Aapo Lettinen

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

I have only seen that Hawk in use on some stuff posted here... most of the anamorphic stuff is shot on 35mm sensors or film anyway and the 16mm option is very uncommon . You should ask the local rental houses about the available options and if it seems to be too complicated you can decide whether wanting to go without the optical finder or updating to larger film format

you can setup custom framelines in either IVS or the onboard monitor or both, it is not an issue at all :) as said if not needing the optical desqueeze in the viewfinder there is even multiple options for a camera body because most modern onboard monitors have built in desqueeze options to view the monitor image in the correct aspect ratio. operating anamorphic with a non desqueeze viewfinder may be pretty annoying though so I would go with the proper viewfinder if in any way possible, helps the operating a lot

I remember the SR3 having a N16 gate available so that was pretty modern. The 416 is much newer, I think it is something like 2004 or so? as said the gate size does not matter at all when shooting for digital release. At most it may make things more difficult to have the standard16 gate (more possibility for gate reflections when having light sources near the frame edges)

apart from the lens centering and the need for correct gg markings there is no practical difference between using a S16 gate camera or N16 gate camera for the work you describe. If wanting to shoot anamorphic I would definitely go with the most modern S16 camera I could get, especially because the anamorphic viewfinders for 16mm cameras are very rare and only few have them... and if not having one you would need to use the video tap and desqueeze in the monitor to see the actual framing which necessitates better quality video tap. So, for N16 1.33 (1.37) shooting any camera would do if it only has the proper ground glass markings for 1.37. the N16 lens centering thing is important only if you are shooting for photochemical release. for scanning the S16 centering is actually easier because the scanners are already setup for it. But for anamorphic there is very limited options if wanting to be able to shoot effortlessly with it. Basically the Arri 416 is the only option I know of where you can get both the optical desqueeze viewfinder and a good quality video tap. it is also the most modern camera available (not a coincident because 16mm anamorphic shooting for cine release is a relatively new thing which probably only happened after the film stocks became good enough for it in the 2000's )

I am still not particularly impressed by this camera but that was nicely shot reel and amazing locations!

of course but if you are doing the skylight with an hmi and you key "sunlight" is tungsten you may want to leave the tungstens to 3200K so that you don't need to gel the HMI down so much. if wanting that 120mired difference you would want to aim the hmi to around 5195K . getting familiar with Mireds helps a lot, it is 1 000 000 divided by the kelvins. If you would think that a real sky ambience would be around 10 000K and the direct sunlight would be around 4500K (sounds about right for a direct sunlight, it tends to be around 4500 to 5000K, a good approximate would be something like 4700K or so) then the difference between the 10 000K and 4500K would be again that around 120 mireds which I suggested as a starting point for your tests for daytime studio look. it is a matter of taste how much you would want to tweak the colour temp difference and it also depends on what time of day and lighting conditions (clouds, dusty air, etc) there is. being a noon scene or dusk scene etc. The ambience is always there though unless it is a night scene so you will want some type of ambience to begin with to sell it as a daytime scene. You may want to do some tests with a digital camera first preferably with a colour temperature meter on hand to get a better grasp on the colour temp differences you would like to have on the final scene

Color temperature difference is the key for the look, not the actual colour temperature. You may want to try something around 120 mired difference for starters and test how you like it. If using tungsten stock that could be roughly made for example by gelling the sky ambience to around 4200K and the key "direct sunlight" to around 2800K which would be pretty usable gelling transmission wise if using only tungsten units (only losing around one stop of light when gelling up and losing maybe 1/3 stop or something like that when gelling down) and the look would be approximately right out of the box for slightly warm sunlight appearance (sunlight around 45 mired on the warm side compared to the base colour balance of the stock which would be pretty ok look for my taste I think). the next issue is how you would get the 4200K sky ambience light big enough so that it wraps the whole set nicely. that can be done in about million different ways and one needs to know how big a set you are actually using and what kind of light levels needed and what type of units are available (if they have the required output in the first place and how much they can be diffused before losing the needed output)

the thing is, the sky ambience needs large surface area soft and wrapping lights and can't really be done effectively with small hard sources without diffusing and clustering them. It is possible to rig lots of smaller units, for example 4x4' Kino Flos in a row side by side to create a large surface area cold light that way but that is relatively expensive and may not be practical compared to using large bounces or a diffusion frames rigged above and then doing the direct sunlight with smaller units. the same works outdoors btw if you need to shoot the last shots of the day for daylight look and the sun already set an hour ago. you just need to fake the sky ambience and the direct sunlight and it sells the daylight illusion perfectly. If you take the sky ambience away then the audience thinks it is supposed to be a night scene. Simple as that.

you need to mimic the sky ambience with a large cold soft source and then make a believable sunlight to light the subjects and background. I believe that star trek shot is lit at least partially with spacelights but you can use lots of different techniques to get approximately the same end result. I have for example done sky ambience in a small studio by rigging the largest overhead frame I can over the subjects and then filling the frame with cold light sources like hmi or gelled tungsten etc. Then making the "sunlight" with diffused or raw tungsten fresnels or hmi par depending on what is needed. It is also possible to bounce the "sky ambience" instead of lighting through a diffusion frame if bouncing is easier or cheaper etc. For example using white molton or cheap white paper etc. for making a very large surface for bouncing cold light. How large a set you'll want to light for daylight look and what units etc. are available for you? You will want to observe a little how the real outdoor daylight behaves to be able to mimic it better in studio. Though the soft cold ambience + harder warmer brighter direct light is usually a good starting point and you just need to fiddle the ratios and colour temperature differences to sell it to the audience ?

I would think it'd be creepy to purchase and collect unknown persons random home movies but there is lots of weirder hobbies existing so what would I know ? maybe if they have some known historical context they would be somewhat interesting ?

You may want to test old fully manual Nikon AI-S lenses, they are good quality and very affordable and have good enough resolving power. For stop motion it might be better to use the F2.8 versions because of the better contrast when stopped down compared to f2 and 1.4 / 1.2 versions. The ai-s are very good if stopped down at least from 1 to 1.5 stops depending on the lens. You can test the ai-s 35/2.8 first and have couple of extension tubes (the cheap ones, no electronics needed) to use if necessary. most of the ai-s lenses can be declicked relatively easily if needed though one needs to make some diy friction adjustments to the iris ring after declicking