Tyler Purcell

Well, what are the benefits of digital? - You can edit right away - You can see what you have as you're shooting it - You can gauge/judge exposure and look on a monitor - You don't really need a lab (on smaller shows) So, Imagine being able to edit right away with synched audio See the exact shot on a monitor without the ground glass nonsense Imagine being able to use that 2k reference digital video file incase your shot doesn't come out on film. Look at actual exposure on the digital side to make sure it's right on the film side (lots of math but doable) Don't really need the lab until you've cut together something We'd have a digital density record for each camera roll. That report will be sent to the lab along with the film, so when they process, they can compare the two and if there are any issues, there will be a red flag. Obviously scratches and other problems will be reported by the lab. Once the editor cuts the digital file, the lab will be told to scan only those particular shots from the negative with handles. Those files will be imported and linked in the editing program and go online immediately, without any labor. So the day after you shoot on film, you can see exactly what you shot on film in your editing system. Then the idea is to send the lab your EDL report after the show is cut and conform the original camera negative and strike a print. We'd have a simple digital audio system that allows for the timecode information to be read and sync directly to the editor. So when you're playing back the film on a projector, your editing system with all the audio will playback in sync. This can also be done with dailies if you want film dailies. Our 2/3 perf projector would be so small and portable, projecting dailies with good audio coming right from your editor, is totally possible. This is all doable, it just requires people who give a poop like myself, to make it work.

Ohh it's nearly impossible to find cameras to rent here in Hollywood. Panavision and Able Cine are the only two companies and they want a lot of money to rent them. 3 perf is easier to find, but still expensive. Everyone and their mom has 4 perf cameras, they're a dime a dozen. Actually, the biggest part of the problem is lens selection. My camera would have an interchangeable lens mounts, which means you can use Nikon, Canon, Sony, PL, Bayonet, Zeiss, Aaton, BNC mount glass. The front of the body will have spacers for each mount, so you can simply install the spacer ring and set the flange distance. Super 8 isn't a commercial format and the new camera isn't silent, so what's the point? Might as well buy a Bolex for a few hundred bux off ebay for your "art" film project because the best you can do with any super 8 camera is mess around with home movies and art stuff. There is only one state of the art 35mm camera, that's the Penelope and nobody is getting rid of those for cheap because they're pretty much perfect. My camera would be similar, but for a lot less money. Here are the big problems. 1) Arri no longer supports 35mm cameras. So once the electronics go bad, you're camera is dead. 2) The current cameras use ONE type of lens and they're very expensive. 3) The current cameras are designed for people who shoot film, not for modern digital users. 4) There are too many variables with older cameras, too many formats. In my view, there is no reason to spend money on "art" cameras like the new bolex digital and the logmar super 8 camera. They're a waste of money in my opinion because people who buy those cameras, aren't really spending enough money on film to keep it a viable product. My goal is to keep filmmaking on film and the only way to do that is with professional equipment that's affordable. Old rental gear that's unsupported by the manufacturer is worthless. We would be fundraising to make these products through my new non-profit. I'm an engineer as well, I know the challenges with breaking ground, but we're not in this to make money or be profitable. We're all in this because we want to see film stay alive and we need to donate our time to make it happen. Nobody will save film by trying to make money from it and that's our philosophy. Yes, the camera will be quiet. In fact, its going to be far less complex mechanically then most cameras. Our camera will be: - Ultra light weight, body will be made of cast magnesium and insulated. - Have mount's for Canon, Nikon, Zeiss, PL, B4 and BNC. Allowing still camera glass on 35mm for the first time. - Record timecode numbers right onto the film (no barcode, actual numbers) - Capture 2k digital images from a CMOS sensor with matching timecode - Capture audio from the external mixer and match it to the digital image. - Have HDSDI outputs for monitoring with a histogram and most importantly built-in exposure system that matches the film perfectly (lots of development needed, but it's doable) - Switchable movements (added cost) from 3 perf to 2 perf. (not 4 perf compatible) - Full optical viewfinder system (no onboard digital display) - Every change to the shutter angle, speed and exposure of the camera is matched on the digital side. - Kelvin and ISO are programmed into the digital camera based on the stock by the user - The magazines will use Arri's space saving technology. - Camera will use standard V mount 12v batteries with 4 pin power for accessories - Standard LOMO connectors for cinema power and accessories will also be included. - Camera body without optical viewfinder, mag and battery will be under 10lb - The pulldown system will be more like Aaton's, which is virtually silent. The camera and projector are two different units, they have no similarities in design.

So I've been thinking a lot about this and have realized the 2 perf and 3 perf 35mm camera and projection system is probably the way to go. Horizontal 4 perf 16 is cool, but it doesn't solve the projection issues, it's just another format for scanning and digital projection. The key is to design a 2 perf and 3 perf 35mm camera and projector system that's modernized with all the things we've discussed at a price point of around 10k for each item. It would be great to use standard mags which are easy to find for the camera and the projector would be an all new design. The camera should have a built in HD camera and record proxies to SD cards. The timecode of those proxy files will be burned onto the film itself as well so it's easy to cut the negative. I'd actually have the camera expose next to each frame the time code number so a negative cutter can see it. This way you can literally take your edl and cut the film. The camera would have two super 35 modes and be sold as one or the other 2 or 3 perf. The movement price will be expensive but if you wish to shoot a different format, totally buy able. The projector will have a digital projector unit built in so theaters can run trailers through it and once over it will autostart the film. Because 2 perf uses half the film, completed rolls can be sent aleady spliced together on reels. The projectionist just needs to thread the projector and start the movie. Audio will be some form of on board digital like Dolby digital, though I'd figure out a way to circumvent the parents. Of course the projector can be 2 perf or 3 perf, with a change of the gate and an electronic switch, the system can run either format. Though 3 perf films would be broken up onto 2 reels... Necessitating two projection systems but for those people who want a larger negative, why not? I envision a different system for film movement then what's been used in past projectors, more like a circle with plastic teeth on it that rotates the film through the entire projection path from the supply through the gate and out the bottom to the Take up. That circle will constantly move and the film will be pulled away from or pushed into it depending on where it needs to go. Since it's an all new format, you can put the audio reader anywhere you want. The gate would use a pull down system more smilar to a camera, though made to deal with projection. It would use plastic pull down claws and metal registration pins. I would make it 4 pin registered so those wobble problems of the past are gone. The projector would be small and portable with the led lamp in the middle of the rolling film mover. The whole assembly will have a cover to prevent dust from hitting the film. The take up and supply reels will sit behind the unit on a tripod. Motors will be integrated and easy to setup. It will be raised and lowered and like a film magazine butt up to the projector and lock in place so it can be covered as well to prevent dust from coming in. There will also be fim cleaning rollers before the film enters and when it exits.

The production cameras are no good. They over heat and blow up the internal battery. The 4k imager is real garbage and they are not friendly to work with. Honestly they were just a toy and people really assumed they were something else. The only real cameras blackmagic make are the pocket and Ursa/Ursa mini. I wouldn't bother with the new micro camera either, too many accessories to make work as a production camera. Plus you can get pocket cameras used for peanuts on eBay.

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.