John Miguel King

Unless the director and producers want to go for a super shallow DoF Look. which is quite envogue. Or they don't have the money or the time or the power to light to a higher level. Or the DoP just wants razor thin DoF. I would argue it is the responsibility of the 1AC to work with what the DoP can give them to come to the look which production wants. Does it make sense all the time? No, of course not--- but often there are things, well beyond one's pay grade to consider.

A good 1st loves the thrill, simple as that. If he or she whines, well, he or she is no good and should stop using an undeserved job title.

BTW, an 18mm at T2.8 is dull. To me, it's where an S4 mini shows it simply doesn't cut it.

It could only happen by going raw and ACES on both. The difference between the fs700´s codec and the F55´s is inmense.

Phil is as bitter as me, i love it.

 

Dimmer is kind of useful but itd be easier to just turn bars off. DPs dont like Divas as theyre magenta and go mega magenta when dimmed.

 

If you were wanting to dim them youd have some precut nd. I have a metal thing i slide in the side to cover bulbs.

True. It'd be pointless to go around with a colorimeter instead of just throwing some nd. Although, one could sort of eyeball the minus green with a bit of trial and error off set.

As a defence, my imagination was under the unfluence of copious amounts of caffeine and a few days off when I wrote my previous comment.

Magenta, magenta, magenta, magenta...

Plus green, plus green, plus green, plus green...?

As a DIT, I'd recommend 640 ISO on the mk3. Due to the electronic processing, perfect multiples of 160 are cleaner, way cleaner than any other ISOs. Like... 640 is cleaner than 500 and so on.

As a budding DP... I've never done underwater, though I'd get the m40 and give myself all that extra leeway. It´d allow you to bounce on silver if you find it too hard, still keep a reasonable base stop and a better falloff. It'd also raise the shadows without looking fake.

I do wonder how water, and whatever particles one throws in, create fill. Very interesting theme.

I think you need to set base stop, ISO and fps first to get a reliable answer. Although if it's a 5d mk III I have the feeling you won't have much of remote focus and will want as much DOF as you can get?

A homebrand that had tube switches would be more use than a diva as the dimmers useless.

In which way are they useless?

A guy "with a five year old macbook copying stuff around" is a huge liability and I don't know a single DP or have worked on a job that would take that risk. I've known some reality folks that operate like that.....scary stuff. It's safe to say that the majority of real production here in the states requires even media managers to have some basic DIT skills.

Not too different this side, Kevin. Not too different at all. If only I was allowed to talk about the setups going on...

 

That's not true is it?

I thought it was still basically British?

Last I heard it was bought out by the Peel group (who also own Media City in Manchester)

 

???!!!

 

Freya

If Disney don't own in in paper, they do de facto. It's Disney jobs for a few years over there.

Feature I was on a few months ago managed to get some stage time there cos Star Wars got postponed.

Well sure, but in a pinch...

 

Also bear in mind that the concept of the DIT with a cart full of $50k worth of stuff making $750/day in rental alone is mainly a USA phenomenon. Here, a lot of people who are called DITs are really a guy with a five year old macbook copying stuff around, at which point Silverstack starts to look a bit expensive.

 

P

Not really. We call those guys Data Wranglers. No producer that values his or her short hours of sleep hires them.

I get hired by the DP, not production.

Just a thought.

I can't answer for James, but I'll remind you that Warner Bros bought and entirely refurbished Leavesden Studios, and Disney owns Pinewood.

And this is only the two bigggest players. There are many, many more.

James, have a look at ACES while you're at it. I'm in the process of shifting my workflow in that direction cos of what promises to be more control and consistency.

Wendy Light in a perfect world, innit.

I don't think that'd work since green woudl be mixed into many things as a component color, so you'd start effecting other parts of the image. Who knows though-- i often look at Resolve's tracking, and other motion tracking software and thing in time we'll just be able to "tell" it to remove this or that from the frame and it'll autotrack it around-- no green required.

It'd be to create the alpha layer, so in theory whatever happens to other elements in the frame is not important, as they'd remain unnafected in their layer. Now, if you are suggesting that it'd make they key harder because the green would not be clean, then it'd be a definite no go, i think.

Of course; but how often are you shooting Raw on a DSLR? The biggest issue I find with under-ing the chroma too much is the green goes from 1990s clothing and chroma key color, to oh, I might exist roughly as something else on set, and you get into doing garbage mattes. Though I constantly surprised by how easy it is to pull a key in something like After Effects. I remember when it was a big[ger] deal to do with specialized very expensive software/hardware.

My fault, I was theorising from the point of view of a perfect capture medium, not a DSLR. When I've done it myself (on Epic most of the times) I've played it safe and done just as you suggest, 1 stop under. But I do wonder if this is at all necessary with a true raw medium?. It'd be a matter of increasing gain and saturation in the green channel when pulling the key, which would then be solely limited by the noise being created and how this affects the key.

On the good side, finding the sweet spot on this after some testing, could result in very little spill. :D

I also prefer to kep my green screen 1/2 to 1 stop under to help control spill.

I'd say you can go even lower if you're raw/log and get away with it. I've seen it done with Arriraw at 3 - 4 stops under and the key pulled alright. I wasn't around for post so can't say fo sho.

And one last advice: have the entire subject in focus. Get your DOF calculator out and close the aperture until you're 100% certain the entire subject is sharp.

These are all, or should be, basic principles of greenscreen work. But with the added complexity of a bad codec you gotta be twice as careful.

Forum won't let me edit, here goes my full reply:

Throw some minus green in the kicker light. Maybe a quarter, not much. Even go as far as having two kickers, one on each side of the subject. It'll make the key a little bit cleaner. Plus also aim to expose the green at a similar stop to the skin tones, as that's where the codec retains more info. Definitely test until you find the right recipe. You want to expose the green as little as possible, so the spill is reduced. But as we're talking of a codec which does not retain density equally at all luminance levels, you'll be forced to ramp up this exposure until density is just right. It won't be too far from your skintones.

Oh, and get the subject as far from the green as possible! The closer it is the more green polution you'll get. Which in this case might be quite a lot due to the need to overlight the green.

Throw some minus green in the kicker light. Maybe a quarter, not much. Even go as far as having two kickers, one on each side of the subject. It'll make the key a little bit cleaner. Plus also aim to expose the green at a similar stop to the skin tones, as that's where the codec retains more info. Definitely test until you find the right recipe.

Film is the safest storage medium by quite a stretch. I recently did a job for Quantel where one of their top execs came with us. Amongst many other topics of conversation over the post-dinner drinks, storage was one of them. It seems the BBC still shoots film during events of national significance, such as Royal Weddings and the like, as it's still the cheapest and safest approach.

The usual approach is keeping proxies available in the network/raid, then conforming during the online from the rushes being held on LTO. LTO is way cheaper per gigabyte.

A terrible, terrible tragedy. It was a legitimate shoot, with a highly experienced crew, and worked out around the trains' schedules well in advance. I think the lesson to learn from it is, in any similarly localised potentially dangerous situation, if something goes wrong, and danger starts approaching just run - drop everything and run.

 

There isn't a prop or piece of equipment in this world worth injuring yourself over, let alone dying for. If they'd just left the bed and run straight away, they may have got far enough away from it to avoid this whole sad event.

Mark, with all due respect, it's 2014. There are a million ways to establish a clear channel of communication with the railway operator to find out when trains are coming or not. Not having done this is criminal negligence, pure and simple.

The only lesson to learn is to end dangerous situations once and for all, period.

And the long drive home after a long day on set preceeded by a long drive to set must also end. I am sick of driving with death sitting by my side so that production can save a few pennies in a hotel room. I know it's not the same thing, but I do wonder how many of our own die on the road.

I now believe it was down to the actor's skin reacting to the weather. :D

Although I haven't tested the internal NDs on the camera properly as of yet... IRND tend to shift the colour in one direction or another, even the Schneiders. So I'm like not too confident in using them internal NDs again until I know exactly which way the vectorscope goes.

So, I used internals and XAVC. Never again going the XAVC way if I can help it. Reason being not so much the quality of the footage, but how very annoying the whole Mlut business becomes once you go that way and start throwing some S&Q at it. Plus the ACES workflow being the way forward with RAW.

When in RAW, the camera is so much more logical, so much more Alexa like. You can change framerate... and that's it. No sudden disappearance of Mluts or whatever.

Spycer. Though it´s more than just copying software.

Resolve does the job.. Be careful with reel names and clip names, talk it through with the edit assistant. The fs700 returns to clip 00001 on each new card, which is totally annoying.