Michael Giannaccio

My advice, hire a dedicated sound mixer for your projects. It's cheaper than buying the gear, you get someone who's specialty is sound, and most of them have really great mics and gear. If theres no way you can hire someone, make sure your mic placement is right. The Rhode mic's aren't all that bad for most things so it may be a placement issue. Refer to what Brian said about the placement.

This is a decent deal but to be honest the lenses in this kit are absolute garbage and you'll want to throw them out the window soon after you get the camera. I would go ahead and get the body from a known retailer such as B&H, then invest in 2 or 3 good quality lenses. I'm a fan of Ziess optics but you can go with the canon EF lenses which are much cheaper and get similar results. As David said your Rebel glass won't cover the sensor unless you're in the telephoto range (just like putting a 16mm lens on a 35mm camera). Also get some nice high speed sandisk CF cards to record to so your footage stays un-compromised, the last thing you want is to shoot all day and find out one of your cards has failed. Also if you can afford it, get Z-Finder or a monitor so you can see your focus. Since the camera doesn't have a tape hook its impractical to measure focus and a finder or a monitor will help you speed the focus pulling process up. That may have been more info than you were looking for but I hope this helps.

Alexander has a valid a point about the colors becoming greyed out and again this goes back to what you're shooting. For example the video I posted a link to earlier was shot on an overcast day where there isn't much contrast to begin with. It seems that shooting superflat in this scenario would be a bit ridiculous since the lighting is totally flat. I have gotten great results with both the superflat and the neutral settings that Alexander described so both are a really great option.

It really is a matter of what you are shooting but I feel that in most situations you should shoot with Neutral or better yet a preset called "Superflat". I like to shoot "Superflat" and then color correct the image in post to get the most dynamic range out of the camera. Here is a link that demos the setting and includes a link to download the file. http://vimeo.com/7256322.

As Jacob said the Black Magic converter box is the way to go. You can attach this to your rig and run the HD-SDI to most any professional on-camera and field monitor. If you are looking for a cheaper different solution I would say that an HDMI splitter may work if you're willing to deal with unruly HDMI cables.

Thanks for all your help.

Also if I were to choose at 200T what would be a good ASA to rate that at?

Thanks for the info, very helpful. When we did the transfer we didn't have the budget for a supervised transfer so we did a best-lite and I failed to give them further instruction not thinking, so it is very possible that they increased exposure to bring it back. I like having a supervised transfer for obvious reasons but hey what can you do on a low budget. The overall look to the last film was a very high contrast look and it had a vintage look to it so the grain really worked well. I will rate the 500T at 320 and shoot film tests if I can squeak the extra cash out of production, if not then I'll go ahead and shoot the film that way anyhow since it seems to be a common practice. Thanks again for your help.

I recently shot a film on Kodak's 7219 and what I did was under expose by a half stop to a stop to make the grain pop out a little bit more but what I got was a ton of grain. I'm not sure if this happened in the transfer or if it happened because of under exposure, luckily it worked very well for the piece and the director loved it. I am shooting another film next month on the same stock but I want to lessen the appearance of grain. I have heard that over exposing will activate the smaller grain structure in the film thus reducing the appearance of grain. I was thinking of rating the 500T as 320 ASA or 250 ASA but I am not quite sure what this will yield and I'm still trying to get the budget to perform some film tests. Has anybody had success doing this? If so what did you rate your film's ASA to be? Thanks, Mike

David, Thanks that is extremely helpful to know I'll give it a try. I also liked the look of your work with "Manure" specifically the look of the 5th picture down on the website that look is what I am trying to achieve but of course with the daylight replaced by the moonlight.

Thanks that is extremely helpful to know I'll give it a try.

Thanks for the reply, I totally understand where you're coming from with the posting thing and I appreciate your help. I'm looking for harsh moonlight shadows, and I would like a slightly desaturated slivery-blue moonlight so it does't look hokey like so many moonlight scenes do. I'm weary of waiting until post to desaturate the blue HMI look so I have been searching for a good gel to use in conjunction with the HMI to give it a better look. A friend of mine mentioned that steel green would work, I've also heard moonlight grid cloth works well I'll have to run some tests and experiment but if you have had success with a certain gel I would love to know. The best way I can describe how I would like the practicals to render is something close to the warm orange color in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". I attached a photo to something that is a similar look to how I would like the practicals to look. I realize that for that film it was most definitely done in the DI process with color correction. I think that warming the practicals within the frame with some 1/4 cto and the desaturating in the color correction suite and adding that yellow look will get me the look I'm looking for. I don't have a lot of experience with color correction and this is the first project where it will be my responsibility hence all of the uncertainty. The picture I attached represents the contrast ratio I am going for as well as the quality of light (harshness) and color as well obviously there is no example of moonlight in this but the moonlight look will transform to this look once the practicals are on and you will see the moonlight in the background of the image.

I really appreciate your input and your time and thank you for not telling me to just search around, since I have done that but really just wanted more feedback. I also have the talent switching on a practical during the scene so I too will have to stick with standard color temp for the timing. What I was thinking of doing is using HMI's for my moonlight with a stipple lens and use daylight kinos with opal for slight fill if I need it since in the complete moonlight scene since complete silhouettes are acceptable. Your lighting setup lends itself to what I'll be doing since the sets are not the most spacious sets, and the french doors are built in but I will have to create the skylight with a frame and some flags. The story itself is a dark piece so it really lends itself to a high contrast look. I was also toying with the idea of adding 1/2 to Full CTO to all of my tungsten instruments and leave the HMIs uncorrected and in the timing reduce saturation to give the moonlight a silvery-blue look and the tungsten instruments should fall into place as white light. Also if I do this I was planning on crushing the blacks down to give me a higher contrast ratio while reducing saturation. I am very weary of doing this on film since I haven't seen the results on anything other than digital specifically red one. I'll probably end up shooting the scenes with normal tungstens for white light and use the naked HMI's for moonlight and see what I can do in the color correction suite. If anybody has any experience shooting this way on film let me know how it turned out.