Tyler Purcell

I don't have anything really good online, I'm mostly a for-hire filmmaker. So I can't post anything and a lot of times, I never get a copy of my work, which sucks. Almost all of my decent film stuff was lost due to the company who financed it, filing bankruptcy and somehow mysteriously loosing all the masters. It's an unfortunate side effect of the industry we live in. But if you're bored, you can check out my company page: http://tpproductionfilms.com

Because 2x anamorphic was made for the format from the ground up. It's 2.35:1 I believe. Nope, it squeezes the information onto the frame. You need to google search "anamorphic lenses" there are great reads.

35mm and digital S35 imager cameras are 4x3 or 1.33:1 aspect ratio. So with a 2x squeeze, the imager captures twice the width. With a 1.33:1 aspect ratio frame size, you're talking about 2.39:1 aspect ratio. With 16mm and HD digital cameras which are 16:9 or 1.75:1 aspect ratio (Super 16 is 1.67:1), 2x lenses would create a MUCH WIDER image then 2.39:1, so that would mean much more cropping on the sides. To remedy this issue, 1.3x anamorphic lenses were developed. These lenses work perfectly on that size imager, to deliver an almost perfect 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Your budget would also include production right? 2 perf 35mm and S16mm are more then HALF the price then 4 perf anamorphic just for production. In post, you have less film to deal with, less money involved as well, so it's cheaper both in production and post. I've done MANY S16 spherical budgets with a 10:1 ratio, they all come out the same, around $40k for everything from stock, processing and transfer. 2 perf 35mm is $50k. 3 perf 35mm is 70k. 4 perf is 90k. Then anything you shoot anamorphic, it's more money due to the lens expense. Spherical is A LOT cheaper!

For 2.39:1 widescreen: There is no waste/loss when shooting 4 perf anamorphic. There is is only a tiny bit of waste/loss shooting 3 perf 1.3x anamorphic. (2.66:1 - 2.39:1 crop) There is no waste/loss when shooting spherical 2 perf. There is no waste/loss when shooting S16 1.3x anamorphic. The only loss would be "CROPPING" any given format.

That's right and the 1.3's don't have that problem, especially the Hawks. I'm no expert, I've just used both and that's what I've experienced. I absolutely love the 1.3x Hawks, but they're $5000/day to rent! OUCH!

Ohh Lumix G7, sorry I thought that was the computer name or something. I didn't recognize it as a Panasonic still camera. Unfortunately with the current laptop specs, I think it will be pretty impossible to edit 4k. You really need a super fast processor and decent graphics board. Pentium processors have been replaced by the Intel core 2 and i3/i5/i7 over the last 6 years or so. Pentium's can't deal with multi-threaded tasks very much and as a consequence, they can't deal with a lot of the CPU based playback and rendering. Another issue is how fast your storage is. Does the computer have USB3 and are your drives USB3 compatible?

Sorry, I haven't used the BRAND NEW 2X anamorphic's. I just know from my experience with older 2x anamorphic's, the lenses were very soft wide open, where the older 1.3x one's weren't. I like running stuff all the way open and to me that was a huge pro with the 1.3x anamorphic's.

Sure, but you can't use 2x anamorphic's wide open, they're very/super soft. The 1.3x Hawks can be run wide open no problem.

Today we don't use the DI process because nobody prints back to film. Films are scanned to digital and from that point on, they are digital. Blow-up's are the increasing of an image to fill a greater resolution. With film, 35mm would be blowed up to lets say IMAX 15/70 or standard 5/70. But with digital, there are only TWO theatrical resolutions; 2k and 4k. Since almost all movies are shot and/or scanned at 4k and presented in the same or less resolution, the whole verbiage of blow-up doesn't matter anymore. Even IMAX films today presented at science museums are generally shot in 4k digital and scanned back to film in 4k. So you aren't "blowing" up anything, you're simply taking 4k and scanning it to film. For wide-screen (2.39:1) movies on film, there are five ways to go; S16 with 1.3x anamorphic lenses, 2 perf (2.39:1 with spherical lenses), 3 perf with spherical and cropped OR 1.3x anamorphic lenses (2.66:1 and you crop the sides) and 4 perf with 2x anamorphic lenses to get 2.40:1. 2 perf is a great format if you use the finer grain stocks, it looks pretty good. 3 perf anamorphic (1.3x) has less distortion then 4 perf (2x) and the lenses CAN BE faster. 4 perf anamorphic (2x) yields the highest resolution, but it also uses the most film AND has slower/more distorting lenses. With digital, you can use the same process. Either crop the imager top and bottom with spherical lenses (2 perf). You can use 1.3x anamorphic lenses on digital cameras with a native 1.75:1 aspect ratio. Or you can use 2x anamorphic lenses with square 1.33:1 imagers. The same issues with glass remain however, 1.3x will be a cleaner/faster lens then a 2x. If I was to shoot a film today that was going to be digital distribution only, I would absolutely contemplate S16 1.3x anamorphic and 3 perf and 2 perf 35mm with no anamorphic, just crop. I'd focus on finer grain stocks and lighting properly to compensate. For anything that MAY go to film print, it's a no brainer to shoot 4 perf 2x anamorphic. Yes, you can do a 1:1 (1.67:1) blow up from S16 to 35mm with a slight matte. It's kind of expensive, looks great, but doesn't get you the 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The problem is, 4 perf 35mm with anamorphic is very expensive. This is why a lot of people shoot 3 and 2 perf with a crop, it's SOOOO much cheaper. Nobody is going to give you anamorphic lenses for free, but 16mm and 35mm bodies can be found pretty easily for great deals. If you do the math, you'll find S16 and 2 perf 35mm with a digital finish, to be very similar in cost to Alexa 4k from the point of view of camera rental, extra hardware needed for set, the coloring process and long-term storage. Obviously if you shoot with a friends camera for free and somehow have a cheap/free colorist, it doesn't matter. But if you want good color, if you want the very best camera's, digital is nearly the same price of film. Anamorphic lens rental will triple the lens rental budget and 4 perf is double the pricing from purchasing stock through finishing. So when you sit down to do the math, to make a movie on motion picture film and do a digital only finish, 4 perf kinda goes out the window budget wise. If you do a photochemical finish only, it's BETTER... but still nowhere near the price of S16 and 2 perf 35mm with digital finish.

There are two RED Rocket cards. The standard Red Rocket and the Red Rocket X. The standard Red Rocket is for the Mysterium imager. The Rocket X is for Dragon. The Red Rocket cards are only compatible with certain software, so it won't magically make the files playback smoothly at the finder level or in your editing software. It would be used to transcode your material in DaVinci and/or Red Cine X to Pro Res for editing. It's great however for finishing in DaVinci, makes a huge difference. Standard Rocket cards are $150 - $200 on ebay. Red Rocket X cards are $3000 - $5000 on ebay. I have two Red Rocket cards in my bay right now and they work great with Red footage. Prior I was encoding around 9 - 12 FPS. With the Rocket, my speed is more than real-time, around 30fps. That includes scaling to 1080p from 4k and doing mattes per shot. If all you're doing is scaling and you have fast drives, it should be even faster. Pro Res is a very CPU intensive codec, so if you're converting to Pro Res you need power. If you have a PC, you're kinda screwed because Pro Res on PC's is 32bit vs 64bit on Mac's. Plus, there are lots of driver issues with RED material on PC's which drag the whole process down. The GTX680 Classified I have does help with the scaling, I noticed a marketable bump in performance with that card, plus it helps with the payback of material that has effects. It also helps with the Red decoding. In fact, with the GTX680 alone, RED can be played back at half res no problem. It's only when you start playing back in 4k that things go a bit haywire and that Rocket card is so important. Most of the DIT's I know run higher end Mac Pro systems and they don't have any problems using RED material of any kind without a rocket card. The newer double AMD D700 6GB graphics cards in the Mac Pro's, are fast enough to playback Red without any special hardware/software. It's native all the way around, which is quite impressive. My friends can encode RED material at 48 - 60fps! OUCH!!!! But it's very powerful processor wise as well.

http://filmemporium.com is a broker who deals specifically with movie production insurance. They are widely used in the world of movie production.

What's your camera? What's your storage?

The vast majority of people, aren't going to transcode their media to a lower resolution (duplicating media and storage) in order to edit and then go back to the original media, conform and export. The vast majority of people are going to open up a simple editing tool, drag their 4k footage into it, edit their piece and export. Heck, without using powerful tools like DaVinci and Premiere, you can't even do the down-res, edit and conform workflow. There is absolutely no magic, I know many PC/Windows guys running DaVinci in 4k, real time with no problems. In fact, right before I started this feature I'm working on, I installed a few windows workstations with Premiere and they were working flawlessly with RED/Arri Raw 4k media. Storage is a big deal, my raid's throughput is close to 500MBps, which is kinda slow for 4k, but most of the storage solutions I work with are well over 800MBps. Storage throughput is critical for working with real codecs. Hitfilm probably does cached/proxy playback like Final Cut X does. It probably caches renders behind the scenes. Final Cut X is amazing with .h264 files, it works like a dream, totally flawless at full res. Ohh I work with .h264/.h265 media every day. It's part of living in our modern world. Most of the time, I'll transcode consumer formats into something more workable by normal editing programs. If I need to turn something out fast, I will use FCPX, edit in real time and export. I've done quite a few FCPX 4k shorts for clients, most of it GoPro or drone origination. I know how to work on a budget, my desktop is from 08, my laptop is from 09. I know how to get the most out of computers, though I will agree that most of my work is on Mac's. I do a considerable amount of PC work as well, computer freelancing for the film industry is partially how I pay the bills. I just promote what actually physically works and has been tested for the application (in this case 4k media for youtube). I have posted hundreds of youtube videos on various channels and have been encoding specifically for youtube delivery for close to a decade. I don't use Premiere on my edit bay, mainly because I work on bigger, more commercial shows and I don't think Premiere is up to the challenge yet. I've been trained by Adobe and have installed the suite on dozens of computers. I've also trained people to use it, so I'm well verse in the newest versions, even though I don't use it at home on my own personal bay. Anyway, we're just talking, the OP is busy and doesn't have the specs for his computer yet.

.h264 and .h265 are long GOP MPEG formats, which are not really designed for editing. Final Cut X and Vegas are the only software packages I know of, which can playback and handle these files properly in real time. The reason they can is because they create new media on the fly and use that media to playback smoothly. This caching process can be pretty quick on a decent power computer with fast storage. But on most computers, it doesn't work properly. I always have to transcode those formats in order to edit them in real time, no matter what resolution. I have yet to playback .h264 files in any resolution to the smoothness of the professional codecs. We've had this discussion on other threads. I have an 8 year old Mac Pro Tower (dual proc, 8 core 2.8ghz for $800 on ebay) Yet, I have no problems working with 4k Media of any professional codec in real time. It's true, I did purchase a Red Rocket card on ebay for $150 to work with RED media and I do have a GTX680 Classified, which helps greatly in DaVinci. I also have 22GB of ram (strange number I know) and a small 3 drive raid zero. Yet, I have zero problems with DaVinci now, everything works in real time, where it didn't with the old Radeon card and 10GB of ram. The editor, the color section and the delivery section. It renders 4k media in real time or faster, which is actually slow in the grand scheme of things. So yea, when I make recommendations on what works... my solution actually works. If you can't playback 4k in real time, then your solution doesn't work. Again, no problems over here with the GTX680. Well, it made a night and day difference on my system.

What are the specifications of the computer? (processor speed, bus speed, graphics card, etc) What is the camera you want to edit 4k with?

More memory is ALWAYS better.

But didn't you say earlier, you can't playback things in real time in DaVinci?

Yea I mean Dom is 100% right and in my first comment I mentioned how robust the movement is on the Filmo. It's pretty much direct drive, there is a spinning disk with a cam. The pull down mechanism sits on the disk, which increases and decreases hight as the cam moves the pin up and down. It's a very simple design, but having experienced this assembly sticking before, I know it can happen. Unfortunately, it's been years since I worked on one, but mine was sticky. The other and maybe more logical possibility I mentioned earlier is the pressure plate. That lever design is kinda weak sauce, I never liked it. The door is suppose to hold that assembly in place, but there is just enough gap for that assembly to sit back a tiny bit and hit the inside of the door. If the pressure plate had a tiny bit of play, it could easily allow the film to slip. However with that said, generally film that slips, will have a double exposure on it, where yours doesn't. This is why I first thought it was the lower loop yanking on the film. Since you've used the camera a lot and only now seen this problem, one is to assume you know how to load it. Maybe I'm wrong about that assumption?

Aww dang! How about Murder By Death?

Right, but again, these tests are all exporting tests. I could care less about the speed it takes to encode an .h264 or Cineform video, both of which I rarely encode and have special tools to deal with. The only thing that makes any difference to me is when I'm editing. That's all I really care about because that's what the vast majority of people who own workstations for post production will be doing. They will be using a GUI to create using different software tools. Being able to playback 4k material in real time in DaVinci with multiple nodes of correction is critical. If you can't do that, your workstation is worthless because you can't see how things blend together. I just finished two 4k jobs, one shot with RED and one shot i-Frame MPEG. I colored both with DaVinci with multiple nodes, mattes, in full resolution. It always played back at real time with audio. With my old GPU (Radeon 5770 2GB video memory) it couldn't playback anything, you'd hit the spacebar and it would go to maybe 4fps. So anyone who says DaVinci is CPU only, again is only reading spec cards. The reality is, it's a VERY HEAVY GPU based system. Sure, on EXPORT it's CPU, but that's mainly because it can spread the load across multiple cores. On my system, playback barely makes the CPU's fluctuate, but export spikes them. Again, you only export when done and it can take weeks of work to finish a project, so how long it takes for that project to export is almost completely irrelevant. What matters is how the software works the rest of the week. Now I edit in Avid, I've not made the leap to Premiere because it requires a newer operating system and I refuse to go there right now. Avid doesn't have ANY GPU support according to their documentation, but again, the addition of the GTX680 was night and day. Avid all of a sudden plays back more layers of video in real time without stuttering, it also allows me to run more composite effects without stopping. It actually performs like an all-new machine, which is pretty incredible since it's NOT a crazy new fancy graphics card and my machine is 8 years old! I also don't work in consumer formats, I work with RED, Pro Res, Cinema DNG and i-Frame MPEG most of the time. Long GOP MPEG (.h264) and Cineform are the two last things I would ever want or need to touch. I transcode those codec's to Pro Res before editing with them.

David, you're 100% correct and I wholeheartedly agree that it's a non-starter. However, my projector would be backwards compatible with 4 perf AND I wouldn't sell anything to anyone. I'd just have lease/rental deals and they would be super inexpensive. Honestly, I'd much rather make a 2 perf camera anyway. I think there is a much bigger market for one.

DO I dare say Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th dimension? I love that movie! :)

If the pulldown claw was getting stuck somehow because the lubrication was bad, yes it could be the claw. I've seen the claw not go out and hit the perf all the way.

Yea here in California, 35mm projection was really good until the day it died. However, in other places it was bad. Today, I haven't seen a decent 35mm screening (outside of special events where someone cares) in years. I have seen decent 70mm though and a lot of it, which is pretty nice. IMAX does have de-static rollers, it also blows air at each frame to help keep it clean. Plus, they've developed technology from the ground up, rather then 30's technology that's been slightly modified over the years. 35mm projection hasn't changed much since sound on film. We still use the same frame size, same intermediate sprocket for pull down, same gate design, same shutter design, heck even the lensing is similar. Really the only updates made to 4 perf 35mm projection have been anamorphic, digital audio and platter systems. IMAX was a new system in 1970, it was developed from the ground up to be excellent and it is the best system.

AJA Cion is the worst disaster to come from anyone in recent years. It has a severe dynamic range issue, which makes it almost impossible to shoot decent looking images with. Plus it won't deliver LOG footage like most of the other cameras, so you can't correct issues when they occur. Sure it has Pro Res XQ which is great, but the electronics suck. I hope their next iteration is good because the concept and pricing isn't bad, but it's otherwise a failure.