John Miguel King

Bite the bullet dude, you don't want unreliable kit. Nor do you want to spend 5 extra minutes per day packing something. Time is life! I'm usually using the belkin or a three card pci chassis. But I've to say that Akito looks totally dope indeed, mostly if bus powered and actually with a good performance. I want two! Only thing missing, to me, is the ethernet. But that's rarely used by a data wrangler and an easy add on. The sonnet looks too huge and clunky, personally. They do, however, fluctuate a lot in performance from one to the other. Do research a lot before buying.

That's very interesting information. Do you have any references to look into? I had a night shoot yesterday on the F55 at 2K. We were using the HG33 mLut and I saw some blotchy artifacts in the shadows. We didn't have the 2K OLPF so I immediately thought this was the issue. Now I'm thinking the HG33 should only be used in very high key situations, with the HG40 then being the default one.

On a sidenote, Topboy season 1 was shot on Alexa at 2000 ISO most of the times and it looks unbelievably awesome.

Oh sorry, now I realise you already have the monitor! Please disregard all I wrote in the previous post.

Hi there, There are a lot of different solutions to what you are asking. What is the main purpose of the monitor? I know the obvious answer is checking the image, but do you also want to have more advanced tools such as waveform and the like? Also, how accurately do you want the monitor to reproduce colour? J

Methinks you need to look at video playback gear... or, if working with Alexa, use the "grab" button. I'm not totaly sure, though, how you can overlay (as in blending?) the resulting screengrab.

Chandler, I said "looks", not final grade. If anything, for no other reason than matching a 3 day ext scene is madness. The show I'm on at the moment has a set of predefined LUTs that sometimes (depends on the DP) we load on the lut box. We are not allowed to depart from this at any time. Yet, on other shows and movies being shot now and whose pipelines I know from my colleagues, colour decisions are made on set and attached to the metadata as CDL. Honestly, you'd be surprised the type of working relationship certain big time DPs have with their pet DITs. Trying to achieve a final look for the film on set is impossible as you have pointed out, but it's perfectly reasonable for a DP to want to see the scene he/she is shooting with the look they have in mind. Because of CDL the DP's input (or, in the olden times, printer lights) reaches the dailies colourist without issue. And it definitely makes communication smoother and faster. Of course the looks are not perfect, and even less final, but the whole livegrading is a very powerful tool that's being used quite intensely. Otherwise, why is every single manufacturer racing to bring 3dl support to their cameras? Phil, it doesn't take any extra time at all to have a lut box wired to the monitor. It really doesn't. The same way it doesn't take any extra time to load your look or 3dl onto the camera if you don't have time for monitors.

In my experience, it's usually the others (production...) that don't see the need. Most of my DPs are very keen to create looks during prep and on set in the hope the looks will survive post, mainly because of raw and log being just that bit too flexible in post!

Ideally, as has been mentioned, you'd have a solid background in the camera department. Even though technology is paramount for us as DITs, the most important aspect remains the same. The equipment and/or software that we bring on set and the understanding of it is within reach of most filmmakers in the 21st century. What has not changed, and what gets you the next job and good friends on set, is helping your crew with the two tools you have and nobody else does, the 24" grade one monitor and the waveform monitor with a live feed off the camera. Our eyes are critical here, as we are expected to detect any minor flaws and issues happening in the entire system. It takes a relatively trained eye to see the difference, for example, from a shot that's soft due to human error from a shot that's soft because of a lens issue. In essence, the more you know about light, filtration, lenses and sensors the more of an asset you become. It all comes down, I think, to the difficulty in defining what a DIT actually does. And this is so because of the different nature of the job depending on both budget and format. Of all the commercials I've done, it's only been once where I was asked to actually bring my live grading and QC tools (monitor and waveform). What they care about here is having the dailies ready for delivery on wrap. On these occasions, what I do is delay all my transcodes until lunch, the moment in which I grab my DP and show her/him the different grade ideas I've done with their input during the filming. I then correct and match with their feedback. Production will rarely ask for this at all, when and if I do it it's because of the personal relationship with the DP and my will to bring them some colourful joy. When in longer form, say drama and features, there is a very welcome tendency to separate us from the data management side. In fact, the larger the budget the lesser the odds to actually have to do any data management at all. In my only two very brief adventures to date in these productions, my setup was a big senior magliner in a blackout tent, a 24" grade 1 + waveform + lut box + remote iris per camera, a nice comfy chair for my DP, hd-sdi looms from the cameras, and an ethernet cable to each camera for remote control and metadata management. On some cases there'll be a station back at unit base with an assistant in charge of dailies and backup, yet more and more frequently we just send the mags to whichever post facility is doing the job. I certainly prefer this very last way to work. No overtime, wrap means wrap, and there's always a couple of assistants running cables. It is much much nicer indeed!

Hi all, I'm DP on a promo with an underwater scene. We've sorted a black swimming pool, which is a great start. I want to add some texture to the water, cloud it up a little bit, but I also want to add some reflecting particles. Ideally it'd be a salt that dissolves very slowly, so that the reflectance is maintained throught the scene without ever clogging up the pool's filtration system. Any ideas? Thanks

Whatever you do, make sure the cameras are 100% matched. A colour chip chart at the beginning of each shot held right by the clapper board shall save your DIT and post a whole lotta time and money.

In case you're interested, the F55 is all about colour science. I've been polishing my workflow on this and at the moment I find ACES to be superb when it comes to the grade. All my issues were due to my inept way to work the footage. My procedure, when not able to grade live, is this: 1. Load the 40% mlut, therefore exposing middle gray at 40% instead of 33%. I find the camera does plenty of highlight protection, therefore I'm more concerned about not starving the sensor. 2. Create proxies with the Alexa-like LUT provided by Sony, the "From_SLog2-SGamut_To_LC-709TypeA". It won't always give a perfect result due to exposing middle gray at 40%, but this is very easy indeed to fix. One issue here, though, is that certain colours, green in particular, get ludicrously saturated. It's not really an issue as we're talking a LUT for proxies here. 3. Grade in ACES colourspace. If using Pomfort's Livegrade is a possibility steps 1 and 2 do change. Livegrade now works on ACES colourspace, so my "solution" is loading a contrasty MLUT just to save my eyes from unnecessary strain when operating, then create the cdl metadata on Livegrade and both bake it and attach it to the proxies. All this results on a much happier grade.

This is what you need, dude!. And it's only paid jobs. http://www.gbct.org/trainees.html

Line producing is about discussing overtime with the crew in such an intense manner that the crew ends up giving up. x

There's not one single path towards being a cinematographer. In my career as a crewmember and, hopefully soon, a full time cinematographer, I've encountered as many paths as DoPs. Quite a few will have read a masters degree, the luckiest of them have done so in one of the rare and prestigious "national" film schools here in Europe. However, these cases are not the majority in any way. These are usually people coming up through the ranks. This climb is not necessarily gradual. After a few years learning the job and on set etiquette it's pretty much down to ambition to make the move. Most will start as camera trainee. Others, and usual quite good I must say, come through lighting and have made the transition from gaffer to DoP. Others will do the masters degree after a few years in the industry. Do bear in mind that a US grip is not the same as an UK grip. In the UK it's sparks that light, and not grips. So don't interpret from this that gripping in the US is a way in. I really don't know. Check the local professional organisations. Here we have the GBCT (guild of british camera technicians). They run trainee schemes and get you on paid jobs straight away. I'm doing it through camera, although through the new position of DIT. It's now come down to making the choice between being a focus puller or a DIT, and no, we don't just copy footage. We're doing it it less and less as we slowly manage to educate people on the voodoo magic we can perform on set. I came to film quite a bit later than you, so after not being offered a place at the national film school here and not being able to pay for a masters, my only sensible option was finding a job as soon as I could in the camera department and make it as senior as possible as fast as I could. I was very lucky that both the big shift towards digital and London's explosion as a production centre happened when I moved from TV and corporate productions to film, some three years ago. This meant that having built my gaming rigs in my teens gave me a dark knowledge that's in very short supply.

The monitor's manual claims it's got a function and all you need is a colour probe. These, though, are quite pricey.

Get this. Free and never failed me.

I've shot with the Atomic 3000 and a Red MX, and the results are not pretty. Wish I'd insisted more on the lightning strikes.

It's got to be 75 ohms. Now, a cheap option surviving a film set? Maybe yes, maybe no. I personally rather have the supposedly best of the best. This way, if it fails, I can say I did all that can be done. Covering one's a$$ is the most important skill in the industry.

Please allow me to enter the conversation. The element missing in the dicussion is the concept of "flux". It is this, the flux of photons, that we measure. The flux of photons of, say, a fully spotted fresnell is much higher than that of an equally powerfull bare bulb at the same distance. What the inverse square law defines is the how flux changes. As you'll see in the wiki page, one (if not THE) most important variable in the equation is the the angle of the photons as measured off the radiant surface.

BOXX Meridian.

Patenting a sloppy setup. Well done.

Cricket ball is best. I find tennis balls to be too soft, hence way too stable.

http://boxx.tv/

1. Yes you can. Three devices are widely used: Wevi, Teradek and BOXX. I've never worked with the Teradek, but I do know that when there's a Wevi on set we shiver with fear... whereas a sense of "this is going to be an easy day" can be felt when it's an BOXX. The Wevi's signal will break down with a whisper, BOXX does not. It's definitely pricier to rent, but if you need a stable signal... it's a no brainer. The BOXX is the standard in broadcast when using steadicam. I would, however, question myself very intensely about the need to go wireless. Nothing beats a coaxial cable when it comes to stability. 2. Use editing? Go to black on the live camera, then cross dissolve to your recorded footage, for example (as in Hitchcock's "Rope"). Essentially what you need is a "hidden cut". Google for examples!. Kit wise, yes, you need a vision mixer.