Tyler Purcell

Why do you constantly berate me? If you have a problem with what I say, then make a better suggestion, don't just throw my comments under the bus for your own satisfaction. Frankly, I don't have the time to go on a treasure hunt for 20 year old slides of me building a plexiglass housing for my DV camcorder. Nor do I have the time to transfer hi-8 tapes to my tower of my first housing. Needless to say, I shouldn't have to constantly prove myself. If you have a problem, go find something else to do.

Hey man, I made two half-hour documentaries on scuba diving before I graduated from college. Since then I've worked on dozens of commercial underwater shoots and am a certified NAUI instructor. I helped form a new dive shop here in CA and I'm always out diving. Underwater cinematography is one of my things man. Little promo I made two years ago about my love of diving

Ohh and BTW, if you're just dipping the camera into a river, just make it out of plexiglass.

Again, I wouldn't bother. I've messed around with UW housings for nearly two decades... even good one's are a pain and leak. Just figuring out how to control it is a nightmare. Sure, hitting the record button and putting the camera into a box with a piece of transparent material stuck to the front is easy. Making it functional enough so you can see your shot and make adjustments, that's nearly impossible unless you plan on ruining your camera. I actually shot an entire training video in a pool, with my Pocket camera in my drysuit inflated to give me positive buoyancy with NO housing. When you're 20 feet away from the edge of the pool, with a shoulder kit and a camera that if it gets water on it, dies... yea it's pretty gnarly. Both of my pocket cameras have been soaked thanks to my underwater escapades, one of them REALLY bad, like I set it on the side of the pool to get out and someone knocked the camera over on it's side into a puddle of water. EEK!!!! So far camera still works! Lil tanks those cameras are.

Yep, bleak and boring. But as a cinematographer, we see past those things. :)

Ya don't need much if it's just going to be splashing in water. I personally would just shoot with a GoPro not only for the safety of the camera, but also if something were to go wrong, IE camera gets pulled out of hands, then it's just a GoPro that you lost and not something more expensive. I shoot all my UW stuff with a GoPro. All the years of using heavier UW rigs and I'm over it.

Yep, that's the best you can do. I haven't gone that far yet with my personal system because frankly, I rarely do 4k stuff. I'm still running a 2.8, 8 core, 3,1 with a GTX680 4GB Classified card and Red Rocket. I'm an IT specialist though, so I've setup many post houses around Los Angeles. Most of the time I use 5,1's in pretty much the same configuration you posted. That config will do everything up to RED 5k in real-time decoding. I find it struggles to de-bayer RED files on the fly when playing back in color mode. This is where the Rocket-X comes into play. The problem is... the older rocket card I have, only works with the older imagers. So it's fine with my school's Epic, but it's not fine with the dragon and up. That's where the Rocket-X comes into play and unfortunately as you know, putting a Rocket X and a Titan-X into the same tower = no more PCI slots... EEK! So yea... :shrug: I just shoot with the Epic for now. :(

Thanks! I got a box of 20 rolls of Kodak Plus-X and Tri-X 16mm reversal stock when I was a kid at a yard sale. I only had a super 8 camera at the time, so I waited until I started taking college classes and had access to 16mm cameras, before burning through that stock. I would have vastly preferred to shoot everything on color, but when the film gods give you B&W for free, you shoot it. I made two, half-hour movies with my box of stock. A comedy called "The ID Project Revisited" in 1998 and "The Perfect Moment" in 2001. The Perfect Moment was suppose to be a 1 week shoot. We had everything ready to roll, but our lead actor bailed on us the 2nd day of production and I got the flu. So we basically shot a few thousand feet that was worthless. We re-started the production that summer with a new actor and then did another shoot that winter to add a few scenes we thought were necessary. During the re-shoots, my box of stock dwindled and all of a sudden, all of the "premium" Tri-X stock was gone. It was the newest and best looking stock I had. Scrambling to figure out a solution, someone at school offered me a box of 5 400t rolls of 500T color stock for $190 bux! I snatched it up and slowly started shooting scenes with the color stock. I shot the winter re-shoots entirely on color, so quite a bit of the movie you see is actually color stock. Originally I had made the entire thing B&W in post. My thesis film delivery was 100% B&W. However, a new telecine that I did post school, allowed me to re-think the edit. So I actually re-cut the entire movie and in doing so, made that color sequence at the head of the movie out of nothing. It had no audio, it was something we shot "just in case" and it was never included in the original cut. I pulled it out of mothballs, resurrected it from the grave and decided to leave it color. I then book-ended the movie with color as well. The point being, the life of that character before and after he meets the girl is "colorful" but her story is B&W. There are moments of color sprinkled throughout the movie, designed specifically to show the melding between their two stories. In the long run, it was all about money. It cost me $900 to make "The ID Project Revisited" and $1600 to make "The Perfect Moment". That includes stock, processing and transfer. I also made another movie called "Elvis and Me" during the same timeframe 100% on color, that cost around $2k all-in, but was edited on film. So 3, 30 minute movies for around $5k? Not bad... I wish things were that cheap today!

Micheal Bay films are full of poop in the background they simply didn't have time to fix. It's just the nature of the game these days.

Truth be told, DaVinci cache is a bunch of very small files. So it's not really a file system hog and no other editing/coloring program has anything more sophisticated. I colored huge 4k projects with DaVinci last year without any special configuration. I have a 500gb 10,000 RPM boot drive and an 12TB internal raid with the media. I set my cache location to my media drive and that's it, done. As you know, the internal raid zero volume system on the mac pro towers, works really well and it's super fast. So there isn't anything you NEED to do. Even with 3 drives, I'm up at around 350MBps. What kills DaVinci is video memory, GPU speed, system memory and system boot drive speed due to VM. I would throw every penny I had at a Titan-X 12GB video card, way before I even think about changing your current storage. If you have a Titan-X 12GB already, then upgrade the system memory and processors to the latest revision, that makes a pretty big difference as well.

Ya know, after watching the original clip, I think it's just a scrim setup between the actor and the background. You will notice, the background light and pattern are fixed to one another as the camera moves. This would be impossible to achieve with a filter in front of the glass as the pattern would be fixed to a certain part of the frame. Just an idea!

Hey Hunter, I've never heard of the Viper before. Can you send me some info and picts? tye1138@mac.com thanks!

Ya know, time is money and if it's going to take hours or maybe days to fix a problem that nobody will notice, I will generally move past it. In my world, if the problem takes an hour or less to fix and you have plenty of time, then fix it. If it takes more then an hour and you don't have the time, if nobody is going to see it, then don't fix it.

Interesting, makes complete sense as well. I didn't know that was missing on your camera. All of those guide components are necessary for the camera to function properly.

Just saying even at a crazy ratio like 50:1, the cost of film isn't so great on a big multi-million dollar movie. These guys on Lost City of Z claimed film cost them 750k, which is unbelievable. At a 10:1 ratio, you can shoot an entire movie with panavision 5 perf 65mm cameras for 1.5M! So when someone says 750K for 35mm, I have to guess the ratio was super high. I just budgeted a 110 minute feature on 3 perf S35mm @ 10:1 and the "film" aspect is costing around $80k.

There is also no reason to shoot a 200:1 ratio... If you're careful with your shooting ratio, the cost difference between film and digital is nothing on a multi-million dollar production. I've done all the math and made a spreadsheet with variable shooting ratio and photochemical vs digital options. It's pretty interesting when you start putting in numbers, what you get out is not very expensive, if you keep that ratio low. I think most movies can shoot 50:1 and be totally fine.

Ya know, when people complain about shooting on film in remote places and choose to shoot digital, stories like this must be brought up. How your movie looks is more important in the long run then cheeping out. They had similar problems on Revenant which prompted them dumping 65mm photography and going all digital. I hope that film print makes the rounds!

Techniscope is a non-anamorphic 2 perf format. Taking a 1.67:1 S16 image and using anamorphic lenses in some way on 35mm seems counter intuitive. The 1.67:1 S16 image will print nicely with bars at the top and bottom, onto academy framed 4 perf 35mm using an optical printer OR what I suggested, digitization and then laser out.

It just looks better and better. He's such a great cinematographer, that trailer is almost like a demo reel it's so pretty. It says online there are going to be prints made... I hope one of them works its way around los angeles.

When you say "some rolls" I assume it's only for a test. As pointed out above, you will do a blow up to 4 perf 35mm and it's expensive, very very very expensive. It's far less money to scan your Super 16 negative at 4k and do a laser out to film after color correction. It will be a crisper image and retain much of the super 16 detail that goes missing with the optical blow up process. Plus you have a lot more control in the DI suite to cleanup the S16 image.

Honest and interesting, thanks for the clarification.

Greg, did you see it on the big screen or at home? I saw it in laser projected 4k and it didn't have any of the issues you're describing.

You mean it looked pretty... looks like a video game to me. :(

The URSA 4.6k is FAR easier to use then the Canon C100, which is a garbled mess. You may find yourself re-thinking your entire strategy on how you use the camera due to it's ease of use. Having shot with the C100 and C300MKII, I can attest to how horrible the menu's and controls are. The URSA's exposure tools are also MUCH BETTER and easier to use then the C100. There really isn't any comparison between the two cameras either. The C100 is an 8 bit 4:2:0 MPEG 2 camera, the URSA Mini 4.6k is a 14 bit RAW camera that can also shoot 12 bit 4:4:4 Pro Res XQ as well. The big problem with the URSA's in general is their lack of an Optical Low Pass filter. This is a HUGE PROBLEM, but there are solutions. Running any filtration in front of the lens helps considerably. Softer cinema glass will also help with the issue. Google search moire issues and you'll see what I'm talking about. Truthfully, I'm a pretty big fan of the URSA 4.6k, the only reason I don't own one is the OLPF issue, but I've been playing with it for a while now and I think it's a great camera. It captures colors the way I like to grade in the coloring bay. Mind you, the C100 does as well, I think the C100 has a good looking imager. It's just matched to a poor processor, which even prohibits capturing a decent signal externally. With the full kit (viewfinder, shoulder kit, V mount batteries) it makes a powerful weapon. It's biggest issues are the lack of direct menu controls without opening up the display. I'd also say it's a bit on the heavy side, which kinda sucks if you're shooting shoulder all day long. It also has a few configuration issues, timecode input rarely works, the XLR's on top is bogus, the power button being behind the display sucks as well. But meh... I'd rather have good menu's and a great looking image anyway.

The video from CES has the camera running, it sounded like a normal super 8 camera. Nothing crazy loud, but not sync-sound quiet.