Tyler Purcell

As Phil points out, it's really a software/encoding glitch. I encode stuff every day and it looks flawless. I've found the base level mpeg 4 engine to really suck. This is what many windows based software packages use as their "compression" type for making smaller files. It's only when you get into the .h264 engine, that things really become substantially better. On the mac side, .h264 is standard, it's the base level compression. Since it uses the quicktime engine to encode, Apple can control the quality with automatic software updates, rather then customers downloading new versions of software constantly. In 2012, Apple released an all-new version of Compressor, which is the widest used program for transcoding on mac's. It has an all-new .h264 engine that works really well, though it's dog-ass slow. At 15,000Mbps (which is what I compress most of my media at for upload) double pass, advanced profile, 1080p, 23.98, if you put the Pro Res master and the .h264 next to each other, there is very little difference between the two. The .h264 is slightly softer and there are some motion related artifacts (adds to the softness), which only a trained eye could see. Also, the colors aren't as vibrant, they're a bit muted on the compressed version. But that's comparing the two files on a $30,000 color grading monitor. On your home computer screen, they will look identical. If mac's didn't automatically display file sizes constantly, I wouldn't know the difference between the two on my computer.

It's a wire rig, you can see the harness being worn in the wide shot, right around his belly. The other dead give away is the shot previous when he's swinging back and forward on the harness. Also the later shots where he's flying. Rig removal these days is very easy, painting the shadow of the crane arm is also easy. You can do the painting out at home with After Effects. I've done it many times and it's very fast with the tracking tool. For sure not a complicated effect at all.

I think the relationship with your gaffer should be one of mutual understanding across the board. If you show up with a game plan, your gaffer should be all thumbs up and making it happen. I personally like telling my gaffer what I'm looking for and letting them come up with the game plan. It allows me to back off and focus with the director on the shot, rather then focusing so much on lighting. Generally I've found a brief explanation gives the gaffing team some time and that gives ME time to work with the director. When the shot is ready, then I'll make some tweaks to the lights before shooting, sometimes with actors ready to go. I'm very hands-on however once things are setup. I'll adjust lights, I'll move things, I'll even put gels up if necessary. I've pissed off quite a few "hired" gaffers working this way, but they get use to it quick. I also like working with the gaffer with what's on the truck. I think that's hypercritical, so I'm generally giving the gaffer a list and he will add what he wants and we'll sometimes go to the rental house together. If it's a smaller truck, I will go pick it up myself and sometimes test things like HMI's before showing up to set and finding out they're broken... been there, done that. I also go through all the camera equipment and insure I've got everything before the shoot. There is nothing worse then showing up and finding out you're missing something.

3.5 minutes of footage?

It's called "B" mount or "Arri B" mount.

I wouldn't try to get a bolex much past 50. They use super light-weight gears and there are lots of them. When they choose the 50FPS speed, they did it for a very specific reason and I'd be concerned about long-term damage. Not saying it's impossible, just saying why risk it?

The BL is so loud anyway, the lens blimp doesn't really make that much of a difference. I've shot with one and without one, the camera was still loud. ANY Arri Bayonet lens will work, there are literally 100's of them on ebay at any given time. My entire lens kit is B mount because you can adapt very easily to other cameras. So the investment on B lenses is worthwhile in my opinion. Since the BL is a straight 16 camera, you won't need anything special. The BL isn't a bad camera, I shot with it a lot over the years. The Arri S is a lot smaller, but it's A LOT louder as well. Where the BL can be a crystal sync sound camera (depending on the electronics) the Arri S can't, it's an MOS camera. The Arri S is also a 100ft daylight spool camera. Yes you can find 400ft magazines for it, but then things get more expensive because people get a premium for them on ebay. If you don't care about a quiet sync sound camera, buy a Bolex. My EBM is small, has pretty good registration and isn't nearly as loud as the Arri S.

The fact it all of a sudden goes away and is in the center of the image as much as the outsides, that kinda tells me X ray damage as well. If it were the camera, it would be consistent, not pulsing. If it were a minor leak, once the film unraveled, it would change considerably and maybe disappear all together within a second of the camera start. Xrays penetrate based on strength, so they would literally penetrate into the roll a certain amount and no more. My guess is the film was damaged from the beginning, long before you got a hold of it.

Nice! Congrats! :)

I know all about the imagers and how they work. When I discuss them, I'm discussing them in reference to conversation, not out of context. I was discussing the HL59 and cameras like it, rather then focusing on the theoretical characteristics of a given technology. I understand there are special application CCD imagers and electronics which work far better then CMOS, but they don't exist in any standard camera on the market. They are for special medical and scientific markets. Now, I don't like CMOS at all, never have. I think the bayer pattern is a bad design. I think the preamp's should be separate and not included on the silicon. I think a better scan system needs to be developed (IE rolling shutter issues) I think CMOS's lack of near infrared capture is also an issue. So I'm not bullying CCD's for any reason. I only made the comments based on experience using a wide-range of CCD and CMOS cameras over the years. Today, on our modern cameras, CMOS delivers a superior image for the resolution, speed (refresh), dynamic range and sensitivity necessary for modern productions. I mean, when have you seen a CCD imaging camera shoot 4k @ 60fps, with no-noise @ 5000 ISO... or the equivalent of around 50db of gain, 10 - 12 stops of latitude (in slog capture) in a box the size of a pack of cigarettes with an internal battery that runs for 2 hours and has a built-in screen? Umm. Sony S7SMKII just one of many cameras that make CCD look obsolete in every way imaginable. Put it to you another way, no digital camera can capture the skin tones of a properly made photochemical image. Heck, our computer screens and the electronics that drive them, are not even close to being up to the challenge. Yet you don't hear people making any changes to fix these issues.

Your example is spot on and the phenomena you describe is actually a complex one with many variables. The biggest one in my book is the standard def format's ability to carry defined color information. So the camera companies focused more on color science, the actual look of the image, rather then trying to represent all of the colors. Download the high res file and present it on anything you want. http://www.yedlin.net/DisplayPrepDemo/# I'm the biggest film advocate you've met and a HUGE digital skeptic. I have been working with digital though since the very beginning, even before the F900 and Viper. Until Steven Yedlin's test linked above, I didn't think it was possible to get digital to look anything like film, but he's done it. Yes, there are SOME instances (night scene for instance) where the digital shot is clearly digital. Yet, everything else, even going from indoors to outdoors, is pretty amazingly close. I do think the Alexa 65 is the best digital camera on the market today. Where I haven't shot with it yet, I have been in color sessions and been able to sit down and work the imager to see it's limitations. It's the first digital cinema where I say to myself, finally digital acquisition is acceptable. When Arri finally makes a 6k S35mm sized imager camera, with the LUT's Yedlin's made, the grand experiment will be over. I know the pre-amps are analog, but after that, it goes through a DA and pretty much everything else in the chain is digital. I'll say one thing, modern analog to digital converters have come A LONG WAY since the HL59 was manufactured. This is why I still prefer an all analog camera and workflow when it comes to re-creating an analog look. Just imagine how different the HL59 would look if it had full chroma RGB analog output, instead of a compressed color space serial digital connector. Yes, I mentioned "cropping" because I thought you would bring up field of view. I've shot quite a lot with RED's over the years, they're pretty darn close to 16 stops. Where I haven't actually put a chart in front of one, (other people have so I don't feel it's necessary) I do use other cameras all the time and so far, the Dragon has held up very well to the high dynamic range shots I've attempted to re-create. The URSA 4.6k does a better job in some areas, but the RED still does exceptionally well. I have access to all these cameras, so hopefully in the near future I will do a test. :) Umm, I don't know of a single CCD camera that holds a candle to CMOS imagers in terms of signal to noise ratio. My pocket camera blows the doors off any ENG camera I've ever used and I've used A LOT of them, not just in dynamic range, not just in latitude, but in signal to noise. This is because as you pointed out above, CCD's use analog preamp's, which means when you need to boost the signal (low light conditions) you are basically increasing the noise floor by huge margins. Not saying a single CMOS imager is superior, far from it. I do think each format has it's pro's and con's. I'm just saying there is a reason nobody uses CCD's outside of broadcast. There have been a dozen CCD cinema cameras made, but nobody uses them. There is a very good reason and it's not physical size of the imager block, it's not field of view which is restricted thanks to flange distance with a 3CCD system, it's not cost either as CMOS cinema cameras are VERY expensive.

I've worked on two shows this year with the C300MKII, one a second unit cinematographer for a feature and one industrial show. Both shows I also cut and colored, which gave me some great opportunities to see what the net result was like. I personally love the color of the C300MKII out of the camera, it's just a good looking camera. It has all the bells and whistles. It's small, but it doesn't hand hold well stock. Like the RED's, you need a shoulder kit and do I dare say an "actual" viewfinder, as the screens the C300MKII come with, aren't good at all. The Canon also requires no setup what so ever. Battery can stay in it's little compartment and you can pull it out of the box, turn it on and start shooting after the 10 second boot time. With all that said, the Canon C300MKII has TWO major flaws. The biggest one is processing power. Canon have gone cheap and use a 10 bit processor, which means the best it can record is a 10 bit 4:2:2 MPEG iFrame signal. This limits the over-all cameras potential, even with Clog capture. Is it bad? No... but it's not special in any way. The XAVC codec in 4k, is a nightmare to work with because it puts a bottleneck on any software, which means you've gotta transcode. This may sound like the normal way to work, but with cameras like the Ursa Mini 4.6k, Pro Res XQ native recording allows you to edit exactly what you shoot with a LOG color space applied. I just shot a short film with a Dragon, which is very similar to the Raven and Scarlet, neither of which I've used on a show yet. I've shot with Epic MX and Dragon on several shows in the past but now I can compare my experiences back to back with the C300MKII. I've never liked RED cine because they are an accessories driven company, specifically driven towards cinema. To make the camera work, requires a box of accessories that need to be assembled before you can run the camera. This is super annoying, especially for hand held work. You need a camera cart or a dedicated place to assemble/disassemble the rig. You need a diddy bag with you all the time to keep the tools in it for making small adjustments. The RED is designed specifically for decent sized crews, where there are cables running all over the place to different outputs and monitors for operator, AC and maybe wireless transmitter, all mounted on the body, THATS the "RED" market. It's not great for a single operator, trying to get simple shots and move on. The camera does not like to be hand held and it's very heavy for what it is. Picture wise? The newest LUT's and software fix SOOOO many of the older problems. I'm actually happy using the Dragon today picture wise. With a decent graphics card, the Red media plays back perfectly fine in real time at high res. The amount of manipulation possible with RAW RED material blows the poop out of the C300MKII. So it doesn't really matter how beautiful the Canon imager is, you can make the RED imager look even better with a few tweaks. Plus, the newer imagers are 16 bit, which means even greater dynamic range. This year working with the newer software RED's have given me a new appreciation for the camera and I really enjoy working with it more then I had in the past with older software. If I was doing ENG style shooting, if I needed a mic input and built-in HDSDI outputs for other monitors stock, if I needed a simple setup and take down, if I didn't need the best quality, just wanted something that works, I'd contemplate a F5 over a C300MKII. I personally would NEVER own a C300MKII... ever. If I was shooting cinema style products, if my camera was pretending to be a film camera with no audio and one video output, if I didn't mind the setup time and was ok with the typical idiosyncrasies RED cameras have, I'd contemplate an Ursa Mini 4.6k over a Scarlet, for dozens of reasons. One of which is the simple fact you get the best of BOTH worlds. Small hand-held package with a decent screen built-in, easy to operate, but still very much a "cinema" camera. Yet, you get 14 bit RAW, you get 12 bit Pro Res XQ, you get 120FPS @ 2k (which is good enough) and most importantly, the color science of the Canon camera, without dealing with the horrible codec. I like the RED output, I like the RED workflow, I even don't mind the menu's and touch screen interface. But they charge A LOT OF MONEY for something that's constantly evolving, where accessories for the new cameras, don't fit the old one's. Where they have proprietary and very expensive storage you MUST buy from them. Where break-out boxes to get audio and I/O are again, made only by them. So they can charge you $8k for the brain, but it costs $12k to build a working package. You can get an URSA 4.6k package out the door for $8500 bux, with batteries, shoulder kit, viewfinder and storage! No, it's not the best camera made, yes it does need an OLPF (which I hear is coming from aftermarket companies soon). But... it's by far, the best deal of the planet for cameras that shoot over 4k AND have a decent codec list for "cinema" shooting. Again, if you're going to shoot ENG, hands down, Sony F5. Used it, works great, doesn't look as good as the Canon, but with a few option boards, can shoot Pro Res and RAW, with high frame rate and SUPER AMAZING high ISO with very little noise. It's great for run and gun stuff, if you find one used, new they're a small fortune. So that's my opinion on the matter and yes, I've worked with the F5 and Ursa Mini 4.6k, both shooting and in post. I look forward to bringing you guys some footage shot by myself and both cameras very soon. :)

I agree with David 100%. One thing I will add though... it's not that easy. When this moved from Film to Digital happened, everyone panicked. Fuji had just stopped making film. Kodak was in bankruptcy court and big labs like Deluxe and Technicolor were closing up shop's around the globe. The industry handled this move HORRIBLY and nobody thought about long term, they only were thinking about short term. Now only a few short years after the big switch, we have less theaters in the country - though arguably more screens thanks to multiplexes expanding in heavily populated areas. We've also lost over 150,000 jobs around the world, from projectionists to shippers. Theaters have scrapped projectors, to the point where most theaters don't even have a SINGLE one left. The film infrastructure as a whole was completely depleted and now, people are starting to realize, holy poop, what have we done? There are a few filmmakers who believe strongly in film projection, but not enough to make an impact. Warner has committed to releasing their big hollywood movies in 70mm, maybe thanks to Christopher Nolan. The rollout has been thus far, pretty successful however, with beautiful prints of Batman v Superman and Fantastic Beasts. Had Suicide Squad not had horrible re-shoot and post issues, they would have been part of that lineup as well. The 70mm screenings of these movies locally, have seen more attendance then the standard digital or even 3D shows. This is showing the studio's, hey... people want a unique experience and they are willing to pay for it. Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, understand the necessity for making movies the old fashion way and projecting them, but unfortunately without infrastructure, there is no way it will be successful. Today we have "options", but only for the big hollywood movies, not for the little guys. This is in part thanks to the lack of talented projectionists, capable of doing a good job. Today's projectionists are technicians and most of them have zero experience working a film projector. Theaters are self sufficient and only have one full-time person in the booth at any given time, mostly loading shows and insuring shows start on time. So there is a lot more then mechanical infrastructure missing, it's also the people to run it. So where we all want options, I don't think it's truly possible at this time. It would require a huge push from the major's and a crazy good deal for the theaters to pay for experts to run the shows and maintain the projectors. It's completely doable, but it's unfortunately nobody is really grabbing the bull by the horns and making it happen. A lot of films are still scanned out to 35mm and sent to theaters, so it's all very possible.

After the first few episodes, you know all the characters, you know all the locations, you're in the show and then you just sit back and watch it unfold. Most of the other big HBO drama's are FAR greater in scope. Boardwalk Empire for instance, much bigger bringing in all sorts of characters each episode and traveling to new locations, etc. How about Game of Thrones? Same deal, HUGE scope. In fact, I can't think of a recent HBO drama with LESS scope then Westworld. It's just, Westworld seems more like an NBC drama then it does serious HBO drama and I believe that feeling comes from the lack of scope. I also feel the characters feel a bit one dimensional, they all have a singular mission and all we know about is that mission. I understand they're "hosts" and the whole point is repetition and programming, but even the humans in the story act the same way. I can tell you the dialog for most characters before they even utter it. Not saying it's poorly written, because the twists and turns are cool, the way time is dealt with is also very cool. Yet, cool doesn't make it "good"... To add scope, they could bring in more of a story to the humans, like why are they working at Westworld? With so much hostility, why would you ever want to work there? There are SOOO many possibilities and none of them are even remotely explored. The filmmakers focused to much on the single vision, the one that was wrapped up in a little bow in episode 10. I don't want to spoil the end of the show for anyone, so lets just say there are more specific things I can talk about, but won't at this juncture until people have seen it. Maybe next season will be different, but I have a feeling it will be a while before we know.

Umm, I edit and color for a living, when it comes to taking a RAW CMOS 4k imager file and matching it to DIGITAL SOURCE 525i NTSC CCD? Yea, it's not a problem. I've done it numerous times and it works pretty good, IF you shoot the same chart. This is how they made the film LUTS for digital cameras like the Alexa, which make it look indistinguishable from film. Its impossible to recreate the look of a tube camera digitally. This is why people who want that look, generally shoot with tube cameras. Again, Analog sources are harder to match. Digital sources are A LOT easier. HA! No sir, nowhere even close. First off, when you crop the RED imager, you can get full 444 RGB color space without the bayer pattern mucking up the amount of blue and red pixels. Second, the HL59 is limited to 10 bit NTSC color, the RED is 16 bit RAW. The Dragon has 16 stops of latitude. NTSC as a format is around 8 stops. CCD imagers inherently have far less latitude then CMOS. It's one of the many reasons everyone has moved away from CCD for the "cinema" market where latitude and "look" is so critical.

I don't believe NBC had a contract with Sony. I've been to rockefeller center for training and they were all Panasonic and Ikagami cameras. They were the only broadcaster I knew who used them exclusively. I have been successful in re-creating the look of old analog broadcast television through the methods I mention. It's not a guess, it's a proven tactic. Getting a beautiful HD signal from a RED cinema camera to match that of an HL59, is not hard. A quick sample of a color chart recorded directly from each camera and ONE BUTTON on DaVinci, instantly matches the colors, DONE. Again, if you want an old school look, you have to take into account the entire broadcast signal path, not just the camera. Since you can't duplicate the signal path, then all you're capturing is beautiful 525i signal that's rock steady from a camera head. That looks NOTHING like the signal broadcast, which is what the audience would normally see. These are the things you need to think about when re-creating a look. It's why some filmmakers still shoot and finish on film, it's to create the entire workflow the way the format was designed. Even if the net result is a digital scan of the finished product, the ANALOG nature of the image will still be retained.

Well, Westworld had a rocky start, so it's honestly a miracle they produced 10 episodes. Remember, the pilot is over an hour and the final episode is feature length, coming in at 1hr 32 minutes. So it's more like 12 - 13 episodes worth of content had it been on a regular network with commercial breaks. Over-all, I thought they did a good job with the series. The final episode answers a lot of questions and starts an all-new narrative that I think all of us saw coming. Even though the series is somewhat limited in scope, compared to say HBO's other top series, it actually fits their model very well. There are a few scenes that felt really rushed (writing wise) in the final episode. Some character decisions didn't seem on-par either, but over-all it worked well and it opens up a whole new can of worms.

Prior to the all-in-one form factor of the BVW300/400, ENG cameras were two separate pieces, with a dockable connector. One component was the camera, one component was the deck. This all changed in the early 90's to a far smaller form factor. A 30 year old camera is great when you're after an analog old-school television look. Sorry, they were the two odd-ball brands at the time. Looking for superior quality cameras like the HL59, you are defeating the purpose. If you want quality of any kind, go shoot it on a modern camera. It's very easy with a plugin to get the color to look like a 3 chip CCD camera, that's a piece of cake. But nobody watched that signal outside of the person in the truck during a remote live shoot with a 26 pin or triax cable plugged into a decent color monitor. The signal people watched, went through a switcher, then a transmitter which in some cases was the conversion to composite. It was then sent via microwave to a receiver which went through another switcher and then down an analog satellite dish (or even coax cable sometimes) to a broadcast transmitter. The whole kit degraded the signal substantially, to the point of it resembling the original camera only in content, not in technical quality. If you take "live" broadcasts out of the picture and focus on tape only. The same story is true. Linear editing was at a minimal, two generations before broadcast, most times three or four. Then when broadcast, the signal was degraded even more, to the point where yet again, only resembling the content not the technical aspects. It wasn't until the full adoption of SDI and a complete digital workflow that things change AND!!! Not everyone switched over right away. Only the big central hubs were digital, almost all of the local broadcasters were still analog until the last day they could be, long after the switch had been made to HD. In fact, my home-town station (Boston WCVB) was still shooting Betacam SP until 2010! Now it's true satellites went digital in the late 90's, so big productions like NBC's Thanksgiving day parade, would have been a 100% digital show coming from NBC in New York. The affiliates would be receiving that signal digitally and with a digital switcher, send the signal to the local broadcast transmitter, all digital until it hit the analog airwaves. That was a vast improvement over the complete analog world from prior to around 98' when the big switch happened. So you're accurate in thinking in the year 2000, a live broadcast from a national network hub, would have been digital. However, there are literally thousands of affiliates around the nation and very few of those, had the kind of money to upgrade their internal systems to digital. So where they were forced to use digital switchers for the satellite feeds, they were mostly analog for their own internal broadcasts. Worst off, I've done several rather large facility updates for broadcasters over the years, including building the truck HBO used for "Jim Rome is Burning" a multi-million dollar traveling road show. In 2008 I believe (don't quite remember the exact date), we used an all-digital workflow, but it was the first time that show was digital. Prior it was an all-analog show... in 2009!!!! WTF!?! So yea, my recommendations were based on getting a more "standard" run of the mill image, rather then the worst (VHS) or the best (all digital). Hit it smack in the middle, all-in-one Betacam SP, not a great camera, not a great deck, but perfect for someone trying to get the look of the era, in my opinion.

I shot with the BVW-300A for years. It was widely used by local broadcasters as a replacement for their aging much heavier dockable cameras of the past. It fit very nicely with the PVW (all analog audio) machines we used for off-line editing at the studio. We had some HL55's that nobody used because they were A LOT heavier and setup for portable shoots with the truck. I actually never worked anywhere with the HL59's, Hitachi wasn't nearly as popular here in the states as it was in other places. The HL59 was also an early digital camera and if you're going to shoot digital, why bother? The whole point is the analog look eh? In terms of the terminology... in the US we refer to drop-out as "hits". We call them "tape hits" because the slang "hit" is easier to say when you're talking to another person. Sony has done a great job making Betacam SP a workable format, but it still has more limited color space then many cameras and the distortion element as well. If you turn undersan on and switch between deck and live feed, you will see the issue I'm talking about. So my point is, if you want an old-school analog look, that's the best way to go. If you want a digital look, what's the point? You can buy a modern HD camera and scale it down in post.

I feel some of the characters are underdeveloped and there just doesn't seem to be enough of them for such a big facility. People would be more up in arms about the trickery going on behind the scenes I fret. Maybe the big reveal tonight will answer some of those questions. Over-all I'd say the series met expectations, but I wasn't expecting much. This ain't no Boardwalk Empire or The Knick, far from it actually. A lot of that comes from hurried writing and a lot of controversy surrounding the production. I look forward to giving a full impression once the season is over later tonight. :)

Insert shot pertains to the action in a given scene. Cut-in pertains to showing action outside of the given scene. For instance, an insert could be part of the main coverage of a given scene, close-up's, medium's, etc. Cut-in would be shot of something the actor is talking about. It could be a moment of flashback or flash forward. It's used to cut-in something that you want to show the audience, that doesn't pertain to the current action on screen.

Like people trying to make digital look like film, the process to do that is far more painstaking in post and nowhere near as variable, then it is to shoot it in the proper format to begin with. Remember video tape and analog broadcast signals are constantly fluctuating, they are never rock solid. If you want that look, especially with the low-cost associated with these older pieces of equipment, it's far easier to just buy and shoot with them, then modify a clean all-digital signal. You'd be surprised how much the tape adds to the "look" of the format. Tape hits/noise and general distortion that goes along with it, is part of the format. When you capture directly off the cameras component output to a digital device, you are loosing much of that look. The only reason to shoot with old equipment is to make it look bad, not to make it look the best it can.

Ohh and the bike is an early 90's CB400. If you removed the seat, you can use the subframe as a way to attach rigging.

JD is 100% accurate with his statement. If you plan on rigging a real camera to a motorcycle, it requires expertise. This is why I simply suggested the Go Pro because it's a consumer product with extremely limited consequence if something were to go wrong. My GoPro's have fallen off my motorcycles countless times, even to the point of one's tether being severed in a crash. They just bounce and generally survive the incident in tact. A real camera won't and with improper rigging, the motorcyclists life is at stake. This is why the Go Pro mounts are made of plastic. If something happens, they simply snap off, which is a great safety feature. When a speed rail rig collapses, it generally digs into the ground, causing the motorcycle to crash.

It's out here in Hollywood starting today. I'm going to try and catch a screening at the dome on those beautiful new HDR 4k laser projectors they have.