Stuart Brereton

Looks like a Manfrotto stand. Probably a heavy duty baby stand with a lighting boom on it.

Nothing looks as good as a nice tungsten bounce. ?

Ah, DPs and their secret vintage filters.... ?

Broad sources don't strictly obey the Inverse Square law, which really only applies to point sources. You can think of a broad source as being a nearly infinite number of point sources, all overlapping each other as they spread. Because of this, the fall off is not exactly as would be predicted by Inverse Square. This probably doesn't make a huge difference in 99% of situations, but it's worth knowing.

I also have the Spotmeter M. Years ago, I recalibrated it using the dial inside the battery compartment so that an 18% gray reading at 1/60 matched my incident meter at 1/50. Obviously, this made it inaccurate at any other shutter speeds, but as I only use it for cine work, it didn’t matter.

My thoughts exactly. Someone, somewhere is very bored.

What does this even mean? Are you just picking words at random?

Are you trying to emulate the ‘flicker’ from the shutter, or the way light levels vary from shot to shot?

Thanks Dom. Having watched a few more episodes, I think a lot of what I’m seeing is just extremely shallow focus, but there are occasional shots where the bokeh has an unusual swirl to it. Almost Helios 44 - like

Experience is not necessarily something that is going to be obvious from a demo reel, unless the reel has clips from productions which are clearly ambitious in scope and budget. Experience tends to show through in how people work, how quick they are, how they deal with unexpected problems, what they spend time on, and what they let slide.

Stephen, I never really shot much Fuji stock. It had a reputation as being slightly lower contrast than Kodak, less saturated color, and a faint green tint.

F-64D was Fuji’s equivalent to Kodak 50D, a slow, fine grained daylight stock. Like all Fuji motion picture stocks, it was discontinued back in 2013, so if you’re thinking of buying some, make sure it’s been stored properly.

I know that a lot of the natural history cameramen at the BBC used to use Nikon lenses with both 35mm and 16mm cameras, so it can be done, but you'd want to be very careful to check the clearance with the lens focused at Inf. before you ran the camera.

I never really looked into it, Adrian. On that particular job, I didn't need to dim the tubes all the way down, so I mentally filed the problem away for another day. Probably would have tried that had it been a issue for us.

I haven't used the Leviton dimmer, but I used to have a couple of American DJ units which are very similar. They worked fine with Quasar tubes, except when dimmed very low. There seemed to be a cut off point after which the tubes just switched off abruptly. It was the same when dimming up from nothing, they would suddenly switch on, rather than fading up. I don't know if this was to do with the dimmer or the tubes.

I used to shoot a lot of low budget music videos on the XL2. Wasn’t a bad camera at all. Only time we used an anamorphic adapter was with a DVX100. The quality of the adapter wasn’t bad, but both the XL2 and the DVX100 are standard definition cameras so the resolution isn’t great to begin with.

So, just increase the contrast? Doesn’t seem like something you’d want done destructively when it’s simple to add in post.

Thanks Andrew.

It's not necessarily the screenwriter's fault. Scripts are not just written, they are developed, sometimes by teams of producers. Even if a writer successfully avoids clichés, there's no guarantee that some helpful development executive won't make sure they put some in.

Thanks Andrew, I’ve bought a late model N.C 28/2. It’s actually to round out the wide end of non Nikon vintage set, so we’ll see how that goes. I have another question, about the AI-S. They were manufactured for quite a long period of time. Are the early and late models optically identical, or were there tweaks along the way?

A director might have twenty setups planned, but they never split them between the two cameras. They just shoot twenty on the A cam, and then add another 15 on the B cam ? They'll always use it as a way to get more coverage rather than as a way to move quicker.

It's extremely common to use two cameras on movies and TV shows these days. The rationale is always that it will be quicker to shoot with two. In my experience, though, unless the director knows exactly what they want to do with the second camera, it can often get used to shoot coverage that's not necessary, or worse, can cause delays because of trying make the blocking work for both cameras. Often, it would be quicker just to shoot two different setups with one camera. Sometimes the lighting suffers as well, as compromises need to be made. All of that said, it's now an accepted and inescapable part of shooting, so you have to learn how to do it, and do it well.

Arri lighting is generally pretty reliable. I'd want to see the condition of the lenses, and also how many hours the globe has on it. Old globes can be very green in color. They are also not particularly cheap to replace.

I’m looking into picking up some Nikon glass for a personal project, and wondering how the old N and N.C lenses compare to the later AI. Specifically looking at the 28mm f2 N.C vs the AI version. Does anyone have any experience with these?

I don't know about any problems with actually running it through the camera, but you'll be exposing into the perf area, and your framing will be off because the ground glass will be centered for s16.