Steve Absalom

I am wondering about that myself, anyone know?

My sound guy just found out that I was looking into that camera and got mad. He said the footage looks bad. I'm going to have to try to test one out at Best Buy or something. I don't know what to think now. :(

Thanks for the reply.

Hey guys, I have a shoot coming up in about 5 months for a very, very low budget film that takes place mainly at night (exteriors) on the edges of the city. We'll be shooting in areas where there are sodium-vapor lamps and other street lights, I just want to make sure we can maximize the efficacy of available light but also compliment the atmosphere that kind of lighting creates on screen. I'm looking for what camera would be right for this shoot. Is anybody familiar with shooting digital at night?

Greetings, I am a student filmmaker who will be shooting on an HVX200 in about a month. My school doesn't give us light meters or let us take the camera ahead of time in order to do any test footage. The best they could do was let me take out a DVX100 and do some shooting around my location to see what it would look like. I wanted to shoot outside on a city street at night. This street is very well lit. I could see pretty clearly on the DVX100 up until about an F/stop of 5.6 if I had the gain boosted to about 6db. At a 2.8 everything was very bright and no gain was needed. Now the HVX200 we're using, they have a lens adapter which I am told knocks out about a Stop and a Half of light. That's why I tested the DVX at a 4/5.6 with gain of 6db. (I don't know if the HD camera has a gain, but I assume it does. ) Now the questions: -Someone told me that HD cameras are more sensitive to light than DV cameras, so the extra stop-and-a-half lost won't really be a big deal, especially since the lenses we use can open up to about a 2 or a 2.8 . Is this true? (I figure if we get on location and its even remotely slightly underexposed, we could just change the shutter angle slightly - although my experience in that area is nil). -Should I scrap the night shoot and just do it during the day, which really would be a completely different film, different aesthetic, what have you? - Um, any comments from you more experienced users?

Wow. Wasn't expecting that indepth or detailed of a reply. Thank you. Thank you very much. Does anyone know a basic... handbook or guide I could look up which would teach me about voltage, watts, AC vs DC , etc? And maybe what an ...uh... alternator does? :unsure:

I'm currently working on a very small independent student project that calls for mainly outdoor shoots at night lit by "natural" lighting - mainly sodium vapor lamps lining a local street. I know this isn't going to be enough light so I'm looking for something to use on the actors to help shape the light. My problem is, although we have access to a generator, using that at night on a local street would probably violate some kind of local law because of noise. Does anyone have experience with battery powered lighting or similar? This seems like it could be a deal breaker.

We shot on 16mm film with a super 16 lens, I believe it was an Optex something or other conversion, 10.8mm to 60mm zoom lens.

Thank you all for the helpful replies. I got an extension on shooting the sunset so now I get more time to plan, and I'm definitely taking your advice into effect. Thank you very much.

We did our first student films this past week. We only had an incident meter and we would measure a scene like this: We have lights. The lights read 1.4 where our actors were. So we put more lights until the actors read almost a 4.0 (try as we might, we'd pile on lights real close and it wouldn't get much higher). Now, since we were taught that in the zone system, the skin of a white person is generally a zone six, one stop above middle gray, we would then, taking our reading of ~4.0, set the aperture to 3.0 (it wouldn't go lower). In theory, we believed this would make the skin show up at zone six, exposing it properly. (We didn't have a gray card) Then someone told us the Zone system was primarily for black and white film. We shot in color. Also, we were then told by another student filmmaker slightly higher in education level than us, that incident meters aren't important for what we were doing, spotmeters are. That the reflectance values for the face are such that they will most certainly be overexposed and may even come out as white blurs. Is this true?

I want to shoot a sunset for a film I'm doing. It would be a very brief scene working as a transition between two different scenes. Since it is so brief, I'm going to use 200T film stock which I bought for the other scenes (don't want to buy a whole roll of daylight film for a scene lasting 5 seconds or so). I figure I'll probably have to use a CTO filter on the camera to get it to look right. But my next question is with exposure. What is the average foot-candles measurement of a sunset? I'm assuming its much less than say noon time or even afternoon lighting. I actually don't have the option of going to the location days before to measure a sunset so I'll have to estimate as best as possible before hand. Any thoughts?

Hi there. This is my first time shooting on film and as the camera belongs to the University I go to and we are only allowed to touch it on the day of our scheduled shoots, I do not have the option of shooting what I am told is called a "test roll." I am intersted in seeing what a bleach bypass would look like on 16mm film. I have seen famous examples from movies shot in 35mm (or what I assume was 35mm) like Saving Private Ryan, but I was wonder just how different it would look in 16mm. I assume it would look a lot worse, more grain and all that. I was thinking I could shoot on a lower speed film so that it would be a better quality image and since I read that shooting with the intention of doing a bleach bypass requires you to be underexposed one stop, using low speed film would naturally be underexposed, I think. I'm new it this. Can anyone offer suggestions and maybe even visual examples? I'm shooting a very short film that 98% of it takes place in a basement during a band's rehearsal. I'm going for very low-key lighting for dramatic effect as well as aiming for the bleach bypass to enhance the gritty, raw feel to it- the story calls for the band to break up rather dramtically and I thought it would work nicely for the whole atmosphere.

Forgive me, what is a "Hi-Hat" in relation to a camera?

I've heard of using a wheelchair before. I actually knew a guy who was on a professional commercial shoot for some liquor company and the director brought one crew member, a DP and they had a camera and a wheelchair. One sat in the wheelchair, the other pushed. Bam, professional commercial - I guess if it works... But where do you put the camera? Would you really have someone holding it or would you put the tripod in the seat of the chair... or the camera in the seat... or maybe perched on an armrest?

Do it in post-production, probably be a heck of a lot easier to control and much more subtle.