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Tim J Durham

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Everything posted by Tim J Durham

  1. I just went up to B&H last week and bought a Lowel Caselite 2 kit and a Caselite 4 kit. I'm totally sold on these, the "kit" packaging makes them much handier than Kinos, I think, and I'll never have to scorch my fingertips again. But that's nearly $2K for two lights. I also bought a LitePanel kit which I'm pretty stoked about. Light... but no heat. And very little wattage so you can use them (both the Caselites and the LitePanel) in the oldest, crappiest tenements in the Bronx. I learned using Totas and Omnis so for the money, you can do a lot worse.
  2. But to get Pro, you've submitted credit info so they know you're registering as a real person. Anyone can download a free player without using their real identity info. No?
  3. Ummmm..... WHY you'd be wanting to view that trailer more than once is the question you should be asking yourself. Also, I suspect there are legal issues involved with you saving those trailers so they limit that from happening. Apple has been playing nice-nice with the movie and music industries so...
  4. I regularly use black pro-mist filters in addition to dialing down the sharpening. Ultra-cons are less useful as they essentially do the same thing as the black stretch function although the filters add no noise. I have not experienced any significant noise problems using black stretch so that's $$ saved. I use grads regularly and every once in a while I'll use a coral, straw or tobacco. But not strong and not often. It's somewhat comical that Sony (Panasonic too?) includes a star filter as one of the four choices on their internal filter wheels. How many times would you actually get to shoot the Emmy's (the only show I can think of that uses them) and if you DID, you'd be using studio cams, not field cams, so why not put something more useful? That's valuable real estate. I'd rather have another ND filter, for instance.
  5. It's hard to believe that cam ops would let the camera continue to roll right up to the point that the battery dies. There is a battery warning which engages near the end of the charge. Why would you keep going once this has started? Stop rolling, change batteries, start rolling again. No timecode break.
  6. The HVX has 16:9 chips and so if you want to shoot that aspect, you don't have to use an anamorphic adapter or use the DVX letterbox scheme which loses 1/4 of your vertical picture info (360 vertical lines vs. 480).
  7. Hey Phil, How big a problem ARE those "missing" frames in a swish pan? I've heard that they only need to be rendered before you begin to edit. Is this right? Or do they show up as dropped frames or what? I may have to do some shooting/editing with a Z1u for the next couple months. Thanks
  8. What sort of philosophy does Steve Vai adhere to beyond the spandex pants-wearing and big hair?
  9. Agree. And as I said in your last thread, Ukraine does not recognise carnets. Who hired you for this job? Was it someone you know? Make sure you know who you're dealing with. By now you should have called the Ukranian consulate and asked what is to be done in lieu of a carnet to register your gear AND you should definitely register your presence (and the presence of your gear) with the American embassy (or whatever country's embassy of the passport you hold).
  10. I would hope not. There was very little of the spirit (or dialogue) of "Tropic of Cancer" in "Henry and June". As much as I admire Philip Kaufman, that film really sort of layed there. It was not based on the book but was meant to tell his story during the time that book was written. Big mistake as far as I'm concerned.
  11. I'm glad I read the thread before responding. I thought you were asking about the guy in the box from "Pulp Fiction".
  12. And you can read all about it: http://www.cpj.org/killed/killed_archives/stats.html The archives only go back to 1992 but that's enough to get a sense of the trend. Since 1996, there have been more photogs and cameramen killed than any other journalistic endeavor. More at: http://www.cpj.org/
  13. I thought- up until Paul Atreides (Muad'dib) lead the attack atop the worms- that Lynch's "Dune" was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. The worm-riding was just about the worst. shaaaaaaaaCHAAAAAA! ridiculous. If I had unlimited funds to make whatever I wanted, it might be Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" or Peter Matthiesson's "The Snow Leopard", neither of which would require HUGE budgets. What I'd want to spend the money on was maintaining total control.
  14. So were the last 45 minutes. Unfortunately, my 7 y.o. son was loving it. I told him I'd rent him the real Pink Panther movies so he could see those, too. I understand Steve Martins (he actually WROTE this dreck) next project is a remake of Citizen Kane. Whoopeeeee
  15. Tim J Durham

    SPG

    Sadly, this argument seems to be prevalent at the top.
  16. Were you checking it with a waveform monitor where the zebras were telling you 70 IRE and the waveform was telling you it was something else?
  17. There may be a compensator which can adjust the auto-exposure up or down up to 2 stops (so if the AE thinks the scene should expose to f5.6, you can adjust it so if will expose that scene at f2.8 or f16 or somewhere in between). I have an XL-2 and it has that feature. The zebras don't have anything to do with the auto-exposure. They just tell you what in the frame is 70 IRE or above if you set them to 70.
  18. Youngins who post here should be jumping at this job
  19. I'd like it if you could sort out all the potential data rates available on the Sony XDCams and their new HD cameras. There are several different selectable data rates, apparently, IMX in 3 or 4 flavors as well as DVCam and I'll be shooting with one in about two weeks and for several months thereafter. At this point it looks like it will fall to me to figure out which data rate to use for broadcast. Shooting in NTSC (rental cams) and uprezzing to HD AND converting all to PAL for broadcast. Edit will happen in Avid Xpress XP and I need to figure out how I can convince them to let me edit on a Powerbook in the field. How's that sound, Phil? I'm not exactly a master technologist.
  20. I saw the film "Red Rock West" by John Dahl in the theatre. It was originally produced for Showtime (TV) so 4:3 and there were 12 boom sightings or thereabouts. This is puzzling because the blow up was 1.66:1: http://imdb.com/title/tt0105226/technical so that would mean that the sides would be trimmed for 4:3 and the top/bottom would stay the same, right? Nearly all the boom sightings were top of the frame.
  21. Tim J Durham

    SPG

    First time I remember hearing it was in Aretha Franklin's "R.E.S.P.E.C.T.": So using 1960's Detroit as your starting point and working backward, you can see it's been around for a while. Most terms that are thought to be "fresh" (the term "fresh" by the way, is now out) now have origins that are much older than most people realise. "Bling", for instance, has been around for decades. If you grew up around Detroit (as I did) or L.A., have been around long enough, and pay even minimal attention to what goes on around you, you know these things come and go in waves. Kinda like the baggy-pants-hanging-low look that was common with surfers in the early 60's.
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