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Aapo Lettinen

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  1. Aapo Lettinen
    I personally think that lighting skills are more critical for a DP than AC skills. Actually, Lighting and Editing would be a very good combo so that you understand what the directors need to get the scene working, how the images are cut together, and you can make the right mood for the film. Using cameras is relatively easy anyway and there is normally a AC and Key Grip who can handle the technical things for you, so the 'painting with light', 'setting and maintaining the mood' and 'making the film coherent' (image choices like blocking, operating style, framing, etc) are the things most critical for a DP I think. technical knowledge is always handy but it is not absolutely critical
  2. Aapo Lettinen
    you can get away without assisting anyone but you cannot advance in your career without the right connections which may be easier to build if you climb up the ladder. The key is to determine which kind of help you will need and then plan your future projects based on that. ...every 15year old kid can make single nice looking images and short films but it is the other things that matter which'll get you hired. prepare to spend many years of your life and work like a mad. it is also eventually, at least a bit, just happy accidents and luck which will get you in contact with the right people who can help. Assisting is a great way to get in contact with new people and to learn new ways to work so I'd highly recommend it... it may be even faster to climb up the ladder than to try to convince directors and producers right away that you are better choice than their usual pick for DP job. DP/Director relationships are quite often built in film schools so it is very unlikely that they would pick you instead unless they already know you and all your work (in which case you could just call them right away...)
  3. Aapo Lettinen
    now I can see the images :) smaller sources work fine for that kind of images. 650's and 300's for example as others suggested depending on which gels and diffusion you use
  4. Aapo Lettinen
    I can't see the pics for some reason but in smaller shoots my favourite fixtures are 2K tungsten fresnels (normally two or three of them if I have possibility to power them up) and then one or two sets of 300, 650 and 1000 tungsten fresnels with couple of Firestarters (1k VNSP par cans) if needed. if HMI is needed I mainly use 1.2K and 2.5K Par:s, they can be powered from normal 10/16A wall outlet and are powerful enough for smaller shoots. Kino Flo:s or small hmi:s quite rarely, in most situations a tungsten fresnel bounced from a white styrofoam or kapaboard is much more versatile for me than a Kino fixture and can be adjusted more than a Kino in terms of colour and light output, spread etc.. but it depends a lot of the situation, sometimes a Kino or a LED panel works nicely. I highly recommend the 2K:s and Firestarters if you are on a budget and have possibility to power them up, they are lifesavers in small productions (good output, cheap to rent) and can be powered with any type of 30 year old cheap-o genny :lol:
  5. Aapo Lettinen
    I mainly light by eye even if having a decent monitor with correct LUT, then checking with waveform or histogram that the exposure is correct. I usually have 95% zebras on at all times so it is easy to see if something is close to clipping. never been a fan of false colour but it can be handy at times. I am used to incorrectly calibrated monitors and general unreliability of digital systems so I mainly treat them just like film: lighting by eye and doing minimal checks with meters, then adjusting it in grading to match the look seen by eye on set. monitors are mainly for framing etc. and not colour tools for me. they are, however, handy if you have lots of diffusion filtration etc. and they are useful for directors because they are not used to "imagining the look over the image"
  6. Aapo Lettinen
    or hard backlights, reflections or spill. totally doable but one needs to underexpose the foreground a bit and avoid any reflections on the edges of the subject like hairlights etc
  7. Aapo Lettinen
    It is good to read the books first, then visit the rental house to get some real hands-on experience with it and to try different configurations and practice loading (if you are planning to do that by yourself). You can also test power options there easily. Cameras are really the kind of things you have to actually use, at least a little bit, before ypu can actually use them as creative tools. Especially film cameras because there is so much mechanical stuff and different configurations and you have to know how the camera should sound like when it's running etc
  8. Aapo Lettinen
    Meaning that every stray light will easily lower the background saturation or make spots there making keying very difficult. Much more demanding to light than a real green or blue background
  9. Aapo Lettinen
    Spill control is a serious issue in this type of shoots. As suggested the lightweight greenscreen fabric could be much better option. Another thing is that you will need tons of light to get highly saturated color to the background, the strongly coloured gels may eat up from 75 to 90% of the light and lowering the screen exposure leads to even more spill problems
  10. Aapo Lettinen
    I would also rent the camera. and it's actually, I think, much easier to even drive the 15 hours to pick it up from the rental house than to try to buy a good kit for cheap which is both good quality AND quiet AND reliable. and the lenses cost quite much in all cases. something like rented Arri SR (1, 2, 3) and set of Optars or mk1 zeiss lenses would work I think. if you want to try the eBay cameras you need to either hire a camera tech or try to fix it by yourself. There's always something wrong with them, usually by improper (seller made) service or missing parts. I myself like to fix and tune and modify old cine cameras, especially Soviet ones, so it is not a problem for me but if you just want to shoot a short film it is not practical, not at all... It's like wanting to just drive a good car but having only little cash, then purchasing a heavily used one from a stranger without knowing its history and what kind of service it has had.... then spending most of the time fixing it (instead of actually driving it...)
  11. Aapo Lettinen
    Thanks! I try to shift the mirror to a little earlier and see how it goes :) I can hear a tiny noise and see the film move couple of hundreds of mm when the pins engage so there is clearly some pin registration going on, better to be sure that it is centered before shutter opens :) I am using a battery drill as a motor at the moment, we am figuring out a rheostat motor solution with Olex but I can already do tests with the battery drill to adjust takeup tension etc and could also shoot tests with it when oct19 adapters arrive :D
  12. Aapo Lettinen
    Hi you all :) I'm trying to figure out the exact timing of the mirror vs. the registration pins in camera using Mitchell type of movement and 170° shutter angle. My camera is a Russian made Soyuz US3N so it is not a exact copy but close enough to some mitchells. Generally, when are the reg pins supposed to engage in Mitchell movement and when they should retract compared to the mirror edge? I have to be able to time this myself every now and then because of lubricating etc. so can't ship it to a camera tech. The movement should be in factory specs so no need to adjust it, so... Are the pins supposed to engage just a tiny bit before the shutter opens so that the pins retract a moment before the shutter closes for film transport and the claws start to transport film a tiny bit before the shutter is fully closed, or... ...are they supposed to engage at the exact moment the shutter opens so that the shutter can fully close before film transport begins but the tiny moment the shutter opens may have some instability when the pins are centering the film, or... ...is the timing in the video about right? to me it looks like it is just a tiny bit off and the pins should engage just a tiny bit quicker after the shutter has passed to ensure the stability of the start of the exposure. but am I then risking instability at the end of the exposure? This is pretty difficult trial and error to time because of the wormgear like gears used in the camera but I can live with a little off timing :rolleyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BITn7xuDses I also asked this at Motion Picture Technology group on Facebook, let's see what they think... :lol:
  13. Aapo Lettinen
    as suggested you can use daylight spools for measuring the 100ft loads. but if using cores and winding exclusively with them you can still use daylight spool flanges as a measuring tool if your rewinder has square axels: drill the attachment points of the flanges open so that you can disassemble the daylight spool, then attach one flange to the rewinder and after that, the core adapter. I have made my rewinder out of old Zeiss Ikon Moviscope winders but you can surely find something suitable from eBay for reasonable price :)
  14. Aapo Lettinen
    never tried red one with those but a blackmagic will definitely work just by connecting with a cord. but it is better to have more voltage for it than 12v so a 14.4v v-lock battery or similar would be more practical than lead acid and also higher capacity compared to weight and size. you can purchase a simple bmcc power connector with cord from ebay and adapt that to work. I have made a tamiya adapter for our bmpc4k so it is also possible to use airsoft batteries with it or to attach a extension cord between battery and camera if needed
  15. Aapo Lettinen
    variable nd's are made by stacking two polarizers together so they always take some amount light even at "open" setting. a nd wheel similar to camera's internal nd wheels (couple of regular nd's + clear) or a graduated nd wheel would be the only option if you would like to minimize the light loss at "open" position, no polarizer based option would work
  16. Aapo Lettinen
    or did you mean 15mm light weight rods instead of studio rods? then you should have a custom adapter to be made. but even then not very difficult job
  17. Aapo Lettinen
    if the rod spacing is the same you can just have the nearest machine shop to make you some adapters similar to these ones but from 12 to 15mm: http://www.ebay.com/itm/15mm-19mm-Rod-Bridge-Adapter-Sleeve-fr-Support-Rail-System-DSLR-Rig-Follow-Focus-/171280609095?hash=item27e11eaf47:g:uJAAAOxy0zhTM6tf even tape would probably work for spacing as a temporary solution but as said the rod spacing needs to be the same than in 15mm system
  18. Aapo Lettinen
    never seen those in use with any camera. my Cameflex original battebox has them but never used them because I don't have 12mm base plate, have just adapted 15 and 19mm stuff to work
  19. Aapo Lettinen
    You can purchase a shotputpro license to the laptop so that you can do checksum verified transfers. The red cameras with fat file system divide the clips to 4gb files which are quite a pain to verify visually. I recommend just using the checksum verification and saving the checksum to a file along with the materials so that you can also, whenever needed, to re check that all the materials match the original files which were on the camera card
  20. Aapo Lettinen
    I personally like the ai-s 50/1.2 but it starts to perform correctly at F2 and if I understood correctly you would not like its aberrations wide open. That's actually why I suggested the Canon F1.0 primes because then you could stop down the lens to get rid of the aberrations which almost every lens creates wide open but could still shoot at F1.4 or so, so that you would benefit a lot from them compared to a zoom like the 18-35/1.8 Sigma shot wide open. If the goal is to capture a flat evenly illuminated and sharp frame then this is much better way than trying to find a lens which would perform well enough wide open but would still be affordable. because you would really need something like the Otus primes to get great performance wide open at very wide apertures
  21. Aapo Lettinen
    those nets last like forever so you can very well buy the original one if you find any. but if not, I think any Chinese Blonde counterfeit accessory would do for this as long as the mesh is right type for the job. I'm pretty sure that those Dynacore etc. cheaper lights have similar enough net that it can be used with the Ianebeam without any problems ^_^
  22. Aapo Lettinen
    you can add pictures from a image hosting site, for example Flickr images (if you have a Yahoo account)
  23. Aapo Lettinen
    I use 1/2 ctb, 1/2 cto and 250 and 251 all the time on shoots. at least the half and quarter diffusions are very essential because you can control light's spread with them efficiently
  24. Aapo Lettinen
    For example GH4 (only with UHD and 4K settings) and 5Dmk3 don't have perceptible moire in video mode when used with right settings. you may be happier with a real video camera though and the look may be nicer but they also cost more.
  25. Aapo Lettinen
    I think the main problem here is the Full Frame shooting rather than resolving power. for example those AI-S Nikkors work perfectly fine for 4k even with small sensor camera like the GH4. But full frame sensor size limits all the more affordable but rather good and lightweight crop-sensor lens options like the Sigma 18-35. I think one should sacrifice the "cine lens mechanics" for lighter lens weight and smaller size. definitely a still lens job, but which specific lenses, it kind of depends... I would not cheap on the Primes though if you want good resolving power wide open and especially and more importantly less aberrations and vignetting. especially chromatic aberration is usually quite bad with low to mid price and old lenses when shooting wide open. I suggest something like L-series 50mm F1.0 or similar higher end stills primes. you will need an adapter with aperture control of course
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