Phil Rhodes

Any of them, but for this I'd just get an Arduino Nano, or any of the clones of them. They're trivially inexpensive. You need a 3.3-volt version, not a 5-volt version, to talk to the Zoom recorder. The thing is, just getting the board itself is only part of the story. You'd need to write some code to control the recorder, and if this is your first time it'll be a bit of a process. That might be OK if you didn't mind making a project out of it. There's enough information available that I could try to do it remotely, but without being able to test with the real recorder it's tricky.

Yes, he should have got this right, no question, and that's what I mean by pulling him up on it. I'm not really here to defend or to criticise anyone, though. What I fear is that all of the world's highly professional armourers, with a proud history of having kept firearms accidents on film sets down to what I interpret as exceptionally low levels, will end up suffering the consequences of one situation, regardless of how that situation arose. As ever, it only takes one idiotic mistake to spoil things for everyone. They don't deserve that. To address something else that's come up quite a lot in discussion of this, firearms simulation effects do not have a history of looking very good. I'd be the first to point out that they're often not done nearly as well as they could be done, and that is something that the industry should brush up on; it's a bit much when YouTube channels are making whole videos out of fixing the firearms effects in major action movies. P

Well, yes, as Andries says, just connected together. That's what I'd expect. Controlling the Zoom recorder is a little more complex. If I had one here I'd set up an Arduino to do it for you then it'd all be easy, but I don't. P

Something like that. I recently spoke with someone who'd shot a feature on Master Anamorphics, because they stay far sharper when opened up than older designs - to the point where they reckoned they could get another half hour out of a dusk setup. It was exactly the scenario you describe. Trying to do that on what we might call classic glass might start to reveal the rather abrupt border between "expressive" and "bad." The problem is that it was a period piece, so they were very keen not to have it look all modern and, well, Zeiss. So they used pearlescent, black pearlescent and black satin filters, in several grades, chosen to suit the scene. Pretty much exactly what you seem to be thinking.

Much as I agree with a lot of what's been said here, this is a slip in terminology - I'd pull him up on it, but what he means is clearly that a lot of blank ammunition is fired on film sets and problems are extremely rare, which is correct. P

Litra Studio is similar to the Aputure MC - and waterproof!

It'll likely be connecting the pins of the socket together, as opposed to emitting a voltage.

Or, to put it another way, nobody ever gets any credit for accidents that didn't happen. They do very often end up being criticised for making a noise. This happened to me on at least three unpleasantly memorable occasions and is one of the reasons I don't work on sets much anymore. One of the less wonderful things about the film industry is that people assume a lot of managerial authority without recieving any training to do it well. Directors of photography, for instance, generally come to the role having been at best a focus puller, with opportunities to observe other people doing the job, but absolutely no formal training, no qualification process, not even any real guarantee of the mentor's own competence. People are free to promote themselves to new roles at any time. By any normal standard of managerial protocol, it's utter chaos. Cautious as I am about speculating, I'd be willing to bet this was a factor here as it is commonly a factor in many filmmaking mistakes. Senior people in the industry need to recognise this, and ensure their approach is not prohibitive to genuine concerns being raised, especially in a cross-departmental context. It would be viewed as very inappropriate, for instance, for a member of the camera department to comment loudly on the safety behaviour of, say, a member of the art department. There are circumstances where that has to be okay and people need to be able to raise things, even abruptly and loudly, even going around the chain of command, in emergency situations, without fear of retribution. Right now that is very often not the case, and one reason I conclude that the film and TV production sector is often abysmally poorly managed.

All this depends heavily on the size of the room, the layout, the furniture, what action you need to stage, what time of day you're shooting, and what look you're going for. My first thoughts include: Do you need to block external light somehow, for consistency as the daylight changes? 4x4 is not a very big green screen for a window. How big is the window? You may need to have the green very close to it. Two M18 and two Joker 800s is a fairly decent amount of light, although not enough to overwhelm large amounts of direct sunlight. What do you want it to look like? What time of day are you shooting?

The brief way to express this is that the rulebook is written in blood. The problem is that it doesn't always work. NASA infamously succumbed to go-fever, the normalisation of deviance and a detached and actively anti-technical management culture before Challenger, and they did something shockingly similar in Columbia. I'd bet we'll discover that the rulebook was not followed here for very similar reasons. P

We're all appalled by what appears to have happened here and if everything we're hearing is both true and complete then I find it hard to disagree with much of what has been said. If the information we have is true and complete. Personally I feel that everyone involved deserves the benefit of the doubt until the facts are in, given that the degree of ineptitude that appears to have taken place is so extreme that it calls into question whether we're really getting the whole story. I would advise caution on further speculation, much as, for instance, professional pilots tend to avoid commenting on the cause of air crashes until some sort of official report has been issued.

Confirmed by who, how?

Well, sure, but good grief, I have very rarely been involved in productions in the UK which used blank-firing weapons specifically because making it insurable requires rare, expensive people. Even in the USA, where more or less anyone can go and buy a wide variety of weapons at any time, one would expect the insurance requirements to be stern. Were they not invalidating their insurance? On top of which, even a student should be able to do better than the reports we're receiving. I could have done better, and I've had no formal training around firearms whatsoever. As ever I suspect we don't have the full story and I'm loath to speculate further.

I hate to sound a note of dissent, but I'm not sure what relevance the union connection has. If even half of what we've heard is true, a series of absolutely catastrophic oversights was made here. Many serious accidents are eventually shown to have been caused by a combination of several factors which, individually, might reasonably be interpreted as a mistake anyone could make. If - if - what we're being told is true and the whole story, which it may not be, then these were not small mistakes. These were very, very big mistakes that most people should not be capable of making without involving significant external factors (chronic fatigue and understaffing spring to mind). I have very little experience with handguns, but I've seen no comment on this so far, including the rules that should have been followed, that has made me go and look anything up. This was not hard stuff. As such the idea that this is an issue of insufficiently experienced people is, in my view, giving people excuses. This is a big, obvious danger. Anyone of average intelligence should have been able to control that danger, if only to the point of realising they were out of their depth and stopping. It shouldn't take a twenty year union veteran to make that decision. On that basis I suspect there might be some details of what happened to which we're not privy.

Sounds reasonable. Depends what sort of time of day you might end up shooting. If you have the resources to fully tent the windows, great.

Speaking as someone who has at least some small influence over "what's in the papers," it won't be "in the papers" until someone who was there goes on the record to talk about it. You know where to find me. P

That's beautifully explained. I'd never got my head fully around that.

I've even used then on anamorphic lenses - I wondered if it was going to be an issue, but it worked fine. P

The viewfinder Blackmagic made for the Ursa Mini is pretty reasonable, and it just takes 12V XLR power and SDI. It may be worth checking that whatever you get will accept all the signal formats you will want to use on the Alexa. Some are pickier than others. P

I can only echo what Bruce says. Modern lighting, particularly fluorescent, metal halide and LED, is likely to use electronic ballasts which may cause flicker at almost any frequency the designer found convenient, and which may have nothing to do with the local mains frequency. Equally, most computer displays won't; they're often at 60 or 72Hz regardless the local TV standards. Often you can change it but even then you won't have synchronisation between multiple computers in the same room. P

I think I'd accept "four tenths" as a way of expressing the difference between the numbers 1.5 and 1.9, but it's rather imprecise, and I'd rather have said two thirds of a stop, certainly. I really don't know where he's coming from with the iris blade count stuff, but I haven't watched the entire video. is there a point where he actually compares the same lens on film and video? I can't see how it could significantly differ. It sounds to me more like he's comparing different lenses and rather imprecisely describing how he preferred to shoot certain lenses on film, and certain other lenses on digital, and how those different lenses behave differently.

Mainly. Just bigger, heavier, clunkier.

To be clear, what I'm talking about here is more saturated filters, not just darker. The filters on most modern single-sensor cameras are rather desaturated; the red isn't that red, the green not that green, etc. This is done to improve sensitivity, sure, and more saturated filters would reduce sensitivity, but... that's part of why an Alexa isn't that sensitive. It would, I suspect, also reduce the degree to which the middle of bright light sources go white. I don't know any reason why a CCD would be different, other than that most cameras we've seen that have CCDs also have three-chip blocks... which have saturated filters. Notice in the photo below, the Bayer sensor on my Canon DSLR misreports the blue output as purple! P

I want this one: I have a soft spot for this kind of thing. Try doing that in After Effects!

The middle of the traffic lights stays coloured! It doesn't go white! Even the green one! Why can't we have that from digital cameras. Oh, wait, I know why - because they want to put really feeble RGB filters on them so they can claim higher sensitivity. Sigh.