Phil Rhodes

I keep wondering whether I should buy a large amount of LED strip from eBay and just wind it around some 4x4 frames.

Here's a video which amounts to pretty much a detailed how-to. I'd be fairly convinced that how this guy does it is very close to how it was done. Most of it is fairly obviously cloud tank effects. I saw the film yesterday and I thought the shots of what was supposed to be the actual nuclear fireball looked like what they were, which is a much smaller, too small, conventional pyrotechnic effect based on an explosive charge lifting a liquid fuel. At some point, you have to unbend and CG it, or at least do a big cloud tank effect. You can draw a mushroom cloud in the foam on a coffee if you drag the tip of a spoon through it. Cloud tanks are underutilised. The late, great, Doug Trumbull was a big fan. Interesting factoid: you can see the pulse width modulation in the lights if you look closely at his whirling safety pin. I would suspect that in reality a lot of that was shot at low frame rates.

Nothing to do with the original question, but I was always quite taken with the use of chunks of polarising filter to create animated graphics on the backlit panels for Star Trek. Various real world physical phenomena have interesting behaviour under polarised light.

The only digital camera I have ever seen that was even theoretically capable of this was the Viper. It had a mechanical shutter and frame transfer CCDs, so for a brief moment after power-up, before the shutter mechanism was properly synchronised, it would produce this effect. There was never, as far as I'm aware, a firmware option to do it intentionally. Modern cameras use entirely different sensor technology, so this will be entirely a post effect.

A couple of visits ago, I found myself downtown near the Little Tokyo Galleria (having visited the nearby virtual production stages at Orbital Studios, which was entertaining) and decided to stroll over to the garment district and buy some fabric as a take-home gift. What I hadn't quite realised was what's between the Galleria and the garment district. It was the middle of the day, and I didn't acquire any interesting new scars. Honestly, being a walker in LA inevitably means using walking routes which are practically disused, under freeway overpasses and beside drainage canals, which are all common haunts of people with nowhere to crash but an approximated tent made out of a dollar-store tarpaulin and a couple of shopping carts. My impression is that the homeless of LA, like most places, are overwhelmingly desperate to avoid trouble. Obviously there's much to say about the cost of living and the overall economic equitability of society but that's true for most large cities in the western world. I've had more trouble with the cops. What is it with Pasadena?

I've never lived in LA for more than a few weeks at a time, but I have done that a few times, and perhaps a foreigner's perspective is useful. Still, I mention this in the hope that it might be helpful, but also in the hope that someone might verify my suspicions. About a year ago I was seriously pondering a job offer in LA and concluded that the answer was basically Burbank. There's a bicycle and walking path which goes up Chandler Boulevard and can make everywhere from North Hollywood to downtown Burbank reasonably accessible even without a car, and it's significantly cheaper than the (admittedly much nicer) area northeast of the 5 freeway. There is actually public transportation in LA. The metro works perfectly well for the places it goes, and can at least avoid the cataclysmically horrendous rush hours on the surface - then get an Uber if necessary for the hopefully-shortish distance to your destination. If you're willing to put your life in thrall to Uber, you can avoid driving in LA. The area just west of North Hollywood (not quite as far as Van Nuys or Sherman Oaks) is quite nice and I've often AirBnB'd in that part of town. It's a compromise location that is not near anything of significance, although if you walk down to the right part of Ventura Boulevard, say between Whitsett and Laurel Canyon, it's possible to convince oneself that other humans actually live in LA and might occasionally go out for a stroll. It's got life. It's almost pleasant. Santa Monica is coastal and lovely but way beyond expensive. Breakfast consisting of toast and conserves, eggs, coffee, and avocado was $55 a head when I was there in April, and Santa Monica is incredibly far from everywhere. I love meetings in Santa Monica because it's so pretty, but if you have something down there in the morning, and something in Burbank in the afternoon, well, that's your day. And they're only ten or fifteen miles apart. In general I don't think anyone is going to LA because it is architecturally gorgeous. There are exceptions: walk along Wilshire in the area of Highland and La Brea and there's some quite nice art deco buildings, some with restored classic neon signs. A couple of the studios, particularly Warner, are also historically significant for their buildings, with the classic barrel vaulted roofs and walls with gatehouses. Personally I have retained enough excitement for this stuff that any opportunity for a visit to the Paramount preview theatre, or the ASC clubhouse, is always fun. LA natives don't seem to see this stuff, somehow. Mostly, though, LA is an identikit smorgasbord of extremely nondescript low-rise buildings made of tan concrete, punctuated occasionally by a huge elevated roadway, school, or stripmall. The air tastes of exhaust fumes and on bad days you can still see the smog, though it's vastly improved even in my experience of the place. But there's always something going on, the food is wonderful (AJ's Tex Mex on Riverside!) and the can-do attitude to getting things done is unsurpassed. Feel like a moron for having turned it down, really.

There are DC inputs on the new Aputure 2.6k. The mind boggles.

I was at FotoKem just after the NAB show researching a story, and we had to get a special go-ahead to visit the labs because "a sensitive project" was in process. Lots of 70mm on on the rollers but all blasting by far too quickly to see what was on it. All the cans were marked "Gadget," which had to be about the least-encoded codename ever. Still, I suppose we could have been led into believing it was one of the other projects about at the time which needed 70mm release prints.

I find myself wondering if this sort of thing is becoming less relevant in the time of comparatively powerful, often quite large flexible LED panels. They take up so much less space - so very very much less space - than a conventional light plus diffusion setup, it's hard to see why people would do anything else. It's also vastly more power efficient, since all that bouncing is so lossy. Well, other than the sheer horrifying price tag of an Aladdin fabric light, of course. Or the even more horrifying cost of four of them, enough to fill a frame.

Dear indie filmmakers; Remember those lights we talked about? This one's going for a song. It's in Royal Oak, Michigan, and it'll probably cost a fortune to ship, but anyone nearby might take some interest. https://www.ebay.com/itm/185947854183?

Someone is currently selling an ancient PAG four-position charger, which only handles NiCd batteries, on a battery mount nobody makes anymore, plus three mismatched NiCd batteries, on eBay, for UK£1000 (around $1300) right now. That's gear which is comfortably thirty years old, the batteries will be junk, and only one of them can easily be recelled - even if you wanted to recell something to NiCd. Some people want all the money back, and that gear is ancient, so it goes back further than X.

Strictly speaking I guess you'd sort of expect that. The very earliest designs might have been designed for the peak sensitivity of orthochromatic film, which would have been bluish. Reds might look smeary. But I'm speculating wildly - did they have much capability to tweak things that finely back then?

The problem with doing that is that the colour filters are put on modern camera sensors as part of the manufacturing process, usually when the sensors are still on the wafer they were built on. The same photolithographic techniques which are used to create the circuitry are used to deposit and etch away the colour filters, so once you've finished manufacturing the sensor, mounted and encapsulated it and turned it into a deployable component, there isn't really any way to go back and put a filter array on it. You'd have to go to a sensor manufacturer and commission that manufacturer to make one of its existing sensors with your filter array, and you'd have quite a bit of development to do before you had filter materials with the optical properties you wanted that were compatible with that process. And then you have to build that sensor into some sort of camera, even just a test rig that could fire up the sensor and take stills, that you could actually test, with all the considerations of matching the sensor to an appropriate lens. And then you'd have to write the demosaic software to give you a finished image, which is where the real magic would happen. In short, it's not a trivial thing to do, and it would require some significant funding, but that's what it would take to test this out. P

To sum this up, I think people are likely to be a bit cautious about this simply because we've heard a lot about alternatives to Bayer's mosaic in the past, and the results have been pretty much a wash. Filters described as emerald, yellow, cyan and colourless white have all been tried and in the end the engineering compromise almost always ends up as a balance between unsaturated filters (higher sensitivity, lower noise, poorer colour rendering) and more saturated filters (better colours, but less sensitive and noisier). Small differences can be shown in theory but in practice it seems that a given area of silicon has a certain amount of performance, and within sensible limits the amount of picture quality which can be extracted from it is close to a zero-sum game, perhaps within a stop or so. I think this needs to be demonstrated practically, and that could be done using an existing sensor design with new filters. That's still a big deal and I understand that it's probably difficult to make that happen, but that's probably what it would take.

I guess my fear would be that what you're calling an LMS camera is likely to use very unsaturated filters on its sensor, given that the spectral sensitivities of human cone cells are themselves fairly broad. This is already something of a problem in modern cinematography cameras. Many of them already use unsaturated filters in order to maximise spatial resolution and sensitivity, which can make it difficult for the electronics to figure out what colour things are. Blue LEDs, for instance, are very saturated at about 440 to 445nm, and many modern cameras misreport them as purple, especially when at or near overexposure. This is supposed to be a triplet of red, green and blue LEDs. The red clips to white and it shouldn't, but the blue looks purple. Can the new design help with this?

That sounds a lot like an essay question, and would require quite a lengthy response. Is there anything more specific we could maybe discuss that would help?

Last week, I found myself at the ASC clubhouse in Hollywood, and noticed that among the fascinating exhibition of historic cameras was this - a Cinerama camera! Those lenses are under an inch in diameter and I wouldn't like to guess what the effective aperture is. P

I don't think I'm particularly daft about this stuff, but I've spent quite some time staring at the colour management settings in Resolve and concluded that what the world needs is a large, poster-sized wall chart showing the exact path the image takes through the application, indicating where each process is performed and which controls affect them. In my view it is not well organised. For instance, some settings are labelled as colourspace controls, but deal also (or optionally, or sometimes) with luminance handling too. It mixes concepts, it's extremely poorly documented, and it gives every impression of having been allowed to grow and evolve without much care or attention being paid to comprehensibility. Of course, mention changing it and a thousand colourists who have their own special sauce to make it work will immediately complain and deny any possibility of improvement, but that attitude leads us down the same path taken by things like Pro Tools, which have been added-to and expanded for decades in a manner that's created a chaotic beast which is highly familiar to long-term users but impenetrable to anyone else. It's a slow rot that affects professional software and I don't think most of Resolve has these problems - it's fast and well done - but the way the colour management setup works is a nightmare from the seventh circle of Hades' own eternal damned kingdom.

That is some amazingly steady 16mm.

Is it too obvious to point out that shooting Super-8 in 500T is a somewhat orthogonal choice to those leading to clear and crisp images? I haven't checked recently, but every time I have checked for the last few years, 16mm (to include Super-16mm) was barely more expensive than Super-8 - even cheaper, quite often. 16mm cameras and lenses are better and the format is capable of far more. I don't know about 4K, exactly, but it can produce devilishly crisp HD pictures if you're willing to shoot the 50D on good glass and hold the thing steady.

I'm not sure about the car - none was in evidence - but they seem to have bolted the fire hydrant back into place now. Looks like a large cast iron fabrication to me.

Yes, this was early afternoon yesterday on Ventura Boulevard near Radford Avenue, where the CBS studios are.

I can't say how entranced I was to witness the real thing in person! Now, where can I see the two guys carrying the large pane of glass across an alleyway?

Hello! I'm making my annual pilgrimage to Vegas for the NAB show, then to LA for a week. It's always a pleasure to put faces to names so if anyone's interested in saying hi in person, that'd be great. Anyone aware of fun things going on? Best, Phil

In extremis, software can do it. Knoll Light Factory, for instance, makes a reasonably good fist of simulating that specific effect, and with a little manipulation using other filters you can achieve highly realistic results. This is the unprocessed output of the plugin. It's highly configurable, but the bottom left seems to be what you're after.