Edgar Dubrovskiy

Cheers! The end of the story (sort of - still dragging) is that the lab admitted that some scratches have appeared on the neg after processing and telecine, plus, some dust got stuck to the neg - unfortunately, emulsion side. They tried to clean the roll after the whole issue was raised. But in couple places the frames appeared to be damaged on the emulsion side after the process... So producer is negotiating at the moment what will happen next.

No. I love film. It's just I live in London. And I will give you my soul if you manage to find a good 16mm package with some new Vision 3 and HD transfer without dust on it for under $1000/day here.

Adam, where are you from?

But surely by swapping to a longer lens/coming closer you make the fine print less... fine. Thus solving the aliasing. That's how I solved it couple times at least - by avoiding making the small pattern even smaller.

Spend 50% of that on production design.

Changing lenses or the distance to the subject can help. Had this on a music video recently, decided to drop a head to toe shot and just shot waist up. Not good.

I second the "deeper canned air" pocket.

A good heavy tripod with a good head. This light camera shakes as hell. Especially on some wooden floors. Then an on-board monitor with false colour/peaking options, HDMI splitter to hook-up director's monitor (you don't want an operator, focus puller and director crowding around one 7" monitor), good FF, MB with some ND grads.

Hype sells.

Amazing :)

Found it - 50 and 75. 75 for video. BBC uses 50 though...

Thanks! What would be a normal ohm rating for a bnc?

While being at uni, I felt that Kodak definitely had a much better PR - free tests, Kodak Student Competition etc. Where Fuji was not that "open" with students. Plus, in the first year we shot Kodak 500Ts - because of safety and plus some 7222 reversal.

Any ideas?

Hi guys! Was assisting today on a promo, shot on old-skuuul 1970's cameras, recording onto DV clamshells. And at some point we ran into a very unusual problem - every time you point a camera at a bright light (eg. shining down the lens, silhouetting artist) the monitoring would just shut off - as if there is no signal coming down the BNC, whereas the picture on the electronic viewfinder was ok. So it seemed as if BNC was overloading and just shutting itself. It only happened for like 1-3 seconds - basically as long as the light was really shining down the lens. Tried different clamshells - the problem persisted. Any ideas of what was the technical cause of this? Called the rental house - guys told me that they have never ever encountered a problem like this. Wasn't a big deal - I'm asking more out of curiosity. Thanks!

With older, student-used lenses always trust your eye. As 9 out of 10 times unis will not be looking after the lenses very well, unfortunately. So as long as the viewfinder is set to your eye - you should be safe to do eye-sharps. We had this problem with old bayonet-mounted lenses on Arri 16st as well - and were pulling the whole short by eye, as we had exactly the same problem - at 6 feet we are looking at about 12 on the barrel.

It means that the lens will open up to 2.8 with variety of other stops that are tighter - up to f16/f22 usually.

Shoot some dark subject (like a black card of some sort) on that stock - like 10ft. This way you will know how will the footage look if you accidentally shot an exposed neg (or some student loader opened the mag while loading). Good experience :)

Wow. Real nice.

Very nice. But make it 1 minute - to many shoots look similar (like the drama with grey-haired guy. And club promos).

That's usually on the rushes level - then we do HDCAM tech grade from neg. And then the actual grade at the post house. I always do that now - shooting at the same settings as 16mm shot, sometimes with adjusted WB - to give the desired look. Sometimes PShopped. I usually check with a gaffer on the first day, so both meters show the same, plus the back-up light meter - so far always showing same exposures. What I don't get - how is this transfered if it's definitely under? Wouldn't lab call production up and say your tests are way under? They do send reports - 99% times it will say all good, sometimes occasional "flare". Sorry for all this moaning :) It's just I am really frustrated as student graduate - because it's so often we had some random problems with labs. Starting from not following the frame leader to taking all colour out (happened on the grad film where lab took out all orange (CTOs on tungsten) in the final scene - despite the e-mailed pictures and shot greycards). And then when you actually DO make a mistake - it makes you never sure is it the lab again, or you this time?

Kate Collier runs Arri Crew - that's the top diary service in UK at the moment, I think. Heard some really positive things from technicians on the list. http://www.arricrew.com/index.html

Here is an example that I really want to show you, guys. Was doing some exposure tests for the grad film. This is shot on Kodak 100 and 200T, Vision 2s - exposed as on the can. This shot, for example, was definitely exposed correctly - spot metered and double checked :) Footage was developed as normal and transfered to digibeta - as this what uni wanted us to finish the project on. Here is the grab (split-screen was done for some producers' presentation): But I started to suspect that it's definitely too dark for a normally exposed grey card, so went to FCP (I know, not highly scientific :) ) and put up a waveform. And to me this looks way under for a greycard: What are you thoughts, guys? Thanks so much for all the suggestions!

Yeah, that's what I though, John. But also I can't get my head around something I had on every student shoot for some reason: I always overexposed 16mm by around half-stop for the purposes you mentioned. Then it usually went through the processing overnight, and one-light-telecine to miniDV, digi which goes to the editor - and I get a DVD copy next day. But it always always look like that - soft overall, underexposed and grainy. But, that's what I don't get - we go to HDCAM tech grade after the picture lock and the moment they load the footage into Spirit or other machine they use at the facility - it's fine, grain is normal for 16mm, it's not underexp etc... I am not trying to make excuses, honestly. I just don't get it - is it normal to get your dailies looking quite poop, especially grain-wise? Or is it just a student thing? Or is it purely technical thing that when you telecine to SD it won't look "pretty"? Does HD tighten the grain SO much? I will try to dig up couple stills of SD dailies vs HD scan.

Thanks Karl! Thanks John!