Ryan Thomas

There is a good section on miniatures in the ASC handbook. Might try looking into that...

Your dream product does exist to a certain extent. It's a wireless video transmitter. The one I've seen in action is the wevi HD video transmitter. The picture quality is pretty fantastic for all being wireless, and I believe it rents for somewhere around 200/day the last time I checked.

Another thing you can do is have a few people sit out where they can see things better. Like, if you're looking straight on, have them positioned on the side with walkie talkies. Then you have them call it out as they get to the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on marks.

It records quicktime files that are compressed using h.264. A friend of mine has the 7d and uses mpeg streamclip to go to pro-res, so using that codec I'm sure you wouldn't have a problem.

I would think as long as you keep an eye on your histogram and make sure none of the channels clip, you should be good.

Yeah, I don't think you should ever go without a prep day. They almost always save your butt.

I just saw this as well. I believe it should be playing on PBS on November 17th as a part of their independent lens show. At least that's what I hear...

Good luck man! Sounds like your hard work is paying off a bit.

Just get a streak filter, point some lights towards the lens, pulse them up and down a little with a dimmer, and you've got yourself this video. I really can't tell what the light is, but it looks like a row of pars wired together into some sort of practical looking thing.

It's not just warmer, but the shadows are longer. Maybe consider shooting it around 4 and warm it a little and things should be alright. How long is the scene?

It's not always necessary, but as said before, it's definitely the nice thing to do. It's a bit strange that a teacher would get pissy over that though... I do like to say, "watch your eyes, light coming on", as I think that's a bit easier for everyone to understand. Especially if they're not usually around film production.

When you were on set, did you see that all the information was contained inside of the histogram? Or did you have two mountains at both the far ends? I could understand outdoors being a bit of a problem, but how contrasty were things inside? I think even if you know that you're going to go for that contrasty look in the end, you have to make sure that you shoot for the latitude that the camera is giving you, then tweak in post.

I think it's a setwear one you're probably talking about. I saw someone wearing one on a show a while ago and I tried it on...it was slightly tempting, as funny looking as it was.

I went to a school in San Francisco called the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking. It was only a year long and pretty hands on, also by the end of it the school put all the students on a feature with a bunch of people who work in the bay area. It was sorta pricey, but you'll definitely come out of it with some real world experience. Worth a look...

You should be able to get a 4 pin to 4 pin cable.

I would usually turn it off and bring it back everytime, preventing that annoying buildup of cable. I do like the hand method though. Obviously cars headlights aren't perfectly even as they travel across the landscape, so the handheld would definitely make things a bit more random. Either way though, it's always something you can do a test with. It's something that often comes up, so one good test of things would be pretty useful to you to see what you like.

I'm not sure any other way to find out the color temperature of the stadium lights other than use a color temperature meter. You may be able to find out some manufacturer specs, but the hard part would actually being able to see anything that you could get specs off of, or use to figure out the name of the particular bulb. You won't need full CTB though. You aren't shooting in the day time so you aren't mixing your tungsten lights with daylight, infact, a lot of the lights around you will actually be tungsten. So it's probably best to keep it at 3200. If you are planning on using the stadium lights somehow, it would probably be best to figure out a gel pack that gets you a similar color on your tungsten lamps. That way you can easily correct it back to normal without having any strange mixing of color temperatures...

Even with the shutter problem, you don't shoot stills and motion the same way. I'm sure a lot of the still work that might be done would be for magazine or other print purposes, in which case a vertical format would make the most sense a majority of the time....but I haven't seen any commercials recently in a vertical aspect ratio, so.... I would be interested to hear what they said, but for 350? Ouch.

As you pan the light it will fall off in intensity. I worked on a feature that was sort of a road movie a while ago and this is all we did. Sometimes we would have to set up two flags on either ends to prevent the light from spilling onto part of the set when we we finished the pan, but that's the most involved things got...

I've always just had a few lights on stands, keep the top knuckle loosened and then swing it around to simulate the car passing. After you pan it off the set, turn it off, bring it back to 1 and repeat. Simple, but it works....

Hey ribroast, Glad to hear I at least know someone who's AC'd on that thing...I've been trying to find a way out of the whole adapter game and this seemed like a pretty good way out for cheap. When you say getting some calibrated lenses would solve the problem, are you saying the backfocus is off? Or is it just that whatever canon primes you find don't have a big enough throw to be able to accurately judge focus with distances?

AWESOME. Does the light travel the entire distance of the monofilament, or does it taper off? Have you tried any effects of moving it back and forth past the light?

Go to hollywoodcamerawork.us I found their dvds extremely helpful when trying to figure out how to cover a scene. Hope that helps!

I wouldn't really rely on your light meter at all if you're shooting digitally. Too many things happen in camera (gamma curves, black pedestal, your knee setting) and there really isn't an accurate ISO that you can set for the HVX. Basically your readings just sort of end up inaccurate. Learn how to read a waveform monitor though and you'll have no troubles getting a nice black and good highlights. It's definitely the way to go.

I wish I went to play kickball.