Phil Rhodes

Print stocks were (well, still are) made to have very low sensitivity, so they have extremely fine grain, and there may be some tweaks to the colour response and contrast to ensure things come out looking nice. Other people may be able to say more about that. At its core, though, it's all colour film producing a negative image using broadly the same basic chemistry. P

Three-chip blocks have always been glued together; that's where the final precision alignment is done. First I've ever heard of one coming unstuck, though, on any camera, not just JVC.

One significant problem is that a lot of modern lights, particularly ceiling installations and desk lamps, are not rated for a power level at which halogen is particularly useful. Bear in mind that Kino make compact fluorescents which use their high colour quality technology, though they're considerably bulkier than either halogen or LED which may affect fit it a lot of situations.

With only a bit of mechanical ingenuity, you could fabricate something like that with parts from eBay.

In 2019, y'see, we'll be shooting sunlit day exteriors at ISO 1600.

I'd like to second Mr Mullen's comments here - shooting stuff on a studio set (not that I've done much of it) is orders of magnitude easier than achieving that same look on location. You're never at the mercy of the weather. The gear is all right there. You can remove walls and ceilings. You can rig anywhere, quickly. There's loads of power. Every angle of every room looks good. Much of it is probably prelit in a way that took lots of time to set up. It's not in the same universe as walking onto a location.

I find some of that article profoundly dubious. What's said about the streaming situation and the inevitable consolidation in a year or two is probably a reasonable prediction. But Paterson's quote says it all: " if during that time, we lose the independent film business in this country – which is going to happen unless we make big choices – then in three or four years’ time there will just be a few American-dominated platforms that control all creative content." Unless you know someone at the BFI, that is already the case. Paterson is described as saying this would have the effect of "depriving cinema audiences of original and diverse films in which the UK has always excelled." As far as I'm aware cinema audiences are already pretty much deprived of those things. How many of Paterson's films have seen wide distribution? Loach's producer Rebecca O'Brien is quoted as being concerned for "our ability to keep the sector going." I don't know specifically how profitable Loach is - I would suspect quite the opposite - but in general there is no real ability to "keep the sector going." Loach's I, Daniel Blake took nearly £16m but it's not clear what was spent creating it, and it is a highly unusual breakout success. Has anyone even heard of Loach's most recent film, Sorry We Missed You? It's not a sector. It's not supposed to be self-sustaining. Well, it'd be nice, but nobody appears to be trying very hard toward that end, or they wouldn't keep making Ken Loach movies. We've already had commentary in this thread that many independent films are made without any expectation of making money and this sort of commentary, which treats the UK independent film scene as some sort of industry, is inappropriate. Filmmaking in the UK is a very expensive fringe artform. It's not a business and it's not trying very hard to be one. The fact that Paterson and O'Brien are making very nice middle-class incomes out of being film producers on films practically nobody has heard of and practically nobody will see is irrelevant. I'll say it again: the solution to a more robust, self-sustaining film industry in the UK is protection from imports. It's the only thing that can possibly work at this point, and it will never, ever happen. So, forget about it, and concentrate on that US work permit application. P

I think the important thing to consider in the context of Red's rather shrill complaints about this is what the purpose of intellectual property rules actually is. The reason we allow people (limited) exclusivity on their inventions is to encourage inventions. Does Red's storage system represent a particularly useful innovation, embodying any new discoveries or novel techniques? Not really. It's a flash card. Lots of manufacturers make flash cards that could do much the same job. There's something to be said here about the more general problem of patent law and the behaviour of companies that use it. I wouldn't go so far as to call this patent trolling, particularly, as they're not trying to stop people making flash cards in general, but it might be a case of patenting a design which only exists for the purpose of making the design patentable. That doesn't encourage anyone to do original or useful work. It encourages people to spend more money on patent lawyers than they do on R&D. It's profoundly counterrevolutionary in terms of what intellectual property law is supposed to do. In the end, it retards progress. Legal professionals might make other arguments, and big expensive productions will always be cautious, which is completely understandable. In my view, though, something as simple as a flash card is something that should quite reasonably be open to competition.

I don't think we ever thought the situation was anything different to that, did we? P2 cards are four SD cards, for instance. Many companies have effectively repackaged commercial flash. I understand why they do it to a degree; they want to avoid being blamed for problems created by poor-quality storage, but as the general standard of NAND flash devices gets better and better there is less and less justification really. P

That's some pretty obscure software. Conversions from DVD in general are a bit of a bear for sound sync problems; I'd ask around on the movie piracy forums where they deal with this constantly (yes, seriously.) P

Isn't it V5 that's coming up for Venice? 4 was at the beginning of the year.

Companies like that are obsessively concerned with reliability. For instance, when Sega was making home games machines, one of the prerequisites for a new games release was that several of them would sit there running your game for weeks on end, just to make sure it didn't crash. They've probably got a fix for it already, and I would imagine that fix is sitting in a lab at Sony on long-term burn test.

Nobody needs credentials to be right, but they do need some degree of geniality for anyone to care about what they say. And I say this as... well... me. P

I said this to someone today. You can buy three Ursa Mini bodies and still have enough left over for a van to put them in, for the price of a modern Alexa. There is a limit to the difference all the obsessive Arri quality control makes; in the end, three Ursas are probably more reliable than one Alexa, and they do considerably more. Obviously it's not solely about spec. But I am often dismayed by the fact that good engineering is being done for a very competitive price and overlooked because... fashion. Engineering talent and ability is not encouraged by this, which makes me very sad.

I sit on the fence in all this. Some stuff can be, should be shot by individuals. I just wrote a piece on a spectacularly beautiful natural history piece mainly shot by one woman with a Red Epic and a tripod. Equally I've been on stuff where we were desperately shorthanded and the day was horrifically held up by it. I suspect what Robin may be reacting to is the very real danger that producers will see the increasing portability and easy operation of camera gear as a reason not to hire an adequate crew. The fact that a lot of film crew spend quite legitimately spend a lot of time waiting for other film crew to do things doesn't help here. A lot of people will enthusiastically seize any opportunity to downscale things. It's complicated.