Tyler Purcell

There should be some sort of slippage, but I would imagine it being within the assembly, like most cameras. Riddle me this, when you cleaned the disks, during re-assembly, did you accidentally squish the assembly too much? It does require some sort of gap. Also, shouldn't there be some sort of "slip" material in those disks that MAYBE wore away?

Isn't there a brake system on that supply assembly?

Well, the EOS M is a different style of camera, it's a mirrorless design. So I assume it uses entirely different electronics, but I just don't know.

The newest DSLR's I don't think have that problem anymore. The older one's are limited to 7 - 9 minutes depending on your luck of the day.

I have a film educational foundation here in Los Angeles called Celluloid Dreaming inc. We offer small one on one classes to teach filmmaking on motion picture film AND most importantly, offer these classes for minimal money. Just the cost of film and processing. You can come learn the basics, understand how to use a light meter. Understand F stop's, shutter speed and film sensitivity. We also teach the fundamentals of shooting on 16mm, so by the end of the course, you will have something to take home with you on 16. If you had the time to drive down, I can take time off and we can do the course together. It's a lot of fun and it won't cost you much. I can even let you borrow a camera for your shoot, as I have several. If you're too busy, I suggest buying a 35mm still camera and learning how to expose film properly. There are a few very good still photography books online that will teach you the process for free. Translating that into working on 16mm is very easy, as long as you know the basics, you're in good shape. So the first step is to probably buy a light meter and old school manual 35mm still camera. Then figure out if shooting on 16mm is something you CAN do. In terms of cost, I do budgets weekly for short films. Typically, you'll be shooting a ratio of 5:1 on a short film. This means, for every 5 minutes of camera negative running through the camera, you will get 1 minute of cut material in the final. This is the lowest ratio I'd even contemplate and most of my budgets are 10:1 as a minimal, but for your case, I think you'd be ok with 5:1. On a 10 page script, you will probably be making a 10 minute movie total. So the math looks like this: 5*10 = 50, so that's how many minutes of film you'll shoot total. 50 divided by 11, is going to give you how many rolls of film you will shoot, if you were using 400 foot loads, so that's 4.5. Now take that 4.5 and * by 400 and that gives you total feet = 1818. So the nice round number is 1800 feet of film total. Film stock is .32/foot * 1800 = $576 Film processing is .12/foot * 1800 = $215 So you're entire budget for shooting and processing is $792, which when you include shipping, will be around $900. Now you've gotta get that filmed material onto a video format of some kind to edit. The best way to do this is through a film scan. This is a pin registered system that takes a picture with a camera and stores that picture as a raw file, like a digital still camera. The result is a folder fill of still images, which can then be transcoded into whatever format you want. Of course, the cost to do scanning varies on many things, but the only thing you should be concerned about is getting something that looks good and CAN be manipulated in post so if you make a mistake shooting, it's not very costly. Film scanning is .40/foot * 1800 = $720 for a 2.5k Scan, which is the lowest cost per resolution you can do on 16mm. So you're looking at $1500 + shipping + drives, I'd say around $1850 when it's all said and done. When you're ready to shoot, contact my friends over at Cinelab in Boston to help cut you a deal on the processing and transfer package. He may not be able to do better then my pricing as it's already rock bottom, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Jeff also said that Kodak sometimes helps people with stock pricing, but I wouldn't budget for that help. Two things that will help save a bit of money is to do a lower-quality video transfer called a telecine AND to use what's referred to as "short-ends" which are available through a few retailers in the US, one of which is "Reel Good Film", they sell lower-cost stock. Combining shooting on short ends AND telecine transfer, you could shave $200 bux off that price if you're lucky. In terms of a camera, that depends on if you need/want the actors to have dialog in the film. That's a whole other subject honestly because sync sound cameras and audio gear can be prohibitively expensive for a "$1000" budget project.

Well that complicates things tremendously. Everyone has moved away from Linux in post production because of the lack of driver support for modern codec's, graphics cards and volume formats. So even if you had a super fast computer, it wouldn't matter because the driver's aren't written to work with the hardware in the same way mac OS or Windows does it. I know there are some great GUI's available for Linux, none of them have the support necessary for speed with a standard post production workflow.

Making Super 16 look good is actually pretty easy, you just have to light properly and scan the original negative with a decent scanner at a reasonable resolution. I use tricks like blasting 12k lights into windows and bouncing light around a location with mirrors, to help light faster and get more over-all brightness in a given shot. The trick is to make the lighting as flat as you can, then in post production, you can make it all work. The best stuff shot on film and finished digitally is done this way, it's how you keep the film noise to a minimal because the dark sections are actually only a stop or two below the highlights. A lot of people even over-expose the highlights by a stop to help push it even further. Since film has MUCH more latitude then most digital cameras, you can get away with that kind of manipulation and it also helps reduce noise. Another trick I've tried to use, though I will admit unsuccessfully sometimes, is to run the lowest ASA/finest grain stock you can for a given scene. Don't buy a bunch of 500T and expect it to look good. Try to shoot with 50D on ALL exteriors, try to shoot with 250T on all interiors. If you need that one or two shots with 500, then you've got it, but don't use it as a go-to stock for everything. This in my view is the BIGGEST mistake filmmakers make when shooting on motion picture film. They simply shoot everything interior on 500T and the grain gets annoying very fast. For those quick cutaway's, it works fine, but if all you see is grain central, it's a problem. Carol has a very grainy scene in the house which is 500T pushed I believe and it's very noisy on the big screen. I really like the DP Ed Lachman, but I personally think his choice to go that noisy on such a soft and quiet scene, wasn't very good. It was only one scene though and they may have run out of time for lighting and had to move on, which happens. Unfortunately, it's easier to make 35mm look like 16mm then it is for 16 to look like 35. The biggest things you can do outside of the major one's Jeff listed above, is to make the composition and shooting style very cinematic. Cranes, dollies, jib's, steadicam, move away from the shoulder mount and onto the hard mount.

It doesn't matter, film is film.

Yep I bet when you run it, the problem goes away.

You can get a pretty good computer for 1500 bux, but if you're really going to edit, I highly suggest buying a Mac Pro tower and getting that native prores support, 64bit native processing and double processors, designed for multithreaded task loads. I was recently involved in a geekbench test of a modern pc workstation vs 2010 Mac Pro doing the same 64bit multithreaded tasks and the difference was night and day, the Mac Pro was way faster.

I'm confused about something... If someone lets you use a piece of equipment and you don't bring back parts of that equipment, you should replace what's missing. Usually this is done through insurance but if I lost something you bet your ass Id try to find a suitable replacement. That's the only way to keep things right between you and the supplier. A lens cap isn't a big deal though and I wouldn't have thought twice about telling them my mistake and supplying a replacement. People today don't take responsibility for their mistakes and it pisses me off.

Have you tried running the camera? It uses a mirrored shutter so if the shutter hasn't stopped square in the center it will have a dark screen.

Yep, I agree Shawn, especially if there is already a camera in play. I mean I'd love to upgrade myself as well, but can't afford it, so I'm not going to do anything at this juncture in time and keep shooting with what I've already got.

Well yea, that's the big problem. So it really doesn't matter what mic you use, as long as it can pickup what you're trying to get. Internal mic's really suck at that.

Yea, this is the problem with inexpensive computers and it's one of the reasons I don't own PC's. I'd much rather spend the money up front and have something that will last me 5 years, then keep spending money upgrading/updating something that even at the beginning was old technology. I mean look at me... my 17" Macbook pro is from 2009 and my Mac Pro Tower is from 2008 and both work great, I can edit RED 4k full raster natively on the Mac Pro and can even playback Pro Res 4k on my laptop flawlessly. This year I plan on "upgrading" to a 2013 laptop and 2010 desktop (with newer processors), both minor price increases, but huge performance gains. That's the great thing about owning a mac, you'll always get money for your old one, which helps fund the new one. You can get a 2012-2013 NON-RETINA 15", 2.6ghz i7 quad core processor and 16gb memory Macbook Pro for between 600 - 700 used. That machine will last for another 5 years no problem. Parts are becoming cheaper to buy, so even if you damage it, the cost to replace them isn't bad. Heck, even apple only charges $315 to fix ANY problem with a laptop. So even if you were in a bind and the machine totally died, they'd fix anything and everything for $315, not bad. Plus, that's the most current machine you can run DOUBLE internal drives with. There is a kit which removes the optical drive and puts a 2.5" drive in it's place. It's friggin' awesome because you can run one drive for your media and one drive for your boot. This means you're truly portable. Plus if I hadn't said this before, this machine has all the ports, USB3, Thunderbolt, Firewire 800, 10GB ethernet, 1/8" stereo I/O ports AND SD card reader. They even made a 1920x1080 resolution version, specifically for editing people, so pixel per pixel is identical to HD. My 17" laptop is the same way, which is really cool for editing and displaying content to clients. Personally, I don't like laptops for editing. I think they're a waste of money because they will never be optimal. It's way cheaper (over the long term) to invest in a desktop anyway because they will last ALOT longer then a laptop will. The final generation 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 towers are very easily upgradable to the more recent Xenon processors, new/modern graphics cards and ultra fast I/O boards. You can buy a 2.66ghz, 12 core, 32gb memory version on ebay for $1200 any day of the week. It will work flawlessly from day one and as time goes on, you can spend money upgrading it. The great thing is, the stock parts have value, so you can always sell them to help recoup the upgrades. So things like a decent graphics card, faster processors and more storage, aren't going to be overly expensive, especially if you buy them used. I buy all of my parts used on ebay or from local retailers and they work great. The "ultimate" upgrade package; Intel X5690 double 6 core 3.45ghz processors, GTX980 6GB or Titan 12GB graphics card, 4x4TB 7200 RPM desktop storage (internal raid), 500gb SSD boot drive and USB ULTRA card... probably run around $1500 if you do all the work yourself and sell the stock components on ebay. I know both of those things are probably WAY over your budget AND over-kill for the kind of work you do. However, if you really want to be future proof, you have to make a pretty heavy investment. We've talked about the Rode mic before and mine is very acceptable. It all comes down to the preamp quality on the camera at that point. So unless you've heard the mic raw through an excellent preamp, it's hard to tell how good it is. I've done that test as I have good preamp's, so I know the mic is good.

Yea, BUT that's been happening since the very first optical printer. It's just, people don't pay attention to older movies and see the punch-in's. Studio's use to control all of that stuff, even leaving directors on the sidelines. Personally, if I'm a hired cinematographer, I'd absolutely fight for the framing, but it wouldn't be much of a fight. Most of those changes are made in the coloring suite, so the DP SHOULD be present for them and plead his case.

Whoops, yea sorry I see my error on decoding your response. The Metabones speed booster is like $500 alone. Heck, only reason I don't own one is because they're expensive! I'd otherwise have one in a heartbeat. The cheap Chinese alternatives aren't nearly as good, I don't quite understand why. I've tested them and wasn't so satisfied for $200 bux. Coming from experience with spending no money, I think you're going to struggle with spending a grand. You won't be satisfied with anything and in the end, it won't be any better then what you currently have. I also don't understand why you can't save more money to buy something better? To Macks comment about the built in audio, you'd be shocked how bad it is on most DSLR's. The 5DMKII and 7D I've worked with quite a bit, the fan noise was so loud, I couldn't use pluraleye's to sync the audio in post. The pocket actually has lousy built in mic's, they're really atrocious.

If you took a 12 inch chunk out of an LTO tape, it would be missing data on every track, thus it wouldn't be missing data from ONE file, but several different files. This is part of the reason I don't like LTO. Not saying that could ever happen, but the tapes are SUPER thin and it's still a mechanical system prone to magnetic field interference and mechanical failure. With 35mm film, if you took 12 inches out, you'd still have a movie! Maybe a funny little cut, something you see a lot in classic movies where the camera negative has been lost or destroyed.

Auto correction is in your computer, not the BB. :)

It doesn't really matter since it's 720p, all the cameras can handle it. I messed around with magic lantern on the 5DMKII and wasn't very satisfied. Well, a $75 tripod and $60 lens, aren't going to be any good. So you're clearly not looking for quality. Why do you care if the camera records RAW or any higher bit rate, if the glass making your image is substandard? I mean, what's the point?

ALL of the DSLR's are Long GOP MPEG 8 bit 4:2:0, generally varying from 35 - 50Mbps depending on software and age. Nobody has bothered making an intraframe codec based DSLR yet. If you're OK with a 1080p camera, the Blackmagic Pocket is 10 bit 4:2:2 220Mbps Pro Res or 12 bit 444 Cinema DNG for around $800 used. So basically two of the best codec's in a camera that's smaller, lighter and more cinematic then the Pentax.

They already make RGB separation prints for big movies, scanned out from digital to 35mm. That's the only REAL archive. Honestly, I developed a machine years ago that stores one's and zero's onto film. The problem is, film fluctuates too much for digital information. So you couldn't fit ENOUGH to make it worth while. Theoretically, Kodak COULD produce an ultra-fine grain B&W stock that could be used for that purpose, but it kinda negates the whole point I'm making about being analog beings in a digital world. Currently, we live in a world where everything we do needs "translation" of some kind. Which to me, is a real red flag and when the sky comes crumbling upon us, whoever inhabits this planet 500 years from now, will probably be looking at photochemical images wondering this current generation couldn't stick with the same long-term preservation format. The sad truth is, it's not about money... it's about power. We are OWNED by our "machines" and technology. It's an interesting subject for sure and if you study, you will learn that our culture is on the precipice of self destruction. So as someone who cares deeply for history, it's time NOW to figure out how to make things more technology/future proof then they currently are. Server farms and data centers, don't mean anything if there is no way to access them.

One more little side note... digital storage will always be a failure without a culture surrounded by the technology. If something happened to our culture as we know it today, if the paradigm shifted somehow, the likelihood of loosing digital material is far higher then something that can be physically seen by the human eye or physical heard through a needle/stylus. My comments aren't a film vs digital thing, in my eyes they are just common sense concerns. Does anyone honestly care about some stupid studio movie lasting 300 years? No... I sure don't. But what I DO care about is people understanding that digital technology hasn't been around for a long time and neither has this modern world we live in today. We are reaching a precipice, as no other civilization has survived to the level we have. It only takes a small incident to start unraveling everything and our history, what we are as a culture, will be the first things destroyed. People may not care about this, but these are the kinds of discussions archivists have on a regular basis and it's important to understand. New "technology" doesn't solve the problem, it only complicates things even more.

There is one small misunderstanding here. I don't think anyone is referring to ONLY the final output. The problem ISN'T storing the 2 hour movie, that's a piece of cake. The problem is storing all the camera original data, which can be hundreds of terabytes per project. This is because, most productions are not finishing in 4k, even if they're shooting in 6k. It's FAR cheaper to finish in 2k or even 1080p. So the only way to really future-proof your digital product, is to store every single frame of camera original and prey in the future, there will be someone who can re-compile everything and bring the resolution up to the spec it was shot at. None of this is a problem in the film workflow, but it's a HUGE problem for a digital workflow, even if it was shot on film and finished digitally. I work for some reasonably sized post houses and most of them are freaking out about this whole 4k nonsense. It takes longer to do everything, it costs more money to do everything and the infrastructure necessary has put some companies out of business. The one's who survived, are charging more money because they put so much into their infrastructure. Using higher compressed consumer based media formats like MPEG, are not solutions either. They are simply a waste of time for any professional shop as it's not up to the standards most clients want today. Most companies in the industry with finish in Pro Res XQ or some sort of tiff/jpeg based format, with an average file size of 25-40MB per FRAME (600MBps-960MBps) CD's were a great medium, but not all disks were created equal. If they are stored perfectly, never touching anything, they should last 50 years or more. However, that's because the data is physically large on the disk, so the likelihood of error is much lower then DVD's for instance and burned BluRay's have to be treated very carefully. So there are digital formats out their which are pretty good, but nothing that is guaranteed to last over 50 years. Honestly, modern computing hasn't been around long enough to test these theories yet. Spinning disks are an atrocious storage medium, they're very expensive per GB compared to LTO and their life span is around 5 - 7 years. Sure, we all have stories about 20 year old hard drives still running today, but most drives will fail. Either you keep them spinning to prevent bearing failure, which causes board failure or you keep them in a safe place not-spinning and the motor/bearing system fails. I've done A LOT of data recovery, there are petabytes of information being lost every year thanks to consumer storage systems that suck and people loosing/dropping/damaging their consumer devices. SSD's are also an atrocious storage medium. They use multiple flash style storage IC's to create a small RAID ZERO internally, that's how they get the speed up. The problem is, if any one of those IC's goes bad, you loose everything. Also, if they aren't used on a regular basis, they can "forget" the directory block data. I'm very good friends with a designer of SSD's who works for Seagate and he's told me how hard they're working to fix some of those issues, but at this point, SSD's are really only good as constant use volumes. When SSD price per GB are in line with tape backup solutions, which may happen, we COULD see people building small SSD raid 5's and trying to make them work. Right now, they're not considered an option. The great thing about a 35mm camera negative is how robust it is. You can submerge it in salt water and the image will still be fine. If stored in metal can's, you can subject it to quite a bit of heat, moisture (humidity) and beat the living snot out of the container physically and you've still got an image. Plus, film is permanent, it can't be erased, you can't misplace it (big/heavy reels are hard to loose) and most importantly, it's fixed-pixel resolution agnostic. So you can always get more from it, especially large format's like 8/35, 5/70 and 15/70, something impossible to do with today's digital medium's. Stick an original camera negative in metal boxes for 100 years and when the world has changed, you can always find some sunlight to shine through a frame and look at the past. People who think about preserving history, understand this... people who are just looking to make money, don't. This is what separates the archivists, from the people looking for easy/cheap solutions to storing their movies.

Some of you may not know this, but most movie-specific content distributors require 4k source material today. Also, a lot of the UHD BluRay's aren't mastered in 4k. They're a lower resolution master, upres'd to UHD. So the whole UHD BluRay thing is a total scam in my opinion. In terms of LTO as the industry standard for backup, it works great if you make two copies, stored in entirely different facilities, in completely different libraries and duplicate each tape at least once every 2 years. LTO tapes aren't expensive either but the formats are always changing. So the cost to keep migrating libraries from LTO 6, to LTO 7 to eventually LTO 12, is crazy. Libraries large enough to handle a catalog worth discussing, have a hefty foot print and are expensive to keep running. Unlike film which happily sits on a shelf, digital needs electricity and technological support to keep it working. Worst part is, if an LTO tape does fail, you can't splice it back together and magically get all the data like with film. One's and zero's don't work that way, though I will admit, data recovery from LTO is MUCH better then spinning disks. The great thing about film is that you could take the IP and store it at one facility, take the IN, store it in another and take your original negative and put it somewhere else. None of that costs you any extra money since those three items are already struck during the photochemical finishing process. All you have to do is be smart on whose basement you store them in! Just kidding! :) Still I agree with David, most people still buy standard DVD's and are OK with them. As I've said in MANY threads, everyone was forced to buy HD TV's and until those TV's fail, the vast majority of people aren't going to be upgrading to UHD. There are cinema geeks (myself included) who will eventually migrate to UHD content and display, but outside of the people who always need new tech, the UHD market is very small. 1080p BluRay's look amazing for most people (if done right) and it's far less costly then UHD today. Now we all know that will change and there is already a provision in place for 8k BluRay, which is very interesting. I think all the "tech" will exist, I just don't think it will mean anything substance wise. There are less than 100 feature film titles on UHD today, compare that to the beginning of BluRay and DVD, it's an atrocious number. It just proves how "soft" of a launch UHD really has been, mostly because the content just doesn't exist. The big question in my mind has more to do with internet distribution and getting 4k to look good streamed into houses. That's the big breakthrough technology which hasn't happened yet because currently Netflix UHD content looks like poop, they had to lower the bitrate too much and it ruins the image quality. Satellite and cable providers are screwed as well, they have so many active channels, it would be nearly impossible for them to make UHD look good, even if they could get it to work at all. They'd have to upgrade everyone's decoder box for free? Yea, that ain't gonna happen anytime soon. So call me a skeptic, but I just don't see any of this happening anytime soon. All I know is that every time I work on a big show shot in 4k, I ask myself, how are these guys backing up their movie. They've got two sets of spinning disks and that's it. I'm like, guys you've gotta pay someone to put this on tape. They're like; tape, I thought that was long gone. I'm like yea, well... it never left the IT world. People just don't know any better and they can't afford to do the proper procedures either because labs charge a lot of money. In fact I've done the math and to this day, if you account for high-end 4k camera rental/storage cost through keeping your product alive for 100 years, shooting on film is still cheaper then digital and fixed-resolution agnostic.