Tyler Purcell

David is right, 400ft rolls of 16 are 11 min.

Well the Panasonic GH2 is really a still camera that shoots video. It records low-quality 8 bit 4:2:0 MPEG files, like it's later generation GH4 and DSLR's. By contrast, the Blackmagic Pocket camera shoots 10 bit 4:2:2 or 12 bit RAW. This gives you the full dynamic range of the imager for post production cleanup. If you want a still camera, buy a still camera. If you want a cinema camera, buy a cinema camera. Mixing the two can give you mixed results as MOST of the double purpose cameras are better at stills then moving image, mostly lacking a decent recording format. Now, I have two pocket cameras and for the little shows I produce, they works adequately. Nothing I shoot with it is going to the theaters, but for short subject narrative, doc, music videos, commercials, for web or broadcast, it works great. I use a Canon EF lens adaptor which allows me to run the Rokinon cine primes. I also have an older Canon Rebel still camera, but I use Canon glass with it. The reason is quite simple, most of the still glass has auto focus, stabilization and zoom, which are very nice to have for stills. With cinematography, you're generally taking your time to setup a shot, but with stills, you may wish to capture something that's moving. Having those three things will help greatly for still photography. So picking up a camera and glass specifically for stills, is probably a wise idea. Interchangeability is nice for those few times you're doing still life and can take your time setting up a shot, then you can use the Rokinon primes on your still camera. If you wish to learn more about the power of the Pocket camera, you can check out my video all about it below. Unfortunately, it's starting to get long in the tooth and Blackmagic will probably release something new for that form factor at NAB in 2016.

Well believe it or not, if you do proper coverage, the minimal ratio would be 5:1. The moment you add one flubbed line, you increase that ratio. So a conservative ratio on a scripted feature would be around 8:1. I always budget for 10:1 and a lot of my friends feel 10:1 is conservative, but I don't feel the same way. If you have good actors, storyboards and a tight shooting unit, you can shoot 10:1 without a problem. 10:1 ratio would be 900min of stock: 4 perf 35mm = 80,000 ft (80 rolls of film) 3 perf 35mm = 64,000 ft (64 rolls of film) 2 perf 35mm = 40,000 ft (40 rolls of film) 16mm = 32,000 ft (81 rolls of film)

Ohh for sure. Still my point from earlier was only in reference to bigger shows, not spending the money to build sets or even shoot much outdoors due to the cost. If the cost of shooting on location AND set building was decreased, we'd most likely see more films that aren't being forced to use special effects. That was the whole reason for brining "union's" up in the first place.

Thanks for the info Dom, yea it's for sure above my pay grade. ;) I'm actually a pretty good technician, I've worked on far more complex things in my life. I wanted to pull it apart to figure out if it was something that I and another machinist could do, but alas, I feel its a bit more then simply mechanical changes. It was great to understand how it works, lubricate everything and throw it back together again. That was a real treat and worth the effort. I'll contact those guys in Australia see what the deal is.

The 1st gen SR's were pretty loud for sync sound cameras. They got better over the years, the SR3's are by far the quietest. I agree with Dom, the SR3's are kind of the way to go because they fixed many of the issues of the earlier cameras. You could always the go the route I did, buy an Aaton LTR. I honestly like the SR more in a lot of ways, but the Aaton does do the job, it has excellent registration and most importantly, it's a lot cheaper to maintain. My Aaton is pretty quiet and with the barnie, it's silent. If you're interested, let me know because I've got a buddy selling one here in LA, he can cut you a killer deal on it, thou it's straight 16 not S16.

Well, that's good news then. It's interesting that my line producer, the many truck driving friends I have and even the vendors I've talked with, have said the opposite. Maybe they all need to make the same all you did! I bet you some shops are relaxing rules due to the lower budget nature of our modern shoots. I've struggled with this problem for years and have always used smaller trucks as a consequence. Thanks for the info and maybe you can send me over the company you talked with so I can throw it in my line producers face. :)

You can't get honey wagons or 5 ton + grip/lighting trucks. Without union drivers, you can't even rent them. We're skirting around the carpenters union by simply hiring friends.

I just pulled the movement out of my camera and studied it's design. It uses an offset cam design, where a shaft fits through two rotating cam's. Those cam's profile decide how much the pull down mechanism moves. I tried to get the assembly apart, so I could measure the cam's profile and maybe do some math, however even after taking out all the screws that hold it in place, it wouldn't budge. Since it's a working camera, I didn't want to put too much force on it, so I gave up and put it back together again after around 4hrs of studying and analysis. Good news is, I found someone online who did it with their superamerica, so it's possible. I e-mailed them and hopefully they'll get back to me. In any event, it was fun exploring and the more hands-on I get with this camera, the more knowledge I gain.

Nice! I gotta talk to him soon about my project. :)

You do know I'm not talking about the physical creative shooting crew right?

And when you add labor, it's more like 60% more. People get more money to use equipment that takes less talent to operate. It's bullshit. Laze around on a film set sleeping in the cab of a truck all day and make more money then someone who builds the damn truck! Then when someone like myself wants to pay someone a fair rate for their time, the union says I can't. I need to pay 20x more so those drivers can sleep all day long in their truck. Is that fair?

Man I love your ideas!

Really? 120k is not enough for working a few times a year? You make it seem like it's impossible to live off that much money, yet most of our population lives off less than half that and works 5 days a week every week of the year. Heck I've never made anywhere near that and I hustle my ass off. Perspective man

Go try to rent a truck anywhere without a union driver. The trucks are affordable. The workers are not. It makes production outrageously expensive. Those guys work every day of the week, probably 8 months out of the year. They really don't need to be making 45/hr and double time on most days. I have the union rate sheets for all the departments and as I said in my previous post, the standard shooting crew rates aren't anything crazy. My point is, there are many ancillary things that drive up cost and in the digital age we have even more: DIT, DI, 3D conversion and visual effects. Did you know, the most expensive part of post production is color on normal no vfx films. It's obscenely expensive and there isn't really any reason besides demand. Everyone needs their digital projects colored and a single LUT doesn't work. So yes, making our modern digital films is more costly then film and a traditional photochemical finish. For ulta low budget projects, I understand digital if you can do all the work at home. However for anything that's going to a theater, what do you gain from spending all that extra money? Some of the best looking cinema in film history is done photochemically.

Ohh got ya. I think you're right. If the mirrors are full on they would be fine.

Because David it costs 400,000 for a few grip trucks and honey wagons for a 20 day shoot. Four hundred thousand dollars!!! And if you try to circumvent the union, you'll get bullied. How about the $5000/wk DIT? Do you really think that's acceptable? How about the carpenters Union? They want 156,000 dollars to build us a small fake facade that would take them 7 days. Yes seven days of work and 8 guys = 156k!!! You're right David, the camera, sound, gaf and grip departments are all normal. You're also right that above the line is outrageous and is HALF the problem. But the other half are the unions. The kind of pay rates my Union post friends make is ridiculous. 250/hr for online. 450/hr for color. 3800/wk for assistant editing. Really? The guy who copies and pastes poop makes almost 10 grand a month?!! Does that make sense?

Far less discipline and now with the union costs being crazy, production of big movies is more then it's ever been. So people want to shoot less on set, which means movies are being made in post. You either have a lot of money or you make it in post.

Exactly. Not many of our modern films can hold a candle to those made 20 years ago. I re-watch the movies of my childhood and their so amazing. It was the beginning of a great era of filmmaking where people had figured out technology and all they were doing was telling interesting stories using the visual medium. Personally I can connect to good looking film that tells an ok story. But I can't connect to a bad looking film with a great story. I get bored because it's a visual medium and if it's not interesting visually, there is no point. All digital technology has done is make most movies look bad (like bad TV) and uninteresting to watch visually. Now some television looks amazing. Since its 1080i, you can't really tell what the camera original looks like and it's not being projected on a big screen. Plus nobody really cares about up-resing in later years. Ohh and don't get me wrong, when done right digital can look very cinematic. However, in my eyes, to do it right is far more challenging and more complex.

Just an FYI, my business is post production. I worked directly with Iron Mountain on their archiving solutions for 3 years during their initial development. LTO tape's don't last very long. So the data store houses charge thousands of dollars every year to duplicate those tapes. When you duplicate compressed media, you actually loose data. It only takes 10 duplications before there is irreparable data loss. This is why we use JPEG2000 (RAW) compression standards. It's the only format capable of loosing part it's structure and delivering an image. However, MOST movies can't afford this premium service for their camera originals. So their media resides on LTO tapes sitting in a vault or maybe even stacks and stacks of hard drives which will go bad. 20 years from now, there is a very good chance most of that media will be gone forever, only the final 2k export stored by the distributor will remain. So the problem is, how do you make a movie shot in 4k, finished in 2k up-res to 8k in the future when you don't have the 4k original media anymore. We've already lost some camera originals from the early digital films. Yes there is. Modern processed camera negative sitting in a household closet will last 100 years. Put it in a vault with climate control, make RGB (B&W separation prints) you extend that to 200 - 300 years. It costs around $500/year to store original camera negative at Iron Mountain's facility, which is pretty much bomb proof. You can also store internegatives at the library of congress and in your closet. Most of my film work is commercial. Anything to get rid of that horrible "digital" television-esque motion blur.

My previous statement was directed at our modern vision of cinema, which is less about telling stories and more about tricking the audience through artificial means. My problem isn't illusion, cinema in of itself is an illusion. My problem is taking the illusion too far and just assuming the audience doesn't care. Do you really think the general audience didn't notice that horrible helicopter green screen in Spectre? Or the flat image that wasn't very interesting to watch? Ohh and Nolan... no green screen. I've studied Interstellar more then any other modern film, frame by frame in a lot of cases with the BTS on in the background. Sure, he was forced to use modern compositing techniques, that's simply because nobody developed a decent optical printer. Sure, they made a few 100% computer generated shots and punctuations on other shots. They also did some wire removal when necessary. Yet, when you see the finished product, it's so seamless only a few computer generated elements irked me, which is pretty amazing. What bugs me Satsuki is that we've gone backwards. All of this new technology, hasn't made better movies, but it's made the movies closer then ever to television. As filmmakers, if we aren't striving to separate ourselves from television, cinema as we know it will eventually fade into history. Filmmakers who choose to let their "films" look like television (flat, lifted blacks, aliasing, poor FX, etc) clearly don't understand this concept and it's a real shame.

Oh that's interesting. However the moment you add a DLP chip, your dealing with digital pixels again. Even when the imager is all the way black, the edges of each pixel can be seen. I've done lots of testing with DLP and found even without signal, it still letting light through. Plus and this is the killer, you can't shoot light through a DLP chip. Now, you could make a small mirror shutter. That's possible for sure. The DLP chip can reflect on the mirrored shutter onto the screen. That's totally doable, it would just put the shutter in front of the film plane. Not the end of the world. I actually would like this design to be very simple. More like a rolling loop projector. Use a stepper motor with large steps to bring the film into position using a combo pull down claw and registration pin on a drum that rotates and pulls the film through. The stepper would be controlled by computer as well and use mechanical alignment and electronic alignment. When the film has stopped and has been centered properly, the shutter will open. Brain is working on this one. :)

I don't consider photochemical timing "trickery" and it's not required. In today's digital age, filmmakers know they can manipulate more, so they're ok with things not being right in camera. This is what lead to material being unwatchable out of camera. There are many modern films that have little to no post manipulation shot on film and projected on film. The moment you add digital anything, you have to manipulate the image to fit the color space of the digital world. This is why when you watch raw shots from a film scanner that aren't corrected they look like crap. I've watched the work print of many 35mm films untimed. They look fantastic, they don't need anything. But that same material looks like crap on video because it doesn't match the color space of video. So the argument that film MUST be timed isn't grounded in any truth. That's just how people shoot today. Adding film grain doesn't solve anything really. It's a patch for a problem that shouldn't exist. The real problem is that we're filmmakers. The word film is the mere definition of what we do. Our business wouldn't exist if it wasn't for celluloid. People are so eager to play around with alternative technologies to maybe save a few dollars and have a product that only exists through a computer screen with some ones and zeros! There is nothing physical about digital media. At least with video tape you had a physical asset. With modern digital you have nothing. You have to trust some tech wizards that your data will exist 20 years from now... Which by the way, it won't because most films won't pay to store that media. So all your camera originals? Gone. Wanna up res to whatever the next format is? Good luck, your master is whatever you could afford when you did post. I can sit here all day long and explain how utterly pathetic it is that filmmakers could care so little about their products they shoot digital and don't care about the future. We'll be watching separation prints of modern films 100 years from now or we could continue shooting film and keep the tradition alive for our future generations. It's all education and most "filmmakers" don't have that education. They trust other techies and when those guys fail, the filmmakers will he screwed. Oh and by the way... 45 deg on film and digital is totally different. Why? Because digital doesn't have a shutter. the film physically moving in the gate means in every second, there is actually less image on the screen. So as a consequence when you scan film to digital it's removing those moments of black between each frame. Thus, the film camera and digital camera don't really have any similarity in how they work. So digital at 45 deg looks totally different then film at whatever your camera calls 45 deg.

Anything can be done in post. Good filmmakers don't resort to trickery in order to fool people. That's why films like interstellar are so great. Nolan did almost everything in camera and didn't resort to digital manipulation in order to sell his movie. How would you like to go to a theatre and see 3d holograms of actors on stage? The only reason that doesn't exist yet is because nobody would go! Deakins is such a great cinematographer, he can make magic out of a pixel2000. Mind you, it still looks digital. Actually they are technically entirely different. If you don't understand why, you should research how film cameras work. Then all movies suck. Or maybe when I pay $16 to watch a movie, I expect it not to look like television.

how about this... Lcd shutter? When you turn the gate, it automatically figures out what format your using. Then all you do is punch in the perf format and it protects it. Idk about it being a scanner. But digital and film projector built into one unit... That's not a bad idea. Most theaters could care less about it being a scanner. I'd aim for 35 only because that's the best projection format due to its size and quality to cost ratio. Just module the living heck out of it so owners could build the machine they need.