Aapo Lettinen

waiting will work perfectly as long as one does not need the camera for paid work. for personal projects thus totally OK most of the time. But if you have lots of paid projects waiting you can't just delay them because you don't have the camera right now, you need to rent or purchase another camera then even if it costs thousands of dollars more. Waiting is simply not possible and would be the most expensive option for sure. I already started looking backup options in case the Pocket 4k is not delivered in time which is likely. the problem is, I really need 50fps in 4k and preferably raw or at least very high bitrate low compression footage (lots of gradients, greenscreen plates, etc) and the camera needs to be very sensitive so there is no cheap or easy options especially if not wanting to purchase two separate camera bodies AND an external recorder with a bunch of SSDs

I ordered one too in December and last time I checked the store estimated they could deliver "maybe in this Summer" in best case. Not surprised though when remembering all the previous delivery issues Blackmagic has had. well, at least it's a CHEAP camera IF they some day deliver more of them to the end customers... if the technology in it has not become obsolete by then. That has been kind of a tradeoff with their products, they would be wonderful desings IF THEY COULD JUST DELIVER THEM IN THE PROMISED SCHEDULE AND NOT A YEAR OR TWO LATE when there is already better alternative camera technology available from the more reliable manufacturers.

I personally don't like Premiere much but it is useful for some stuff I work with. I also use Photoshop, After Effects and Audition a lot so it does not hurt to have the Premiere come with the same package. Honestly speaking, I think Premiere is pretty much piece of crap program for most professional uses, it is not very reliable and it is pretty awkward and slow to use for large scale editing I think, especially on mac. The main purpose for the whole program as I see it is for fast turnaround one-man-band video guys who do low budget commercials and indie films etc. where it is useful to have lots of basic features in the same program so that you can edit and finish completely within Premiere even if it's very slow to do (for example grading with Lumetri) and unpractical at times (but still useful for beginner indie guys who don't want to learn to use any other programs and don't know any better nor have high standards for end result...) FCPX lacks most of the essential features I need so I rarely use it for actual editing. It also does not have very good integration with any other essential pro programs. It is pretty much "editors love it, all the post persons hate it" program :P . Resolve is now more reliable than the previous versions so I would consider it "pretty ok" for basic editing. At least it is fast to grade the end result then even when the editing is not super fast with it. BTW, I really love Audition for basic sound work like making of docs and similar stuff. It also seems to be pretty reliable in my use. The funny thing is, it is NOT originally an Adobe program... it is based on CoolEdit from the early 2000 something which Adobe bought and just added new features when keeping the interface and other stuff the same. Maybe their 'anti-Midas touch' thus did not reach the core of the program and it is a bit better working than other Adobe stuff :lol:

I think at the beginning of the digital era it was common to measure film mtf with approx 30% or 20% response and digital with 0%. that is because the largest film grains mask the fine details sooner (finest details drawn by the smallest thus least sensitive grains) so there is no point to try to see the 0% details on film whereas with digital it is somewhat possible

after unsuccessful and short 3D race come large formats and anamorphic. Nothing new really, history just repeats itself all over again :wub:

with DCP on normal screens it is still the choice of whether to letterbox the oddball aspect ratio inside the 1.85 "flat" format OR to pillar box it to 2.39 "scope" format. projectionists may be lazy and/or uninformed so even if the dcp spec would allow other aspect ratios it is best to stick with the standard ones... cinema screens tend to be natively 2.39:1 shaped and pillar boxing 2.35 into it would just annoy the audience without bringing anything extra to the viewing experience (very slight difference between aspect ratios so they are virtually the "same" but the unused screen area would disturb some people) . projectionists might also just zoom the image a little bit so that it fills the sides of the screen completely and thus the top and bottom would be cropped a little which would annoy the director and DP even though the audience would be happy :P

maybe they think that the general audience has no idea what a cinematographer or editor does in a movie production (true) so they won't mind if just leaving out those "non-important" categories and show more commercials instead :blink: well, the general audience has no idea what happens in a movie production in the first place and so they could leave the other categories out as well ;)

how did you do the final sound mix? for dcp it is most straightforward to have it in 5.1 I think, stereo may require more work from the projectionist to get the sound right when playing it back and the end result may be anything for that reason (will they use the side channels only for playing back stereo or will they mix some of it to the center channel as well and how much? how the subwoofer is handled. etc etc.) I sometimes do demos by doing a poor mans mix from stereo to 5.1 by mixing some amount of it to the center, some frequencies to the sub if needed and possibly some small amount to the back channels as well. It does not sound "surround" but it is less annoying than having the audio played back only from the front side channels and nothing else like might happen if delivering a real stereo mix only :blink:

yep I meant the integrated thunderbolt conversion LTO drives. there is some of them available. All SAS cards are not compatible with all the LTO drives and it may be pretty challenging to try to find out which is compatible and which is not and what one can do about it. and driver/operating system/software compatibility issues complicate things more because there may be 5 or more different possible failure points in the chain from the drive to the backup software and thus it is complicated to try to find out what should work.... OR one can just randomly purchase stuff and hope that everything works correctly (most likely will not) . I use BRU PE for lto backups, for me it has been more useful than LTFS for many reasons and more future proof. there is other options as well. Like you said the LTO has benefit of being pretty future proof because the tape drives are more common than pro video decks used in the past. And every post house is likely to have a compatible LTO system up and running so even if your own system would burn up you can always get the tapes restored somewhere near you. The backwards compatibility is also a great feature so the drive does not need to be even same generation than the tapes, just max. 2 generations newer and you can still restore the tapes with it.

you can export the project to Jpeg2000 or TIFF from Resolve and use OpenDCP to wrap the contents to DCP package (in the case of Jpeg2000 you just wrap the frames to mxf in opendcp and audio wrapped in it as well to separate mxf and possible subtitles added, then make the DCP metadata files on separate page. In case of TIFF, you could encode the TIFF sequence to jpeg2000 in OpenDCP directly and then do the same wrapping thing. Note that audio must always be separate certain format wav files. I don't remember what other formats the OpenDCP supports but it's a great little free program for this type of small jobs. there may be all kinds of errors in the final DCP so it would be wise to check it in a real dcp projector (in movie theatre) before sending it to festivals. that quality control part is challenging if you do the dcp by yourself, otherwise it is easy

LTO systems tend to be very picky about software versions, operating system version, driver and hardware compatibility so generally it is not a good idea to just shop for a LTO drive and random SAS card online and blindly purchase the first option. the incompatibilities may start with different SAS connectors on the card and the drive (just purchase another card then...) and the drive may be incompatible with the SAS card or the SAS card may be incompatible with your computer or your archiving software etc. I for example have the LTO5 set up on imac with the SAS card on external pci-e thunderbolt box (sonnet echo express se2) and I had to literally check EVERYTHING before dared to purchase that box in the first place. took about a week or more of hard work to make sure everything SHOULD work correctly before could purchase anything. Even if the drive is compatible with the SAS card and the SAS card is compatible with the Thunderbolt box, the drive and software may not support the data through VIA the box in LTO use :blink: there was other type of box which DID NOT support LTO use with that Tandberg drive even when it was compatible with the card and computer and software and everything else. SO, you need to be very careful when setting up the LTO system for the first time and especially if it is setup on a computer you need for other work like an edit computer. That's because you usually need to update your edit every now and then (for example update the operating system because FCPX or Adobe programs cannot be otherwise updated further) and basically ANY system or software update may disturb the LTO drivers or software, even rendering them unusable unless you purchase new software versions. Setting up a LTO system is relatively easy if everything goes well but these setups tend to have crazy compatibility problems with everything so it is best to have a dedicated computer just for LTO use and not for anything else and no one is allowed to update anything in it without permission. I personally don't even connect the dedicated LTO computer to the internet EVER so that I can be sure it does not auto update anything and I don't need to purchase new software versions for everything which would easily cost 1000 USD or more :o with Thunderbolt compatible LTO drives it is slightly easier to setup them because you don't have to worry about the SAS card and possible external box compatibility so you have less things to worry about though the drive may still be incompatible with the computer and software/operating system and there is quite few of the Thunderbolt compatible drives available in the first place so the options are quite limited. But as said you really should dedicate a separate computer for LTO work and not try to use your edit for it. You also don't want to have the edit reserved by the LTO station multiple hours at a time if you have to back up something or restore something from the tapes... using the computer for something else at the same time tends to disturb the LTO transfers so you generally don't want to do anything with the computer when it backs up or restores and therefore it is not practical to use your valuable edit for the LTO tasks by my opinion

if you know someone with an LTO7 or 8 setup you can ask them to back it up for you from the RAID when you get it up and running. it is generally not practical to own a expensive LTO system if using it for only couple of projects per year... if shooting something like 100TB per year or more or having extensive archive of projects on LTO then it would make sense. For example archiving a single movie project per year with perhaps 30TB of raw material and some smaller projects yearly it would not be very cost effective to own the LTO by yourself I think but it would probably be economical to pay a little for someone else to make the LTO backups for you, especially if running a newer system using LTO7 or 8 where tape capacities are large. As a comparison, I have backed up many projects raw materials around 30-120TB a piece on LTO-5, it is actually pretty practical if you can finance the tape costs because the one tape would be about one shooting day worth of material, sometimes two days even ( one LTO-5 tape would store around 1.38 - 1.47 TB of video material depending on the hdd's feeding the drive, the general system configuration and how fragmented the data is on the hard drives. LTO works by writing data and at the same time immediately reading it back to ensure it was written correctly and if not, it will write it again until it went correctly on the tape. No possibility to rewind and rewrite over the bad data, it must be written again to keep the tape speed in limit. This means that any errors in the backup process (for example caused by slow HDD's feeding the LTO station) will result in more write errors and will end up consuming more tape and will thus lower end capacity of the tape because more of the space was wasted due to the write errors. So the capacity varies from tape to tape depending on a lot of things. video data does not benefit from the LTO compression so the max capacities for raw video are normally the uncompressed capacity of the tape or lower) for your needs a LTO6 capable system would probably be more than enough so a LTO7 drive could be the practical choice if you really want your own system (you can write and read LTO7 and LTO6 tapes on an LTO7 drive and read LTO5 tapes and you could save some money on backing up on LTO6 if LTO7 tape is not needed for the job due to capacity. If you decide to update the system to LTO8 someday later you can still read the 6 tapes with it) . if using someone else's LTO system I would do the backups on LTO7 or LTO8 tapes to be able to save on the manual work with the tapes and get the material in smaller physical space. larger tape capacity would be beneficial because the material would be in larger chunks due to being already archived on raid and the fast raid setup would lower tape usage by lowering the amount of write errors. Thus the newer generation drive would save a lot I think in the case you would use someone else's LTO drive and if the material is already archived so that you could write the large tapes full )

this is to keep the setup more neat than having multiple SATA drives and separate docks around. Bare sata drives are cheaper than external hard drives and if you don't need to change them every day it may be worth it to use them this way. I personally use lots of SATA drives for backups just because working with large amounts of material at a time and the sata drives give the best price/performance ratio plus they are easier to store if you have dozens of drives per project

if you don't have huge read/write speed requirements you can buy a raid box with for example 6 bays but keep the drives independent (not raiding them at all so that the box is basically acting as a large hdd dock and every drive is showing independently to the computer) and then it is possible to change drives if needed and keep the most used ones attached. all hard drives will inevitably fail at some point and you may never know when that happens. I recommend keeping a separate archive copy of the material on LTO whatever the primary backup plan would be

Yes the head room of 16:9 will be thrown away in the scaling. You will scale horizontally and vertically by the same amount so that horizontal stays uncropped but you will crop the vertical by tiny bit to fit to the different aspect ratio. You have planned this beforehand and shot for the 1.85 ratio so it will be no problem but it is probably necessary for you to fine tune the vertical framing a little bit during the crop which may necessitate different workflow than if it would just be a straight upscale with the end result having the same aspect ratio than original. the vertical framing can be done before grading, during the grading or after it to the original resolution OR upscaled version of the image (graded or non graded) and it depends of the other workflow and the quality of your available scaling tools and available grading time which of the options would be most practical for you. In most of our workflows the fine tune of framing is done during grading but it is also for example to grade the image with full height and then crop the graded image or to grade the image with full height but do the framing adjustment during the grading so that there will be some headroom available even after the grading and you still have the final framing available in the render output, just crop the vertical to correct resolution and that's it. The latter option is most practical when you are doing letterboxed outputs where you need to add black bars over the final graded image for the correct aspect ratio masking, then you will get the framelines (bar edges) with better quality by having the full height grade output available instead of cropping in grading to for example 2.39 in a 2.39 resolution timeline and then trying to fit that exactly 2.39 image inside the same aspect ratio bars (will usually need one pixel smaller bars to mask the frame edge and that will change the aspect ratio slightly in the end product)

The biggest problem when making dcp's is actually quality control. They are pretty hard to check for all errors without investing significant amounts of money to equipmemt. Ideally you would need a full server and projector setup. For free and low budget stuff I prefer rendering the jpeg2000 out of resolve and wrapping with opendcp software. Commercial high budget stuff is always full done in post house and check screened in movie theater. It is pretty cheap to get the ext file system work in pc or mac, I have couple of computers with the plugins installed

I prefer exporting to jpeg2000 sequence and wrap that to mxf container with the other dcp materials in separate program. for low budget stuff it is also cheaper because no need to purchase the easydcp license then . it is also possible to export to TIFF format after grading (DCDM style materials) and convert the tiff to jpeg2000 sequence in another program before wrapping to mxf for the dcp creation. The post house will handle this for the OP so no need to worry about it in this case

ok then I would scale it directly to 3996x2160 and reframe during scaling. if you really need an intermediate version of it (for example if the upscale needs to be done before grading and reframing or similar reason) then you could do an intermediate upscale version at full image height (the resolution being 3996x 2245) where the image is upscaled horizontally. then this version can be later vertically cropped+vertically reframed in 3996x2160 timeline without any further scaling. It depends on the software used how this is most practical to do (if the quality of the upscale would be substantially better if doing the intermediate instead of scaling directly in the grading software). of course you could also grade in UHD resolution and upscale, crop and reframe the end product after the grading. It depends of your grading workflow which way would be the easiest and whether or not you will need the intermediate versions (do you for example need an graded upscaled but uncropped version of the movie or alternatively an letterboxed UHD distribution version of it? if the UHD version is also required in great quality then it may be practical to do the upscale after the grading so that you would grade in UHD using temporary bars as framing guides and then do UHD direct export and DCI flat upscale export after the grading. You should consult the post producer and colorist about the upscale options and at which stage the upscale would be most practical to do. If the program allows I would do the grading in UHD if all the material is already UHD and then do the upscale to the end product but it depends on a lot of things, especially how well your grading software does upscales compared to external soft)

are you planning to pillar box it inside a 1.89 "Full" dcp (4096x2160) or are you planning to generate a DCI 4k Flat dcp (3996x2160) ? it would also be possible to create a "hdtv dcp" of 3840x2160 and letterbox the 1.85 there but I am assuming you specifically want the 4k Flat type output. In that case (the required output being 3996x2160) I would just scale the image to that resolution directly without the 4096 intermediate. you would lose the same amount of image quality but the scaling process would be simpler without the intermediate step (both horizontal and vertical are scaled upwards anyway by the same amount whether you do the intermediate or not. the scaling amount is exactly the same because the vertical resolution of both formats is the same (you are scaling horizontally by the same amount and cropping vertically by the same amount) You will can calculate the scaling percentage from the horizontal resolution difference between 3840 and 3996 or just do it automatically in the software you are using (for example in Resolve you could set the Scaling to "Fill" in the settings and then reframe vertically the desired amount

I have not seen the animals fearing HMI units but I can imagine their high frequency sound could be a problem for some species. Even some people may get a headache from HMI noise as far as I have seen. Did the trainer specify why the daylight would be preferred, would the animals be more active in high colour temperature?

and it creates massive amounts of moire/aliasing depending on what you shoot. some people can live with it better than others, for me it was a deal breaker and the single reason I never purchased that camera model

European audiences are also more stimulated when something happens here instead of that thousands-of-times-used-boring-as-hell New York :P (though London and Paris are also so used that they are becoming boring too :wub:

blimped 2C's were pretty common in non-panavision films before Arri BL came around. I believe they were cheaper and easier to use for that than Mitchell cameras and there were not many alternatives back then. lots of Finnish feature films used them as well as far as I can tell from the making of photos

Sound pretty reasonable if they let you get it wet for that price. You can also do vfx with stunt hand adult dropping the real dead cat to the floor child never being in the same room with it. OR you can do the ok quality cat prop thing with the child, then do separate closeups of the real dead cat at animal shelter etc using small for example 4'x4' floor prop under it which can be disposed after the shoot

it would be more humane to use a dead cat and scare the child with it than make the child to hurt a living cat multiple times by dropping it to the floor and tell it is somehow "ok" to do that :blink: ---- anyway, why not use the best cat looking prop you can find and if that is not enough for the whole scene then you can just edit it differently and do some separate closeups later with a real dead cat ;)