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Tyler Purcell

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Everything posted by Tyler Purcell

  1. Can be a lot of things. For me, it's the expectations of the studio. Everyone forgets the bombs ya know? You're on a ship for a month or two and that's when you get paid to work. You wanna be back on that ship and if that captain has success, then it's easy to rejoin the ship. However, if the captain doesn't have success, if the product is shelved, or not properly distributed, or maybe just a poor product for whatever reason, all of that effort may be for nothing. In this part of the industry, where we're making lower budget content, yea it does vary a lot. Unlike the studio world, where the Directors generally work with the same DP's a lot and those DP's work with the same crews, you don't get that in the indy world at all. So unless ya got a big success under your belt financially and the director is ready to shoot their next project right away (maybe a commercial or industrial film), the crew kinda get busy on other things and disperses. You'll find a lot of top directors do shoot other content, which keeps their crews pretty busy. Plus, big shows have a lot of prep time, so outside of day players, you may get a few months of prep and few months of post tacked onto your already lengthy production. The indy world is nearly entire day playing by contrast, which means, you're a straight freelancer. Which is NOT the case in the upper echelons. So the problems are; - Consistency of work hours (how many good paying jobs you get per year) - Consistency of other crew (if you do a great job, is everyone else also working at 100%?) - Consistency of finished product (are you working a project that will go nowhere?) It's also very cutthroat. There are thousands of DP's in the US with better equipment, more connections, extreme talent and ready to jump on a plane AT THEIR COST, to be involved in even the smallest project. Sometimes I regret, not doing the same thing. Sight side note; what happened to me, happens to a lot of young filmmakers. They move to an industry town like Los Angeles and they immediately get work on shows. That's exactly what happened to me, shot two features back to back upon arrival. Both direct to video, but I was 25 years old working in Hollywood, it was awesome. Then some politics happened and my entire team wound up getting fired from our 2nd film. I was devastated. Suddenly the money dried up and I was forced to make a decision; work like a dog for 16hrs/day for practically minimum wage to pay bills or get a real job. I took the latter, which forced me out of the industry for just over a decade. I got lucky tho, met some industry people during that time, who kept me busy creatively and those freelance gigs, led me to bigger ones and eventually I was a full time freelancer. It was stressful and I did blow a lot of cash on shit I probably shouldn't have, but I was young and wanted to enjoy my youth.
  2. It's a tricky question and a touchy subject for everyone really. Nepotism reigns supreme and I think you'll find, that people who really succeed in this industry, have excellent connections and can back up their work, time and time again. Nearly everyone struggles to find their position in the industry, even incredibly talented DP's. What has always scared me about this industry is how fickle it is. One day you're getting a decent sized feature film and the next, you're eating Raman noodles wondering how you're going to pay rent. It's all who you know, it's all about the people you work with and their career paths. The lucky ones, find this very early on. Many start out as 3rd camera assistant right out of school, find a decent team to work with and then simply go from project to project, going up the ranks until they become DP. I've had this happen to me once in my life, it was a 6 year whirlwind journey where I found the right team and basically did all of their work. It was non-stop, incredible amount of effort. We did features, commercials and industrial films. It was a blast, until our results weren't good enough and the team split up. For a few months after the last show wrapped, we stayed in contact, but we never worked together. I got a full time job to pay bills outside of the industry and many of them moved away from Los Angeles. It's that fickle nature, I see so many really talented people struggle with. So what's the answer? Nobody prevents you from being creative. Getting a good non-industry job that you can take time off from, I think is the key. Something that doesn't suck up all your time and will give you the freedom to pursue the creative work. Being around other people in the industry does help light that fire, I always find it does for me. Whenever I'm away from industry friends, I'm kinda lazy about my own work. But man, get us together in group and I'm ready to start writing again. There are so many outlets to show your skills today. Nothing stops you from creating great content and demonstrating your talent. Nothing stops you from meeting new people and creating those connections. You can do all of this without too much money. I think making an image for yourself on the internet, really helps a lot. Don't do what everyone else is doing, do something different. Find your unique voice and stick to it. I've found solace in running my own industry adjacent businesses, where I get to talk to and meet some top people on a regular basis. It's always fun to hear their stories and realize; maybe that lifestyle isn't for me. Sure it would be fun to do a 100M feature once, but I don't think I could deal with the stress of not knowing where my next paycheck was coming from ever again. The older you get, the less you wanna even contemplate that. Where I absolutely love making films, nothing prevents me from doing just that and I have a whole series of short films I've been shooting over the last few years, which keeps me busy and presenting new work to the internet, friends, family and fans. That is enough creativity to keep me happy and I think you'd find, making your own stuff, will satisfy the most difficult to reach itch. No isn't an answer when you're in charge and all you need is a decent gig to help fund your projects and you're off to the races.
  3. Funny enough, the last THREE super 8 jobs I got were all prints. I guess in the 60's and 70's, companies offered a service where they'd make a print of your camera originals, so you didn't damage them? I can't fathom any reason why these prints would exist, but I've been seeing them more and more. Basically they're 400ft unspliced dupes of assembled camera originals. Man they look horrible tho, huge contrast and lots of issues with highlight blooming and lack of blacks. However, some people only have these, the source is long gone. I was shocked to see them interspersed with raw Ektachrome and Kodachrome rolls on our last 3 jobs. The clients mostly don't know because they're transferring their families home movies and they don't know how they got them. One of the rolls was a wedding, so the filmmaker who did the job, made an edit and print. But the other ones, they were so random. Maybe the idea was to stripe magnetic soundtrack and record music or something? None of them had soundtrack. I must have done 30+ reels of them as well, very strange. But yea, we scan everything in 4k, but our clients rarely ask for the 4k scans. The archives charge per gig to store and when they realize the 4k pro res files are huge, they balk and simply want the 2k. I think many of them don't really care about the quality of the finished work as long as they get it scanned and delivered.
  4. A 5.2k imager and movable optical element, would allow full frame scans at 5.2k of all the major formats. Plus, capturing in a raw format in HDR, with direct access to resolve, is killer. I love the workflow of the BMD scanner. I think it works great. The only issue is the imager. I don't know the answer. BMD does have a capstan based system today, so they probably have less of an issue than in the past.
  5. The process is always different. Not two rolls are the same. Not to clients are the same. There are really 3 types of clients we deal with when it comes to print film; - Consumers who want to watch their films digitally. - Archives who want to get a quick scan so they can understand the value of their assets. - Consumers and Archives who want to never go back to the film again and are most likely throwing the elements away. Obviously the first two are a quick scan to get done fast. The latter, is what we really do customized workflows for. We do shoot video of some things, but most of the time we're so busy, we never get a chance.
  6. A "good" scanner is more important. I think they could easily dominate the sub $50k market with a scanner that has a movable lens system like the Scan Station. Even if they did a basic update to the imager, like the 5.2k IMX imager, that thing is really good. I just think they have to re-write everything for it to work and the budget is low. AEO Light works great. The FF audio reader is fine, the scanner doesn't run at a constant speed. I've bitched to them about this, but unfortunately, there isn't anything they can do. There is no crystal lock or anything of that nature. So it's kind of a re-design for them, with a much bigger capstan system that has better grip on the film and a crystal feedback motor design. The motor varies by around one tenth of an FPS all the time, so you get WOW and flutter in all the audio. You may not notice it, but I do. Drives me nuts. Every client is different. However, we've found that nobody actually wants or cares for 4k Super 8 or 16mm PRINT transfers. Most people request 2k because archives don't want to store all that excess data. Plus, 16mm prints never get close to 2k anyway. So over scanning in 4k and then cropping to 2048x1400 or so (depending on the frame size) is what we normally do. Believe it or not, you aren't losing much res by doing this. The actual image area is still around 2.8k or so. We generally TRY to scan with perforations visible on those prints, so if there are any jumps or issues caused by splices, we can easily just automatically fix them in post. We need the perforation in frame to do that. So keeping the soundtrack in frame, is very easy. Our workflow using Resolve is very fast. It's practically real time and allows us to walk away and work on something else whilst it's chewing. AEO delivers us perfect audio and then we simply marry it to the picture. It's not perfect, but I'd say 80% of the time it lines up fine. I think audio is one of the biggest issues with lower end scanners. It's why the Blackmagic is so great, because it has excellent audio and can scan 2k prints in real time. It's just, our scanner allows for instant real time cleanup of the image in the form of a wet gate. This is really and critically important for digital post. Starting with a really good clean image, is the best way to insure you won't have major problems in digital cleanup. The last job we did, was insane. Extremely tight deadline, every roll was falling apart and needed work just to scan, it was bad. However, we worked around the clock and got it done. A testament to our abilities and the client was so happy and impressed, they're probably going to give us the rest of their library work.
  7. The big thing for me at least, is that 19' has much more dynamic range below middle gray than any of the other stocks. Honestly, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think 19' does have the most dynamic range of any color negative Kodak makes today. I find myself able to push 19' much further in situations where lighting isn't optimal and still able to create detail. The finer grain stocks, just don't have that same ability unfortunately. Sure, they'll retain highlights very well, but below middle gray, they just seem to be missing a few stops of latitude. They "fall off the cliff" so to speak after 3 stops under middle gray. You can almost get 5 stops of latitude below middle gray out of 19'. The other stocks appear to have all their latitude in the highlights, offering 8 or more stops above middle gray. The only down side to 19' is that it's not great in daylight. The grain does tend to pop more and it's nice to use a finer grain daylight stock as much as possible whenever you can. I prefer 50D 7203 for broad daylight. I think the tighter grain just looks nicer, plus without filtration, it puts you at about F11 in broad daylight. With 250D, you're always having to filter for broad daylight. I carry a .9 and 1.2 around with me everywhere and sometimes need to use both with 250D, just to get in the stop range of the lens. So the added sensitivity, seems to be kinda wasted. 250D is great in sunset scenes, or shaded areas where you don't have any direct sunlight and are dealing with shadow. I used it quite a bit on my last shoot, where I had to deal with some extended sunrise scenes. (The beginning of this demo below)
  8. ... and there is the problem sadly. I love working on them honestly, they are so simple and easy to understand mechanically. If they had a better magazine system, using standard off the shelf 100ft spools, I'd contemplate owning one and trusting it for commercial shoots. It's really the magazine AND the film loads/reliability, which is the problem. It's not ready for any commercial work in 2024 sadly. ?
  9. Right, but are you actually using it for commercial work or just having fun? Shit happens when you're on the road, producers make changes, suddenly you need 40 more rolls of film flown in and yea... I assume you're bringing your mobile darkroom with you and another 80 A minima spools right? Honestly, it's rare for me to be on a shoot and not want more film myself. So this is why my "lightweight" camera is a Beaulieu 2016. 100ft daylight spools (off the shelf film) Crystal Sync High speed up to 80fps Built-in light meter Forward AND Reverse operation C mount (low cost lenses) Extremely small/light body Simple/basic operation No darkroom required Yea it's not Super 16, but I dare you to pick out the S16 and N16 shots from anything I've shot. You can't. Plus, you can get them for a few grand.
  10. Yep, they make a single side viewfinder, but you'll loose the beam splitter for the video tap. Some people remove the meter if yours has one and put the tap here, but honestly the T bar is pretty straight forward to remove for a tech.
  11. Yes, thats the only path forward is a more expensive scanner and yes, at $50k they'd sell them I believe.
  12. We offer 3 services; - Clean + wet gate scan, with light color grade. - Clean + wet gate scan + basic automated restoration. This is usually done with Phoenix. We add the effect and hit render. Once rendered, we playback and anything that seems too screwy, we'll clean up. Tho we won't do scene to scene. We do a more advanced grade, but only if there is something wrong. - Clean + wet gate scan + frame by frame restoration. SO this one is the same as the one above, but we do frame to frame restoration. Remove splices, remove scratches, remove dirt, remove artifacts, basically it'll look not too bad. We do a scene to scene grade as well. We find the first option to be the most popular. It's the cheapest and it's very easy for us as well. The results are WAY better than just running film off on the scanner. Even with a very light dirt and dust removal in Phoenix, it comes out very nice. Most people won't complain about a few dirt hits and some hard scratches now and then. So those two are the most popular services. I've only gotten a hand full of frame by frame touchup jobs. It's why we haven't invested in a new system yet. We may have one coming in soon tho, so gonna have to suck it up and buy something shortly. Hopefully by then the new motherboards will be out for the threadripper.
  13. Once we're happy enough and delivering decent product, I will gladly show. I think our constantly in-flux business model, precludes us from sharing too much. Not because I don't want to, oh no... I share a lot. But because I'm just not settled/happy with some of the solutions. Our gate is nice tho, I have shared many pix with people.
  14. I heard from a little birdie, that imager they're using now is very special and they'd have to re-design the entire camera/thunderbolt interface. They actually do the registration in the scanner, not on the computer. That hardware is specifically written for that imager as well. So it becomes a real issue, not something that can be updated easily. They could easily use the 6.5k imager that's in the Scan Station, but the data bandwidth maybe too much for thunderbolt. No more optical reader, we just use AEO-Light now. Works way better. The audio in that sample sucks compared to the quality we CAN deliver.
  15. Bingo... that's what I felt using it. You read my mind. Tho probably 7975WX. We'll see. They haven't come out yet, but should be shipping any week now. Good to know. We already have a PCI gen 4 quad NVME raid card that we use for caching and such. Unfortunately our 10G network storage is kinda slow, but not slow enough to hinder Phoenix. Thanks for the tips, good to know it's really our system that's slow.
  16. Yea, I've used Phoenix for years now. Sadly, most clients can't afford a full scene to scene/shot by shot restoration. We're doing mostly 16mm, mostly films that just a bit of cleanup, maybe a day of dirt removal and some automated tools. Phoenix is just too slow to preview finished scenes fast enough for me. I want instant results, which I can do in Resolve, right off the 4k DPX files. So most of the time I just use Resolve. I'll run the film through Phoenix's automatic dust/scratch removal overnight and then toss it into Resolve for stabilization and frame by frame dirt removal. Results are ok. Not the best, but they're good enough for 90% of the clients out there. Diamant would be nice, but they charge too much money for something (yes I've tested it) that isn't THAT much better for OUR workflow. I guess if all you did all day long was film restoration, if that's your ONLY business and you lived in the software 9hrs a day, 5 days a week, YES! Diamant is the way to go, 100%. But if you're doing basic restoration here and there, want something to throw the film into, hit render and come back later to hand off to the client, then I don't know if it's worth the money. Phoenix full license today is $350/month, which is a STEAL for how much ya get. That's worth the price of admission. Diamant doesn't offer anything like that from my understanding. But I agree... with faster hardware, Phoenix maybe ok. We just haven't invested in that yet. It will be something we do, if we get more restoration jobs. Also, I appreciate your feedback.
  17. Yea, what do you have for a system? On our mac's, I can nearly real time stabilize in Fusion.
  18. We're working on it. Been trying some unique 3D printed ideas first, stuff that doesn't touch the film directly outside of PTFE material. I'm not sold on the design, but it's close to something that works at least. The pinching gate is tricky to manufacture and it also allows for any dust/dirt on the film to be pushed deeper into the film itself. Sometimes we clean stuff 4 times or more and its still got plenty of grime. So I get worried about a straight metal clamping gate. Our design doesn't clamp that much, just enough and it seems to be ok. I'll send pix once I feel we've got it working well. I used gaf tape to hold it together for our last scan because the hinge doesn't work right. lol ?
  19. I've tried both Nucoda and Phoenix, they both seem to be the same thing. Have you found any differences? I just resorted to using Phoenix for everything. I wonder if there are certain plugin packs that don't work on one or the other. Yea, I agree, if the perfs are good, the Lasergraphics and Arri scanners will do a good job. I get so many films WITHOUT perf's at all in certain sections, it becomes a lot of post work to fix up.
  20. I've not been able to get it to work well. If the frame moves around too much, or has too many jitter issues, I've not been able to get it to lock. Also, Phoenix doesn't use the GPU for stabilization. So it's extremely slow. Mind you, our Phoenix system isn't that fast, we're gonna be building a new one that's a 32 core threadripper shortly, but I don't think it'll matter too much. At least with Fusion in Resolve I can easily and quickly preview stabilization very fast, within a few seconds, make sure it works and then let it render. Once you add cleanup tools in Phoenix, it's all over, damn thing only plays at 5fps at best before rendering. But yes, theoretically Phoenix should do better.
  21. Thanks, yea its not easy. I do a lot of coloring, so I'm kinda use to the issues we have to deal with on a day to day basis like these. You need a decent system to run Fusion's tracker, which is what we use most of the time. Our new M3 MacBook Pro is actually the fastest at it. She'll render at 14fps and finish an entire 30 minute roll of 16mm without stopping. It's very nice! Can't wait until the M3 Ultra.
  22. That's a cool idea. Yea the only way for a wet gate to actually work, is if the film is suspended in liquid during the capturing process. So the FF system does work ok. Is it perfect? No. Our process is to physically examine the film on our rewinds, light box and loupe first. We also thread it up and roll through it by hand to see how bad it is. If it's not horribly dirty, we'll run it with just the wet gate. If it's really dirty, then we clean it with alcohol, running through the PTR's at slow speed, under tension. It works pretty good. We've tried our friends pert machine, it doesn't work that good, for sure not worth the effort. I'd rather just scan and if we see major issues, we can address those issues during the scanning process by hand cleaning the tricky sections with 100% alcohol. I don't think it's a great process, but we can't have any other chemicals without proper venting. So it's challenging. A vent hood with rewinds and a light table, would help greatly, but we'd need some system to view the film so we can find the issues. Currently, we find them as we scan and we can just assemble the cuts (start stops of scanner) in post. We find it works ok, we've got good results. Then we throw the film through Phoenix first, which cleans up 80% of the small dust and scratches. Then we finish in Resolve with color, stabilization and manual dirt removal. It takes around an hour per minute of finished film, for the entire process (Clean + Wet Gate Scan + phoenix + Resolve + soundtrack + final output). Here is a sample:
  23. Sorry been busy! hahah Thanks for sharing tho, I'll have to dig it up and watch. I think love stories in general, no matter how good they are, can be tropeish and many aren't exited about them. But hey, I'm willing to give most things a chance, especially if they're pretty. ?
  24. I mean, has there been in the last decade? Not really. Scanners have been scanners for awhile. Laser Graphics dominates the mid tier. They make THE BEST machine for the money, period. DFT and Arri dominate the upper tier. Outside of resolution, none of their machines have changed much in years. The lower tier like BMD and Film Fabriek, nothing new there. BMD will require an entirely new design to use a new imager, so that being the only "negative" about the BMD scanner and unfortunately makes it not a very good machine to boot, means there isn't any real developments on that front. They will not be making something new anytime soon sadly. Film Fabriek may have a prototype of their new machine by NAB, but doubtful it will be ready for production. I also don't think it will be game changing, probably just fixing the issues of the old machine. So no, nothing new really. I will say for the record, I'm pretty chuffed we were able to scan this destroyed film that was literally tearing itself to pieces as it came off the roll. We took a slab, put it between two blocks to get it flat and measure it, which was 15mm wide and the frame size was down by half a mm. It had shrunk THAT much. Emulsion was flaking off in our hands as we worked with it and it was so brittle, it would tear sneezing on it. However, with low-tension mode, a clever little gate I developed with PTFE clamping material and our wet gate, plus two layers of digital restoration, it's now a watchable product. Mind the audio, we did make a mistake on this demo sample that I haven't fixed yet. Before: AFTER:
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