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Phil Rhodes

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  1. Red's been using it since day one. (Redcode is, or at least certainly was, just JPEG-2000).
  2. I mean... for all its faults, it's well lit.
  3. Yes, and the optical quality is pretty variable as a result. Someone will always say that this kind of thing is a look which works, and here I'd agree, especially as that wide angle is leveraged so successfully to get so much out of the locations. Still, it's... A look.
  4. I was looking at this just recently and I'm sure I found a reference somewhere to the use of some very wide angle lens which then had a wide angle converter added, for an effective focal length in the single digits.
  5. I have an FDM printer; if anyone needs anything done in the UK, more than happy to oblige.
  6. Don't trust the exact resolution too much, here, I just hacked them out of a YouTube player with snipping tool. I guess my main concern was what the effective sensitivity and working stop might have been on something like this. Clearly they might have compromised the lighting for the crowd in order to make it work for the camera, and there's some fairly obvious instances of large, powerful lights (not the big Xenon followspots) sweeping the crowd to make it visible, though I don't know if that was done routinely. At least two cameras have zooms. 70s anamorphic zooms, in the dark? Ouch.
  7. The following frames are from a 1977 performance by ABBA in Australia (full video). For something more pedestrian compare this, which is presumably from within a few years of the same time, in 4:3 and much more conventional. The first one shows pretty unequivocally that an anamorphic lens is in use, even if the aspect ratio hadn't already given it away. This makes me wonder: we can see the audience pretty clearly, and anamorphics and film stocks of the period would hardly have been fast. Depth of field is... present and correct, but it seems well exposed. The blacks are a void. I wonder what the light levels would have been like and how it would have been to operate - this is a handheld shot. Obviously, this is a modern scan, so it has potentially been cleaned up a lot. This looks archetypally Panavision to me but I wouldn't be too shocked to discover it was some other option of that period that I haven't heard of. There's also some flickering edge flares on occasion, one frame on and one frame off, which I've seen in all kinds of movies but I'm not sure if it's specifically associated with any one camera design. Presumably it's something kicking off one leaf of the shutter but not the other. Mere seconds later, someone takes a flash photograph. This is the first frame in which any effect is visible. As this is a magnesium flashbulb, it takes about ten frames to die down to a lambent glow, and a few seconds to extinguish completely. The flare is wildly different; this is presumably a deliberate star filter, which is believable for the period, but I'm not sure why it isn't also producing an anamorphic flare as this would have been extremely intense. Some shots show eight-pointed star flares; others don't. There's another photo flash in the last shot of the video which doesn't show a star but does show a blue streak. Apparently not every camera was filtered. Stage shots scream anamorphic, partly because there's some visible vertical elongation of out-of-focus regions, but also because the top and bottom edges flare. This big red flare is being produced by another red-gelled parcan above the one we can see, which dances in and out of frame and produces several flashes like this. Anamorphic artefacts are clear in the sparks produced by these children's sparklers.
  8. That's a labour of love just to be able to do monochrome processing! What next, 65mm colour?
  9. I'm not an expert either, but like Joerg, I'd expect to see more sign of the heat of the airliner's engines, especially in the cone directly behind the engines themselves, and in terms of the cooling and spreading of the contrails, which does not seem to occur. I'd expect behaviour to vary by altitude, pressure, humidity and other conditions, but see here. It's a matter of the dynamic range of the thermal imager and it's not necessarily completely unconvincing. It's notoriously difficult to fake thermal imaging footage, either way. I was once asked to do it for a military-themed short film because high resolution thermal imaging cameras are rare and expensive, especially with very long lenses. It's hard to get it to look right, though we were featuring humans. There's some vibration in the thermal imaging shot which appears to be generating absolutely no motion blur, which is slightly suspicious, but thermal imaging cameras may have very odd behaviour as regards shutter speed, so again, while slightly odd, this is far from conclusive. I'd say if this has been faked from the ground up, in a 3D rendering package, or something, it's been done with a reasonable degree of enthusiasm. Just adding in the swirling dots is a more trivial job. The cold trails are a nice touch. But in my view the problem with this is more logical than visual. In the thermal-imaged footage, the camera aircraft appears to fly barely beneath the engine exhaust trails, just a few seconds after the airliner passes. It's a dramatic, dynamic shot, the sort of thing you'd see in an action movie, but if you think about it, it's a really unsafe bit of aviation. I suspect this would count as a critically dangerous failure of separation (an airprox) unless the view is from something like a military combat aircraft which has been specifically tasked to follow the airliner. These aircraft were within seconds of colliding. This opens up other awkward questions about the provenance of this footage. What exactly is claimed about where it came from? Who shot it? Where was it shot? Is the airliner in the cruise, in which case why does it appear to be executing what would count as a fairly tight left turn in the thermal footage. And a right turn in the stereo footage, assuming what we see beyond it is the sea, since you refer to it as satellite material. If it's not satellite material, then the blue we see may be the sky, in which case it's a left turn. If it's in the cruise, it would be travelling at perhaps 450-500 knots and tens of thousands of feet. This is considerably beyond the capability of most things which could reasonably be described as a "UAV." Something like a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper is fairly typical of the general arrangement of unmanned military aircraft likely to be equipped with thermal imaging, with straight wings and a turboprop propulsion system. It typically operates at under 250 knots. They're designed for long loiter times and low fuel consumption, not speed, and would be considerably outpaced by anything Boeing or Airbus have ever made. The only common thing with the speed and altitude performance to intercept a commercial airliner in the cruise is a fighter jet. It's possible some militaries may have high performance drones capable of doing what's shown here but it's certainly not common, which raises the question as to why this particular airliner was of interest to the military. Like so many things of its type, this raises more questions than it answers, and in the end the answer to the question "are there aliens," in a universe as vast as the one we are known to inhabit, the only reasonable answer is "presumably," and that's neither surprising nor controversial. The sad reality is that we have only one example of life existing on a planet to work with, so it's hard to tell, but it's completely plausible that there have been alien civilisations which grew up and died out millennia ago, or alien life which never evolved beyond single-celled organisms, etc. The idea of alien life is not a stretch. The idea of them travelling to earth and bothering airliners probably is.
  10. I use elastic bungee toggles. Gets a bit more tension on the textile and I think it's a little faster to use.
  11. Funnily enough I was just thinking of getting a better meter. I only have an old Sekonic L-398A, and much as it's a classic design, the direct approach of simply connecting a solar panel to a moving-coil voltmeter doesn't work at the sort of low light levels typical of current practice. The aim would be to improve consistency, given I'm more often working on a tiny crew without a dedicated DIT. I don't want to spend a fortune but I think something is in order. Don't even really know what the field contains.
  12. The thing is, this does get quite sensitive to exact sensor sizes, especially if you're talking about short focal lengths. Not everything that has a "Super-35" sensor has something that's exactly as wide as the Academy gate. The Blackmagic Ursa Mini series is pretty big, for instance. It doesn't often have a sufficiently significant impact to really affect things like lens coverage, but the field of view will be more affected. If it's bigger, no big deal, you can always crop in if you've a spit of resolution spare, but if you find an unusually ungenerous sensor size, I could see it being at least noticeable.
  13. So, I went into a camera rental place the other day to buy a couple of cases they were looking to get rid of. "What's it for?" asked the super-helpful chap. "Oh, just some dolly accessories," I responded. "Are you a grip?" he asked.
  14. That's a pretty good example of it, yes. What it does is to keep the light off the background behind her while allowing for a flattering, soft key. It's not even that bright a key, I guess. In that part of the world, you might even complain that a soft key of that type would be unusual, unless the sun is around the other side of the building, say, when it might look bluer. And why are the windows behind them all battened? Still, it's pretty, which I guess is the main thing. It's also built on enough of a scale that people can reasonably move around a bit without it changing too much.
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