Phil Rhodes

I'd assume not, given the PK flange depth is considerably less than the PL. The PK lens would have to be physically inserted into the PL mount. Possibly it could be done by including corrective optics in the adaptor, but that'd be expensive and cost image quality. What's the camera? P

I try to walk at least three miles a day, otherwise I'd be sitting right here ten or twelve hours a day. The only thing I dislike about doing it is the time it takes. I'll likely need new hips and knees at some point, but that's at least possible. Better that than dead internal organs from the lack of fitness. P

I wonder if that's just someone holding down the button on a DSLR and shooting a load of stills.

I suspect any such thing would be extremely rough. Bear in mind that most modern colour mixing LEDs of any quality aren't purely RGB devices anyway, so RGB is just another way of expressing a colour - just like CIE xy numbers. The difference is that xy numbers have at least the intent of being consistent, light to light and manufacturer to manufacturer, whereas RGB doesn't.

Well, there are other camera systems on which you could shoot 2:1 anamorphic and still have a 4K effective sensor on a 16:9 image, although whether the anamorphic lenses involved are actually capable of sufficient MTF to satisfy a 4K sensor is another matter entirely. Certainly Netflix have acquired and distributed non-4K material, but in general I would suggest this is a question for your producer. P

That's actually not always two, sometimes it's three, but you can choose your frame rate to taste. No idea how they ended up with that result. It looks like real time to me so I'd propose that it was shot at (say) twelve then step printed back to 24.

What's hilarious is that the formulation that's being deployed in some six-colour lights as "lime" is heavily related to what would have been considered a reasonable white in 2011. P

Ha, I don't know about fax machines. For some reason the UK police are still obsessed with them, but outside that microcosm they're things of the early 90s at best. Japan, on the other hand... I had to fax a company in Japan in the mid-2010s to enquire about a music clearance. But yes, it's very YMMV. I think here most of the problem is actually caused by the courier companies - Fedex is particularly nasty, remembering that they get paid if they have to clear something so they like to do what they can to clear everything they can. Anyway yes, I've found there's a significant random factor involved. I could conceivably go down there and look at one of these lights if they'd let me. Who're you talking to?

I'm about 45 minutes from that place. I'd be very cautious about trying to figure out how something like that would be viewed by the customs people. I have some experience of this having received quite a lot of packages from all over the world containing equipment on review, which in most cases is intended to be free of import duty on the basis it isn't a commercial import. The fees you end up paying are based essentially on the whim of whichever customs inspector you get, and particularly the behaviour of the shipping company and how they describe the shipment to the customs people. You will probably end up paying fees to the shipping company for clearing it, which may be where Uli's 35-euro fee comes from. The company is incentivised to behave in whatever way makes it the most money for the least work, without any regard for you. It can be difficult to contest the fees because the company makes the decisions about what information goes to the customs people, and you have no control over that, but you may still end up being legally responsible for the information given. For what it's worth one of the reasons I was never a huge fan of the EU was that in my experience the import duty exemptions didn't work very well. I was frequently charged import duty when moving goods between EU countries. I have no idea why that happened other than that the outside of the box was marked with Chinese characters and the text "made in China" (and what isn't made in China, these days?). It didn't work very well for individuals. It worked very nicely for big companies. P

I found this manual for the EB1200/1800 Event Three ballast, which is a rack-mounting pack of three ballasts presumably designed to run heads like that. It does say "flicker free," and I have found various online references to the Event series, or at least modern incarnations of it, being flicker free. I don't know if it's equivalent technology to what's being sold there, but that does look like an electronic, rather than a magnetic, ballast. If it's anything like the event-style 575 ballast I own, it may well be stuck in the square-wave mode a normal Arri ballast would call "flicker free" and cause the lamp to emit a high pitched singing sound when active, which is probably not what you want. Or it may not. In short, I don't know, and I suspect it'll operate perfectly well as a light source - just be warned of the possible shortcomings of this. You may reasonably take the position that a 1200W HMI PAR with highly-sensitive modern cameras is likely to be so far away as to make the whistle easy to ignore. (Oh, and if you do figure out they're good, let me know. I'll take a pair!) P

I'd be interested to see how the colour differs between the HMI and the LED. It's not as if HMIs are actually paragons of virtue in all this, but that teal silk dress is a painful memory.

Historic gear porn.

Can't help but feel that if it needs that bit of blackwrap (or whatever it is) taped to it, the optical head design is a little suspect.

Called it! I always thought that was pretty successful; certainly better than the giant Vegas neon sign in the Next Gen's engine room. It'd have been better if they'd faded it, which neon will do, but which most neon controllers won't.

A long-dead naval architect and Marlon Brando's makeup artist.

When exactly did this happen? Do you have a web link or any other info?

Print clear registration marks in the corners and use those to line everything up in something like After Effects. Run tests by repeatedly scanning a single page of a registration test pattern with deliberate registration inaccuracies and make sure you can get the results you want. Otherwise, sounds doable.

Sekonic L-398A. Very, very primitive, and not really usable in the very low light modern cameras can handle, but very informative about just how exposure works. Uses a mechanical calculator to work out exposure based on the meter reading. Not something you want as a daily driver in the modern world, but a great learning tool.

It's interesting that the overpowered lens motor issue comes up. It's a problem I've noticed even on the low-cost focus controllers people use. It's actually even more of a problem on the sort of lightly-built converted stills lenses that are often paired with these lower-cost controllers. I think they're probably trying to make a point of showing they can provide a lot of power to handle difficult lenses, but there's often no way to moderate the torque. P

There are types that use butane gas for heat, which are probably the most portable because they don't need lots of mains power. One such type is made by Artem here in the UK but there are presumably others. Otherwise, a good portable option is the diminutive Le Maitre Mini Mist, which uses aerosol canisters for the fluid so it doesn't need power to run a pump. As a result, once it's heated up, you can wander around with it, placing smoke where you want it, for quite a while until the heater block cools down again. P

I began redacting most contact info from call sheets even on the tiny one or two day things I do because of the privacy considerations, so that's not unreasonable. Not sending people a call sheet is unreasonable for all the reasons shown here, particularly working hours considerations. This is not OK.

I only get to do these things on Google Maps at the moment, but yesterday I found myself wandering around Brooklyn looking at fairly nondescript street corners used for The Interpreter. Nobody seems to like The Interpreter, but I have a big soft spot for it; a nice blend of realism and drama. I once shocked a New York native by walking down Hatton Garden in London and pointing out it had doubled Manhattan in Eyes Wide Shut. Other than being straight with regularly-spaced crossing streets it looks very little like Manhattan and the amount of stuff they had to truck in to make it work was massive.

Maybe I'm grabbing the wrong end of the stick here. Seems to me it'll do what is being suggested if they're fairly narrowband filters, given the usual controls in grading.

Yes, you can do that, and yes, that's the effect it will have. It's something that's worth testing because the various colour processing systems - the sensor, the camera electronics, the grading software - have various nonlinearities and mismatches which mean this sort of thing does not always work in a straightforward and predictable way. P

The Google search I need for this is "green LED floodlight," but whatever works in your part of the world. The flicker issue will be the same either way. If you don't mind getting a bit creative, you can just get lots of green LED sticky strip and stick it to something. Being driven by 12V DC power, flicker is absent. Or, get some fluorescent fittings and put green tubes in them. That's how I do it. If I had to design it now I'd use the sticky strip.