Jason Hinkle RIP

i had a friend of mine tell me he went walking up a stairway only to be greeted by a fisher dolly plummeting down the steps towards him! luckily nobody got hurt. just for your comfort, the chances of an explosion from a pilot light is highly improbably unless you are in an air-tight room. smelling a trace of gas is not nearly enough concentration. but there was probably a real danger of crew and actors getting nauseous or headache from breathing in the gas so it's always good to fix that situation.

Hey Evan - that actually looks pretty good! It looks a lot smoother than most DIY telecine. Do you have a 24p camera and/or did you have to use any flicker removal plugins? Also, how large did you project the film while transferring? I've done that a few times myself but it didn't come out nearly as good as yours.

you can shoot negative film and get a work print too. at least where i go it's a lot cheaper than getting a digital transfer because there's a 1-hour minimum for the telecine which is $250. not worth it for 100' of test footage, you have to shoot 400' to get your money's worth.

Spectra I think has one of the cheapest one-stop-shop deals but this is an SD transfer. you buy stock from them with processing pre-paid. http://www.spectrafilmandvideo.com/Film.html if you plan your shots carefully you can make a decent short with 400' of film. not bad for $359 - don't forget to factor in shipping too, though! if you are just experimenting, it's cheaper to buy a projector on eBay and then get a work print made instead of digital transfer, which is usually the expensive part.

thanks everybody. i think i'll go with the 17-12 combo, sounds like it's a proven winner!

I'm shooting in a few weeks a short with half interior and half exterior. i like 7217 200T for the interiors because it works pretty well with the amount of light i have available. my question - would you go with 200T for exterior as well just to keep things simple and easy to match? or would you go with another stock for the exterior? i'll be losing a stop due to the color correction filter. obviously i don't know exactly what the sun will look like that day, but i could probably work the locations to get out of the direct sun. would you have a preference and/or know of a good int/ext one-two punch for stocks..?!

I can't seem to find it now but there are a few videos posted here in the forums where people did stock comparisons. Problem seems to be that nobody has really shot the exact same scene with different stocks and processed together so you can really compare head-to-head. So it is tough to compare stocks when one is dark interior and the other is in the bright sun. I suppose there aren't too many people who want to throw down a couple thousand dollars just to do a comparison! that being said, one thing i do is go to vimeo and search for a stock number - you can find samples various stocks that way. for example search for "7219"

Just another suggestion you could shoot on the Red and then do a film transfer of the edited movie at the very end.

Thanks to Greg this is available now for anybody who wants a copy - http://eclair16.com/documents-database/ . Thanks Greg!

As Chris said, the $50,000 camera most likely has a great lens and an experienced DP operating it. Also new cameras have generally better accessories that make it easier - video assist, brighter viewfinder, accurate light meters, etc. But, I do think a skilled DP will know how to get the best from whatever gear they have. Here's a nice piece on YouTube that looks great despite the terrible compression - - according to the info this was shot on a spring-wound bolex with standard c-mount kern lenses.

nice - congrats on a sweet deal!

Anybody replaced their ground glass on an ACL or is that a tech-only operation? I basically have two cameras and want to swap out the ground glass because one has S-16 markings. I am building one camera to rule them all!

I don't know the NPR well enough, but I don't think you'd be able to tell 16 from Super-16 without seeing either a picture of the gate or some footage. Have the seller measure the gate width/height in millimeters then you can calculate if it's a 4x3 or a 16x9 ratio. If you absolutely forced me to guess, I would suspect it is regular 16 due to the fact that the included Angenieux 12-120 does not fully cover the Super-16 frame and you stated that the seller doesn't know much about film cameras. But, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

thank you so much. since it's on the 2nd floor and we don't have access to the first floor i'll try the spanner approach. that makes total sense to neutralize the movement of the floor planks by having a beam across them.

I'm shooting in an old house that has cool hard wood floors, but they also have a lot of play to them and the camera can tend to bounce a bit if the actors walk near it. I've weighted down the tripod as much as possible but it doesn't always fix the problem. I was wondering how much should be expected of the actors to adjust their walking vs. the crew's responsibility to get the camera stable and allow the actors to walk normally? If it is on the crew, are their any simple, creative solutions? I would think putting the camera on a heavy fisher dolly would work nicely but of course this is a low budget and we don't have one. thanks.

thanks very much for the suggestion. I've been having the best luck so far reflecting light to bring out the dark skin tone, but I don't know why I wasn't thinking the opposite, I could just blast the heck out of the scene with light and have somebody block the fair-skinned girl instead. I think I'll try that tomorrow. Thanks!

If you're near Chicago, AstroLab does 16mm processing and they have a great staff who handle a lot of the feature work that happens here in the summer. http://filmworkers.com/branches/chicago/ I often order stock from http://www.filmemporium.com/

I'm currently shooting on HD and two of the actors that have scenes together have very different skin tone. The lead is a medium skin toned African-American actor and the other has very fair/pale skin tone. wardrobe for both is nearly solid black and I'm shooting a decent amount of night footage. I've been finding it extremely challenging to light. I find myself trying to block out light and create shadows for the fair-skinned actor while the other is under direct light. This works pretty good, but it makes their marks very tight and if they lean in/out too much they go out of exposure range. I had somebody suggest using more backlight and having an assistant bounce that light from the front, which seems like a good idea since they could react to the actors movements. does anybody have other suggestions or tricks for this type of situation? thanks!

wow - great short! I don't understand the language but I really like the interesting framing and the stark white set. The audio work was also really good and it created a very unusual environment and mood. I'm surprised your images look pretty sharp with the lens nearly open like that but it looks quite good. I'm curious how did you get those overhead shots? It looks like you are pretty high in the air - did you have a jib or something?

My friend just directed this video using my ACL w/ Nikon primes as his B camera. The A rig was an Arri II Super-16 with a very nice looking cine zoom lens (Canon I think). Here's the video: http://www.spinner.com/2009/07/13/company-...video-premiere/ I know for sure the 2nd shot of the video is ACL footage (long shot panning down to the band). I was told that a decent amount of ACL footage is mixed throughout the video. Granted this web version is pretty low resolution, but I was impressed that the footage blended so well together. I watched a high resolution version and the ACL footage was obviously a little more grainy - but only if you were looking for it.

Seth was looking for somebody with an ACL II to measure the bottom plate so he can make a rod support for that too. From the pictures I've seen the ACL II base sticks out quite a lot further. I think if you sent him the measurements, he is interested in adding it to his product line. He makes each one by hand as I understand it. I'm fairly used to the way it attaches to the bottom because my previous one worked like that. only difference is that this one fits the base exactly with a little lip to keep it from spinning. Unlike my previous generic one, which was thin/cheap metal and prone to coming loose (not to mention the off-center lens problem). This one is super solid and fits perfectly tight onto the base plate.

I think you guys show great motivation and it's admirable that you want to go out and get your foot in the door. If you're serious about starting a business one of the big parts of that is packaging your services together into a "product" that, yes, has a price tag. For example "Commercial Package A = $$$". You would gain tremendous business experience by doing this and then trying to go out and sell packages. I think it is perfectly legit to give away a few free jobs to get things started. Businesses do this all the time, it's simply a form of advertising. The reason this strategy doesn't turn into paying work for most individuals is because we don't go into the job with a plan on how we'll convert it into paying work. Speaking for myself my plan was only that I imagined somebody would just see and appreciate the quality of my work and tell all their friends to hire me! Unfortunately it only works like that if you do some advance business planning. Otherwise you wind up giving away free labor and gaining nothing, which is probably what your ad is setting you guys up to do. From my experience running a small business for 7 years, you have to treat every job as if it was a paying customer even if they are not paying you this time. That includes a contract where you indicate what the terms of the work is, and you write in a credit under that showing the deduction you gave. You should even send them an invoice at the end marked "paid" - this sets a very clear tone that you normally expect to get paid for your work. It establishes your rates, your professionalism and this is what you need to do if you want the next job to be a paying one. On the other hand, if you're just looking to shoot for fun - heck just go find some actors, theater groups etc and stick with shooting fun projects. Or do your own commercials for a local business that you like. There's plenty of stuff to shoot - you don't need to find some cheapskate on craigslist! Best of luck to you!

If anybody's looking for a rod support for the ACL, Seth at American Cine Spec just designed one: http://www.americancinespec.com/pages/Eclair.html Mine just showed up today and I have to say it's extremely solid. The mount plate is offset to the side so the rods sit correctly under the lens on the ACL. I tried two other "standard" rod supports and they didn't work very well on my ACL because I couldn't adjust them far enough over to work with the way lens mount is off to the left (relative to the tripod mount/hole). This one's especially cool since it's custom designed specifically for the ACL, it fits perfect & doesn't get in the way of the anatomic grip. I talked on the phone for a while with Seth and I know he's still feeling out the market for making custom parts for Eclair cameras so if you want one I'd definitely recommend giving him a call. I know he's also made a prototype for the NPR, I'm not sure if he's selling them yet - probably based on whether anybody contacts him about it. Here's some pictures (He cut down the rods for me, which is why these are kinda short):

For that price range I like the Oktava MK012. They have a "movie set" kit with a hyper-cardiod capsule at http://www.oktava-online.com/shop/view_prod.php?id=110 You can get them modded at oktavamod.com which improves the signal-to-noise ratio. I also have a Schoeps 641. I loaned that to a friend for his feature and I threw in my two modded MK012 mics because they were doing a few multi-mic setups. Even though the audio engineer was doubtful they told me that tracks from all three mics mixed together really well - which is pretty impressive considering the price difference. Here's a great article with clips comparing various mics - http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/right_mic_brockett.html

I couldn't tell if you were saying that making shorts it pointless, or rather just that one is not likely to get noticed these days by making shorts? (or is my sarcasm detector entirely broken today.?!) To Shawn, some people may feel that making a $30k low-budget feature is a total waste of money when you could instead make a high quality short for the same budget. It doesn't mean that one of you is right and the other is wrong, you just have totally different goals. The price is all relative depending on what you want to do.