Phil Rhodes

I asked some questions about this situation above but I don't see a response. Perhaps you could confirm my understanding?

Y'know, actually, I'm not sure they are. I think it might be at least as difficult to make digital formats look good, if only because we're even now conditioned to like what film does, technically they vary widely, and we're trying to simulate one medium with another. I think we should also be a little cautious as regards lionising 35mm people. It's only possible to shoot 35mm effectively with absolutely massive support, from camera assistants to the entire lab and transfer apparatus, so it's more likely than ever to be an issue of relying on other people (which, again, isn't wrong, but l

One of the slightly scary things about this is that a lot of them actually don't have that knowledge and ability and rely heavily on other crew members, particularly DITs. There's nothing wrong with this - the crew is there to assist the head of department - but it's worth being aware of who's actually responsible for what here. This is changing, frankly as the people age out of the industry, but there are still a lot of people in very senior positions who are much more dependent on fairly junior crew than is widely admitted.

Has Sony upgraded the Optical Disc Archive system recently? I looked at it years ago and it was completely uncompetitive with LTO in terms of cost, speed and capacity, a real lame duck of a format unless you needed some amazingly specific things. P

There are some specific effects that only really work with certain things. If you want a deep, powerful blue, like Lee's 181 Congo Blue, then it's vastly easier - certainly much, much more efficient - to drive it with HMI than tungsten, and you'll discover that the vast majority LEDs actually don't contain any Congo Blue so you can't really filter them for it. It's deeper than most blue LED emitters, deep enough to create something like a blacklight effect. It's also frequently out of gamut for both cameras and monitors which can create ugliness. The other thing to watch out for is what h

The first time I noticed this sort of thing was many years ago when I was doing the very occasional bit of Steadicam work. I hasten to add, I was never really a Steadicam operator and never had the potential or the ability to be, but I really gave up on it after one particular instance of a sports event being televised. It wasn't a long-duration job and the operator would have been fresh. Steadicam was used to show the trophy being held aloft by the winner, a simple shot requiring the operator to do nothing but walk in a straight line, forwards, past the arrayed people, with the camera facing

Well, you'll only see it when there's enough motion to create significant motion blur, and it's subtle even then when you watch in full motion. I suspect this actually happens quite a lot, and people just don't see it because it's not massively objectionable. Also, if you're under a mixture of continuous and discontinuous lighting, it'll be less obvious. The clearest way to see it is often to whip pan across the scene and look at the lightbulbs - it should certainly be visible in a freeze frame, and you can sort of train yourself to see it in motion if you look at a few examples. The othe

Question for a lens tech. Is there a significantly reduced amount of glass in the back of a film lens compared to an otherwise similar B4 lens? I'm thinking of all the chicanery required to land the image on a 3-chip block, which B4 lens to PL camera adapters are required to reverse. What I'm getting at here is the idea that if a Fuji or a Canon wanted to make a single-chip-compatible version of one of their lenses, whether they'd save any significant money, size, quality by building it targeting single chip cameras, and it then wouldn't need the converter, or probably the extender,

Ha. Is that the only picture you've been sent, of the thing with someone's hand wrapped around the crucial part?

The NYX shouldn't really cause too may problems; they're designed to work well on camera.

One of the things about night exteriors is that they very rarely are realistic. Most of us are used to living in urban areas which are lit. Without that, night is dark, and even the sensitivity of the human eye struggles to make much out in moonlight, much less just starlight, or even less than that if it's overcast. That sort of realism is perhaps best expressed in something like the HBO Chernobyl, which frequently, to be nice, leveraged underexposure. This is perhaps dawn, but it's about as close to realism as you're likely to get. I don't know about realistic, it's too bright and

I have to say I'm actually not that big a fan of this; the softness of it makes it read as artifical to me.

If this stuff was shot at, say 24 frames, and it's a 60Hz region, there's a stable relationship between the LEDs and the camera, so the total illumination available to each frame is constant. We don't see flicker, but we do see the discontinuous illumination on moving objects. Various other phase relationships are possible between various lighting technologies and camera taking rates.

Er, yeah, this is getting a bit beyond the scope I'd originally envisaged; if someone could give me all this about the UK situation I'd be pleased as punch. In the main I suspect that the situation will be strikingly similar here, as it so often is, inasmuch as there'll be lots of laws, standards, codes and labyrinthine history, and not much guidance.

As Brian says you can push it to black and white and then just tint it in post, though you'll then get everything being blue. Then again, that's more or less what you've got in the example image you showed. As to white balance tricks, try it. Balance with a piece of CTO gel over the camera, remove the gel, and you should have a cold-looking scene. Test, and look at it carefully, though, on a big, full-resolution monitor in comfort when you get home, to make sure you aren't pushing the noise up to a place you're not happy with. Street lights like those are a shocking pain; there's oft