Phil Rhodes

In Parry Sound, Ontario, visiting the set of Wickensburg, on which I did some writing work. I currently sit here:

No, there isn't. This is what mattes and fingers and dots and things are for, to keep things from shining in the lens. If the light source is in shot there's not so much you can do, as you'd naturally see whatever's flagging it, unless you can figure out a way to flag it with a piece of set dressing so it looks reasonable. Lights that are out of frame can still flare the lens, which is where mattes (hence mattebox) come in. But no, you're absolutely right, there's no perfect solution. This is why people spend so much time designing lens coatings.

There you go, Imran - Ed's the guy to ask about this stuff. What were you proposing to do, exactly?

Hello again! What've you been up to recently? Anything fun to look at?

VERA! But you needed a soldering iron.

I tend to agree.

Hmm. I suspect you're right, but it instinctively feels like 40 kilos on the end of that arm is an awful lot (that's a sturdy child!). Your best answer will come from the manufacturer, or maybe the distributor. Send an email about it, I'd say. Or call a gaffer who has some.

I think you could probably cut a basic HD proxy timeline on that machine, but I'm not sure what the performance or workflow would be like.

The other thing about this is to consider what lens you might use. Even quite wide lenses may look tremendously juddery with a hard mount, depending heavily what you're driving on. Perhaps evaluate gimbal options, which can take the curse off handheld in a situation like this.

And you've tried just throwing your 5K R3Ds on a timeline and cutting them, with the resolution wound down?

That's a fairly basic machine, particularly since it doesn't have a real GPU, but if you have proven you can throw a basic timeline together in Resolve then you can probably do what you need to do. Render time may not matter much as it can happen while you sleep! Really the way to do this is to work backward from what you want to end up with, exactly like you would if you had to deliver a big TV show to Netflix. If you need to deliver an HD result, convert your r3ds to some sort of intermediate format at HD resolution (prores springs to mind) ideally with a log encoding, then edit and grade that. What are you aiming to end up with here?

Where'd that clip come from? Is that something you scanned?

This is true to an extent. The likes of Netflix use sufficiently high data rates that at least some noise does tend to make it through, at least from what I've seen, although I'd generally counsel against it as a general choice for exactly the reason given here. P

A buddy of mine in LA is an enthusiast of this sort of thing and I think he still has an old tube camera, very much detuned for maximum smeary tube fun and frolics. I believe he records it to a miniDV deck but the look would be earlier, more historic than the Hi8 period. Are you looking for a camera as a prop or something to produce old-looking pictures? There are many, many kinds of Hi8 camera. Certainly dozens, from little handycams to dockable recorders for broadcast cameras. If you do get something like Hi8 then I'd encourage you to check it produces recordings that other devices will replay. Hi8 in particular is a little notorious for drifting, and the youngest of them will be pushing 25 years old now. They may play back their own recordings, but there are sometimes issues playing a tape made by one camera on another VCR. P

Not sure. Possibly have some choice there.

There's an outside chance I may find myself in Toronto in the next couple of weeks, with a day or two to spare while awaiting covid test results so I can fly back to London. What is there to do in Toronto?

Can you upload the file somewhere? Lots of things can cause apparent issues with playback of compressed video files and it's hard to diagnose without access to the data.

Volvo. The old ones are squarer and therefore have more internal space, but I suspect that in your part of the world you'll have the same issue we have here, which is that all of the old square ones are now made out of rust held together with caked-on deposits of winter road salt. Good old Volvo. Stupid new Volvo. Still, Volvo. Open the tailgate, yell "Hello!" and time the echo.

I'm not really sure it was ever intended that anyone would splice VHS. If it peels apart you may end up filling the head gap with glue from the tape, which would be bad. The solution here is to probably respool the two halves you need into new cassettes, taking extreme care not to introduce dust or to create static while spooling the tape quickly, which will selectively erase parts of the magnetic pattern and cause fixed dropouts. Really the splicing tape ought to be the same width as the tape. Do you have a half-inch splicing block to do it on? Alignment will be tricky otherwise. Make sure you're sticking it onto the non-signal side. Tape lubricants may make it hard to do. You'll get a long period of broken mess as the splice rolls gradually past the head drum. The splice will be hit by the head at least seven or eight times, creating multiple opportunities to pick up the edge and peel the joint apart. Whatever you do, you'll want to capture it immediately to an archival format and never touch the original tape again. I had some long, interesting conversations about archival handling of VHS (which would apply also to other composite formats) and how they'd be best captured. P

Some of those books were available in 1946. Formulas: Papers: Kodak Data Book on Slides, 4th edition, 1949. Date visible at the bottom here: Also seems to have been available in green, possibly different date. Durn monochrome.

Believe me, I'm painfully aware. Ten years ago I was writing code to handle it and I've written effectively that same function in at least three different programming languages. Various people suggested we should eject fractional frame rates when we went to HD, and nobody objected in principle. The reason it wasn't really practical is that at the time there would be a need to broadcast downconverted versions of stuff shot in HD on then-still-extant standard-def channels. Whether that's a big enough issue anymore to worry about I don't know, given that at least in the USA they shut down the last NTSC-M transmitters recently. Personally I think there are probably some fairly easy ways to solve the problem. Would anyone object to a converter that just dropped a frame at cuts? It'd only have to find less than one cut every thirty seconds and drop one frame at each cut to keep up. Still, if you want to have a sensible conversation about why it wasn't done at the HD switchover, that's why. Nobody's contending it isn't a pain to deal with. P

This is actually quite difficult given the common desire to see the photo develop through the rippling fluid in the developing tray. Assuming you're talking about black and white processing, which you presumably are otherwise there's no safelight to see by, what you can do is light the scene in green light from a colour mixing LED, and print the photo in green ink on white paper. If you do a reasonable job of matching the LED light go the ink colour, the photo image will be invisible. Then, dissolve the LED to red, and the image will become visible. Finally, push it all to monochrome then tint red in the grade and you have a photo apparently developing. Note you can't use an inkjet print for this as they're usually not waterproof. P

It's hard to object in principle, but there are some difficult underlying issues around simultaneously broadcasting standard definition downconversions of HD material which may still require fractional rates. Scaling the image is easy; retiming it, presumably requiring very subtle optical flow processing, is not. I'm not sure how often this would really be a problem but it's worth taking into consideration.

Techbid has one on this month's auction. I don't know what the condition is likely to be. If you're in a bind, I have six IDX Cue D95 sitting just outside London doing nothing. Some reason it has to be IDX? I have some other V-mounts I could let go. P

Hang on, the F55 has an FZ mount; the PL mount is an adaptor you've maybe never taken off, but you can. I don't know if anyone's ever made Pentax K to FZ, but it's at least potentially doable.