Stephen Williams

Most VFX & motion control work shot on films over the past 30 years has been done with Fries Mitchells, some R35's others 35R3's. I bought one from Digital Domain that was used on Titanic & Dante's Peek. It images looks just like any other 35mm film camera.

Now we all love these cameras, the problem I find sometimes is finding test footage of these gems.

 

example. Right now I'm looking to see what the fries mitchell 35R3 looks like in motion.

 

I'm sure there are plenty of films out there shot on the formats but it'd be great to make a database of examples, listing films shot with such camera_ such lenses_ and maybe even include clips.

 

 

but in any case, anyone have any Fries Mitchell 35r3 footage that they've shot or have seen online anywhere? I'm trying to get an idea of how well the camera runs before I start walking in the domain of considering the purchase of one.

 

Thanks!

Peter

Aatons for sure need regular servicing & there is quite a bit of Eclair in an Aaton I cant thing it's any different.

Major expensive service every 4 years regardless of use so I am told-

Is anyone familiar with what the common periodic servicing requirements are for both the Aaton LTR and the Eclair ACL II ? Most importantly the lubrication. And some idea of the relative costs?

 

I read somewhere on the forum that Aatons have scintered aluminum bushes that need a vacum process to reimpregnate (can't find that thread now, if anyone knows where it is). I'm thinking all ACLs have scintered bronze and a drop of oil on the bearing surface replenishes that.

 

I heard that there are oil wells that get toped up in an LTR during service. What are they feeding? How often are they replenished?

 

Any thoughts much apreciated.

 

Cheers,

Gregg

Ah, so in that case I was misinformed by the seller when they told me it was an LTR54, good job I ran it past you guys! I don't suppose I will be taking any risks then. What a shame, I knew it was too good to be true, I had my suspicions that serial number was low (and the price).

 

I guess you've saved me quite a bit of cash.

 

Many thanks for the advice,

 

Francis

Be aware that an old Aaton that has not had a full overhaul may well need $4,000 spent on it to bring it up to scratch. Ask Abel Cine in NY to look on their system to see what service history is like on any camera you want to buy.

Hi Guys,

 

For the first time we are moving from Kodak to Fuji. And we are planning to use Fuji 64D extensively. So, can any oneplease tell me what all the other stocks which goes well with Fuji 64D. And what all the things we need to look while using Fuji stocks.

 

Regards,

 

 

Bagath

It's a great dayloght stock that I have used extensivly over the last 12 years, very low grain. I generally mix it with other low speed stocks, if your grading in telecine you can pretty much match any 2 stocks, especially if there is a scene change!

The highest quality external recorder will be good, with least compression. A great deal depends what your budget is. Why not use an Alexa or Epic for the shot as you want 120fps?

I'm using Sony EX3 and will do slow motion shots. I need to keep as good quality as possible, because EX3

is only 720p at 60fps. Shots I want to make will be full of dynamic water details, so for that reason I need to get image as good as possible. Besides, I need to make twice as much fps (120fps) of some shots by using Twixtor.

Is it good idea to use external recorder 422? I thought about Samurai Athomos (Pro Res) or Nano Flash, but I also read that there is no significant improvement of image quality with this configuration. Due to dynamic water splash and very small drops, certainly there will be visible compression artifacts.The main problem is that I have EX3 only on my list for these slow motion shots. The project is 1080p.

What is the way to keep the best quality of 720p with EX3? Does anybody have some experience with EX3 and slow motion with ext.recorder?

Best regards

locked off camera - check

 

clean plate - check

 

actors and table against green screen - check

 

plenty of coverage - check

 

so far, so good

 

Now go over everything with the editor and compositor BEFORE you shoot

Not sure why bother with the greenscreen, much more likely to look cut out, just shoot the scene with the person in different places & just soft edge between the 2 passes.

Hello,

 

I was wondering If anyone here had used a Super 35mm gate on their Konvas 2M?

I'm about to order a gate from Bruce McNaughton. Are there any optical considerations. Aside from needing new 1:85 ground glass? Any experience of this?

 

Cheers

 

P

The lens centre will be off, probably not an issue on a prime.

Right, I wasn't thinking intesnity, I was wondering about flicker. Would 2ks be more prone to flicker at 50hz than 60hz because of fewer (and thus longer) cycles per second?

 

Interesting to hear the dinos are okay on multi-phase. Good to know.

A 2k at 110v is 18 amps

A 2K at 230v is 8.7 amps

A 100w dedo light at 12 V is 8.3 amps

A 2k at 230v & a 12v dedo light with have approx the same amount of flicker.

This is about from flicker from my gaffer's webstie.

http://www.davidsatz.com/aboutflicker_en.html

 

 

That being said, to get back on topic, I wouldn't mess around with the dinos either. Big single-lamp units will be the sure and consistent bet. Supposedly 2k and larger are flicker-safe for 60hz (never used 2k myself but can confirm 5k+), but I do wonder whether 50hz would require going a little bigger (maybe only 5k and up?) Regardless, if you do indeed go for the full 1000fps you're probably not going to use anything smaller than 10k.

It's the Voltage & Amps rather than the hertz so you need to double the size in Europe, so where you think a 2k is required then 4k or 5k in reality is probably the minimium.

I have shot 1400 FPS with 5k's & 10K's, however my gaffer has used dino's on multi phase with good results.

You need to put the lens on a collimator or on another camera & see what happens.

My greatest apologies for double posting, but I figure this is the better forum for this.

 

 

I just got a new Red Pro Zoom PL mount 17-50mm shipped to me. The PL mount slides in all the way, the tabs touch the steel of the camera mount, but it cannot be locked on, the tabs seem slightly too thick. We measured and they are just slightly thicker than a PL lens we have that fits. The mirror clears the lens back just fine.

 

More importantly-- the focus is WAY off. When zoomed in to 50mm, and I focus on a point 8 ft away, the witness marks show between 20 and 50 ft! Zoomed out it loses focus. Obviously the back focus is off. I heard these lenses were used on Arricams, and PL mount is PL mount, right?

 

I am using a PL mount Konvas 1M. I have used Arri Super speed lenses on this just fine. The camera has been collimated very recently. I've seen videos of this lens on lots of different digital cameras all focusing well, so why would it focus badly on mine, if all PL specs are the same? The first version of this lens which became the Digioptical 18-50mm on BH Photo says it works with Digital or film cameras, one would think this one would as well.

 

Do I need to modify the lens? Kubrick got that NASA lens to work right? I don't have that much money... Its sad a beautiful affordable lens does not work. I was guaranteed that RED would have this perfectly collimated when I asked before I bought it.

 

We are poor filmmakers, I sold my old fuzzy lenses and pooled all our money into this one lens! We are very upset. :(

 

If anyone has ideas how we can get this fixed, let us know.

 

Thanks Steve

hi folks,

i am about to shoot a small commercial with the alexa. does any one has some experience with the different lenses? since i found the arri ultra prime to clean and to sharp, i would like to try some older arri lenses. did any one already shoot with T2 or high speed primes? i would appreciate an idea or tip.

julian

Cooke S4's look very good.

The Scarlet Isn't even shipping yet is it?? You can only put a deposit on it!

They have been shipping for some time, I know at least 1 has landed in Switzerland

Welp, there you go, I guess!

 

My reference is the first camera's debayer, which was really inexcusably bad. You could, in the early days, rip the JP2K frames right out of an R3D file, ignoring one of the green channels, and do a reconstruction just based on that (which is I assume how Epic does it, perhaps with slightly better scaling). The SDI out on the Red 1 was worse than that incredibly basic approach by quite a degree, which was surprising.

 

P

To the Eye the Epic Debayer looks OK, a huge improvement over R1.

Ouuuch, have you looked at the quick debayer on a zone plate?

No , it was a commercial for Swiss TV, it looked way better than any of the material they provided to cut with together.

The Epic Deybayer is pretty good, I had a post house using a Pablo refuse to use the original files as the offline tacken from a pix 240 was so good. They were able to recover details in a window where I had even used HDRX.

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Not very usefully - it's only a very coarse debayer.

P

There will always be a few people who cant handle Epic, it's a huge step forward from a DSLR. As I usually shoot 35mm, I find the move fairly easy. I continue to be blown away by the images & how much info is there.

It will just about cover however may slightly porthole wide open, as you change focus there could be the odd place where it goed darker. It was designed for 4x3 Academy a long time ago.

The lens's can be dirt cheap, however a service will run to 2,000 USD, I dismantled one & used it as a prop 5 years ago.

Hi Folks,

 

Does anyone know whether that old Angie zoom in Arri standard mount will cover the supposed super 35mm frame of the Sony F3?

 

We don't have the camera on hand so we can't do our own test of it (or any other S35 sensor) but would love to know if someone else has tried it and can advise. Thank you!

 

Mike Tounian

[ The HVX-200 was a pretty bad camera and I don't feel this way about Panasonic, for instance.[/size]

P

I remember that IBC well, Panasonic were not a happy bunch.

Assuming your a Califorian resident you know perfectly well that you have to pay sales tax on any in state purchases.

I suspect the address the lens was sent to was an address you gave to save on Tax, I really don't get what your problem is.

I have found Red to be 100% reliable on orders I made, however I stuck to my side of the bargain & paid by bank transfer the day I said I would.

As soon as Red had my funds they shipped without delay, what more could I ask for.

If you have an issue speak with your Bomb squad rep, thats what they are there for.

Just a quick update for anyone curious.

 

Still have not received the lens, which they had in stock, because it was shipped to the wrong address across the country.

 

Luckily, I caught it in transit, and called in to have it rerouted. No problem, right?

 

Huge problem. Apparently, to have it sent to me directly at my original address would incur further CA sales tax, which amounts to hundreds of dollars. I told my rep that I already paid said tax, and was notified that I hadn't, because my quote was modified with the wrong address, and was not shown a new quote with this address or new total before being ordered to wire the money.

 

So, in short, RED completely failed to deliver after payment, and is forcing me to have my lens shipped twice, over a month after the purchase.

 

This will not be forgotten.

I'm a former QC person and it would be easy to life the levels on broadcast, you'd just need to run it through a legaliser to keep your cheeky 100% under control.

I was doing this in the 80's on 1" tame, long before Betacam, DV & legalisers were common.

Hey Stephen i always thought i was only one that did . Love it.

I was just re-engineering what they wanted to see on their scopes with how I wanted the picture to look! It took about 2 minutes to figure out, same trick 20 years on with inexperianced DIT's today!

Thanks for the responses! Yes, the viewing situation is another one I'm concerned with considering we're in a dark room and can bring time at low levels that in the real world (someone's living room or office) may not read.

 

MJW, I'd be curious about that as well, how low you can go and pass QC for broadcast or distributors for scenes like this. This director was fighting me on set in terms of just the lighting of the scene, wanting it really dark and it was already all rim lighting with no fill and the rim lighting was already more than two stops below my exposure stop. I don't remember what the IRE was reading on set but in the grade, he's wanting to push it down further.

To pass QC at the BBC I usually had a tiny area outside normal viewing area at 100%, then they could not turn anything up, always worked like a charm!

Not to get too prying into your affairs, but do you find the camera has increased the actual volume of work?

Hi Phil,

In my case I may have got an extra day or two, not totally sure either way, the shoots were all projects that I knew about before I got the camera.

If I was looking to sell myself with Epic as a package, I would get more work for sure, not sure if that equates to more money or not.

There is a huge amount of general interest in the camera, it's 'The in Camera' along with 'Alexa' right now. I suspect buying Epic M today is still a better deal than buying a Scarlet, most of the projects are using high speed 30% of the time & the difference in price is far less once accessories are added. I bought Red Armour today for £1850 for 2 extra years guarantee, I think the camera is good enough to still be in demand in 3 years time.

I am totally amazed by how quickly the camera will pay for itself, I am still shooting 35mm film & not pushing Epic at all.

In November I will shoot with it for 9 days, with at least 5 additional rental days. December looks quite busy too.

I had read of people paying off the camera in 2-3 months, thats clearly possible mine will be nearer 4 months however I had originally assumed 18 - 24 months.

The lens & camera needs to be checked, however you could just try to adjust the Back focus to the lens, it's rather easy with epic.