camera to replicate the camera move afterwards in the cg program to be able to get the same camera move to the cg elements. This is very distinctive of the normal approach of tracking because you are not following a photographed single markers path but are using dozens og tracking points which the algorithm uses to calculate how the camera originally moved in three dimensional space. This is a very challenging type of tracking to do without experience because it can fail completely if there is not enough points or the points are not constant in certain parts of the move (covered temporarily by the actor etc) and it is challenging to get enough tracking markers available if shooting greenscreen. Modern trackers can use both point and planar trackers for matchmoving so you can normally use most of the fixed objects in the shot for tracking. This is the type of tracking where you need to have lots of parallax tracking points on different distances from the camera to be able to track the shot and you need a lot of markers as well. You can use green painted pieces of kapa cardboard to host markers if the are needed on different distances. Easier to control shadows than with cloth. Point tracking generally works best by locking to a 90 degree or sharper angle corner of high contrast difference. That is why the traditional cross marker has evolved, it has lots of 90 degree high contrast corners to use. Another good marker type is a triangle which is more seen on matchmoving markers but can be used for normal tracking as well. It has the advantage of being a bit easier track if its blurred. With greenscreen and basic tracking you can often place the markers outside the actors movement area so that they can be just masked out easily without rotoscoping. If doing matchmoving I advise shooting about 20% wider so that there is unused extra area on the sides which is cropped in post and you can place as many markers than you can fit there to be sure the shot does not fail

as their name says the Daylight Spools CAN be loaded in daylight no problem but that is only valid for N16 framing. if using S16 gate the light may leak to the picture area in worst case like seen here so complete darkness required. the 2nd clip looks either x-ray damage or the film roll stored so that one side of it was much warmer than the other which lead to the other side of roll aging at different speed. relatively common on improperly stored old rolls stored years in wrong conditions but I am not sure how much temperature difference one would need for this happen in only couple of weeks (maybe if the sun is shining to the other side of the roll and the other is in shade or the roll is stored one side against a radiator for weeks).... the fog fluctuation being blueish and constant and it speeding up towards the end of the roll would make the x-ray more probable reason for it

Impossible to say without knowing what kind of vfx elements you are going to add afterwards and the special paths the camera is moving and what kind of tracking software you use and how wide the shot is etc. It may vary from a single tracking marker to hundreds and the optimal marker shape can vary as well. Sometimes it may be even more practical to shoot a certain shot without the greenscreen with using normal background to get enough tracking data and then just roto the subject instead of keying. A basic distinction would be whether you will do 2d or 2.5d tracking or 3d matchmoving and whether you use point trackers or planar trackers or both and how many you need to see at minimum on each frame to be able to track reliably. Have you hired a vfx supervisor for the shoot, he/she can check the shots you want to do and tell how it's easiest to archive them? We can try to give some suggestions here as well if you tell all the necessary details about the scene and individual shots

there is nothing wrong being a first time fiction DP but it may make things incredibly slow especially if there is high artistic intentions and standards which need to be met and if the rest of the crew is not super experienced so that they can help you out both in pre production and in the field when problems arise. By my experience, the easiest way to slow a production and get it to go hugely over budget is to hire a newbie DP and newbie Assistant Director. if the Gaffer and Key Grip are also inexperienced it can multiply. It is mostly about staying in the schedule as best as you can and any mistakes can have serious time effects to the point of having every day go seriously overtime and still needing to leave shots or even scenes off the movie because the time for shooting them was wasted earlier on. I heard of a newbie AD who wasted maybe half a million euros on a movie production by being inexperienced in scheduling and not listening the technical people enough and trying to be too nice to the director when really should have said no and moved on to the next scene. lots of time wasted there and the production company was not happy at all.. I would say keep your lighting and camera setups very simple and fast to do (make sure they can be done in half the time you have available for rigging) and always make sure the safety is taken care of. You need to communicate with your staff and the Director and AD beforehand to make sure everything planned can be done in the time you have and if there is any time consuming setups you can find a workaround which is more time efficient. For example on that kino flo shoot in the middle of the forest I would have had possibility to use gimbal every day on certain shots but I intentionally left it completely away because it takes lots of time to rig the camera to the gimbal and back to tripod so we would not have time to shoot all the shots for the scenes and would have needed additional day to finish them. it would have been marginally possible to shoot the shots on steadicam which we also had possibility to use but the terrain is very difficult there and would have slowed down the steadi a lot so it was not practical. .... you need to be able to do this kind of decisions both beforehand and on the fly without consuming too much time to think about them. otherwise it will seriously hurt you in the next scene when you are hours late on schedule and the sun is setting and you have only one smaller light and still two pages of dialogue to shoot...

the vfx supervisor tends to be the key link between vfx post and the Director +DP +production designer+ producers etc. production company hired staff. depending on the production and post workflow there may be varying amounts of post production staff and multiple separate companies may do the effects work overseas if that's more cost effective than doing everything in-house or hiring a local company for doing all the vfx. If you look the end credits of a major Hollywood action film you may spot even dozen different companies who did parts of the vfx work (certain types of work they are good at, for example roto work or character animation or landscapes and buildings or fire and smoke effects and other particle effects etc.) and then there is the companies who did the 'basic picture post' like online and grading, normally one or two companies. there tends to be one or multiple post producers per company which do the deals and control the scheduling and client communication etc and then there is artists which do the actual effects work. the vfx supervisor may communicate the artists directly or via the post producer or other management staff of that particular company. linking the director and artists directly together would be very counter productive and slow because a single artist may do only a small part of the final image and the director's intentions need to be translated to actual vfx tasks which may need to be spread to multiple artists or even multiple companies so it mandates having a technically experienced but still artistic person in between them (the vfx supervisor) to find out what actually needs to be done and how it is easiest to archive and what it would cost to do and who will do it. sometimes the cinematography-related artistic decisions are overrun by the director or producer and the cg department so that the end result looks unrealistic (for example the cg background being completely unnatural looking and screaming fake because it being completely in focus when the foreground and other elements show that it must be out of focus if it would be real... that is actually relatively common in movies to have these unnatural fake looking composites seemingly because they want to show the small details in the background which would not be possible if it being slightly out of focus)

safety is a really challenging issue on indie/low budget shoots and on any film set for that matter. the HODs are responsible keeping their crew safe and to report any safety issue they observe and immediately react appropriately. Personally when in DP position I feel responsible keeping the whole crew and actors safe which involves saying NO to the director or ad or producer if something cannot be done safely enough. There is the downside that you need to be always able to find another solution on the fly which may require incredible amount of improvisation in very limited time frame. The tough part being a HOD is that you need to be able to adapt if plans change suddenly... and they always change. saying no to stupid and potentially dangerous ideas is accepted and is generally regarded as a good thing but being unable to adapt quickly and being unable to instantly find a new great solution if the planned approach didn't work will leave a very bad impression and may affect your ability to find work in the future. The more hats you use the tougher it will get and the riskier it might get at times. it is best to choose your projects carefully and always prepare as well as you can. and if in any way possible you should hire the best crew you can, ideally them being more experienced and talented than you so that you can learn from them in the process. if something cannot be done safely, just say no. then you will figure out a better way to do it with the resources you have available. ps. No cheaping on sandbags. use them as many as necessary especially if it's windy or the terrain is soft and unstable. a falling stand can really hurt an actor or a crew member and it is incredibly easy to get them fall down on outdoor shoots if the g&e don't know what they are doing

when shooting in a forest I often find it challenging to control the shadow colours reliably. there tends to be lots and lots of green cast from all the greens around you and that contaminates the shadows very easily because the key and sky ambience are limited by trees and are thus often very directional and everything around is dim and green which just reflects the green everywhere. You can use it as a part of the look of course but if you want to cancel it you may want to use large bounces (if there is enough direct sunlight available) or artificial lights (larger surface softer lights just enough to cancel the green and add a little of pure cold light to the shadows) if direct sun is not available. On a recent shoot I had two 4' 4-bank Kino Flos on outdoor set in the middle of the day which looked ridiculous because they are not normally used that way but they had just enough output to create a nice shaping light on a cloudy day to a couple of meters wide set without consuming too much power or being overly heavy to carry about 1km off the road to the forest along with the small genny and sandbags and stands and everything. then could bounce that kino light and the sky ambience around as needed.

if you have another camera and onboard monitor with scopes you can keep with you on prep you can try to catch the flicker on the waveform monitor. Hold the camera very still or on a tripod and keep the waveform full screen so that you can see it better... you can probably catch most of the flicker by looking for unusual shadow activity (lows "jumping" up and down in a steady rhythm etc.)

basically it gets easier and easier the more standardised and widely used the same technology is outside the very niche film industry. For example the introduction of HDCAM and HDCAM SR (designed for TV use) simplified the post workflows here a lot and enabled making reasonable priced hd masters of the movies for later use. The file based workflows have simplified it even more because basic computer gear can be adapted to work for movie post production use. and LTO for example is used for lots of other uses outside the film industry so there is always a working LTO deck somewhere which can be used if the company's own machine breaks. No more those super rare expensive tape formats with one working machine for each continent... both the availability of the technology is much better but it is much cheaper as well. for example a basic LTO system as a whole is maybe one tenth of the price of what a HDCAM deck would have cost years ago

I have seen lots of local early 2000's movies which went through a DI and digital grading and in the recent years the producers/distributors wanted to do a new dcp or hd tv release out of them. that has been proved to be surprisingly difficult considering the early days of DI where they recorded the graded movie directly back to film for striking 35mm prints and then did the tv master on beta or digibeta tapes and that's it (no hdcam sr yet). the graded DPX intermediate was generally not saved (hdd space was expensive back then) and one can't really scan scratched and high contrast print copy to get a 2k quality version of the film for re release. Meaning that one basically does not have any decent quality color graded version of the movie at all in good enough quality and one needs to reconform and rescan and re grade the whole movie from the original camera negatives to be able to make a 2k digital version out of it. AND do the vfx again if there was any. The whole process is extremely cost prohibitive (will cost at least tens of K's to do) and they may give up the idea when hearing how close to impossible it actually is to do for reasonable price. another thing is those rare D6 tapes used for doing the hd masters in the early 2000's. One is extremely lucky to find a working machine to play back those (those are extremely rare, only couple of them in working condition in the whole world) and that is basically the only graded usable master one has apart from the film prints. the alternative is to again rescan and regrade everything. the hdcam sr masters made it a little bit easier because there were actually an existing hd quality tape you could find a working deck for and could actually play it back and get the image out of it. That was very helpful after the erased dpx nightmare and the D6 times ? --- anyway, nowadays it is best to stick to the most useful standard formats I think. Audio as separate .wav or .aiff 24/48 files, the picture in both prores 444 and dpx or tiff files. clean versions without bars and separate subtitle files if available. archive to LTO and do the other copies to the mediums of choice (ssd, hdd, raid, network storage, cloud, etc.) and migrate to new media types as needed.

if it needs to be precise then a depth gauge would do better job I think

they did already shoot something on the card and it is not showing anything? it may be a broken partition table, I have seen that happen once before on Mini. They can try another reader or test if the camera can still read the files. If not, it is best to let a pro dit or a data recovery company to handle it if it's the partition table problem. It is possible to fix on the field but that may be somewhat risky to the files and needs data recovery programs. I personally only do this type of fixes to my own materials (has happened couple of times with SD cards) when there is no high reshooting costs if something goes wrong. can happen for example if the card reader is faulty and destroys some partition data when inserting the card. the simplest method has been to format the card to wipe the partition table clean and then use a recovery program to try to find the missing files from the "emptied" card. most of the time it has been worked though I have never tested it on UDF cards and I don't recommend trying it to any valuable footage

when I switched to making less projects per year I started to get more money and experience from them so stopped counting at that point :) what counts as a "video" anyway