Josh Silfen

Well, I guess it's just my own perception then. I agree that this is the case most of the time -- looking at a still frame gives you the time to really focus on details like grain, but I think excessive grain or noise becomes more apparent when it's in motion, precisely because you don't normally notice grain when it's in motion. I was doing a DI once and was really pushing one particular color in a scene, to the extent that it was adding excessive noise to areas of the scene that were that color. It all looked fine on the monitor, because we were just looking at one frame, but when we actually applied the effect and played the scene, the noise in those areas became immediately apparent and we had to go back and tone it down. Watch that trailer in high res and see if some of the noise moving around in the background of some of those scenes doesn't jump out at you.

I watched that trailer (the 720P version) and some of the footage did look extremely noisy in the shadows to me. One shot that jumped out was one of a creepy-looking guy with blonde hair pointing his finger towards the lens. It jumped out because it was noisy enough that it noticeably did not match the shots that came before and after it. I think these kinds of problems are often exaggerated by trailers, because footage from every part of the movie is thrown together in a way that was never considered when the color correction was being done, so things don't necessarily match as well as they might in the context of the actual film, but nevertheless I did notice the high level of noise several times in that trailer. And sometimes it wasn't in the "dark" scenes you would expect, but in an otherwise bright scene there might be a gray object or wall that showed an excessive amount of noise. I also don't think frame grabs really illustrate the noise level very well, because noise (or film grain) is much more apparent when you seem it in motion.

Don't overlight it. With the equipment you have, you're not going to be able to light up the whole place, just close-ups. That's ok, because the location seems to be lit nicely for you already, but if you use all your lights to light the close-ups, you're going to have to stop down on the camera and you will lose all the nice lighting that's going on in the background. I would choose the camera that performs best in low-light and then dim any units you bring in to shape the close-ups way down, so they don't overpower the general ambiance level and you can shoot wide open. Plus, if you dim them down, it will also warm them up quite a bit, so you may not need the straw gels.

This may be true, but there is no reason why an editor must cut a film in a certain way just because they cut on a computer. It opens up options and makes it easier to try out new editing styles, but if they wanted to try to replicate the pacing of a movie from the '70s, they could easily do that too. I'm just saying that cutting a film on a computer doesn't inherently alter the look of the film.

Cutting on a Steenbeck or Moviola would have no effect on the look of a film, unless you were watching a work print, which would be full of splices and grease pencil marks, but I doubt that's the look you are going for. These days many movies (thought not all) are scanned into a computer and printed back out through the DI process, but people were cutting movies on Avid long before the DI. The Avid cut generated an EDL (edit decision list), which a negative cutter would use to conform the original negative, which would then be used to make prints (or interpositives and internegatives which would be used to make release prints).

There are some filters designed to produce the anamorphic lens flare effect, but I don't know where you could find them to rent. I wanted to use them once on a film that I wanted to shoot in 2-perf, but we ended up shooting Super 16 instead, so I never investigated them further. http://www.vantagefilm.com/en/news/news_2005-09_01.shtml

I was once going to shoot a short film that was a fictional story about the origin of paisley. I planned to use a cut-out of a paisley shape on the front of the lens, and lots of Christmas lights in the background to get all the circles of confusion to look like paisley. I was even hoping to use a lens with a rotating front element so all the paisley shapes in the background would rotate as the lens was focused and call more attention to them. In the end, the shoot never happened, and I haven't found a use for this gimmick since.

Magic Gadgets makes dimmers that produce random flicker. http://www.magicgadgets.com/

Yes. This seems to be particularly true of video files that are exported from a Mac and viewed on a PC. h.264 is supposed to recognize the OS of the user and display the proper gamma, however there's some bug that causes a much flatter, more washed out image on a PC. Apple is apparently aware of this problem but they have done nothing to fix it. I only discovered this the other day after having used h.264 encoding for the last several years and was horrified to see what my reel has been looking like to PC users. There is a strange, somewhat complicated work-around solution to this problem that you can find here: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=10&t=643310 It requires quicktime pro and note that if you are using a Mac, you want to use "composition" transparency instead of "straight alpha". I have no idea what any of this means either, but it seems to do the trick. To further complicate matters, I found that once I followed the above steps, the resulting file looked ok on a PC, but the movement was somewhat juttery on my Mac. It might have been a little juttery on the PC too, but I didn't really notice it. In any case I would rather have slightly juttery movement for PC users than the major gamma shift. In the end, I made two versions of all my videos -- one with the above gamma fix for PC users and one without it for Mac users. Since my website is in Flash, I added a line of Flash code to detect the user's OS and direct them to the correct version of the video. Another option would be to just have two different links for PC and Mac users, or just live with the motion artifacts. Hopefully Apple will correct this problem soon.

True, but they are not the ones that guarantee and test their product and we had no dealings or arrangements with them, only Media Distributors who sold us their film. The images were upside down if I'm remembering correctly. How much money could really be made from selling a few hundred feet of short ends to a reseller? It seems unlikely that they would do such a thing for so little money. I think it would have to be either gross negligence on the part of the loader, or some kind of vendetta they had against the production company (and/or other productions that might use short ends). We did have production insurance, but it was the cheapest insurance we could possibly get, just to allow us to rent equipment and get locations. I don't think it would cover negative damage, and even if it did, the deductible may well be higher than the cost of the re-shoot. -Josh

Neither can I, but then again, I can't see any loader unloading an exposed roll and labeling it as a short end either. Not necessarily. They must have shot on a camera that takes up emulsion in, onto a core. And it's 35mm, not 16, so there are perfs on both sides of the frame, so it could easily just be reloaded and shot in the other direction. -Josh

A production I'm involved with is in an unfortunate spot involving some bad short ends, and I was hoping to get some unbiased opinions on the situation. I recently shot a series of three 35mm spec commercials for a director I know. He works mostly as an editor, but recently attended Columbia University's grad film program in an effort to start working as a director. He is particularly interested in commercials, so for his first project since graduating, he decided to make three specs for his directing reel. He was financing them entirely himself, using all of his savings, as an investment in the future of his career. At the time I came on board as DP, I think the intention had been to shoot on Super 16, but through a connection I had to a cheap 35mm camera package, I was able to convince the director and producer that we would be better off shooting on 35. The producer suggested that we shoot on short ends to save money. I was a little wary of short ends, because I'd never used them before, but I told her if we buy short ends, Media Distributors was the place to go. I've seen them recommended so many times on this message board and elsewhere, and I knew of their reputation and the fact that they test and guarantee every roll they sell. According to their website: "Every end we sell is tested - one of only a few sources here in the US providing such service. All short ends and recans are tested in a Kodak certified laboratory. Each and every can is tested to insure proper color levels and guard against any damage, before it's certified and sold by Media Distributors." Last week we went to the post house to do the transfer of the footage, and we were shocked and horrified to discover that three of the rolls of film we had bought from Media Distributors had already been shot! We watched three rolls that were completely double-exposed with our image and what looked like another commercial both on the same film. It was a little disorienting because we had shot 3-perf and the other footage was 4-perf, but we could easily make out an image of a man standing next to a computer screen, talking to the camera. There were even slates that identified the production, production company, director, DP, and date, so we knew where the film had come from. Now, I have heard of rare problems with short ends, but they had all been things like minor color differences between rolls, or slight fogging. I have never heard of being sold film that had already been shot! I'm not entirely sure what the short end testing process consists of, or how it works, but if it is able to "insure proper color levels and guard against any damage," surely it should be able to reveal that a roll of film has already been exposed and has another image already on it, waiting to be developed! Plus, the problems I had heard of were extremely rare, maybe one bad roll out of hundreds of thousands of feet of total footage. In this case, we bought maybe nine or ten rolls total, and THREE were worthless. Worse than worthless, because we shot them thinking they were fine and that the footage we needed was in the can. Now, my question is what exactly does Media Distributors mean when they say they guarantee their product? If they offer us new film to replace the bad film, is that the end of their responsibility? One of the three specs made it out unscathed, but one scene each of the other two need to be re-shot. By the time we rent all the equipment again, hire the crew again, secure the locations and actors again, etc, it will cost several thousand dollars to re-shoot those scenes. It will certainly be way more than we saved by shooting on short ends in the first place. I understand that there is in inherent risk when shooting on short ends, but then what's the point of testing "every roll" if you can still get burned so badly. Had I known that the tests wouldn't reveal such a glaringly obvious flaw in the film stock as having already been shot, I never would have agreed to use short ends in the first place. That was the only reason I thought we were relatively safe. Media Distributors claims to have fired the lab they had been using for the tests as of this incident, and hopefully that will save other small productions from the same fate as us, but in this case, where their tests and guarantee so utterly failed us, should they help us out with the costs of a re-shoot, or is it just our fault for rolling the dice with short ends and losing? And if short ends are inherently this much of a risk, why would anyone use them? Any opinions on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot. Josh Silfen PS: If director Jim Perretti, DP Romeo Tirone, or anyone from Perretti Productions is reading this and is wondering what happened to three rolls of film that was shot for a commercial you did about a year ago, well, it was sold to Media Distributors as short ends, and now has other footage on top of it.

When I said it looked bright on my computer, that was from a version I encoded earlier. I replaced that one with a better-encoded one, so I think it looks ok now. The band performing on stage from the music video is HDV from the Sony Z1. Most of the stuff after that is DVX100 (with and without PS Techniks Mini 35 adapter) except for the supermarket stuff and the last 2 shots, which are 16mm. Thanks a lot for your helpful feedback. -Josh

Hi, I am in the process of recutting my reel and I was hoping to get some feedback on what to leave in and what to take out. It's still pretty rough and I know it could be better cut with the music. I'm also still playing with the H264 quicktime settings to try to achieve the best results (everything looks a little bright on my computer), but please let me know if there are any shots that don't belong or look unprofessional. It's hard to get a sense of perspective when you're cutting your own reel. Thanks a lot for your help. -Josh Silfen http://www.joshsilfen.com/reelbnew1.mov

I'm looking for advice on Super16 zoom lenses. All the ones I've worked with have been quite old. I know that there have been great strides in zoom lenses recently with the Optimo series for 35mm, but are there similar sharp modern zooms out there for Super16 as well? Specifically, I'd like to know what Super16 zooms have the best anti-flare coatings and least breathing. Thanks a lot. -Josh Silfen