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John Miguel King

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Everything posted by John Miguel King

  1. John Miguel King
    I haven't yet used Resolve on a multimonitor environment. It works straight away with a grade monitor provided there's a blackmagic interface present. Could be any of them, from the tiny tbolt to hd-sdi, to the largest and fattest decklink. As to the media page, it's not copying. It's a database with links to the footage. You are telling resolve which files you want to conform to. AAF, XML and CMX-EDL all work perfectly fine. It might be an issue with reel names?. However, provided you have the right filename and TC, Resolve gets it done. Even if a file won't conform automatically, you can just select the file in the media page, then right click on the placeholder within the timeline, and force conform to that file. It should work straight away. I prefer it to Baselight and Pablo, and these are NOT CHEAP.
  2. John Miguel King
    HAHAHAHA I wish. Well, big budgets are now being shot in London by default. We're all talking of a wave of nonstop work for the next ten years! It's going completely insane like nobody's ever seen it before. So the cost is not really an issue when you pass it on to the client. If it gets the job done, and it's fast, it's a no brainer. I think you had a bad experience with Resolve. I'm reading your post and there are a couple of misunderstandings there. I'll post them there if you want. I'm off today after a very long day on set yesterday. As to the app, there are a few doing that. Mind you, something simple, free and or cheap, that transcodes to the usual offline flavours could be helpful for those on no budget. But then, there are options out there for those that research. A simple rsync command line will get you a good copy, then resolve for offline.
  3. John Miguel King
    Shot Put Pro does the job. Not the best, but it works. And Davinci Resolve Lite is awesome, and free, for anything short form, so no, unless you're going to give it a grading interface... :D For everything else, there's Scratch, which is just perfect. I'd bring it to every job, if only clients understood the extra cost. Although, a little app that could automate it all, and was cross platform (no need for grading, or colour correction) would definitely help a lot of people out there.
  4. John Miguel King
    No problem Phil. We're seeing paradigm shifts on this area at a rate of once a year, at least! I´m forced to keep up cos I like to pay my rent on time. ShotPutPro has been replaced by Pomfort Silverstack. MD5 is now legacy, with MHL being the algorithm of choice. MHL signs and seals the copy, which I can then use to tell my clients "what's on that folder is exactly what was on the card". Silverstack also has advanced metadata capabilities, useful for naming rules, logging, transfer to ALE, quality control... It's a Data Wrangler software solution in one single place. I agree, cables are abundant on a laptop solution. However, because Thunderbolt is the PCI bus, you can end up with only two cables, then take these to your rack of choice, and expand from there. I prefer laptops because they clutter my cart less, allowing a big 24" Grade monitor and a waveform to sit comfortable, so I can actually do real DIT work. Also, up until the new Mac Pro, the old Mac Pro was a bit of joke. Huge but underpowered. Sadly, very sadly, software on Windows is scarce and the laptop hardware lacks crucial expansion slots. I've been building my computers since my teens, and it enrages me not being able to keep doing it now. A hackintosh just wouldn't look right... and there's bound to be conflicts with every OSX upgrade :(
  5. John Miguel King
    Thanks David, I appreciate you taking your time to give such a cogent explanation to an apprentice. I've recently ditched a mistake i used to make (or what it seems in this stage of my learning) which was filling from camera side. I just almost never manage to get it right! It's this the reason why I'm tending now to mixing sources from the same spot. Seen it in a couple of jobs with great DPs and the penny dropped... Thanks again.
  6. John Miguel King
    And Luke, don't buy anything. It can all be hired for very cheap indeed. ;)
  7. John Miguel King
    Phil, I do this for a living, and trust me, TBOLT expansion chassis works perfectly fine. I use it on commercials and long form. Even for RED transcodes as long as you've the latest Retina and a Redrocket. The Belkin Hub is spreading like wildfire at the moment. Jigsaw 24 simply doesn't have enough stock to keep up with the demand. The only situations in which I'd recommend bringing the big one are these: - Multicamera transcodes. In 99% cases best go big one, however, I've gone retina MBP with up to three Alexas at prores 2k 4444 and it was absolutely fine. The intermediate drive was an 8 bay RAID 6, and I had my assistant operating it whilst I attended the three camera crews. The name of the game was "feed the monster". We managed to ingest, verify and transcode with a one light grade close to 1 tb of 2K prores 4444 per day. Staying only 30 minutes after wrap. We were real proud of this feat. - Anything RAW, with the exception of a single Red camera, in which case red rocket on expansion chassis goes just fine. What I've discovered is that the number of cores does matter greatly in the retina. The moment you have 4 verified copy processes in the background plus one transcode the GPU stops maxing its FPS due to the processor not being able to feed the GPU. The retina is a real beast. And the moment apple finally (as in they'll never do it) decides to release thunderbolt GPU drivers, even single camera RAW will be doable with an external chassis. But for data wrangling... even an i5 Macbook Air with the right expansion chassis and cards, or hub, is overkill. And yes, I'd rather have a Linux or Windows going on in a bespoke computer. But ShotPutPro, the only pro verified copy appication in Windows is slow slow slow indeed. Silverstack beats it to a pulp every single time. And the list of OSX only DIT apps is larger, way way larger then the alternatives. Not what I personally like, but it's the status quo. :( My humble opinions.
  8. John Miguel King
    Can we just leave it at... You like film? Great! I hope you can shoot on film whenever you want and make films the way you want. I like digital? Great! I hope that you hope that I can shoot digital whenever I want and make films the way I want. All else, such as this looks better than that, that looks better than this, the je ne se quai of film, the sharpness of digital... they´re like children. My children will always look way more beautiful to me than yours, and the other way round. As dirty Harry said: "Opinions are like butts, everybody has one" I just can't understand this quasireligious battle on one system vs the other. They're tools. Period. We're craftsmen. Period. Enjoy what you do and let others enjoy what they do. Period. After all, we're there to capture talent that creates drama. We are not that important nor should we be.
  9. John Miguel King
    Try the GBCT too. They're very nice people and will sure guide you in the right direction.
  10. John Miguel King
    So you reckon mixing hard and soft would be unnecessary in a case like this? My guts tell me soft is needed to raise ambient but maintain direction within what's believable. Thanks a lot.
  11. John Miguel King
    Two cloned G-Raids is essentially RAID 10. x
  12. John Miguel King
    Hi all, I´m grading a promo I shot on the F55 and I keep seeing wild shifts in the saturation of the red channel that's making skintones jump all over the place. First, I wonder if I'm the only person finding this issue. Second, I keep getting opposite views as to the nature of the camera's internal ND. Sony won't confirm they are IRND, which sort of says they aren't. This would be a very plausible explanation. Another explanation that would compound the issue, and I'm reading this article by Art Adams, would be the way the camera renders colour. Anybody else out there has come accross this issue? Sort of makes the camera unusable, no?
  13. John Miguel King
    Spend a couple of years as a camera trainee in the real productions then make your next move. If these jobs don't happen on a daily basis where you live, then stop living there and move where they happen. Search for trainee schemes in the union and guilds. Ask, chase and beg assistants to train you. There's only so much you can learn on your own. The industry's been going for a century, that's where knowledge and a path towards your goal exist. Don't give up! It's the best thing ever when after years of struggling to pay the bills one day you find yourself driving your relatively new car to a set staffed with friends, and that day you're blowing some $hit up... or filming some emotion. You might not be the DP that day, but you'll be part of the team. :D :D
  14. John Miguel King
    You need to assess the weakest link in the data flow. The G-Drives and FW are the definite ones in this case. G-Drives are safe for storage but horribly slow for transfer, they peak at 100 MB/s on a good day. FW peaks at 80 MB/s. Add to this the checksum, which doubles your time, and you're looking at 40 MB/s total in the very best of all possible scenarios. It looks like the wrong setup, to be honest. You need to ditch the G-Drives for G-Raids, and go either USB3 and/or eSata. Those drives are so slow they won't be able to actually play the footage. It will all, however, work as you have planned it, but it'll be dreaduly slow. Make sure you get plenty of redmags to keep the camera rolling and arm yourself with patience. How many USB3 does your laptop provide? Belkin has a nifty little thunderbolt hub that provides 3 USB3 and another thunderbolt. It's the cheapest option around, and with TBolt being a direct connection to the PCI Bus you won't have the slightest problem, bottleneck or conflict with it. Patch an esata through the belkin via tbolt and sonnet's expresscard reader. This way the weakest link shall be your drives, with esata2 (what the redmag reader has) being the second slowest at 3 gigabits, and usb3 the third slowest at 5 gigabits. It's what happens when producers buy the drives!
  15. John Miguel King
    The magic words are "camera on" & "camera off". And then your grip comes to the rescue like the knight in shining armour he is. Love those guys.
  16. John Miguel King
    I'd say... don't allow so called common wisdom or practice define how you relate to your director. When shooting something what matters most, and what you will enjoy most, are the relationships you develop with your director and all the other lovely people on set. Each director is a different person, hence the relationship you will build with her/him/them shall be unique and different to the ones you build with others. Follow your instict and don't forget it's a group effort. As a DP/cinematographer your responsibility does not stop with getting a technically correct image or move, you are telling the story. From this fact one thing derives, the one I personally enjoy most, and it's that you are expected to have a vision for the film just as the director has. You are the Director too, in fact, you should have a solid grasp of the editing and of the visual flow, so that your boss can focus and all the other gazillion aspects of the production. Actually, and I'm talking from personal experience, I appreciate a director that can and wants to operate. It'll give me a much firmer understanding of what the grammar and style of the film are, an understanding which is very difficult to communicate with words. Sometimes, and here's when I do enjoy most, this switching of the roles leads to a healthy competition to see who gets the best shot. Look at this picture, these two have known each other since high school and they're creating the cinema of the future. Do you think they care who operates what and when? Their relationship is way beyond what the rule book says it shoud be! And maybe that's why they keep creating such stunning work...
  17. John Miguel King
    Certainly gels. It's virtually impossible to light and shoot with the same colour on all lights and then pick and choose the colour of each in the grade. You'd need a whole lotta vfx, 3d models, relighting and compositing to simply somehow approach that look, and it would never look right.
  18. John Miguel King
    It depends on what type of moon and were the moon is in relationship to the window-character. A full moon casts hard shadows. In this case, I'd mix hard and soft. Say, for example, two vistabeams outside the window for ambient and an HMI fresnell also outside the window and aimed at the character for shaping. Maybe a 2.5kw would be more than enough? I'd place it as far and as high as I could from the window so as to keep shadows parallel and falloff unnoticeable. Also, I wouldn't bother about getting the moonlight colour right on set unless you've some practicals. I'd keep the vistabeams slightly colder than the HMI, which would be my whitepoint, then play with diffusion (very very tiny indeed!) and exposure from the fresnell to shape the character. You could definitely downgrade the luminaires in cost/power, although these sources will give you a good basic stop and a falloff that's easy to play with. As for fill, I'd move a poly in and out according to the size of the shot. Mind you, this is all for a low key and high contrast situation.
  19. John Miguel King
    There's no need for 4:3 to shoot anamorphic in the F55 and F5. All you need to do is calculating your new field of view. There's even a desqueeze option in the EVF settings.
  20. John Miguel King
    How many angels fit in a pin's head?
  21. John Miguel King
    I've an exterior shoot next weekend on Epic and I'm concerned about the relationship between noise and highlight detail. Mostly because we want to shoot 300 fps, and this pushes the camera to the extreme. I've been looking at these filters, mostly the soft contrast, but I've found very little information on how they affect sharpness. We do want a lot of sharpness. But I also want to keep as much density as possible and no clipping. Weather's probably going to be very windy (London in October...) which makes frames a no go. Also cos I'll be on a rickshaw. Any thoughts or experiences on this issue of sharpness? I'll be testing the combo on Monday but I do wonder if there are other recipes for this. Cheers!
  22. John Miguel King
    Interesting info. The two other reasons why I prefer 4k are encoding ratio (4:1 on 5k vs 3:1 on 4k) and keeping distortion within the normal parameters. However, I just did a short that's 99% Greenscreen with Epic and SuperSpeeds and the key pulled as smoothly in 5k as it did in 4k. I had to go to 5k at times as the studio wasn't deep enough for a LS on 50mm, which made 35mm at 5k the best compromise between distortion and coverage. Just theorising here, but going back to the adapters, if I find one that extends the coverage and has little or no coatings, it could just leave the SB's flares as they are? Methinks it's test time!
  23. John Miguel King
    Thanks Stephen, I feared that would be the answer! I tend to use 5k as a bonus when I need that bit more coverage, preferring the 4k as it keeps the calculations simple and any vignetting fears as far as I can. I did a bit more research yesterday and I thought one solution would be the usual fisheye adaptor so normal in broadcast. Do you have any experience with these on s35? Thanks!
  24. John Miguel King
    So, been googling for a while and I haven't come upon any information on this. I am planning a shoot on Epic + Super Baltars, until here all good, however the director's asked me for POV and Snorricam shots. This does look like a job for 8mm lenses or wider. Now, as we all now the whole point of this glass is the flares, so I need a fisheye that cuts with them. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This job is a step up from me, my first DP feature film credit (even if I'm just the pickups DP!) Thanks in advance
  25. John Miguel King
    It is. The production designer stole my budget, all the lamps are borrowed. However, I do have a pretty comprehensive set of filter for the matte box.
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