Nate Weaver

The dolly is an Elemack Spyder, and only weighs about 300lbs. Maybe 330 with the low mode arm that they have on it. I use to own a Cricket, the successor to the Spyder. Lifted it many times. The Elemacks at that point didn’t really have any accessories so you could ride and get an eye to the eyepiece in low mode. Any Panther, Movietech, or GFM dolly of a center column design like this now have all that taken care of now...sideboards, front porches, ways to hang a seat low and in weird places, etc etc.

I have an LWZ2 to go with my 28-80 and 70-200 CZs You can tell if you pixel peep that they are of slightly different design schools at Zeiss, but they all match just fine. I’d sell mine to complete my CZ set on the wide end with a 15-30, but s35-only lenses have taken such a value drop this year it would be hard to stomach the price I’d likely get. It’s a fantastic lens, thoroughly modern in all the best ways, I’ll just baby it and prob hang onto it.

There's a correct answer to how low you run your batteries down to, and it's based on what the cells in the battery pack are rated for. 14.4v "nominal" packs we use for camera is typically a 4s3p config...4 groups of cells in series, creating the 14.4 voltage, and then 2 or 3 cells in each group, creating the Ah or watt-hour capacity. (the P part of the 4s3p above) Modern lithium cells are usually specced at a range of 4.2v at max charge, to a low of 3.12v or 3v when they are considered depleted. This is data off of spec sheets from the manufacturers like Sanyo and Panasonic. That translates to a depleted pack voltage of 12.5 to 12v You are good depleting to 12.5 for sure..my new Bebob batts are specced to 12v. The dual battery plate I got from them runs each pack down to 12.0 before switching. You do no harm running down to 13 and swapping out of course...it gets you more cycles out of the battery pack. But cells made in the last few years will be good from 300+ cycles down to 3-3.12 volts. If you're wondering how I know so much...I lost a lot of Anton Bauer packs on rentals and I thought it was because people were running them down too much. There was another problem. But I learned a lot along the way.

My guess is they did this in telecine. I only think this because there are other telecine fx going on such as the overscan/deysync, but most of all they saved the stretch/rotate for the wider shots that could be put anywhere in an edit. I could be wrong. Clairmont has/had a rig they called the "Squishy Lens", but I don't think it could get this particular distortion. But it would have been easy on DaVinci. There were a couple distortion lens setups towards the end of the 90s, Clairmont's and the Hylen, but hard to tell which particular one would have been capable of this particular distortion.

So I went out today to the Venice boardwalk to shoot some Amira UHD vs. 1080p. I've been watching everything in 4K on my Sony Bravia via HDMI. I won't bore you with a long review. Suffice to say it looks really good. It's pretty much what I expected...it's not F65/4K crisp, but it's a good sight better than 1080p and it's very pleasing. A/Bing the 1080p vs 4K clips, it's immediately apparent which is the 4K (that is, if you shot a deep stop and put the entire frame in focus). The Amira lets you know right away it's working harder, when you switch to UHD the fan kicks it up a notch (which you can only hear if your head is right next to it). 60FPS in UHD, it really moves some air. I'd post some of it, but Youtube 4K is really pretty terrible and I feel you just have to see it for yourself in ProRes to get a good handle on it. But I'll go on record now saying I don't think any producer or broadcast outlet is going to come down on the current Arri ALEVIII 3.2K/UHD offerings and say "that's not 4K, we can't have that". I don't particularly dislike Dragon, but given the choice I'd go Arri UHD first if the end result is 4K and post didn't need 6K for FX and repos.

I've got my friends upgraded/calibrated Amira today and tomorrow, mine won't get in the queue at Arri Burbank for another week or so. I'm doing some of my own stopped down, HD vs UHD tests right now. Hopefully I'll have a better handle on it very soon. My trashcan Mac Pro pipes right into my 4K set in my living room. Not a bad way to test!

I have seen it, both projected and on a good 4K consumer set. It's hard to put into words what the improvement is. Will it knock your socks off? Doubtful. But is the improvement visible? Yes. Does it look fantastic, judged vs other 4K cameras that goof highlight handling and or lack in dynamic range/color handling? Absolutely. After having a good 4K set at home with 4K Netflix service for the last 5 months, it became apparent to me just how well the Alexa delivered via high bitrate 1080p compares to the Netflix shows delivered in 4K, shot on Red and F55. I can put on Skyfall and A/B it against House of Cards or Marco Polo, and Skyfall lacks nothing in picture detail. Believe me, before I got the set I would have been skeptical of such a statement as well, but there is a lot to be said about exceptional 1080p put up next to 4K. I think going forward, people will begin to notice the difference between 1080p and 4K. Arri ALEVIII UHD adds just some detail sparkle that isn't there otherwise. I think it will be accepted as a viable alternative for 4K capture as it's clearly higher res than 1080p. What it won't be doing is taking the place of Red or F55 4K for FX work. There's just not enough spare res to do resizes, etc.

It's in there. You have to switch metadata views until the pulldown menu comes up.

In my experience, the F5 or F55 will match better than a Blackmagic. I've had all 3 on a job, and been in involved in the subsequent color correction. The F55 material matched much better than Blackmagic. You have to shoot SLog3, and then start in the color correction with the LC709A LUT. That gets you 90-95% of the way there.

Funny or not, Reduser is pretty much the busiest cine gear classifieds these days. I've seen a few Alexa EVs listed in the last month. A lot of Alexa owners are selling EVs and upgrading to Amiras or XTs. When the Amira pricing was first announced, I had a dour view on it as well. The equation changed when they announced the UHD upgrade. I just sold my F55 that I had for almost 2 years for an Amira, and I've seen quite a few of them go out the door at Abel. I don't know whether it's the truth or not, but from my conversations with others, they do appear to be selling like hotcakes.

In my experience, as I have made it a hobby of mine to learn as much as I can about color work (along the way as I shoot)... There's a ton going on in these frames from the colorist. Not drastic music video looks mind you, but I can say: 1-Shadows are bent blue cyan 2-Almost a full desaturate as the toe hits black. 3-Skin tones are being secondaried out, and flattened in chroma (this means they're bent towards warm, but then desaturating again, reducing spurious chroma) 4-Overall contrast boosting via s-curve It should be noted that putting a cyan or blue tint in the shadows and then desaturating below that is a VERY common look these days. Often then the below-key parts of the frame play complementary to skin tones. Blue/orange or green/orange (in subtle amounts, natch) always looks nice.