Sol Train Saihati

Are these posts gonna become an infuriating weekly regular? Please block them, they're not good for my blood pressure.

What's your budget mate? :D

Good Choice. Simple Answer - Stick the money in a savings account and keep your eye on the market! Bear in mind that most technology is moving at such a rate that almost any consumer product you buy today will be worth 35% of that in two years time. Read Websites, forums, magazines and attend the major shows and conferences. Ask the same question a hundred times. A lot of people will tell you that HDV is a flash in the pan. Personally, I believe that unless you're looking for a consumer/TV/ENG product you need a camera with a decent lens mount, although it depends entirely on your situation and way of making films. If its for a one-off project have you considered hiring an HDW-F900? The rental prices are really starting to drop however, as always, the lenses still cost a bomb. Don't forget that Aaton have an 800 foot mag option on their XTR prod, allowing ~ 22mins of shooting time, although that may not be long enough eh? Good luck to you, I'm sure whatever choice you make will, if it's thoroughly researched, be the right one

Is it my imagination, or has the new look forum slowed things down considerably? Anyway, we're shooting an interesting piece next week on S16, with a large number of kinos built directly into the set, mostly singles. We were happy as Larry, until someone mentioned to me that the kinos would probably blow out, leaving long tubes of fuzzy white light, rather than seeing the details and tubular shape of the fixture. To complicate things further we're shooting on Fuji F-250 with a bleach bypass on the neg, underexposing accordingly. This time we're lucky enough to be a able to get a full grading, although unexpected results on the neg are still pretty disconcerting. Does anyone have any experience with exposing this kind of situation? Of course, we could gel the kinos if neccessary, cannot really think of any other solution....

Please keep the advertising to leaflets and banners, once is enough.

An f 2.8 is one of the easier days for my AC's! If the spot meter says 1.4 and a half, I usually ask for a 2.8, although most of the time it just says "Eu".... :ph34r: I have a lot of faith in my Ac's, even if they do pull some funny faces now and then. Great stills JP, looks like you've done a beautiful job there. If you're up for starting a new thread would love some more info?

Thanks very much for your help all, hugely appreciated as always. I was convinced that Technicolor did'nt offer the service, but we gave them a shout and they're more than willing to process tests with both a 50% and 100% bypass respectively, (At extra cost of course, but nothing too extreme). Apparently they have been getting many more requests for this kind of work lately. Far from being gimmicky, I've always firmly believed that it's just another weapon in the arsenal, so it's good to hear they're being more open minded about the procedure. Especially for those of us who cannot usually afford a print. Ps. Cheers Stephen, I may just PM you about that Zurich house in the Future, these London rates are hurting my feelings. :blink:

Hello All! I'm photographing a S16 short next week and have been granted persmission to shoot stock tests. We would love to perform a bleach bypass tests on a couple hundred feet of film, but cannot find a lab in the UK willing to skip bleach on a S16 neg, does anyone know anywhere that offers the process? We may be willing to go outside the UK, to Europe or Scandanavia for the processing and perhaps for Telecine too if the price is right.

PS. Have a look through a gel catalogue and pick up a few meters of anything that takes your fancy. A combination of two or three colours on different lights usually does the trick for me, but try and stay away from predominant use of CTO. Although mathematically you're only bringing the colour temparature down, I personally find the results are often a bit sickly.

Any chance of shooting with a real fireplace? It will drive your AC mad, but with some fast lenses and a little supplementary fill you could certainly use real fire as a key source a la Barry Lyndon. Gas lanterns are also great way of making said fire a manouverable source however, as always, safety is a primary concern when dealing with pyrotechnics. There seem to be several schools of thought on replicating fire/candle light artificially. The two main questions are whether to make it a hard or soft source, the former being the most realistic but the latter the more flattering. You should also consider whether you want the source to flicker manically, Hollywood Style, or to have a more consistent output. There are some excellent articles here: http://www.theasc.com/clubhouse/tricks/tip-cc1.htm http://www.theasc.com/clubhouse/tricks/tip-rd1.htm Watch that scene from the Big Lebowski as a reference if you can, its a beautiful lesson in cinematography. Although the scene is explicitly tongue-in-cheek, Deakins uses a traditional method without getting anywhere close to the boundries of "cheese." Colour correction can be tricky and again there a many examples of fire/candlelight throughout film history coloured in different ways. Sometimes, depending on the production design and skin tone of the actors, the colour can be quite plain like "The Others" and at the other end of the spectrum we have vivid oranges, reds and yellows like "The Devil's Advocate" or "Apocalypse Now." As is usually the case when considering how to light a scene there are so many areas to think about and it largely depends on the tone and context of the scene. As a purist, I would usually go with Deakin's technique, supplementing the real fire with artificial light from the same direction, effectively "lighting the scene" with subsequently moody results. "One and a half stops underexposed, that's my bread and butter."

Yes! Hope-Jones is your man : www.vorticistfilms.com Excellent Kit, well looked after and a decent priced packaged. If you're a student, speak to Panavision, they're heading into their offseason so you could certainly swing a deal for an SR3 if you were nice enough - but don't take no for an answer! (If you're a student you can get a basic SR2 S16 kit for £100 + Vat.) There are other houses around who will also cut you a deal if their equipment would otherwise be on the shelf collecting dust. Post up on this forum for an operator/Ac's. Contrary to popular belief, I have also found some great people on www.shootingpeople.org. PM me if you're having any trouble with anything, time is tight as always, but will see what I can do to help you out. Good Luck Mate!

Hello All! We're shooting a feature in Belgium next month and we're prospectively looking for houses from which to hire our lighting package. It seems a wiser option to rent from there, rather than hauling it all over from England, the insurance alone would be a nightmare I'm sure, not to mention the Logistics of crossing several borders with a couple of vanloads of equipment. There a suprisingly large number of rental houses in Belgium, so rather than just pick one at random it would be nice to hear some first hand experiences. Have any of you shot over there and if so, which companies did you deal with, were they friendly, what did you hire, how were the prices, etc... These are a few we found after a quick search online: http://www.eye-lite.com/eye-lite_topic-lig...ower-rental.php - these guys have a very decent list of equipment http://www.k-light.be/en/index.html - less stock but have some essentials http://www.kftv.com/group-country-KG04-BEL.html - company listings in Belgium I must admit I'll be quite suprised to get any replies, but on this forum you never know eh?

Nice one Adam. You can see it here: Gorgeous Enterprises I hate to say it, but these guys are really on it when it comes to cutting edge advertising.

Like many others on this forum, I have a deep and desparate hostility for most forms of advertising however I must admit that this ad really blows me away. It's the one with the A8 inside a warehouse, being examined by a forensics team. Does anyone have any information on this ad; DP, Director, Camera, Lights, Stock etc... Everytime I see it my eyes feast on the visuals, especially in the cinema and it would be great to know how it was put together. Audi_Pic.bmp

When dealing with rental houses, its always quite obvious that their list price does'nt mean too much and a discount is always available, the question is: How much? Mainly working on low budget films, the money available to us is usually little to none and we always manage to convince the big houses to give us either around a 50%-65% discount or try and get equipment for free (rarely happpens). On higher budget features (Esp those in shot the UK) what kind of discount are you generallly looking for when compared to list, or do you not even bother asking? What's the cheekiest thing you've managed to get away with?

If you phone up your local kodak or fuji rep they'll help you out, although you will almost certainly have to load the film onto reels yourself. Like mmilford said, if you use a standard 35mm still camera the size of the frame won't match a 35mm cine frame as the film is exposed "lengthways", so it might be worth looking at a half frame camera... Also, depending on what stock you are using there are some pretty comparable still stocks on the market, again Kodak or Fuji will be able to help you out and for exposure tests this would be a good way to go. It might also be worth doing some research on the Kodak Look Management System and hiring the neccessary equipment although I'm not sure what the ultimate cost will be?

http://www.theasc.com/magazine/july05/charlie/index.html ! There are some pretty epic lighting setups in there...

a few more... I'll try and post up the digibeta transfers to compare if I can get hold of them.

A few more...

If I have learned one thing, it's stay away from S16 transfers to MiniDV, the results for me are often appalingly grainy and its seems to take the life out of the film. These stills are the raw stills from a number of different stocks both Kodak and Fuji, ungraded. I'll post up the stop and stock details when I get a minute to find the report sheets.

Has anyone else had any experiences with this camera? I would trawl the posts but searching for "235" isn't easy. What's the largest mag it can take, apparently a 400'? Does it also have a 3perf option? What would you say its biggest setback is as apposed to say, a 435 ex?

I think the main complication in the issue was a director who was not technically well versed! The producer and myself had made the mistake of telling him too much! After a lengthy meeting yesterday we finally made the decision to shoot on film with a transfer to DigiBeta, as you mentioned: So it's a return to my first love. Perhaps one day the money may come a long for a HD master to be made but I doubt it. Theoretically, supposing we were to transfer the selects, what would the average cost of a 10 minute S16 film to be transferred to HD? Ballpark... I have yet to DP a 16mm short which had the budget to even think about it! :lol: Surely the overall costs are considerably less than making a 35mm print, especially considering the possiblity of rolling off multiple HD copies?

I often find that a video assist saves the director and myself the hassle of them having to ask to look through the eyepiece. In England, especially with the older DPs, this kind of request can often lead to the cinematographer asking the Director to step aside for a moment for a private scoulding. There should implicitly be an unconditional trust between the two and a monitor (or three) can often be a tool for ensuring a smooth relationship. If a director must have total control of their shot, surely storyboards are a more effective method of communicating their ideas, rather then sitting in a tent 25 meters away saying "left a bit, right a bit" through a headset. A monitor should be treated like it's namesake, an "assist". If the director is not fully concentrating on directing his actors and the reality of the moment, I firmly believe that they are not doing their job. On a recent shoot, while two actors battled it out in an argument scene take after take, the director's presence was no more than a shout from the other room: "Action!" Only the people in the room could obviously feel that with each progressive take the actors were dramatically losing energy, a fact to which the Director seemed completely oblivious. In any fiction piece the actors should certainly not be treated as talking props, as they are the primary vehicles by which we are trying to tell our story and part of the decline of modern cinema may be due to the directors' preoccupation with the shot itself, when their first priority should be their players. Side Note: On my last shoot, our ingenius sound man had a small lcd monitor attatched to his rig, allowing him to check the safe position for the mic and for boom shadow, whilst quietly getting on with his job. Well, it impressed me anyway.

I've got a short film shoot coming up in a couple of weeks and been given the option of shooting on either S16 or HD, all costs included the prices are quite similar. I've got quite a bit of S16 stuff under my belt and am considering the move across for this one, although the director is quite adamant upon a "film look", he's been burned by HDV before and is very sceptical of HD as a whole. Now, condsidering the budget we've got, the best transfer we can get is almost certainly S16 to DigiBeta however we can get a deal on a supervised grading. Supposing you did an AB with with a HD master, both lit the same way, how would the look compare? Also, considering the best we can do as far as HD lenses is the Canon J17 x 7.7B IRSD Standard , would we be wasting our time with second rate glass? The Zeiss Digi Primes are well outside our budget, but if we go Super 16 at least we'll get a distagon set. His ultimate goal is the festival circuit, with the idea of having the best format for big screen projection. Do many festivals have the facilities to project HD or even Digibeta? My gut tells me that with this one, HD is the way to go, but I'm still torn as we may have to convert it to a lossy format anyway. Thoughts?

As a new cinematographer I must thank you for your time and effort in putting up this post, it gives a great insight into lighting set-ups, something we rarely stumble across even in the ASC.