David Mullen ASC

They shot at a low frame rate so the people were sped up (when played back at 24 fps) while the man stayed very still so he wouldn’t look sped up — but near the tail of that sped-up shot, the editor slowed the footage down for a moment.

Jumbos by Iride are similar to MaxiBrutes and Dinos, but use tungsten DC-powered Aircraft Landing Lights (ACLs) in a spot globe design. Concordes I believe (could be mistaken) use ACLs in a circular pattern that can be tilted inwards or outwards to spot or flood the beam.

Seems better to use a MoVI on short pole and have someone walk around with it; we did that on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”, sort of a lower-tech version of an ARRI Trinity.

Sure if you had a sturdy steel ceiling beam that can take that much weight and the beam had enough ceiling space above it, and there was a post coming down from the beam, to allow the weight bucket to move higher than the fulcrum point and swing around. An experienced grip team would have to rig it, with safety cables, especially since that's a lot of weight to suspend in midair.

It's just another form of flashing or latensification. And yes, there are on-camera flashing devices (Panaflasher, ARRI Varicon, etc.) The claims of increased sensitivity have always been a bit exaggerated.

First of all, make sure the lens has the back-focus set for a glass filter behind it. Second of all, the filters look heavier from behind so generally the 1/8 strength is about as heavy as most people go. Also, very wide-angle lenses are more sensitive to changes in back-focus so keep an eye out for that.

Seems fine - in that video the light has a lot of fall-off as if it was spotted in at times. And I'm not sure it is mounted to the camera or handheld above the lens, maybe it depends. The thing is that this video wasn't only lit with this spot, the space has some ambience, whether that was just available light or added, otherwise just having one light might be too high-contrast.

Hazed set and ellipsoidal spot light (like a Source-4 Leko, etc.). You can certainly spotlight someone with an M18 with a spot lens but you won't get the sharp beam and circular pattern on the floor. Even something like a Molebeam won't create a neat circle like that. But there are now some projector lens attachments for the ARRI Orbiter: https://www.arri.com/en/lighting/led/orbiter/accessories/optics/projection

To minimize clipping, you need to use a camera with a good dynamic range and then record all of the highlight information that the sensor sends to the recorder, plus adjust your exposure to at least keep the clipping to minimum. But generally this means recording raw or log and then color-correcting later. For anyone shooting broadcast video with no color-correction planned, staying in Rec.709, the only thing that helps is knee compression and formats like Sony HyperGamma (if that's still a thing.) If you can create your own LUT to convert log to Rec.709, you could create something similar to HyperGamma, flatten the signal in the shoulder of the exposure, plus brightness compensation for underexposing the signal to hold more highlight detail. Or if you're shooting video on a mirrorless still camera, often the log option is mild enough to not look bad in Rec.709 with only a minimal correction later needed to restore some contrast.

Two different concepts regarding diffusion. Longer lenses need less diffusion to match the degree of softening compared to shorter lenses, though the jumps in filter strengths may be bigger than that difference… but wider shots need less diffusion than tighter shots because our eye craves more detail in wide shots. So together it may mean the simplest thing is to just use the same filter if your wider shots are on shorter focal lengths and your tighter shots are on longer focal lengths (which is not always true.) The complicated answer is that so many things affect the perceived sharpness of the image that you have to evaluate which filter strength to use based on the individual shot rather than follow rules blindly.

“My Darling Clementine” is redundant? All of Shakespeare’s Histories are redundant?Historical fiction is a pretty huge sub-genre of fiction to dismiss! I mean, that’s a lot of movies alone — everything from “Reds”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Schindler’s List”, “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Oppenheimer”, “Raging Bull”, “Bound for Glory”, “Glory”, “The Aviator”, “Joan of Arc”…

I felt it should have been a mini-series if it was going to cover the entirety of Napoleon's career. Imagine the screenplay that Robert Bolt could have cooked up if the timeline were restricted to a few significant years. I also had trouble identifying some of the other historical figures in group scenes; it was like Napoleon had no other generals... The photography was great.

Congrats to Dirk DeJonghe and his lab for their work on Aki Kaurismaki's latest movie! It was nice to see an ARRI BL3 Evolution listed in the film credits, plus the Kodak 5219 stock and the lab.

Am reading the chapter now on “Casablanca” in the Curtiz biography and I had it backwards — Howard Koch was brought in to add more romance and politics into the Epstein Brothers comedic script, to give the story more dramatic weight. Finally, Casey Robinson did a final draft where he added some of the big romantic confrontations between Rick & Ilsa.

I don't think it was so much that the script was half-written, it's just that Howard Koch's romantic, patriotic story needed punching up by the Epstein Brothers, who added a layer of cynicism and humor that was much needed, creating a lot of the memorable lines in the movie. In this case, the schizophrenic nature of the final script actually works rather than hurts. I currently reading the biography of Michael Curtiz and have just come to the start of his directing of "Casablanca" after finishing "Yankee Doodle Dandy." The script issues reminds me of "Patton" where the inverse sort of happened, the first draft was written by a young Francis Ford Coppola and then rewritten by Edmund North, mainly to make the military campaigns more understandable. But all the best lines of dialogue came from Coppola, plus the opening monologue against the giant flag, a scene that they kept debating about dropping.

It's a bit tricky with digital because the issue just isn't when the area clips but how it looks as it clips, and whether it clips at the same point in all three color channels. So by recording more information, you have more flexibility in how you roll off the overexposure to the clip point so that it feels more organic, like how film burns out. But on the other hand, you don't want to underexpose everything else too much just to hold onto highlights that you don't plan on seeing anyway! So it's a judgement call. Add to that the new twist of HDR mastering, where you retain more highlight information in areas that are burned out in SDR. Sometimes that's not what you want, if you were aiming for a view out the sunny window to just be rendered as a white fuzzy mush but now in HDR you can see detail that you didn't want.

Sounds like you did everything possible. I'd have avoided two filters, especially since a Black Satin already has a GlimmerGlass in it as a base, plus degrees of Diffusion/FX -- so I can see going from a GlimmerGlass to a Black Satin but I don't see combining the two. But if the lens flares even when you pull everything out of the mattebox, add flags, etc. then the problem is the lens itself, so either accept the flaring as a style or stop pointing the lens into lights that cause the flare.

Because you don't know all the scenarios you will be facing between the minimal focus on the lens and the size of the object and the distance you need to be at. +2 may be too strong in some cases and you won't be able to focus on the object.

You don't need to achieve zero clipping, remember that clipping is something burned-out to pure white with no detail, but if that clipped area is very small in frame, like when a distant flashlight points into the lens or the sun glints off of a passing car, then it's acceptable and not distracting.

There's no hard before and after dividing line, just trends in that direction. But look at Jordan Cronenweth's 70s movies like "Zandy's Bride" and "Nickel Ride" for examples of that approach.

Softness is due to the size of the source (the soft light) relative to the subject. All the heaviness of the diffusion material does is make the soft source more even in intensity edge-to-edge but once the frame is filled equally with light corner-to-corner, it cannot get any softer unless it gets bigger relative to the subject (i.e. you make the frame larger or move the subject closer to it.)

The question is “when does it matter?” If you shoot the whole scene at the same f-stop, let’s say f/2.8, then when does depth of field matter? If deep focus matters then you probably would have lit the scene to a higher f-stop. With digital you can see the depth of field effects on the monitor and make decisions like needing to stop down for example. Depth of field calculations only happen in two scenarios generally — in prep if planning a deep focus shot or miniature photography, or on the set when shooting film if the AC knows the focus was off on that take but wants to know if it is in focus enough to be acceptable.

From “Film Style & Technology” by Barry Salt:

It would be much earlier than 1927…

It was the generation or two before Vision-3 5219 500T where Kodak felt pushed one-stop, it was better than their 800T, which they obsoleted. But in theory today, a Vision-3 1000T would have slightly better dynamic range than 500T pushed a stop because of the increase in contrast.