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Sean Emer

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Everything posted by Sean Emer

  1. My plan for now is to use a raid tower and run 8x 10TB NAS drives in Raid 50. That way I have a fault tolerance of 2 drives and still get some speed benefits without halving my available space. Almost all of the media is backed up on other HDDs as well, and my hope is that in my career the footage that degrades and is lost on old hard drives will be irrelevant to me once they fail. Thank you for the tips on LTO though! Some day in the future when I'm rich perhaps I can do a true backup of my favorite works.
  2. Omar, I've seen used Alexa Mini packages on sale for 40-55k, that doesn't seem too bad considering the work it allows you to do. I've had mine for 2 years and it has just about paid itself off.
  3. Do you happen to know if that test was saved? I'd love to see it if it was
  4. Thanks for the great writeup Phil, I appreciate your help! Are you sure that a RAID 10 setup is cheaper than a 5-enabled controller? I could get 70TB out of 8x 10TB drives w/ RAID5. I'd need 14 drives to get that from RAID 10! Raid 5 just sounds like a good deal, especially when the basic pre-built enclosures don't seem to be more expensive to add RAID 5 to.
  5. Thanks for the reply Phil! I'd love to hear how you did yours. Right now I'm looking at an external enclosure with USB 3 connection. LAN connections don't seem particularly worth it for my applications, and my PC doesn't have eSATA or anything like that. I custom built my PC, so I am familiar with the screwdriver :) I have 6 8TB drives right now, but can buy more to fill in the gaps if needed.
  6. I should clarify that I meant to type RAID-1 above, not RAID-0
  7. RED cameras stay small for a couple reasons: - In RAW, they don't need to do heavy image processing or encoding, so they don't need as much CPU/processing hardware power. - RED cameras aren't designed for good thermal performance. This is why they can overheat, why the fans are loud, why you need to black balance the camera, etc. Arri doesn't need black balance, doesn't make noise, doesn't easily overheat, etc. because the bodies are larger and have better cooling systems in them. - RED cameras tend to have noisier images than Alexa because their photosites are smaller, less efficient, or of inferior quality. All of those tradeoffs allow for a smaller camera body.
  8. I don't have a profile, but I've found that rating it a stop brighter works best. If you're shooting in 2000EI, light to 1000 ISO on your meter and things will look close-to-correct. iirc this is because Sony sets their ISOs with the shutter turned off, so when we're at 180° we need to compensate for the stop loss. I've found my favorite profile is the LC709 type A, but I've also heard that the Venice LUT works better, as does the Arri SLOG LUT.
  9. Hi guys! As my career progresses I've found myself without an adequate solution for storing my footage and old projects. I try to cut a new reel every year or so, and right now to get to work I need to have as many as 8 separate HDDs plugged in. These are mostly personal drives or backup drives from the projects themselves. I'd love to build myself one giant tower of hard drives that I could have everything on and which would be RAID-0 for safety, but I've never built such a thing before. I've got around 10TB of footage to store right now, but would like to be future proofed, so some kind of enclosure in which I can slide drives in/out depending on my needs would be great. Do any of you have good recommendations for external enclosures, brands to prefer/avoid, that sort of thing? Thanks for any feedback you can provide!
  10. Has anyone used the larger Mole LED sources (the 900w 5K equivalent or the 1600w Tenner) for Phantom work? I'm going to be shooting around 1000fps, and want an f/8 on top of that, so looking for right around 4,000FC on the products through diffusion. I know 5K tungsten fresnels would suffice for this, but if the LED models are flicker-safe then it'll save us a bunch of headaches with heat and power consumption. I'd love to hear if anyone has experience with this!
  11. My mini has the Arri Look Library license, and I'm trying to throw a bunch of references to a director to see what kind of look he's after. It'd be great if I could take my test footage, throw on a bunch of the different looks from the library, and send them out. As far as I know I'd have to shoot a clip with each look applied and then extract the alf/LUT from that clip with Arri MetaExtract. There's got to be an easier way. Normally I'd just make my own LUT and call it a day, but in this case I'm pressed for time and need a bunch of reasonably well made and distinct looks. Any ideas?
  12. Hi Filippo! At ISO 320 and f8 you're looking for 240 foot candles for middle grey exposure. Even if you're comfortable under exposing for an inherent dark look vs doing it with a LUT while on set, then kinos and pocket pars still aren't going to cut it. I'd recommend a few Litemat 4 Plus's, as they are CT switchable and dimmable. You might also look at the Aladin 4x1, which is even brighter than the Litemat. These are inherently soft, lightweight, and imo easier to work with than Kinos. Here are the photometrics on the LM4+
  13. If you have multiple units then you can get identical results at higher efficiency by going direct through the 12x12 and spacing your units to evenly light the frame. I lit a show that needed super high intensity, but super soft, lighting. We use 4x 12-light Maxi Brutes rigged in a square array, each shining into one quadrant of a 12x12 diffuser. The resulting light was as soft as any booklight I've ever used, but we got tons of stop out of it too.
  14. Hey guys! I'm shooting a music video this month whose main visual reference is the Sia 'Rainbow' music video. I've done both color lighting of fog and rear projection, but never both at once. My current plan is to use a bank of S60s along the back of the stage (right above and in front of the projection screen) and use that to wash the fog. Maybe a couple units on the ground as well. What do you all think of this? I'm worried about making the fog appear to be a smooth mix of colors, and to avoid 'shafty' lighting, all hopefully without messing with the Talent's light too much. Perhaps RGBA Source 4s would be better? Has anyone done something similar here? I posted this to the lighting forum as well, but I think this forum gets more overall traffic. Sorry if that's against the rules!
  15. Hey guys! I'm shooting a music video this month whose main visual reference is the Sia 'Rainbow' music video. I've done both color lighting of fog and rear projection, but never both at once. My current plan is to use a bank of S60s along the back of the stage (right above and in front of the projection screen) and use that to wash the fog. Maybe a couple units on the ground as well. What do you all think of this? I'm worried about making the fog appear to be a smooth mix of colors, and to avoid 'shafty' lighting, all hopefully without messing with the Talent's light too much. Perhaps RGBA Source 4s would be better? Has anyone done something similar here?
  16. The implication here is that changes to luminance and color properties will effect the resolution of the footage, since all we care about in the test is the resolution (actual and perceived). I'm not sure I agree on that, can you go into more detail?
  17. I believe he mentioned that he did custom grading on the footage to get everything to look as similar as possible so that the only comparison we needed to make was in the resolution (or halation or noise). That seems like a plus, not a minus.
  18. His display prep video, which is what I assume you're referring to, is still a good demonstration that the limiting factor is our grading/transform rather than a tangible lack of quality in digital compared to film acquisition. He didn't even make adjustments to his alexa footage in reference to the film versions of his shots. As for the resolution demo, which was the focus of referencing Yedlin in this thread (or so I assumed), it is an analysis of 'perceptual experience of resolution' or 'spacial fidelity', and not concerned with digital vs film
  19. Care to share your upres pipeline? I know some people use custom algorithms, some just do it in premiere, some do it in media encoder, others in nuke or AE. I'm curious what you use.
  20. In that context it of course makes sense, but relinquishing to ignorance for the sake of convenience isn't a good method to make a habit of! Luckily we have tests like Steve Yedlin's that we can use to try to educate people on these 'non-issue issues'. If I have to shoot on a C300 II because my Arri is disqualified, we have made some serious mistakes in how we go about our business. I imagine it would be possible to write a custom upscaling algorithm to convert 3.2k Mini footage to 17:9 4K. If you have the producer a file with 4k, who can complain!
  21. A-Bing a 2k and 4k image yields no tangible difference assuming decent quality cameras and glass was used. It's a silly delineation to be sure, and I'm very hesitant to say that UHD isn't 4k, since the only difference between uhd and 'cinema 4k'is the width of the image, not the height. And uhd already fits 16:9. It's the difference between HD and 2k. Show me someone who can tell the difference and I'll give you everything I own!
  22. Alexa mini does 3.8k, so UHD. I think, but am not sure, that it is an internal upscale, but it certainly looks just as good as any other 4k footage I see. The sxt is in the same boat I believe, but I haven't used it so I won't say anything specific.
  23. XT is still about as old now as the bmpcc! Sxt does 4k, as does the mini so Arri has already jumped aboard the 4k train. The XT looks great, and upsampled to 4k still beats most native 4k cams, but if you're going to buy an Alexa today it's going to be a mini or an sxt
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