Kevin Zanit

You can also overpower the lamp through a VariAC and give it higher voltage. Should be fine temporarily, but turn it off between takes and during downtime.

A balloon light could be a good choice. They are easy to skirt off the walls also, no real rigging needed, and make a nice soft light. Kevin Zanit

I think Hollywood Rentals has some generators that small. In my experience though, it doesn't pay to really go with those smaller generators. Price wise, they are almost the same, but I have had reliability issues with the smaller ones. Also talk to Cinerep/ Amps, they may have what you need. Kevin Zanit

A "water tender" truck or just water truck is what we use all the time. It holds a ton of water, someone drives up and down the area to be wet down while the truck sprays water on both sides of the struck and I think from behind as well.

I love when they try to sell me speaker cable worth more money then the speakers I just bought . . . or my personal fav. - the $10,000 silver 6' speaker cable (for a pair).

Really? I'd definitely be curious to hear more. I rent lighting gear out a lot, and that type of stuff can sometimes take a beating. It used to mostly be guys I work with, so they were smart and took extra good care of it. Now I am renting more and more to complete strangers . . . Figuring out a way to take a credit card deposit to somewhat cover myself like all the other rental houses seems like a good idea.

Yep, I will third the above. If you have a cert from the production company, then their insurance will cover it. If you don't, you could be SOL, but try and ask the production company first and they may take care of it depending on how nice they wish to be. Kevin Zanit

I love to work with the same team of people as often as possible. I choose all my keys and then for the most part have them choose whoever they want. That said, I have become good friends with some of my electrics, dolly grips, 2nds, etc so I like to keep everyone the same as much as I can. Working with the same team is great because A. I like all the people on the job, and B. I can really predict our pace better and if the team all knows each other, we all tend to move faster. Kevin Zanit

I'll be there, as is Elhanan Matos who posts here is going, we're car pooling.

Thanks for the complement Kieran, The thread is: http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...mp;#entry193138 I would agree, those look like PAR globes of some sort, I would bet the source there was a 36 light Dino, I think it is 6 globes tall by 6 wide in the photo (6*6=36) I think a lot of the trick to shooting into the sources is good lenses keeping the flare under control and also making sure your talent really pops to begin with because when the lights behind them start blooming you can very easily loose the foreground. Kevin Zanit

My experience with the cinetape/ panatape is ordering it and then joking with my first on why I bother trying to get them for him when he has never used it on any job with me, ever. I think the one time we did use the Panatape the sound guy yelled at us. Kevin Zanit

All the tests were rated normally, the tests were to sort of partly figure out if I wanted to rate the stock "normal". For the shoot I did rate the stock normal (i.e. 500 was 500 on the meter). I find that with my meter technique I tend to underexpose a little, which is fine because I normally rate a stock 2/3 of a stop slower to overexpose some. So knowing I tend to underexpose some builds a little safety into the bleach bypassed material. Kevin Zanit

Haha, Zing . . .

I mean if you like what your getting on film then theres nothing wrong with it. That said, there is no reason to open up with lighter skin when taking an incident reading. The incident reading is just measuring the light hitting the subject, so a lighter object will appear lighter on its own. If you were taking a reflective reading of your subject, then interpreting the reading (and in the example you gave, open up). Kevin Zanit

To beat a dead horse/ thread: Found another video of a different take of the above. This video shows very little of the mortar hits, but does show you how little pyro is needed to shoot the dirt into the air, you hear how quiet each hit is. Kevin Zanit

Well you would certainly want to maintain correct exposure, not underexpose something you are trying to match. I normally use ND when shooting outside, so I would pull ND from the lens rather then change the stop to maintain consistency in DOF. Now all this does not help match the changing light over the day. I usually try to shoot the wide shots together and then the closer coverage because its easier to match the lighting in closer shots. Sometimes you just have to use "brute force" to make things match:

I would not go in blind either. I don't know if it helps, but I posted some of my bleach bypass tests here: http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...mp;#entry170410 Kevin Zanit

Kaminski in Saving Private Ryan

Just relabel how strong they are and ignore the fogging as free diffusion ;) Tricky problem, I like the oven idea.

I know of a few instances where people have used DC power fairly recently. Trouble is, its fairly hard to find good DC power, I know Universal still has DC, and I have had DC/ AC generators, but I have heard mixed reviews as to how reliable DC power from a generator is. Kevin Zanit

Electronic ballasts in flicker free mode are known as especially noisy, much nosier than a magnetic ballast. That said, I would not liken the sound to a lawn-mower, its usually a high frequency noise that sound guys love.

Some flares from multiple sources: It really depends on the lens, this was a digital still from a lower-end Nikon lens, the actual video was shot with a Zeiss Digizoom that had virtually no flaring, which was amazing to me. Kevin Zanit

I have to run out real quick, but in the meantime, here is a topic I posted a while ago testing some of the stuff you are asking about: http://www.cinematography.com/forum2004/in...mp;#entry170410 Kevin Zanit

Assuming you are shooting with a negative cut and not a DI in mind: Your orig. camera neg. is telecined for dallies to usually some lower SD format for editorial. If you have the money you get HD dallies (or even film printed dailies though this is very rare now). Editorial finishes their work and turns over an EDL they generated. The negative cutter then conforms your original negative based on the EDL, it then goes for color correction. You color correct and typically strike your interpostive/ internegative from which your release prints are made. This is a pretty simplified version that doesn't deal with audio, transitions or titles. I am sure someone will expand this, but also do a search on here is a lot of this stuff has been discussed in great detail.

I just saw the thread as well. A few weeks ago I was doing some whip pans on an Arrihead, just put it into neutral and used the pan handles. I hate fluid heads for the most part, though I always carry one just in case. The nice thing about doing it with a gear head is the tilt control is much cleaner during the pan. I also played with what Brad suggested, worked great as well, but I needed more speed, so neutral with the handle was what I used. Kevin Zanit