Mei Lewis

HLG is intended as a delivery format, not to be graded or have luts applied to it. Alister explains it in the first few minutes of this video He has a lot of luts for various purposes and they usually work on al cameras with the same profiles e.g. slog2 whether from ana7s or a higher end camera. He has a lut that converts log to hlg ie from a capture format to a delivery format. Maybe that is what you are thinking of.

Could use a Sony fx6 for this shot? That whole camera is less expensive than the cinefade. Not sure how easy it is to vary the nd in realtime or remotely.

Yes you’re right. I just tried it. While it does give a straight on shot without a camera reflection, the perspective is still clearly from a point not in front of the mirror. I was just trying to work out camera height in that Bond shot. Providing the camera doesn’t move and they don’t lean across the table it would be very easy to paint out the reflection of the camera in post because that area of the frame would not change over time.

I think a tilt shift lens could be used for a similar effect to this, allowing the camera to be positioned so its reflection doesn’t show, while having the image look square on. Could also crop a much wider angle lens that is pointing straight at the wall but above the line of the too of the mirror.

You may be able to achieve the effect using the effect described at this link, with additionally the blurred layer on top of the non-blurred version and the blurred layer set to only show its brightest areas

I don’t think anyone else has mentioned this yet: which usb port you plug a drive into on your computer may have a significant effect on transfer speed. This is even for ports of the same generation(usb 1,2 or 3). I believe it’s because of how the ports are connected internally, sometimes the bandwidth is shared between more than one port. You can probably use black magic’s free disk speed checker to see if there is any difference between ports on your computer. —- BTW, as Phil said, having power supply isn’t much of a guide to a drive being fast. Some of the fastest external drives are now ssds without psus, e.g Samsung T5.

Is there such a thing as an industry standard for organising the files related to a specific film or project? Here's a screenshot of what I use. Within the video folder I will create sub folders by shooting date, with the date format such that they sort properly when sorted by filename e.g. 2020 12 4 2020 12 5 2020 12 7 'Projects' contains the editing program files, so e.g. with Premiere it will be the .prproject file etc.

Some Sony cameras allow you to stream directly to an iPhone/iPad/android app called 'Imaging Edge Mobile', or third party apps like 'Field Monitor'. https://www.adamwilt.com/fieldmonitor/ There is a delay, fine for a director to watch on but probably too much for an operator in most circumstances. I often use it to do 2 camera interview setups, where I can be at one camera and view and change settings on the other using the app on my phone.

That BTS video is stunning. I knew they were doing this sort of production, but I had no idea they were using it that much. The shots in Werner Herzog's office - I didn't think for a moment they weren't in a real space. Wow.

Somehow this is the first Spike Lee film I've seen, thought it was great. I watched it just after seeing one of the Marvel films, and the juxtaposition really highlighted the differences between the two types of films. I like both types, but BlaKkKlansman felt like it had a voice.

This issue is partly that the model for a 'good' film is now more widely understood than it was 50 years ago so more people use it when making films. Partly that people understand film better (especially ppl on cinematography.com, and especially as we age) and so see the tricks. Partly that 'film' is now an old medium and most of the fresh snow has been broken. People have been making 2hr, single story, complete arc narrative fiction for a hundred years now.

I love games, I just wish they'd leave the cutscenes and stories out. When I want to play, I want to play, not watch.

Obligatory Cine Tracer mention: https://www.cinetracer.com/

What others have said is true, the right lens for the right job. Having said that, I like to get the camera in physically close, and wide lenses enable that.

Not sure where to post this question, hoping it fits in the VFX forum. I'm trying to work out how to convert 100fps, 1/100s footage to 25fps, 1/50s footage inside Premiere, but I'd be willing to try other software. I should be able to do it like this: If the frames are numbered 1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4,1,2,3,4,.... and so on then I need to take frames 1 & 2, average them and combine into a single frame, then ignore frames 3 and 4 and so on. So every four frames of input generate a single frame of output, with effectively twice the shutter time, which is what I want. My first step towards this was to make sequence inside premiere at 100fps where the digits 1,2,3,4... appear each for one frame. This would allow me to very clearly test any method for converting 100fps->25fps. I've made this as a sequence, now I need to get it out of premiere into a video file, so I can then re-import it and test. BUT premiere refuses to export anything about 60fps. I've searched online and in several places Adobe says this is because professionals don't want anything about 60fps - which is so wrong it's silly. Anyway, does anyone know a workaround? Or does anyone know how to do the conversion I'm after directly, without making this intermediate test file? Thanks!

You're right of course. I wasn't really thinking of Deakins compared to Yedlin, more Deakins compared to the many younger/newer DPs who would like to emulate him to some degree (myself included). Whatever Deakins or Yedlin do to make Bond/Star Wars look so good probably needs a lot of re-thinking if applied to an unknown actor standing in a field on a wet day in Wales(!) ---- I'm really not bothered if something looks 'filmic' or not, I just want it to look good. Based on his camera choices Deakins doesn't want his work to look filmic either. If he did he would simply shoot film. He wants it to look the way it does when it comes out of an Alexa.

That’s true as far as camera settings go, but you don’t have to play a video back in the same way it was recorded. If you record with the shutter open all the time (a 360 degree shutter) then on play back you can choose to have any shutter time that is a multiple of the shooting shutter time, even if that comes out to greater than 1/(frame rate)s. Do it by multiplying the frames together. E.g. you can have a shutter time of 1second while shooting at 25fps with a shutter time of 1/25th second. . I did that using blend layers in Premiere but since learned there’s a plug in built into after effects that can do the same thing

I don’t understand what you mean by ‘clean’. Can you explain that in another way? The commonality between the images to me is the slightly retro fashions, mostly warmed up a bit colour wise, and slightly lifted/low detail blacks (crushed then lifted?)

I don’t want Yedlin to reveal his process so I can use it. I don’t especially like the film look. I just think his argument would be stronger if he was more open. Plus I love maths ? Roger Deakins is very interesting in this regard. There’s an interview he did for Arri related to using one of their cameras for his latest film 1917 where he says he wants the camera to show things as his eye sees them, and he doesn’t like artefacts that occur in the image plane like lens flares. I *guess* that would extend to things like depth of field, noise/grain and a film-like contrast curve which are all unrealistic (compared to the reality our eyes-brains see). I think what’s going on is, he doesn’t need to make the things he photographs look awesome, because they already look awesome, because of set design, locations, acting and yes lighting etc for which he is directly responsible. I feel like most of the things I get to shoot could do with some help to look more interesting, and so resort to color correction, certain lens effect, unnatural lighting etc.

Yohoho!

I just chanced on this video Which shows a quick way to examine the field curvature of lens using a photo of some tarmac and photoshop's 'find edges' filter. It actually refers back to another lens rental blog post https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/11/stopping-down-some-bargain-primes-and-zooms/ Here's the example the video makes (it's dark and raining outside here, will directly test myself another time).

Thanks Dom! That wheel comparison has really cleared up my understanding of what tangential and sagittal refer to in this case. I think!

Also, I *think* the horizontal axis is the distance across the sensor from its centre, and 20mm for that makes sense, because 40mm is roughly the diagonal of a full frame sensor, for which the .cp2 lenses are designed. But what's the vertical axis? It's described as the focus position in mm, is that referring to distance in front of and behind the sensor plane? If that is the case, can we assume similar pattern out in front of the camera, where we can actually measure things? I really want to be picturing these charts like this, but I'm fairly sure this is wrong!

Here's one pf the images related to field curvature from Greg's link to lens rentals. https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/11/testing-lenses-best-individual-focus-mtf-curves/comment-page-1/ I think I understand most of the rest of that page, but not this diagram. Specifically I don't get why there are two graphs. What do 'tangential' and 'saggital' refer to here? This page https://www.optics4kids.org/what-is-optics/refraction/aberrations explains the terms but I can't see how they relate to these graphs. It seems to me that because a lens is circular only one graph would be needed, showing information about focus at various distances out from the line that goes through the center of the lens. I had previously thought that's what the left hand graph was, because I'd seen similar graphs on their own. But now I don't know!

Yes, the closer the more it's an issue. But this isn't about measuring from the ground or not. The intention with my original post is that everything is happening at roughly the same distance from the ground, which is fairly typical, the camera is most often at roughly eye level and it's the eyes that need to be in focus. So distances are measured in a plane parallel to the ground and at roughly camera/eye height. That's why I indicated 'top view' on both my pictures. I'm ignoring to up-down dimension completely, for simplicity, and because I think it's mostly not significant.