Aapo Lettinen

one of the disadvantages of this type of cameras is the lack of built in ND filters. that is actually the reason why I choose the FS7 so often over BM cameras. making great quality internal NDs seems to be quite expensive because Blackmagic does not even try it <_<

if it's intensifying/fading every turn of the roll then it might be temperature damage or pressure sensitization. if a roll is stored for example in the fridge in a way that one side of the roll is much warmer than then other and it's like that for long time then it may do this kind of damage: other side of the roll ages faster than the other. I have had this kind of problem in some eBay rolls but otherwise not that common. I rarely store rolls for more than two years after purchase though so if yours was very old it is easier for it to generate this kind of problem. X-ray damage is normally faster pulsing which may "sweep" across the image as far as I have seen

I have had good experiences with both Sandisk and Kingston cards. Lexar I have only used in XQD but they worked fine. In SD I have had slight issues with Transcend cards sometimes, one of them had loose write protection switch (had to tape it in place after couple of weeks of use) and one had some other problem I can't quite remember. But generally yes, you should be fine with Sandisk if your camera supports it

I use more 81 and 81C filters than 85 /85B, it is more practical for me because the full correction is most of the time not necessary when I use them but higher exposure may be. like when shooting dusk shots or in the shade with cold sky ambience and relatively low light levels. net filters are nice if you can avoid bokeh issues they create. nowadays I use nose grease/vaseline filters in place of promists and nets most of the time but the 1/8 and 1/4 promists are great in some situations

I think the biggest disadvantage of the Lomo tanks is the low capacity per spiral. with 16mm the splitting can be tolerated but with 35mm it makes the tank unusable for anything other than camera/film tests or shooting single separate shots for art projects. so the single spiral uninterrupted capacity is the key here I think, if you are making 8mm/16mm compatible gear it would need to be 100ft minimum, maybe 200ft option would also be good with ability to stack at least two of such spirals per tank without any modifications

I tend to store in the fridge all the cans which I will use in about 1.5 or 2 years. If I have some special discontinued factory sealed stock then I may freeze some of it to save it for future projects, but even then rarely store for over about three years. If you shoot Vision stocks it is best to plan for about max. one year time period and purchase enough stock for that time when you have possibility to get good discounts. Film doesn't last forever even in frozen state so I'd advise against trying to keep it forever with tricks and accepting various levels of degradation, if you shoot vision stocks you can always get more from kodak or a short end broker so just buy enough for a year or so and then get more when you have shot the most of the previous cans

I never freeze opened cans, especially old recans or short ends. You can't know how much humidity there is inside the can and may run into problems when freezing it. Factory sealed cans can be freezed without problems but the risk is always higher if it is opened even briefly at some stage. If you clip test them always before use then it is of course not a problem. Zip bags are good for avoiding condensation on the outside of the can and protects it from food splashes if you store them in the kitchen's fridge. In fridge it is important to maintain the same temperature on the whole surface of the can, if you store it for years in conditions where the other edge of the can is warmer than the other you can have "pumping" base grain which intensifies every turn of the roll when you reach the "warm stored side" of the roll

With sun it is normally more of a temperature risk, with lasers you can get so much overvoltage to the photosites that is destroys the insulations between them. CDs in the microwave type of effect in the micro scale. Maybe you could get lots of over voltage also with the sun in some situations but it is much more unlikely than with lasers where there is no upper limit for point intensity and the intensities may be thousands of times higher than with sun

As always it all comes down to lenses... With krasnogorsk you can use inexpensive Soviet ones but with Bolex you have to buy the at least 4x more expensive switar ones (which are so expensive because every hipster in the world wants to use them for shooting instagram stuff with crappy digital cameras...) You should look which lenses you want to use and decide based on that. camera bodies are dirt cheap nowadays but lenses generally are not

Krasnogorsks are quite ok but they scratch the film much more easily than for example bolex. Russian gear generally needs more knowledge and service experience to operate reliably. If you choose a k3 it is good to discard the loop formers and be very careful about the upper loop size, it has to be accurate by one frame to avoid scratching (the upper corner of the aperture plate is not polished and is very close to the upper loop) or jamming of the camera (if upper loop is too small). The lenses are quite good for the time. I recommend the kmz bayonet primes for most use. It is possible to fit kinor16sp primes to the camera but the mount is NOT the same despite some ebay sellers claim they are interchangeable. The kinor mount has wider and thicker flanges with slightly different orientation and the ffd is slightly different. It is possible to adapt these to a krasnogorsk mount by yourself but it needs hours of work and lots of machining and fine tuning (I have done that with a 10mm sp lens)

I use double or triple adapters all the time, generally it works very well but you have to test the combos beforehand of course

you mean the adapter vignettes because the c thread part is too deep compared to the rear element? The back focus will stay the same unless there is something wrong with the adapters. Efs lenses are not very well suited for film camera use, too much ramping, focus problems and only electronic aperture adjustment. I suggest using old manual stills primes instead for tele, like nikon ai-s or pentax super takumar/smc takumar lenses. If you choose m42 lenses you can fine tune the adapter by yourself with sandpaper if the ffd is not right. For wide angles you can use certain cctv/machine vision lenses like those Chinese 8mm c-mount lenses found on ebay. If you need a zoom you can look for old c-mount tv zooms or alternatively a b4 zoom with ef adapter and attaching the combo to the camera with a ef to c adapter. Good b4 zooms are expensive though and you may need to use the extender to avoid vignetting. Still lenses usually don't have accurate focus scales anyway so it is really only up to whether it can be focused to infinity or not

one thing to take into account is that with filters you may change color channel exposure and compression to technically worse balance compared to making the look in timing. for example, by using heavy warming filters you are intentionally underexposing the blue channel which may, depending on situation, lead to more compression artefacts and noise compared to shooting neutral and adding the look in post. That said, it may be useful to make the look "halfway through" with in-camera filters and enhance it in post with additional filtering. that way you don't compromise the technical quality as much and may even enhance it quite a bit. For example, if you are shooting a warm-toned scene in dim overcast weather or in shade (very cold ambience) then it would be very useful to use warming filters in camera to lower the blue channel exposure--->open the iris a bit--->get better red channel exposure, better signal/noise ratio with the final look, less compression artefacts and better use of the camera's dynamic range. doesn't matter if it's raw, compressed video or film, it always enhances image quality

here is a quick example of a Fomapan shot with Konvas. I transferred it with my "Konvas scanner" and had a bit of sync problems with it (+ had some drying spots on film, will re wash it later) but you can see the basic look at least https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vQ_7m4yAcY&feature=youtu.be

I have done the 3-phase 16A to 32A for 4K par thing numerous times, never had a problem with it. the arrisun had a 3-phase input though. I have even used a 16A to 32A adapter with a 150m of 32A cable and a 4K and had no striking problems or anything. if using the one phase model it surely won't work and will blow up some fuses though. Using a 2.5K on a single 16A 240v is very common here and will always work so maybe just changing the bulb to 2.5K so you can manage with a single schuko?

I haven't used the Foma reversal kit but a plain Potassium Permanganate + Sulfuric Acid bleach is only good for couple of minutes after mixing so the problem may be that the bleach was mixed too early before use and thus aged before getting in contact with the film? with the plain stuff it is recommended to use it immediately after mixing the two solutions

depends on the production but normally on feature sets there is a DIT handling the copies and also helping with the monitoring LUTs, making dailies and offline versions on the fly, sometimes also making LTO backups, etc. It varies a lot depending on the specific movie but the very basic setup is a laptop, couple of external drives, card readers, UPS backup for all the setup, and a backup software which is able to do checksum verified file transfers, preferably one which can also automatically create good enough reports for prod department and post production. If making only the file transfers+dailies etc. and not on the fly LUT+live grading+color management work the DIT can usually arrive to the set later than the rest of the crew, in our productions usually about 3-4 hours so that he/she already has something to transfer when the DIT set is up and running. The DIT should always have a separate car and power supply so that it is possible to transfer+transcode the last card when the rest of the crew is wrapping, with mediocre setups this may take so long that the last car out of the set has to wait the DIT to finish so it is not ideal at all and the DIT needs to set up on another location every day after the shoot (hotel room etc.) One thing to note is that a screw up may cost anything from 20K upwards on pro sets (reshooting is expensive) so the DIT should be very careful and always triple check everything (probably will never be hired again if screwing up the material even one single time, even if it's not your fault) So a very basic setup: -laptop, usually macbookpro, or a "trash bin" MacPro with at least Thunderbolt and USB3 . some setups may need a separate thunderbolt-->PCIe box and add on cards like a SAS card -necessary software, for example Shotput Pro or Silverstack . for smaller setups, Resolve may be enough for quick grading tests and for making dailies and offlines, though it needs lots of GPU power and is a bit unreliable program. -separate hard drives for 3 physical copies (will be stored on different locations after the shooting day) -card readers, preferably two or even three so that you can swap them if having problems or use two at the same time if having lots of material like high speed, multiple cameras, etc. -fast RAID array /arrays if needed to reduce transfer times, especially for the first copy -extra monitor if needed -very good UPS to protect the setup from (always very frequent) power problems like over/under voltage, power failure, enables you to shut down the genny for couple of minutes for refill without affecting transfers, etc. -good small and silent generator +lots of gasoline (always have your own genny if doing time consuming transfers) -backup genny -a separate car for the DIT only so that you can have your own wrap time and don't have to hurry when everyone else is wrapping -backup laptop and one card reader +hard drive(s) (don't have to be your own, just make sure that there is another laptop existing on set at all times even if someone else is using it normally for other work) so that if your setup fries, gets stolen etc. you can still transfer simple copies using for example simple Finder drag->drop

I thought the whole idea of making lower priced models is to get rid of the off-spec sensors which don't pass the flagship model's quality requirements. all the camera manufacturers do this with their models. no wonder they all have about the same look, but signal/noise ratios and dynamic range may differ a bit. for example some FS7:s may be much noisier than F5 and have more variability between individual cameras than the manufacturer would allow for F5:s.. That said, the whole idea of making those test videos is to show that one can shoot SOMETHING useful with the camera and also (ideally but not always) to show the basic look of the camera. If the look does not differ much from the previous models it is completely understandable why one can't see much difference; one cannot judge dynamic range, signal/noise ratio, resolution or real world usability or even the base look with only youtube videos (or anything with worse than prores444/xq compression at native resolution and the whole used post process known with great detail. actually the only possible way is to shoot with the camera by yourself, only then you can know all the details needed to evaluate how it compares to everything else you can use instead of it)

for a silent film the 4:1 can work out but dialogue scenes usually need lots more takes so the 7:1 minimum sounds much better. I am often shooting mos second unit indie stuff at about 1:2 or 1:3 but that limits quite a lot and sound is out of question

my Fomapan 400 test with the Konvas 1KCP came out fine :) the Foma came on standard 2" cine cores already, normally bulk film uses different cores and has to be spooled down to cine core before use but the Foma worked out of the box

konvas cameras are much more common and cheaper than cameflexes and the lenses are tons cheaper. if picking a cameflex you may want to have a converted one with for example Nikon mount so that the lenses don't cost 5 or 10 times the price of the cam body <_< the drawback of Konvases is that they limit your lens choices and conversion options a bit more than the Cameflex system, you have to spool down your own film or use smaller short ends (about 45m with the 60m mag when using the western 2" core) and you have to be able to service them by yourself at least to some point. they are generally smaller than cameflex so they may be much easier for documentary and handheld use

one or two 1kw vnsp par64's are good to have on hand every now and then and they are not expensive. just pick up some screw-on spigot adapters so that you can attach them to stands. PAR cans are also lightweight which may be useful in some situations, and you will get a very bright spot with a vnsp par from much further away compared to fresnel

if you mean those wall gradients by artefacts I don't think you can do much other than use a compression method for the end product that hides those as much as possible. you can also tweak lighting, like use edge lights etc. for the door frames, hallway etc. to draw the space and try to avoid the dark subtle wall gradients by using lots of negative fill and lighting the subject much brighter so that you can "print down" in grading. video cameras only have certain pretty much fixed amount of stops between noise floor and clipping point and the ISO rating you use just determines how those stops distribute compared to middle gray (for example, EI 800 for certain camera has 4 stops of usable shadow detail before noise floor and 4 stops of highlights before clipping point. if you rate it EI400 you will have 5 stops of shadow detail and 3 stops of highlight detail. that's how video cameras (digital cameras, raw cameras, however one wants to call them) generally behave and that also includes the Blackmagic cameras, RED cameras and Alexa. I generally light by eye, verify with the monitor if needed and then fine tune the exposure according to waveforms or histogram if needed to make sure that all the necessary details are captured "technically correctly" from extreme shadows and highlights. ISO rating stays the same unless absolutely needed to be changed because of technical reasons. tweaking ISO with video cameras works just the opposite way than you usually want: high ISO has less shadow details and low ISO has less highlight detail. If you need to raise the signal to get the compression (for example S-Log) to work more efficiently on the important shadow details it may be useful to gain the signal in camera though

if you use strong enough diffusion and make sure that both of the bulb's beams merge on the diff surface, then the lit diff surface acts as a single light source casting only one shadow. some of the light will scatter all over the place so you will lose lots of intensity which is why it may be more practical to just use Blondes which need diffusion anyway to be usable (my opinion based on the linear bulb's tendency to create irregular ugly shadows) or to use multiple par cans with narrow spots and to make sure that the beams are separated enough so that they don't make double or triple shadows

it would work better for sunlight with diffusion if you want to get rid of the double shadows. but blondes may be better for that use if diffusion is used anyway. I think the Par cans are at their best when used with very narrow beam bulbs like VNSP, then you can great quite sharp and bright beams with them affordably, get enough distance to get the beams parallel and you can separate the beams easily if you use multiple units. that is easier if they are separate fixtures so you can fine tune the distances. you can use better lights like fresnels if you need more uniform light distribution