Tyler Purcell

I reckon so

Well, its got a much bigger imager then a GoPro, so in that sense it's already one step above. I haven't seen anything shot with it, but most of these Chinese knock off cameras are crap. They don't have the proprietary software that real companies use to drive the imager. Plus, they're all using a very similar h264 encoder which is already 10 years old. It's kinda too bad, none of the cheap Chinese camera companies have really developed a decent solution. There have been a few tries, but all of them have been a failure in one way or another. Mostly due to marketing and poor professional support. At least Canon's 4:2:0 8 bit cameras were bitchin' still cameras, so the "video" portion was only a feature, rather then the cameras main function like the E1.

It's a real shame, I hope people who are local/close to these guys can start making some negotiations on camera parts.

Thanks guys. Yea I'm thinking of an old beat up MOS camera. There are a few Russian cameras on ebay which aren't too much money, worth looking into for sure. I was just wondering if someone owned something they were willing to donate or sell for not much.

The Keystone and Filmo maybe both double perf cameras, so be careful.

Does your camera have a built-in meter? Have you tried pushing on the ground glass metal holder with your finger to see if it's loose? Can you take a picture through the viewfinder and show us what it looks like?

Metal tab eh... I'm not aware of any metal tab. The ground glass is glued and then screwed. With symptoms like yours, the first step is to pull the viewfinder off the top of the camera, which is very easy. Then look straight down to the ground glass itself and you can see if there are any issues. Here are some picts for you to look at from my camera, you can see how it's "suppose" to look.

The ground glass itself is glued into a metal holder. The holder is screwed into the frame with two screws which have locktite on them, so it would be very difficult for them to come out. Most likely the glue has failed due to age and the actual glass element itself is "floating" in the holder. If you take the lens off the camera and turn the motor by hand so the mirror is facing down and the gate is exposed. You should be able to stick a q-tip in there to tap on the glass and see if it moves. If it doesn't... then it COULD be something else. I've seen the prism at the top get un-glued as well and that would cause the same problem.

I just grabbed a Krasnogorsk-3 for $150 bux at a photography flee market. I've been wanting one for a while because I talked so much poop about them (thanks to my friends not liking them), that I really wanted to give the camera a chance. So far I'm pretty impressed with it's over-all design. Haven't shot a lick of film with it, but it's smaller and lighter then the bolex and has a pretty decent lens stock. Plus, it's a spinning mirror reflex, not a prism design, so there is less likelihood you'll get dirt between the lens and the film plane. It's one of the big problems with the Bolex, keeping that prism clean is difficult. One other thing to note, I believe the K3's are all single perf, where many of the inexpensive H16's are DOUBLE perf only. So when you search for a Bolex, you may find it harder to find a great deal on one which can use modern single perf stock. Not a huge problem if you only shoot B&W, but if you shoot color, I think it's impossible to buy NEW double perf negative anymore. The K3 is also easier to update to S16. The parts are on ebay all the time, basically an offset lens mount and gate, both user installable. Converting a Bolex to S16 is a lot more work and requires a professional. The only real good/modern small S16 camera is the A Minima, but they are a lot more money.

Says you... "acceptable" is easy. It just requires a bit of work. One of the two movies I'm currently doing post on, has "acceptable" exposure and it won't be difficult to color when I'm done cutting. The other one is a mess, absolute train wreck with a cinematographer who told me on set to "fix it in post". Mind you, a working cinematographer that has shot hundreds of commercials and many features. I was the DP on that show for 2 days AFTER the first DP left and my stuff came out great. It's not that difficult, it just requires more then 10 minutes to setup decent lighting that compensates for issues. I always pretend I'm shooting film and I could care less what the "monitor" looks like. With digital? I've never seen that, or done that. Generally with digital the first step is to apply a LUT, usually a custom one that was created on set (if it was given to you). The second step is to balance the image and the third step is to create a look. The "look" portion of the process includes all the tricky matte work which takes up all the time. I always do cleanup work like that, even on my simple shows. There is always an actors face which is a bit too dark. There is always a background which is too bright that needs to be brought down, but the actors need to stay the same. There is always some object in a shot that needs to be removed or blurred. A typical shot in any show I work on, will have upwards of 3 - 5 power windows. These are the basic things that every show does in post. Not a single digitally shot movie you've seen in the theater, has a REC709 applied as their only correction. Sure, television is a different can of worms because they don't have the schedule allotment. I've worked on several TV shows in post and most of the time, we just color in Avid Symphony, which is probably the worst color tool ever. I did a pilot not long ago where we had two weeks to cut, color and do audio mix. I had to do everything in Avid... so in that case, yes I would literally apply a blanket color and do a single balance pass and that would be the extent of it. Cinematographers rarely know the guy sitting in the editing or coloring chair. MOST shows are posted without ANY cinematographer engagement. Heck, even the TV work I've done, where the DP is still a paid member of the crew during post, they just watch it before release and if they see anything wrong, they'll comment. Most of the time they're too busy shooting to take the time and that's how it is in the indy feature world as well. All of the shows I've worked on, we've had almost no engagement outside of an online screener and maybe a few notes in an e-mail. Yes it's true on bigger shows, especially theatrical, the cinematographer has a lot of input, but it's budget depending. The colorist will generally do almost all the work up front and the cinematographer will be brought in after it already looks good. They never see what the show looks like prior to the colorist spending quite a bit of time cleaning it up first. Point being, most DP's DON'T know how much post goes into their work. People like myself, who shoot, edit and color their own work, we're absolutely a myopic part of the sector because we know exactly what we need the file to look like and how to massage the image in post. Also, I've seen camera houses program LUT's into the camera that we never see in post. Most of the time post is blind to the look they created on set, of course unless it's baked in. Once you have 'monitoring' on set, you tend to gauge your imagery from the monitors. So if the monitors are not relaying what the image actually looks like in the coloring suite, that look is worthless to you. I firmly believe DIT's and color calibrated monitors on set are the cause of the problems, not "digital" technology. Because we have these tools, it's made working with digital a lot harder because cinematographers think they can get a lot more out of the image in post because someone in the past has. I wish the set monitors were black and white and I wish there was no such thing as a DIT. The "loader" should be the person downloading the files and the cinematographer should focus on making the image look good without the support of color calibrated/accurate monitors. On bigger shows where the LUT's are custom made and handed off to post production, it's a blessing. But most of the time, those LUT's don't exist outside of the monitor and most DIT's will program dozens of LUT's into the monitors and never write down what look was used on what shot. So they become entirely worthless pieces of pre-vis, that the cinematographer somehow expects will be applied to each shot properly. This leads to unsatisfactory work in post, especially on smaller shows where they can't afford to bring in the cinematographer for a week to help with the coloring.

If you watch Seale's 2hr + speech on shooting the movie, you'd probably understand. It's on vimeo somewhere and is worth watching. Well I haven't seen anything from a digital camera of any kind that doesn't need re-working to make look "acceptable". Even the snaps on my iPhone will be tweaked before posting online or even storing on my drive. If something looks like crap in the theater, that generally means there wasn't enough money to fix it. I've worked on projects where the filmmakers just shrugged and said, that's the best they could do. I gather if someone handed them another million, they'd probably do better. Robin, how many big movies have you been a part of?

Whose hands were tied. Seale wasn't even allowed to setup lights in shots that clearly needed them. The stuff I worked with in the promo/marketing side, had the "set" color treatment done to it. So it was a "director approved" LUT. Which again, looked nothing like the final. And when I say that, I mean every shot had major work done. That movie cut together from the editing bay, looked like some sort of visual effects artists nightmare. By manipulating everything in the shot. Imagine a shot with 4 actors in it, but the director is like, yea... we only need two. They just delete the other two, re-frame the image, throw some fancy color effects on it and boom, it works a lot better. Lucas pioneered this way of working because he has no idea how to direct actors, (claims made by the actors on the star wars franchise) so he made the movies by putting actors in green screen rooms and then making a product in post. This happens much more then people realize today. If you aren't working in modern post production, you'd never know.

Hey guys, So as many of you know, I've been teaching basic filmmaking courses on 16 for the last year and it's been going great, though I will admit very slow. I just started working at LACHSA, which is the high school for arts here in East Los Angeles. It's a great opportunity for me because I will be teaching film production for the seniors. Everyone who graduates, must go through my class, which means I have to do a good job. My goal is to teach very much hands on. I want the kids to touch every inch of everything we do. It's a photochemical class only, so everything will be shot on film starting with 16 and eventually 35. We will be cutting print and even doing negative cutting, in class. Students will be exposed to every facet and eventually, my hopes are to even process B&W reversal at school, if they permit me. This way they have a better understanding of the photochemical process. Needless to say, what I want to accomplish requires more then I can achieve personally. This is why I'm here seeking not only advice, but also if anyone can help provide some cool teaching aids. What I'd love to do is show the spinning mirror shutter/pulldown assembly and how it works as a physical demonstrating model. This would require finding/buying a camera that has no value, but has easy access to the movement for educational purposes. Obviously 35mm would be the best for this since it's so big. Of course, I would like other ideas of teaching aids, stuff that maybe you've seen in the past that worked well, which is easy to access. Let me know what you think! Fun days are ahead and I can't wait to report back when we start in two weeks! :)

I think (yet again) you guys misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't saying that pre and post make a movie. I was stating that you can have poor direction and cinematography, but still make an incredible product today, thanks to digital technology. Those jobs are clearly important to have, movies don't make themselves. Yet, I can share from personal experience, productions that even I have worked on, where the movie was really made in post. The director was nothing but someone there to keep the ship on course and the cinematographer was only there to make sure the actors faces were visible... and I mean that literally. I mean think about it another way, there are plenty of directors who don't know what they're doing, yet still produce decent product. It's the same for every job, but if you do a good job in prep. If the story tells itself and you have great crew, there will be a decent image on the back end for some post production guru's to clean up and make excellent. This is a new thing by the way, because prior to the DI process, you couldn't make huge mistakes on set. You had to come back with a good negative, which means you HAD to be somewhat of a knowledgeable cinematographer and have a good crew around you. The lab could only do so much and at a certain point, you can try new things and answer print until you run out of money, but the next result always comes back to the DP. This is... (yet again)... why we consider so many pre-digital age movies to not look so good. Most DP's had to come back with a "safe" image because there wasn't much they could do after the fact. Modern DP's appear to be able to do anything they want on set, just look at Mad Max Fury Road. I've seen raw material from that movie and it looked nothing like the finished product. I could say the same thing about dozens of other big hollywood movies that look like crap coming out of the camera, but with a million or so into a top color corrector, they come to life. Which is why I say, pre-production and post-production mean MORE today, then they have in the past.

Picture cutting, audio mixing, color... it's all hypercritical today.

I kinda agree with Peter and I think you'll find, script, acting and post production, trump directing and cinematography any day. If your actors are confident in what they're doing, if your crew understands how to deliver the net result based on the variables put in front of them (excellent art direction/set design, story boards, script breakdowns, schedule), the top people on set should be able to sit in a little black room with monitors for the whole time, talking on walkie talkies, so the crew who does all the work. There are three variables; 1) Good, 2) Cheap, 3) Fast. You can't get all three... but you can for sure get two. You can get good, cheap and slow. You can get cheap and fast, but not so good. You can get good and fast, if you throw GOBS of money at it. I feel that breakdown explains the cinematography issue as well. If you've got a low-budget movie that needs to work fast thanks to it's budget restrictions, hiring a top cinematographer may be impossible and not logical. In my opinion, the extra money you spend, may not be worth it simply because whoever it is, won't have the necessary time to compensate enough in the look for it to matter. Sure you need a "competent" cinematographer, one who won't screw everything up and one that works fast. But to say you need a Roger Deakins, Emmanuel Lubezki or Ed Lachman, in order to make your movie "good"... it's down to more factors then that. An example of this is Janusz Kaminski and how fast he works on the Spielberg films. You can see it when you watch the movies. Sometimes his work is absolute top drawer, but in other scenes it's very mediocre. It's all based on the time it takes to setup lights and where a top guy can walk into a room and understand what to do, that doesn't mean a lower end guy won't know the same thing. I feel the separation is time, the really good guy is only great if they've got the top support crew around them AND lots of time to make their "vision" come to fruition. You look at some of the lighting rigs proposed by top cinematographers and it's like, holy poop that's a two day setup right there! If you're shooting 4 - 8 pages a day, umm... you've got a problem! So of course, the top guys will take your movie to the next level IF you have the time to let them make their magic. Since time is money... it's a no brainer to say, the lower budget movies, simply can't afford a top guy and that's why they don't really need one. It's a catch 22 in a lot of ways, but it DOES leave the door open for some lesser known people to do excellent very fast work. If you can work fast these days and deliver some essence of quality, you'll be booked forever. As a side note, I want to say a lot of the top guys today are having to work faster then they want and that is absolutely a reason why modern movies don't look as good as they could.

Yes, 16mm is a great way to experiment. However, you should first learn a little bit about cameras because you clearly don't understand how they tick or the costs associated. You can't just buy a $45 dollar 16mm camera on ebay and expect it to work. Most cheap cameras are just for show, as they have fogged/fungus ridden lenses and aren't sound mechanically. You really need to buy from a filmmaker who currently uses the camera, in order to find something that works. This is why I recommend cameras like the Bolex H16R EBM, all of which are a single sprocket camera that works with modern stocks. However, with glass and battery, it will run you close to a grand used. Then you need a decent light meter and of course film stock. Remember, one roll of 100ft 16mm stock for one of those smaller cameras costs $45 - $65 dollars depending on where you get it from. It will cost you around $45 to process and transfer and it only lasts around 2 and 1/2 minutes. So your little experiment will still cost you quite a bit of money. I'll put it to you a different way, if camera costs are a problem, maybe you should start by making a short film with whatever you have, to get some practice and then raise the appropriate capital to make a feature.

Digital cameras have the same problem that film cameras have. The camera bodies aren't too much money, it's the accessories that kill you. It's worse with digital because the glass makes a bigger impact due to the crispness of the format. There are no $900 decent 4k cameras. There are no $1500 decent 4k cameras. There are consumer toys... but nothing worthy of shooting a feature. Cheapest 4k digital cinema camera worthy of shooting a feature will run you close to $5k, with just a body and maybe a few cards for storage.

Well, lets first do the math on how much it would cost to shoot a feature on 35mm, if you were renting equipment. Lets say you shoot 10:1 ratio... lets say you get stock for .15/ft which can be found if you're ok with old short ends. Lets say you get a 3 perf camera to save on film stock, so you only use 60,000ft worth which is is $9k for stock alone. Process and transfer would be around $27,000. So you're looking at $36,000 for the "film" aspect at best. A 3 perf camera rental will be around $300/day + $1000 for glass and accessories. So for a complete package, including all the accessories you NEED to shoot, you're looking at almost $4k a week, as most rental houses charge a 3 day week. So your total rental for a 2 week shoot would be $8k. Now, lets say you "buy" a used camera. Nobody sells complete 35mm camera kits with batteries, follow focus, mattebox, filters, tripod, shoulder kit, monitor and of course glass. Honestly, the camera "body" and magazines are the least of your concern, it's the accessories which kill the budget. You can get a modern super 35mm camera body and magazines for between $3k and $14k. When you're done with the shoot, you could just put it back on ebay and get your money back. However, the glass will run you $4k per lens, USED! Ohh and before you say, you'll use DSLR glass on your PL mount S35mm camera, you can't. So in the long run, its far better to negotiate with a local rental house OR suck it up and spend $40k on a complete used camera package and prey when you're done with the shoot, prices haven't dropped. So... lets say you've got a buddy who can make castings for aluminum, steel and magnesium. Who has a really good 5 axis CNC machine. Who is a very good programmer and is willing to donate the time it takes to build the machine code line by line. Now, lets say they have nothing else in their life to do for a year. They're willing to put in a typical 8hr day and make a camera for you. They STILL wouldn't be able to make it. Why? Does your guy have a background in electronics? How about optics? Who is building all the optical system necessary for the viewfinder to work? How about the electronics necessary to keep the camera running at a crystal locked speed. Does the guy who runs the CNC machine, know those things? Nope, not at all. See, camera companies generally build everything in house and they have experts for each part of the camera. Yet, it still takes them years to design and manufacture a new camera. It's not like the digital world, which is just re-badged pre-existing integrated circuits, speciality companies building custom silicone like imagers and some clever code. No sir, film cameras are made almost entirely in-house, with only things like motors, belts and bulk materials. My guess is, even with drawings, it would take a team of specialists to re-create a camera. You know, like the guys over at Panavision, they could do it for a million or two. This is why there aren't any "new" high end film cameras because the cost is so great, there aren't enough people out there who could afford it. At least with USED film cameras, they are currently reasonably priced and have support. It's taken almost 100 years for 35mm movie cameras to be similar priced to consumer cameras... I mean you get get an Arri IIC on Ebay for $1500 bux and's fine for shooting a feature with. In the end, filmmaking on 35mm is expensive, no way around it. The cameras are heavier, the lenses are expensive and the accessories are too. This is why a lot of people resort to the narrow gauge formats like Super 16.

Ya know, I have a strange curiosity about WWII stories, something we don't get very many of in todays world. When I heard about Anthropoid, I was interested in not only the story, but also the filmmaking practices. Here is a young filmmaker who made the leap and shot a pretty big "hollywood" action film with Hawk Anamorphic lenses on Super 16. This really interested me because honestly, I haven't seen very many movies made this way and that along with the WWII story, had me interested. I had a few hours off today, so I figured why not see it before it left the theater. Went over to Arclight and of course, it's playing in the little theater in the back, you know the one with the blown stereo and dead pixel north of center. Sadly, the moment the movie came on, I was pissed because it had typical zipper syndrome on the graphics/text elements, which is a dead give away of a 2k delivery. Alright, I don't care... lets watch the movie. The movie... well, it's unfortunately not very engaging. In fact, in the first 20 minutes, I closed my eyes for a few seconds because the filmmakers kinda forgot how to tell an interesting story. This is a very simple story of a few secret agents originally from the area, but then turned british spies, who have infiltrated czechoslovakia in order to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Jewish extermination and at the time, running the country where they planned to build three of the concentration camps. Of course the agents were mostly doing intelligence gathering, which can be exciting on camera if done right. However, the filmmakers didn't build up the two hero's enough to make anything they did exciting. Where the movie does well is hitting the key historical points, which appear to be pretty close based on my loose understanding of what actually happened. Bringing in some brits to play czech's was... well, maybe not a great idea? I mean they needed faces, but with a movie like this, isn't it more important to get what happened right? Anyway, it was a slight disappointment in that they COULD have told a more interesting spy story, instead they added some fictitious nonsense about a love affair, which was so underwhelming, it could have been left on the cutting room floor and nobody would have noticed anything but the movie being shorter. Yes, there are some good action scenes, but as I'll talk about next, they weren't "covered" very well. The cinematography was for lack of a better word, was uninspiring. It was almost entirely hand held, with the occasional steadicam. It also appeared to have the same focal length's for most of the movie, which was kind of depressing. Every time I wanted a wide shot, it was a medium. Every time I wanted the camera to calm down and give the shaky cam thing a rest, they did more shaky cam and it's annoying. A dolly and nice cinematic camera moves would have made this particular movie look A LOT better. The use of 16mm on this movie was clearly for the addition of grain, more then anything else. They used mostly 500T and clearly underexposed several scenes, which makes it even more grainy. The daylight exteriors were 250D and again, a lot of them were underexposed. The few shots with direct daylight, looked MUCH better, but most of the film was shot in overcast skies between buildings in what appears to be Prague. The lighting was also underwhelming, clearly purposeful because it's really a dark time in history, so why should it look good? So the lighting did serve the story well. The anamorphic lenses look great, no distortion at all and very clean/crisp image when they weren't underexposing. I was very impressed with the glass. I was also not very happy with the DI treatment. I felt the coloring was fine, but the grain was very crisp and the modern cleanup methods, really make it look bad. Probably because it was underexposed in many places and they needed to push the stock in post, but that's just a guess. I felt they could have done a better job over-all, had they over-exposed slightly and made the under-expose look in post. They also added some cleanup and visual effects work that was poor and unnecessary. They could have not shown those scenes, they weren't important to the story. I think a lot of the cleanup work was due to cutting scenes out and them needed bridges between scenes and used VFX to fill in the gap. All I know is when you see fake poop on screen and everything else is tastefully done very realistically, you've gotta second guess someone involved. Over-all, I'm absolutely picking on this movie more then it deserves because it came close to being good ya know? If it was just a load of crap, I wouldn't care but the filmmakers clearly cared about the story and found great locations, made some great sets and made a very simple story work. I just think it could have been a lot more interesting and frankly, made better. Maybe as time goes on, we'll learn more about the filmmaking process and discover what actually happened. For the time being, this is just my opinion on what I saw. It was great to see a Super 16 film on the big screen though, that was a treat and worthwhile to analyze for anyone wanting to shoot S16.... Maybe even to learn what NOT to do...

A brand new projected 35mm print and a standard definition DVD share nothing in common with one another. First off, the DVD would have been made from the original camera negative, the print would not be. The DVD was also made from a 10 bit 4:2:2 HD telecine, not a high resolution, high bit depth scan like we have today. The DVD and Bluray release, are 8 bit 4:2:0 color space, which isn't in the same ballpark as the film print. Plus... the digital versions require massive cleanup because the MPEG encoding system, can't deal with grain, it freaks it out. So it's heavily de-grained, making it even softer then it already is. So trying to compare a brand new film print and a DVD from two decades ago, is kinda impossible.

I still think the camera doesn't shoot 50 progressive frames per second. I think it shoots 60i and extrapolates different formats based on how the file is flagged. That's how a lot of MPEG cameras work. You have to figure out how to un-flag the file. Unfortunately, most of the basic software only identifies thinks like frame rates based on the flags. If you want to post a file on dropbox, I will gladly fix it for you. :)

I think you answered your own question earlier. 50i isn't a frame rate, it's just 25 with two fields per frame. So when you set playback to 25fps, you're basically playing it normally. To get slow-mo out of a field based capture system, you need to apply the "slow-mo" filter on your editing program and it will deliver you a much nicer/cleaner slow-mo then if you shot at 25fps.

The bit depth pertains to how many colors are being represented on screen. Strong red and blue are more subjective to color compression like 4:2:0 vs 4:2:2. The C300 is an 8 bit 4:2:2 recorder, so the resolution of the red and blue channels is half of the green channel. This is most noticeable on the edge between the red jacket and background, which has small jagged edges on it. However, in terms of the redness of the jacket, higher bit depth would make the red not as flat. Uncompressed RGB would help separate the red from the background. This is why "raw" and 12 - 16 bit 444 formats, have become the "industry standard" when it comes to digital capture.

Have you tried sending a camera to them? I was told by the guys at Abel, they are the only company with reliable Aaton parts in the US.