Phil Rhodes

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.

One minor trick with this sort of thing, if you don't want to pull the paint off, is to use a heat gun. Naturally, be gentle, as otherwise you'll risk taking off the paint as well, but it's a good trick with all kinds of sticky things that you'd like not to be attached any more.

I would agree, although the serial protocol on the H4n really is about as simple as it's possible for that sort of thing to be, and it requires no modification of the H4n or camera. You would still need a circuit board of some kind to generate "start" and "stop" pulses from whatever the DS-8 is doing.

To be clear, you would need to write code for this. Not much code, and it's a reasonable beginner Arduino project if you can stand some tinkering. If you want to avoid that, you may need to look for another solution. The sequence of events would look like this: - Any general-purpose input-output pin on the Arduino is wired to the DS-8 socket. Exactly how you do this depends on the DS-8 behaviour. - Arduino serial output pins are wired to H4n control port. - When software detects DS-8 start... - Send serial control bytes to H4n - When softare detects DS-8 stop... - Send serial control bytes to H4n It's not rocket science, but it's not just soldering wires. Yes, that's the first thing to figure out. It may be that the camera puts a voltage on the socket when it's running. It may also just be a closing contact, so that the two pins are connected together, which is actually easier. I have never seen this camera but it looks like a standard flash sync connector as you'd see on a stills camera. Probably you could just buy a cheap flash sync cable and cut it in half to obtain the right connector. If you want to do this little project, order a flash sync cable with a compatible connector and we'll take it from there. P

Assuming it's bright enough to show up against whatever other lighting you might have, the biggest problem I'd foresee is flicker. If you look at it with your cellphone in camera mode, ideally in an otherwise dimly-lit room, do you see any horizontal flickering bands? I wrote about the cellphone flicker detection trick once, maybe have a look here. Otherwise, if it has really brightly-coloured LED lights in it, the colours may not look exactly the same on camera as they do in person. Blue often ends up looking purple, but that might be acceptable. P

Eh, it's not that big a deal. Keep recording so long as you get pulses every so often! The problem with a lot of this stuff (and I'm not sure this applies here) is that the trigger on a film camera is often continuous, that is, it runs while the contacts are closed and stops when they're open. A lot of modern digital stuff needs a start pulse and a stop pulse. This is trivially handled in a simple microcontroller program, which is why little arduino boards are very often pressed into service in interfacing and automation applications exactly like the one we're discussing here. P

You could make it bleep, although I'm not sure that's essential in a situation where the H4n recorder will create a file for each take automatically. You'll just get a bleep at the start and end of every file. To do that you'd have to route your audio through the controller, too, which might risk adding noise to it. You would inevitably need some level of electrotechnical ability to do this. I would happily do it as a fun little project, but I don't have a Zoom H4n Pro or a DS-8 camera. You don't really need the bluetooth features, that's designed to make it wireless. You're probably happy with a wired control for this application. The camera side of it may be quite simple - is that just a closing contact? Does it close the contact once per frame, or something like that? Can we obtain a compatible cable? The H4n side is a little less simple and requires sending some serial bytes to the recorder to control it. It's not hard, it's a day's work, but I would hesitate to try to do it without the recorder available to test. Phil

The feature is described on page 43 of the operation manual: "Optional remote control operation." The optional RC4 controller is required. It would be necessary to reverse-engineer how the RC4 controller talks to the H4n Pro (or get that information from Zoom) and implement that, which, I would wildly guess, is probably workable. Oh - edit - it's absolutely workable, someone has already done it: https://github.com/gschoppe/Blueduino-RC4 Basically you could make a box that sits between the trigger port on the camera and the remote control on the H4n and does exactly what you want. P

The H4n Pro has a remote control connector, so it can be started remotely. It's only a little jack plug so it's likely one could, with only a bit of ingenuity, program something like an arduino to start it up. Perhaps Zoom would be willing to release the protocol data. It might even be simpler than that; sometimes things like this used switched resistances, and so on. P

It's almost infinitely variable. Some people are hugely dependent on their gaffers, operators and the director and really just expressed a desired mood for the crew to implement. Other people place every light. Sometimes directors place lights. One of the biggest lies of film and TV is that there's any one way of doing anything. Almost everything is a matter of opinion at some level, to the point that behaviour that looks borderline incompetent to one person may look inspired to someone else. In certain geographic localities, on certain kinds of job, there's naturally lots of commonality, but even within that it's all over the place. This is one reason that lists of guidelines, let alone rules, are inevitably going to be either so specific they exclude reasonable behaviour, or so general they really help nobody. The only exception is be on time. After that, it's all opinion.

Most of it is just me waving a flashlight around just out of frame. I shot some generic lens flares against black and composited them. Lots of compositing and layering in that.

Not that I noticed, although I didn't exactly shoot charts. There is almost inevitably some variability of compression in out-of-focus areas with most anamorphics.

I do like that! I don't think it's so much a rough journey as an uncertain one, which is a roughness all its own. You have only very general control over where you end up. You may not get to do exactly the work you choose (almost nobody does) and that has to be OK.

Which would also increase the diameter of the wires and alter the effect, but sure. Given the fineness of most scrims, I'd be a bit concerned about them filling in entirely. Are these things really that expensive to replace? I don't think I've ever owned one.

Just start shooting stuff and see what happens. It's literally all you can do. Bear in mind when Deakins talks it down, he's probably basing that on his own experience. And his own experience as a cinematographer is enormous, which is great, but the way he got in decades ago probably didn't tell him that much about how things work now. What he may mean is that you can't do it the way he did it, which is no great surprise given that you aren't an English film student in the 1970s. If there was ever a fixed route in, there certainly isn't now. People seem to get all kinds of jobs for all kinds of strange reasons, or no reason at all. You almost certainly won't end up exactly where you wanted to be; almost nobody ever does, but if you're willing to accept that, and if you can genuinely afford to try, fine.

It's steel mesh so by default it would rust. This is avoided in most cases by plating it with something; if it's gone rusty it's because the plating has worn off, or perhaps been defeated by too much moisture and heat. I don't think you could really recover the plating, but you could dunk them in one of the commercial rust removal solutions (MC-51 is widely used). That might be a good idea, because the rust takes up more space than the steel, and it will make the wires in effect thicker and reduce light throughput, which would put your scrims out of calibration. P

I have to say there's not a lot of point sending it over here at the moment; the UK film production sector is rushed off its feet with the combined post-covid production boom combined with the peak of the streaming wars. It won't last, but right now you can barely get crew or facilities. Beyond that, there's also the fact that the union here just voted on terminating its agreement with PACT (the UK equivalent of the AMPTP) over very much the same concerns as the recent IATSE vote. It's not clear what that will mean in practice, since the union is far less omniscient here, but while things are different they are certainly far from perfect.

I should clarify: I don't think, as a practical matter, that union crews in US film and television production are likely to be replaced on any scale, but there are a few reasons why Variety's line about nobody being able to pick a camera up on any set is likely a bit of a generalisation. I mean, it won't stop people shooting independent music videos... Presumably the real question is what sort of working conditions the business model actually supports - in short, is the money actually there to fulfil the demands of the unions? I ask this question because I've personally been involved in conversations where demands were being made of productions which I knew it was not within the power of the production to fulfil; the production would simply not happen. That's generally at the lower end and it's a complex problem, but in the end, if it's just a matter of scheduling a few extra days on the production and making a bit less profit, that's fine. Equally, there would probably be a band of budget levels at which this might pinch a bit, no matter how you wanted to frame it, though you'd have to ask why a functionally insolvent business is being run basically on the goodwill of the workers.

That was my thought. I suspect that won't be something that any producer would do quickly or willingly, or in large numbers, but on stuff not requiring massive amounts of experience it seems a bit of a stretch that literally no person can do any form of camerawork anywhere. It works if we assume Variety's definition of "a set" is rather restricted. Reportedly the American unions also have separate agreements with certain producing entities (BET and HBO?) which would suggest to me that at least some production could continue. For what it's worth, what Greg mentioned earlier in the thread about the Marvel ten-hour workday is more or less what I understand is generally being aimed for in the UK and has been for years (often it's "ten plus one," the one being lunch, and although "eleven plus one" is also common it's not quite as nasty as 16 overall hours which appears to be normal in some places). Things like "prep and wrap time" (unpaid overtime) and moving the location of the "production office" in order to game the travel rules have been the exploits here. It may be worth pointing out that the very existence of IATSE owes, in a very indirect manner, to a strike in New York over a century ago during which nonunion crew were hired and proceeded to build sets so dangerous the cast refused to go anywhere near them. Possibly the liability issues are a concern here.