Boone Hudgins

I thought Pulp Fiction was 35mm anamorphic. It seems to me after Tarantino's reaction to Super 35 in Resevoir Dogs, he would stay away from anything requiring a blowup, even 16mm. Until Kill Bill. (IMDb says there were 16mm prints made. For festivals?)

Maybe non-editors have always been imposed by the heavy, noisy machinery that looks like it belongs in a mill. Editors might try having a Steenbeck or Moviola, or a synchronizer, next to their computer to run a strip of film with broken sprockets through when somebody comes in telling them they need to use all 18 angles of that one explosion... I'm getting more and more interested in what can be done in one shot. It seems like it would be nice for the cinematographer, too, because people could actually see that lighting you worked so hard on.

I believe the "blue scenes" in The Matrix were shot with tungsten lights gelled with 1/4 CTB. It was really subtle.

I don't remember the AC article mentioning Super 35, either. It obviously looks anamorphic, regardless.

It was.

Nashville.

Dave Gibbons was the artist on The Watchmen. Surprisingly, the artist is lesser known than the writer in that case. That's usually the case with Alan Moore. I'm not sure how much Gibbons did on the book. Alan Moore was known for sometimes taking a page to describe one comic book panel. But I imagine he leaves the better part of the composition up the the artist. I'm trying to soak up all this information here; this is a great thread.

I'm eagerly awaiting switching over to a Mac, simply because I'm becoming bored with working with PCs, and want to learn a different way of using a computer. Since BeOS was bought out by Palm and shut down, I'm wanting to switch to a Mac. I like a lot of the software that comes with Apples, too. I suppose you could get a screencap of your DVD player, and crop out the border in a graphics program.

Another definition of passion is suffering. That's what the title means.

Increasing the noise on each individual channel in Photoshop gives a similar look. The noise is too sharp. The grain on the pictures I've been looking at is softer. I gave each channel a random amount of noise. Maybe an effect like the old Technicolor dye transfer printing, but adding a healthy dose of grain, would look similar.

IMDb claims the blood color issue was from a blue filter, which seemed weird to me, because none of it seemed to be all that blue. I knew that the CCE required a lot of the colors to be changed, though. The CCE process is a full bleach bypass, right? ACE is selective, like ENR?

The only thing I really have to add is to make sure you have a USB keyboard. A lot of PCs still come with PS/2 keyboards that won't work with Macs.

How long would it take to download a 2k video file with cable internet? Even if you got up to 100k per second, it'd still take a reletive eternity...

From my experience with Final Cut and Premiere, I'd recommend Final Cut. Not just because of the supposed real-time rendering (which I can't substantiate, of course, but would love to check out), it just works more to my liking. Personally, I'd like to switch to Macs entirely, simply because I'm ready for a change. And if that's what somebody wants to do, the Mac Mini makes it a good time to do so, it seems. I think I'm going to hold out for an iMac G5, though. 64-bit processing is interesting me. I suppose the best way to tackle render issues would be to set up a little render farm with a server and a RAID array hooked up to a SAN on your editing computer. I mean, in a home DV editing situation.

I notice Conrad Hall is said to be "the best ever" mostly by non-cinematographers. It seems to me, as just another non-cinematographer, that there can't really be a best cinematographer. There are too many good ones. It's not say, like, pop music where it's not always talent that gets you signed; if you're going to be a popular cinematographer, you'd better be good, you know? As opposed to asking for a favorite cinematographer, maybe we should start asking for a long list of favorites. I know I can't choose.

Just giving myself a frame of reference. Oops, no pun intended.

I looked it up. The 20" is slightly less than HD (1680x1050), and the 23" is 1920x1200. Only the 30" is greater than HD. It's 2560x1600, which is around a 2k, correct? Anyway, I was just speaking in the capacity of the video he'd be editing. But, it sounds like I'll have to look more into it. I just had a two-and-a-half hour render the other day on, like, three minutes of video on Premiere. I'd like to get rid of that. I saw your video a few months ago, Robert. I really liked it. In fact, the sync issues reminded me of a Weezer video. Just say it was deliberate. And it did what a music video is supposed to do: it got me interested in the band. I just found out not too long ago that Daniel Brummel from Ozma likes Satisfaction.

What Jordan Cronenweth could do with just one light was amazing. I'm a big fan right now of Caleb Deschanel. All of his work is somehow equal parts realistic and glossy. It's hard to describe.

It's strange. In the seventies, there were a few cinematographer's noted for their "realistic style" by desaturating and using heavy brown colors everywhere. Of course, that desaturated look is very popular today, what with easy access to DIs and bleach bypass, etc. But the thing is, real life isn't desaturated. There are colors everywhere. Production designers, costumers, cinematographers, directors, spend all sorts of hours "creating" "realism." Of course, it looks fantastic, and somehow it makes us think of how realistic it looks, when it's not. And then, how much do we perceive "camera shake" in our eyes? Why does handheld strike us as more realistic? Sure, our eyes don't have a tripod, but they naturally compensate. Which is why a Stedicam looks so pleasing, I suppose. It's obvious that when people think realism, they think documentary. They think of the occasional strange composition, low depth of field, low T-stop, blown out windows look. But that's not real, it's the reaction of the film, not our eyes. But that, I suppose, is the truest we can get to real life in the movies, and so it's the closest to real life movies can get, aesthetically. I guess that my posts, few as they are, go to show that you can overthink anything.

Yeah, I was talking about Crucial RAM. The Crucial website does a pretty good job of getting you the RAM you need for your particular computer; it's tough to get the wrong chip. And yeah, I'm a PC user that's used to doing it myself, too. To reply to a few things that Phil Rhodes said, or rather, to further explain myself: The G4 was pretty much tailor made for video editing (strangely). It was the biggest argument for upgrading from a G3 when it first came out. The fact that, when paired with FCP (4 at the time), there were literally no render times for most effects in DV. That was the claim, anyway. That's why I made the, surely, lofty statement. Of course, I'm really wanting an iMac G5 right now, and may buy one soon, but for $1500 less--or $1400, if you buy the top-of-the-line--the Mac Mini is looking pretty sweet. Esepecially to PC owners that already have VGA monitors and USB keyboards. And about the cinema displays, they're better than most, but I'm not very knowledgable about pro monitors. I do know that they're all currently greater than HD resolution, which is the highest resolution you can work on with FCP. And FCP works well with After Effects. Not on Adobe's behalf, I imagine, but Apple manages to be very good at playing nice with everybody (especially in sound recording). And even if not, Apple currently makes Motion. While it's not as robust as After Effects, it's apparently a very great approach to one-man-army-style special effects, in HD, in real time. It's $300. I cut my teeth with Final Cut 2, and having to use Premiere at school (and teach with it), I really miss the former. Especially with how good it's looking right now. Final Cut Express is better than Final Cut 2. And to Robert, reverse telecine is a very usefull tool in editing film. You can edit 24p, which is helpful if you're changing speeds of shots in post, and other things. You can always convert it back to 30p or 60i or whatever you want if you're going back to video, and (although there's some argument in another post about whether or not this is true), 24p MPEG files for the web and DVD. Premiere does it, actually. That's one thing it has over FCP, since it's half the price.

I'd say go for it. The Mac Mini was designed for people switching from PCs on the cheap. It's only $500, VGA support, etc, with the possibility open to add a Cinema Display at any time. Of course it only has a G4, so it won't be as fast as the iMac G5, but if you're using a PC, it's probably at least comparable with what you have now. I don't believe editing programs rely that much on video cards to render. In the early days of digital video editing you had to buy a video capture card that took rendering duties from the CPU. It may still be a good idea with PCs. I believe it was the Apple G4 that bragged to have real-time rendering for DV, making those cards obsolete. Meaning, it should render video faster than a PC. If you're going to go through with it, I'd make sure to go to Crucial, get a bunch of RAM, and put it in yourself. It's way cheaper than having Apple do it. If you don't have a firewire drive, look out for one of those. You'll have plenty of room for it. You can usually get Final Cut Express preinstalled for $100 when you buy a new Mac, but if you're interested in reverse telecine, you'll have to go for Final Cut Pro. Looking for FCP 4 used might be a good idea, but make sure it has Cinema Tools. If you go through it, let me know how it goes.

I think that absract visual ideas can add to a story. If you watch Sam Raimi's Darkman, for instance, a lot of the main character's emotional pain is represented in quite insane montages where the background of a scene will fall away and literally become his mind, with bug invested nerve endings and electrical explosions. It doesn't make a lick of sense, but you understand his rage. I'm sure Raimi was influenced by the "Spidey sense" in the Spider-Man comic books, which was in itself a very abstact idea, and one that most people probably though would be impossible to represent in motion. Of course, there's the more "traditional" sense of abstract art (if there is such thing...), things like the German expressionism found in silent films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. The way Murnau replicated the look of wide angle lenses with forced perspective in Sunrise is an abstract idea, but somehow we buy it. Of course today, the artifice is probably lost on some of our more "sophisticated" moviegoers, so they should enjoy the abstraction even better, since they don't see it as realistic at all. Of course, James Whale was influenced in the 30s and 40s (even on Show Boat), the Hammer films in the 50s, and today we have Tim Burton for all our expressionistic needs. And then there are movies like The Boston Strangler, who tell their story all over the screen, like a comic book, or pop art. Scott McCloud has some interesting ideas on that style in his comic-related books. I'm not sure if abstract art has to mean nonsensical. After all, abstract art started out trying to tell us something. It was pretty much visual satire, which is something like Terry Gilliam would give us today. If he were given a chance, that is. Granted, a lot of modern abstract art has a problem telling the difference between "I wanted to show the struggle of women in modern times" and "I wanted to paint the whole canvas red," it doesn't mean that you can't make a statement with something apparently nonsensical. Which is what movies are all about, really. I mean, where else do you get to just cut to another angle? It's amazing what we'll buy into in movies. Robert Richardson's use of fading background light, for example.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to join and say, Paths of Glory had a lot of multiple shadows, and it wasn't lit flat.