Aapo Lettinen

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

I once tried to distill pure isopropyl out of the car window fluid which worked pretty well and was relatively cheap to do but it was totally unnecessary because I can manage almost a year with one bottle of Rosco fluid :D Isopropyl alcohol is used on other uses as well. I think the main use is liquid cleaning solvent in electronic and other industries. I believe the normal lens fluid contains small amount of water as well. There is also some fluids which are not isopropyl at all, for example the Zeiss lens cleaning fluid is butyldiglycol. Sometimes pure isopropyl alcohol is sold here in spray bottles as "Electronics Cleaning Fluid" and it can be quite pure though I don't like to use it on lenses because it causes more friction than the Rosco fluid. It is great for cleaning 2nd hand lens bodies and cameras from grease and oil so that they are nice and clean like new (can dissolve some old paints so be careful if trying this) . Scuba air is pretty well filtered and I would be very surprised if you would get any contaminants out of it unless there is some in your regulator or hoses. All the CO, CO2, oil residues and particles as well as water vapour are filtered out of the air at the compressor side if the filling station is well maintained. It is much cleaner than the air we currently breathe. You could die or at least develop serious health problems if breathing thousands of liters of contaminated air multiple times a day so there is pretty stricts regulations about what the air should be and how the filling station should be maintained

You have to admit that the NeatVideo would be a great idea. Look how polite and respectful the filtered comment sounds on the previous page VS. the original one ?

all comments underexposed and then the shadow detail is lifted up so that you get only the dark tones and lots of noise. We need to see more highlights, I am sure they are there somewhere...

OH WOW this is great, finally I got some scientific results! We can see here that Tyler's attitude has changed 3 FULL STOPS in only couple of years ? First he said that 500T was too grainy. So he wanted to use 200 or 250 ISO stock instead normally exposed. That was good and nice. OK. THEN, he switched back to 500 ISO. AND right away pushed two full stops to 2000 ISO. Sadly, just pushing film does not increase latitude in the same relation than it lifts the middle tones up. So he is underexposing a lot, then lifting if back up in post but just gets lots of unwanted grain and noise and lifts the shadow detail but his tonal range gets shallower. I really need to try NeatVideo on his comments, to see how it goes! I believe it would make wonders and tune the noise levels back to an acceptable level ? OMG it worked great! Maybe we can switch the noise reduction permanently on in this forum?

Learning film history is important, sure. But if wanting to learn anything you need to watch much more than just the American classics and you need to watch films from different cultures and modern times as well. How many African films you have seen for example? Russian ones? Polish movies? Italian ones you surely have seen. Bresson? Loteanu? Danish films for sure but how about the rest of the Europe? Southeastern Asia? Iranian films? India? It is good to watch classic films but it is not enough to concentrate on just them and forget all the rest of the good stuff there is. I think there is lots of unnecessary name dropping and canonising going on in film education as well. There is also the general preposition that the American film classics or American high budget films are good on all aspects. Well, they tend to have relatively good actors and great or incredible production design. But most of them are by my opinion not that great storytelling or are just plain lazy in some aspects. A film can be great in some fields but suck at others. Canonising adds sugarcoating and claims that a classic film is a masterpiece in all fields which it is not.

I think there is lots of problems presented when trying to canonise film classics as references for modern work, especially the very old films and especially if talking old studio films. Well, they had great visual ideas and new angles AT THE TIME they were made but now decades later there is not much you can learn and adapt to current work unless you just want to mimic the look and style of the classics of the golden era. Generally dull acting, most of the stories are boring like on the Citizen Kane one and they don't relate much to modern life. The lighting style and the "new visual storytelling techniques" went obsolete more than 50 years ago. As a period piece or a film history reference it can be interesting but there is not much you can learn from it which you can adapt to modern film work unless you just want to mimic the look and style 1:1. Personally I don't think many films films shot before about 1990 are much useful as references when learning modern lighting styles. They all tend to have this 50's or 60's old style theaterish look to them

Oh snap... I only have the Bolex. Everything else of that is missing ? I think I will just shoot a roll or two with my Konvas, I think my Eastern Bloc winter jacket is here somewhere... though I think that if you want to shoot something with a Konvas camera you must buy one from web without never asking instructions, then make a YouTube video about how you THINK the camera works and should be loaded (total BS content of course and the camera would jam in real life) and then disable comments so that no one can post real instructions how you could get it working. ...unfortunately I am not an uncivilised Youtuber with 20K+ followers who does not want to learn anything new or even do basic internet searches to find out how stuff actually works. So I am really not qualified to shoot with a Konvas camera ? He did a BS video about front projection too among many other things ?