Matt Butler

Ken, check out this site, it specialises in dSLR applications. http://www.timescapes.org/ (disclaimer : I subscribe to that site.)

I must order one of the shoulder rigs for my home-gym!

That 200' magazine has me intrigued. The standard ones I remember used to have plastic cores on the rawstock supply spindle (the film was wound on plastic cores) and another on the take up spindle. They were fiddly to load and lace up 'cause of the tight fit inside the mag. The magazine pictured seems to have the rawstock on a metal flange with a thin spindle fit? Perhaps the hospital technicians bulk loaded the rawstock from large 1000' loads. I gather the cameras were used to photograph directly off early cathode ray tube displays connected to medical equipment of the day to keep a permanent record of the patients disposition.

The Tri-Vision gadget looks interesting. I'm a keen "in-camera" fan ..... are you able to post a couple of examples on how it works from the instruction manual. (that is of course if the manaul includes them) In my collection I have a wind up clockwork wipe mechanism that attaches to the front of a lens. It gives you the choice of adjustable straight,circular,serrated wipe in/out patterns. The 40's, and 50's were the age of the great machinists and neat camera gadgets!

There is another more limited variation of what I would call Tricolour photography where you expose the same piece of colour neg sequentially through a red,blue and green filter. After each pass the lens is capped and the film rewound to the start of the shot, resulting in multi exposing three times - once obviously for each filter. It is OK for locked-off, controlled situations, but live-action/talent shots would give a coloured ghosting fx. A tricolour short (4.5MB) I photographed a lifetime ago is at this link: www.vimeo.com/1399698

Regarding The Chaser's APEC prank I believe the charges were dropped on a technicality - they had video evidence (naturally) of a policeman letting them through after a cursory glance at their fake ID's that had words like JOKE etc. in BIG type, and the Chaser team themselves turned back and were NOT ordered by the authorities to do so. The New South Wales state government, the Australian Federal Police and the New South Wales Police Service/Force were probably relieved that the whole embarrasing affair would go away. The same clowns - the State government that is - quietly passed an "anti-annoyance" law designed to stop this activity and people wearing T- shirts with anti religous sentiments during the Pope's current tour here! Civil libertarians and most Sydneysiders were outraged, and the laws were challenged in court and were correctly dumped. A small win for democracy.

I guess we are limited by the current weight of even "light-weight" 35mm/65mm cameras. Once you start putting on all the accesories necessary to get the shot, the weight factor goes up and therefore you need a solid camera support system to achieve this. For those capturing timelapse with digital SLRS, I expect we will see a new range of light weight motorised pan/tilt/track systems?????.... if the market for them is there. These lightweight rigs may already be here.... please let me know. My "landscape dolly" sometimes gets used on TVC's etc. and can cope with a serious amount camera weight mounted on it. It runs on traditional Elemack track and was configured to run in nasty weather. In that regard the camera support technology hasn't really changed that much since BARAKA. That crew appeared to use a custom powered platform type dolly running on regular narrow-gauge track, driven by a custom computer program.

Getting back on topic, do you fellow posters, especially Tom and Joe, have multi axes timelapse systems ( eg. Pan, Tilt, Track) ? Can they run in real-time as well? Would you mind posting a photo of your rig(s) .... and what software do you use to control them? The rig featured on the MOCOMAN link appeared to have a friction style track drive. I use what I call my "landscape-dolly" : a real simple bicycle chain driven, wooden platform dolly with a built on euro-mount and tripod leg retainers. Originally it was built for one-pass time lapse work but the guys who built it over engineered it and it does a great job for multi-pass work if needed! I can attach a photo of it in action later if any one is interested.

Christian, Thanks for the info on the Ultrascope telephoto lenses. I wonder how many sets of the telephoto lenses were fabricated? I recently purchased a Cinepanoramic anamorphic lens adaptor with its lens support accessories (French) for a bargain price at a garage sale: it looks like its shooting days are probably over but it will make a great paperweight!

>This is an entirely different consideration to the DVD you then put the material on; it's perfectly possible to make an NTSC DVD containing carefully converted NTSC material which won't play on anyone's DVD player, regardless of these other considerations. Thanks Phil, In regard to the DVD do you mean the quality of the actual disc or the ability of the player? ......and are domestic US TV's multi-standard?

Here in Australia we are PAL standard. The problem I believe for DVD playback in the US is the fact that most of the actual monitor/TV sets are NTSC. Most modern TV sets in OZ can display PAL, SECAM,and NTSC signals. I went through the whole standards conversion PAL to NTSC for a DVD project and my recipient couldn't play it on their TV set. (NTSC). Must have been a crook conversion. My solution was to send it as a mid rez QuickTime.mov file and they could then play it succesfully on their Mac Cinema display monitor. My question is - are TV sets in the US multi standard like ours are here, or only NTSC capable??

A colleague of mine has a set of 2 anamorphic long lenses. They are 400mm and 600mm focal length, both f5.6. Did Isco manufacture 200mm and 300mm spherical lenses and fit rear anamorphic adapters inside? Were "telephoto'' anamorphic lenses common, as most of the prime A-lenses discussed here are in the 40mm to 135mm range? Thanks for the info on the Cinemascope newsreel/low-budget adapter, my colleague has one of those as well and I was always curious about its' application.

Hi Rob, I've been using Eyemo's filming a short project about the Sydney Harbour Bridge for my university post-graduate course. (Try lugging a Mitchell GC and accessories up to to the top of the main arch - my AC did once and it almost wiped him out - never again!) It is somewhat ironic that a 60 year old WW2 camera operated by a cameraperson of a certain age is photographing a 75 year old bridge mainly in time lapse. Has anyone ever modified an Eyemo to run in reverse? There is just something about Eyemo's. I have attached a link to a short clip from an offline edit of the project for your interest. http://www.vimeo.com/1121373

I purchased that particular Eyemo from a local special fx company. It had no accompanying documentation but it appears that it had been adapted for single frame use with a high torque 12v motor and internal micro swiches for shutter open, mid-position, and shutter closed positioning. The motor has a unique "dumb-default" mode of running continually at 1fps if the timing electronics in the intervalometer controller fails, as I found out unexpectedly on a shoot. It is one of my favourite cameras to always have loaded and on standby in the boot/trunk of the car to capture that unusual time lapse shot that otherwise you'd kick yourself for because you didn't have a camera with you at the time.

Not sure if this belongs here but after all it is about a 35mm camera. I have a couple of these Eyemo warhorses with contemporary optics and motors. The resulting images after a Spirit telecine transfer to HD are superb (2048 x 1556). I have been messing around with digital stills cameras as well but have found the time involved in digitising, rendering and re-migrating large motion files to be significant. Ironically a lot of the material I shoot is time-lapse so spending additional time in post is time I can't afford. ( in more ways than one) I'm currently biased towards film, especially after watching Smoke operators retouch dead pixels and the like from digital accquisation technologies. Time for some comments?

Paul, in post#6 you mentioned you had a stepper motor option. If the software/ chipset controlling the motor speed through the motor drive can be easily re-programmed, then set it for 23.976 fps. That should get you out of trouble with sync. drift.

My apologies - the quality of the previous Youtube download is dreadful! Try this version please. http://www.vimeo.com/1017193

If you want subtle colour in your stars you have to shoot a couple of days either side of a new moon. Otherwise the excessive moonlight over exposes the night sky and you end up with white points for stars. The material from Baraka looks like it has been shot on tungsten film with no 85 correction for the reflected "daylight" from the moon several days on either side of a full moon. Attached is a clip of the Milky Way I shot under "dark sky" conditions. ie. no moon.

A couple of years ago I shot a 35mm comparision test between a 50mm stills lens( Canon FD series) and a commercially availabled pinhole lenscap on the same camera set-up. Nowhere near as elegant as Patrick's flowers, there is more technical information included in the the clip. http://www.vimeo.com/1000070 The results were a little too soft for my taste, but with further testing/tweaking and probably a smaller pinhole ......well who knows

What would be the safest angle you could tilt a video projector off level before the lamp blew, and I understand you can also operate them upside down then correct the inverted image in the set-up. Commercial LCD &DLP projector mounts give a +20/-20 degree range. . I remember Kodak Carousel 35mm slide projectors didn't like too much tilt before you lost the lamp. (I have been using mirrors to deflect the projected images into extreme low angle set-ups for a short experimental film.)

If your project is research based, have you checked the availability of the books listed below, from either a good library or 2nd hand from a site like Amazon? ILM, The Art of Special Effects Thomas G Smith ILM, Into the Digital Realm Mark Cotta Vaz These two books contain a lot of interesting info on ILM.

I have a background in motion-control and timelapse work. A few years back a TVC director asked me how to shoot a circular timelapse move around a moving vehicle. One thing led to another and I presented a technical paper with test footage dealing with the Radial Rig Mk 3 at a SMPTE conference held in Sydney in 2005. The Mk 3 was fine for slow driving speeds and timelapse work, but you know how directors are - they always want more! So back to the drawing board and the result was the Mk 4 with a more powerful motor drive system, preset adjustable boom length and camera height, as pictured on the crewpix site . When it gets up to speed it is capable of a 6 second 360 degree continual move around a moving vehicle (STAND WELL CLEAR!) as well extreme slow speeds for time lapse work. (The Mark 1 and 2 versions were great learning exercises...... learning what not to do.) I am fortunate to work with professional colleagues who assisted in the design and fabrication.

Looking at the actual rushes/dailies was a little strange because of the fact that when you *shoot by twos* the even numbered frames were exposed for the highlights ( the bright full moon disc) and the odd numbered frames were exposed for the shadows (the albedo/earthshine reflection). This combination viewed during rushes projection gives you the effect of slightly under exposed shadow detail with washed out highlights resulting from the gross over exposure from the illuminated moon sectors occuring in the odd numbered sequence of frames.( The shadow detail) How ever the even numbered frames hold the correct exposure for the fully lit moon and allow the fx folks to also pull a matte of their choice to achieve a realistic comping/blending of the two sets of exposure. (it's a sort of poor mans version of Extended Dynamic Range technique.) It was a time lapse sequence which allowed exposure adjustment between frames. That's how it worked and it was OK.