David Mullen ASC

I remember that ILM used to burn steel wool (like in Brillo Pads) to create the effect of burning embers inside a spaceship that was on fire. But yes, maybe hi-contrast images of a dusty negative of a white field (so black) running through a telecine / scanner could be manipulated... Or create an interference pattern (moire) by sliding two screen patterns of backlit art of points of light.

You should be fine. If you see the new HBO Camera Assessment Series, the classic Alexa (Mini) is their gold standard for testing and it held up in the 4K DCP presentation at the Linwood Dunn Academy theater I saw, on their large screen, it was not noticeably softer than the other cameras tested (Alexa 35, Sony Venice 2, Red V-Raptor, Blackmagic 12K). And I was sitting in the second row.

Because of the mirrors there was no electrician in the room, there was just enough room for a Litemat 1 on the floor, tilted up slightly towards one corner. The soft lighting is natural window light. I zoomed into the frame to show the reflection of the Litemat 1 in the eyes.

But is the drop in corporate and commercial budgets due to technology (and if the drop is only in the camera budget, does it matter in terms of salaries?) I think the drop in commercial/corporate budgets has very little to do with what camera is used. There are a lot of other financial forces at work, like the movement from broadcast to streaming, the decline of print advertisements, etc. Digital distribution and the internet have more to do with budgets today than what type of camera is employed. Companies don't have the deep pockets that they used to for promotional work. Yes, at the bottom end, the cost of entry is a lot lower. AI is certainly going to affect some jobs out there, no doubt. Some fields will be devastated probably. And I'm sure some creative content on streamers will be AI-generated though whether that will be a significant number, I don't know. For now, a total AI art creation head-to-toe tends to look like CGI animation. Is that what a large number of viewers want to see? I don't know.

The cheap video cameras that replaced, let’s say, 16mm film, weren’t necessarily on union productions anyway. I was doing low-budget non-union features when digital arrived in 2000 and joined the union in 2003 — I didn’t see any change in crew rates or hiring practices when union film shows switched to digital, the contracts were the same. With sitcoms there were some adjustments, often video used pedestals and a single person to operate, pull focus, push the camera around… but there was always a mix of sitcoms being shot on video versus film for decades so this was not an entirely new situation for the union. What “middle class” union production situations are you referring to where the switch from film caused a lot of union jobs to disappear or the rates to be lowered? Or are you saying that these productions went non-union simply by switching from film to digital?

8 1/2 Day for Night The Bad & The Beautiful The Stunt Man Living in Oblivion Ed Wood

I’ve never heard any general opposition to digital cameras by actors because it allowed them to do more takes; the most common complaint was just that they felt they were unflattering. One actor saying that they preferred fewer takes isn’t indicative of a consensus - besides, if they wanted to do fewer takes, they would just tell the director that. The director couldn’t say “you have to now that we have a digital camera!” The camera union was not opposed to digital cameras IF it made no change to the number of crew people hired nor affected their rates. The issues to be worked out back then regarded digital loaders, DITs, and whether daily back-ups should be done by the camera crew or editorial.

It's just because I wanted red on the back of Billy Bob Thornton's head, which became a key on the opposite person. If I could have figured out how to cross-light them in orange but backlight them in red, I would have.

Yes - it was 17 years ago!

Sure, or even sharper would be a streak filter like the ones used for fake anamorphic flares, just turned 90 degrees. Trouble is that a shutter timing error usually just starts at the highlight and either goes up or down, not across the highlight. I noticed that "West Side Story" (1961) had some shutter timing issues now & then with their 65mm camera.

There are plug-ins now to create that effect in post: https://store.pixelfilmstudios.com/product/progleam/

There’s no escaping driving to where you need to go… I live in the Westside in Mar Vista near Marina Del Rey / Venice / Culver City, the main advantage is that it is 10 degrees cooler on average if not more.

It was pretty interesting. First question I had, but was answered by Jim Mathers as moderator in the Q&A, was what sort of lights were being used for the skin tone test because there was a lot of variation but mostly in saturation, which seemed odd. I figured the issue was probably less to do with the cameras than with the lights. It turned out, as I suspected, they used LED lighting (Creamsource Vortex RGB panels.) Oddly enough, 35mm 5219 did not perform well under those, the faces looked a bit desaturated, and conversely, the reds were oversaturated on the Sony Venice 2. The panel said that up until now, they always used tungsten for their skin tone test, but since LEDs were now the most commonly-used lights on set, they decided to test with those because if there was an issue, then that might spark a useful debate. You would have expected 35mm film to be the gold standard when it came to skin tones but in this case, it wasn't. In the mixed light test, film and the Alexa Mini were the only two cameras to pick up the green spike in the kitchen fluorescents, but then the Alexa 35 really picked up the green spike in the mercury vapor street lighting but oddly enough, rendered the kitchen fluorescents as neutral as did the other digital cameras. Resolution-wise, in 4K projection, the 3K sensor of the Alexa Mini did not seem any softer than the 4.5K, 6K, and 8K sensors of the other cameras; it was surprising how competitive the Alexa still is, even with a decade-plus sensor design. The Red V-Raptor was sort of the surprise hit of the test though it maybe was a bit less saturated than the others. It was so clean in the shadows and worked so well in the underexposure tests, but still had some clipping issues in highlights, that it seemed clear to me that it should be rated a stop faster than recommended. It's more like a 1600 or 2000 ASA camera. The Sony Venice 2 looked great but was in some ways a bit uneven, oversaturated in the reds sometimes. But in the latitude test which had rooms of different exposures in one frame, the dimmed tungsten lampshades in the dark bedroom lost some saturation in the Venice 2 version for some odd reason, the other cameras rendered them as orange but the Venice 2 rendered it as a bit grey-ish orange. The Alexa 35 blew everyone else out of the water when it came to dynamic range and only film was close to the same amount of highlight latitude. In both the test with the hot sparkling fireworks of the safe explosives and the hot curtain sheer, only film and the Alexa 35 held detail, with the Alexa Mini following. In the 3200 ASA moonlight test, the Sony Venice 2 and Red V-Raptor did the best, 500T film (with a 2-stop push) did the worst. At first, the Alexa 35 was also one of the best but in the second shot, with a lot of movement, there was some weird compression artifacts from their internal noise reduction software. I don't know if the level of noise reduction can be dialed down in that mode. 2nd to last was the Blackmagic 12K camera, which had a lot of fixed pattern noise.

Full-frame 35 / VistaVision is 36mm wide and 15-perf 65mm is 70mm wide — that’s a 2X difference in width, not several times bigger.

Certainly not 18K in a print projection. Think of it this way, to me, 35mm film negative practically speaking seems close to 3K (which theoretically means it should be scanned at 6K). I could be generous and say 3.5K / 7K scan. 5-perf 65mm is roughly twice the width so let's say 6K to 7K. 15-perf is 3X the width of 35mm (I'm ignoring vertical) so that would be 9K to 10.5K (so in theory an 18K scan). I want to say that an Imagica scanner scans IMAX at 11K or 12K and then the files are reduced to 8K or 6K maybe, it depends on what resolution they want to do digital VFX. If print projection is almost half the resolution of the negative, then it's roughly lets say 2K for 35mm projection, 4K for 70mm, and 6K for IMAX. On the flip side, if you really believe that 15-perf 65mm IMAX negative is only 6K, then you'd have to believe that 35mm negative is only 2K, it's just real estate. I don't think the optics are much of a factor here because a large format doesn't need to use a lens with a high MTF, if there are more millimeters to begin with, the lens can resolve fewer lines per millimeter -- but certainly high-speed film and an older lens is not the sharpest way to photograph something.

The camera was fine. I’ve never had the video out not work but if it did it would just be like shooting film before the days of video assist. Mainly the focus-puller would have it the hardest, especially since an EVF is not a great way for an operator to judge focus. We’d be on the phone for a replacement camera with the rental house.

In the second season of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel", I had a complex 360 degree Steadicam move in a room with mirrors on three walls that basically had to be shot with available light -- but in a few angles, Abe's eyes went too dark when he was facing away from every window. But because of the mirror reflections, where the camera managed to barely avoid seeing itself, I was unable to have an electrician walk a fill light (nor a white card) around the room and not be seen. The ceiling was historic and couldn't be touched. My only solution was to place a Litemat 1 on the floor of the room pointed in one direction when the contrast was the worst, and then hope the camera or the actors did not step on it.

I'm not an AC nor an electrician so I can't answer about protocol, but the two times I've been "zapped" on set has been due to power flowing from a BNC cable into the camera. Once it was when a BNC ran from camera to a video village and the script supervisor asked for a reading light so the electrics plugged in a 150w movie lamp on a stand with a hand dimmer on the line, running into the same power strip as the monitor. Turned out that the hand dimmer had been wired backwards and this caused the distro box to send electricity through the BNC back to the camera.

I used to put two or three small tungsten fresnels with orange gel on Magic Gadget flicker boxes set to different rates in order to make things look more random, or maybe one flickering and the other on a dimmer just being randomly raised and lowered. Then all the lights would go through a light diffusion frame to blend them. I've also used three or four Astera Helios LED tubes on different flicker rates, like in a 2' 4-bank Kino housing, again with diffusion over the doors. Or a Skypanel on a firelight gag.

The author of the book is NOT suggesting that you are supposed to counteract the effect of the camera's focal length by changing seating position in the theater. What he is saying is a bit reductive and not completely accurate but there is some rough truth in there. But it's more practical when you are talking about very large theater screens showing a very high resolution image. IMAX is a good example, the screen is larger than normal compared to the center viewing distance in order for the image to expand into your peripheral vision. Cinerama was similar except that the image was only expanded on the horizontal axis. The idea is that with a very large and sharp image, sharp enough to look sharp though enlarged, you were concentrating on the center of the screen and letting some information "tickle" your peripheral vision to make the experience more immersive. IMAX often tends to use very wide-angle lenses because when you sat in the center or slightly forward of center, you were concentrating on a more "normal" focal-length area. Cinerama was similar, the fixed field of view was very wide. With either format, if you sat at the back of the theater or looked at the movie on a TV screen, you were more aware of the wide-angle photography. But in a normal 35mm movie, if a director chose wide-angle lenses, it was for an effect or for the expanded view, it was not because they wanted you to get up out of your seat and move closer to get back to a more normal view because you were concentrating only on the center of the screen. Frame from "How the West Was Won" (3-panel Cinerama), in the Smilevision letterbox format to replicate the look on a curved screen.

It's all hard lit with multiple tungsten fresnels with cutters, flags to top the light and separate areas. More or less the drummer and pianist are in one key, then the singers when they are forward are in a separate key. Backlights on everyone. No lighting diffusion.

If the image is distorted in a Terry Gilliam movie, it's on purpose.

If you want to calculate crop factor using area of film used, then you'd have to calculate the area used to create a 2.39 frame (if that's your final aspect ratio) after a 1.5X de-squeeze. This means that the actual area used has a 1 : 1.59333 (divide 2.39 by 1.5). So if you are comparing to shooting in 4-perf Super35: Full Aperture is 24.89 x 18.67mm, so knowing that is close to 1.33, you figure that for a final 2.39 image after a 1.5X de-squeeze, you're going to have to crop the top & bottom a little because all you need is 1.59333. It works out to be a 24.89 x 15.621mm area. If comparing to shooting in 3-perf 35mm: Full Aperture is 24.8 x 13.87mm, so knowing that is close to 1.78, you figure you're going to crop the sides because all you need is 1.59333. It works out to be 22.099 x 13.87mm. 1.59333 on Super16 (which is 12.35 x 7.42mm full aperture) is 11.823 x 7.42mm. So comparing horizontal view for crop factor, compared to 4-perf Super35, that's a 2.1X crop factor. Compared to 3-perf 35mm, that's a 1.87X crop factor. That would help you calculate focal lengths for each format to get to 2.39 : 1 for a final project. But in terms of using that 70 degree AOV figure, you'd have to know specifically for what format area that number applies to.

The director did not want any graininess and she liked the idea of working at high lights levels like in the 1950s/1960s. "Eyes Wide Shut" pushed 500T by two stops but rated at 1600 ASA instead of 2000 ASA, which is really just a 1/3-stop safety margin rather than consistently going for a denser negative. But I'm sure it helped. Dante Spinotti did something similar for "Red Dragon" (2002) -- I think he pushed 2-stops but rated 500T at 1000 ASA or 1250 ASA, so a bit more density.

Intermediate dupe stock is not designed to have its gamma manipulated. You could increase contrast by push-processing the film negative to some extent -- and you could try not underexposing to compensate for the push -- like pushing 200T by one-stop but rating it at 200 ASA (not 400 ASA) and letting it become one-stop denser than normal. It would then be printed down and cause a subtle increase in contrast; it might get you something closer to the look of Vision Premier print rather than a Vision print. 15 years ago, FotoKem had a demo of a very high-contrast look that they got, I think, by using print stock as a dupe element, I don't know if it was in the IP or IN step. The Vision contact prints for my film, "The Love Witch" (2016), were pretty contrasty and saturated because I overexposed 200T stock by over a stop and printed down, like in the low 40s (25 is normal). But that took a lot of light because I was basically working at 100 ASA and then opening up a bit more even after that. So I suggest trying the idea of pushing 200T by one-stop (or even test pushing by 2-stops) but not underexposing to compensate, just end up with a dense negative that has to use high printer light numbers.