Phil Rhodes

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.

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