Nathan Milford

Right-o. I'm quite interested in 2-perf right now. I'm gearing up to shoot some tests at the moment comparing Scope, 2-perf, S35 and S16 w/ 2.35 extracted. The format uses roughly the same real estate as S35/2.35 and with modern lenses and stocks will yield results as good as S35/2.36 and the 50% stock/processing/dailies savings should help you on your way to a 2K D.I. - Nathan

Take a gander at this Wikipedia article. - nathan

I'd like to get some 2-perf gear into our rental department before Penelope comes out, but if you private message me I can give you the contact information of two US owners.

You didn't search Wikipedia.

Yeah, the format is actually starting to get some notice. With more afordable 2K DI's come out the format rounds out quite nicely. I know of two features shooting on it now in New York and Aaton will be releasing a 2-perf capable camera soon. I'm working on an article for the new Abel website (up sometime before NAB) and I'm about to shoot a series of widescreen tests. I've shot a little bit with the format myself and it looks just as good as Super35. - nathan

I remember seeing an Arri S at Du-All that they modified to go 90fps.. or was it 150fps... I can't remember... Give them a call: 212-643-1042

I'm always mixed about Illuminas but I just love the Cooke 10.4-52. Just a great lens. We had a set of the Elites in the office the other day and they're pretty slick... they look identical (mechanically) to Cooke S4's. I believe we're going to buy a set for rental.

Well, they're not too terribly expensive. It's not like buying, say, and XTRprod or SRIII. You can pick up a new A-Minima camera body for the eBay price of a first generation used XTR body. Add glass and accessories and the price goes up, but you can order it in a Nikon mount (which, for reasons I can't understand doesn't happen too often) and put some nice Nikkors on there. We sell them new and used fairly often and more than a few users on this forum are owners. I have a real love-hate relationship with the A-Minima. I'm the guy who fixes them (or atleast is factory authorized to do so) in the United States, so I deal with it on a daily basis, and I typically only see ones that are broken or need service... it's not a terribly convienient camera to service compared to an SR or XTRprod. Other than adjusting screen focus or flange focal distance, you have to split open the shell around the chassis, which we seal with silastic to get to anything. So, if a toothed belt goes, I have to pry it open, scrape off all of the old silastic, disassemble much of the mechanism to replace the belt, reassemble and re-seal checking everything on my way back out and cleaning up little silastic particles. This is why, just to replace a belt, I have to start at charging 3 hours of labor (one for the pre-check, one to open it and one to close/final check) to install a $200.00 belt. That'll teach you a hard (read: expensive) lesson to not 'inch' the camera by manually moving the sprocketed rollers and rather than using the electronic inch button! On the other hand, they're damn robust and other than routine maintenance, I mainly see dings and dents and what not, as their only real flaw is thier size which makes it attractive to put them in ungodly places and strap them to what ever vehicle and occasioanlly UNDER whatever vehicle... A lot of people will pull it out of the case by the eyepiece, prematurely loosening it from the chassis and gate and occasionally the buckles that hold the film down on the sprockets might back off... both simple adjustments easily done in the field. Strangly enough, I've never seen (or heard of) scratched footage from an A-Minima. Either way I love shooting with it! Loading it isn't that difficult once you're used to it, and loading with daylight spools is a nice luxury. It's fine to hand hold, no different really from a DVX100, but it does fit in your shoulder like a rifle butt. I really like to have the top-handle on it with a 4" onboard monitor, great for low angle shots. I only have a few complaints... the non-orientable viewfinder and the lack of a mechanical footage counter on the magazines in addition to the electronic one. Otherwise it's a fine camera and a huge intellectual leap in design, but if we weren't stealing shots in the subway, I'd be using an XTRprod, which balances with a zoom better. A typical zoom on the A-Minima makes it front heavy and wears your arm out quickly as you're trying to compensate for the zoom. But, with a prime.. c'est magnifique!

I'm shooting a short this weekend and I happened to take a quick snap of the A-Minima with my 20D while waiting for the sun to go back under a cloud. Note the Oppenheimer powerbase. It has a much smaller profile than the Aaton powerbase, but you sacrifice the rod's being at the proper height for any rod-mounted mattebox system. Clips-ons work well though. I very much recomend shooting with primes on the camera, I have a Canon 11/165, and I try to avoid it (great lens, just makes the A-Minima front heavy). My goal is to shoot as much of the film as possible with the one Zeiss 16mm. So far so good, I've only needed the zoom for one shot and as the rest of the film (85% of it) will be stolen shots on the subway, I doubt if I'll be taking the time to throw the zoom on. That A-Minima belongs to my employer, but I used to own an Arri S, which I miss dearly. I had to sell it to finance my own film. On a side note, I absolutly love my 20D... with a 50mm prime... it's all I need!

Half Frame PL Mount Still Camera You would want to use a camera like this is so you can get even closer to the look you're testing by using the lenses you're shooting with. My EF mount Canon 50mm looks nice, but it doesnt look the same as a cooke or a zeiss.

I'm also very interested in other's business structures. My fiancee and I are about to start our own LLC in NY pretty soon.

I've shot some 2-perf, and I'm currently writing an article on it. I've mostly delt with The Lab @ Postworks... I had dailies done on a Y-Front\Ursa Diamond, but a Spirit or Vialta will also work well. You might want the look at the archives of the Telecine Internet Group (TIG) at tig.colorist.org - nate

Boston Legal uses handheld and zooms way too much. It's a shame because I like the show very much, but it is almost unwatchable.

They're plastic, or atleast they should be, I've seen people replace them with rubber though... They're there to try to stop film from dishing. We typically remove them as they wear easily and replace them will steel cylinders that fit in the same space.

All of the video assist solutions I've seen for the ARRI S require that you remove the eyepiece and mount the camera in its place, so you can't look through the vewfinder whilst you're using it. Who knows... maybe someone has modified a door to acomidate a beam splitter, but I haven't seen it.

Is the film anyway related to the Japanese Film 'Suicide Club'? Or is it just a similar title?

I think you'll be able too. I'm gearing up to shoot some 2-perf tests. I shot some stuff in TimeSquare the other night on a converted Kinor on a set of LOMOs. We'll see how it turns out.

For all intents and purposes the Aaton 35-III isn't the quietest or easiest to load camera out there. It's very light weight and runs on 12v so it's very handy for steadicam work, but rarely is it used as an A-Cam. I see it get rented out for a lot of commercials though. I just shot my thesis film with it, and it was fine, but had another camera been avaliable to me I would have used it. (We now have a MovieCam Compact and ARRI BL4s) The new Aaton 35 that will be displayed (in prototype) at NAB this year will likely change all of this though... I'm especially excited about the 2-perf option.

If you're in NYC we have a demo unit on our showroom floor. I'm probably going to shoot a test with it for the HVX for a film-out sometime before NAB.

Yeah, I remember Pac-Lab from back in my early college days. I called Cineric and they don;t process or transfer S8, but they blow it up. Onwards and upwards... I'll call Pac-Lab, but from what I remember it's a small little basement so I'm not sure if they'd be able to transfer it to any format the client would need.

Howdy, I have a client who wants to shoot a sequence for a commercial in Super 8. This commercial is being posted in HD (I'm not sure if it's HDCAM or DVCPROHD) and he wants to process and transfer the footage to HD. So, where can this client get his stock (probably negative) processed and is there anywhere that is setup to transfer it to HD? Thanks, Nathan

There is a section covering them in Max's Anamorphic FAQ in the cinematgraphy FAQ section of the forum.

I really enjoyed Jon Stewart... What I didn't enjoy was the cutting-off of a few of the award winners' speaches. I don't care what your network restrictions are or about the old jabs at the show's length.... that evening is for the cast and crew and it is absolutly cruel to do that to them.

The DVCPRO codec always runs at 60fps. The Varicam and the HVX (which uses the same system) will do some mathmatic wizadry and flag specific frames to drop from the 60 to give you anything between 4-60fps. So for any variable frame rate the camera shoots it will lay down the whole 60 frames onto the media to be frame-rate converted when imported into your NLE. On the HVX, you now have native modes for some frame rates where it will discard the flagged frames before it hits the media, thus 24pn. But the codec is still 60fps This is a very non-technical description, and I'm not a video engineer... but that's roughly what's going on.

Upgradin an ARRI S to S16 is not an easy matter. The guys at Du-All are working on a process, last I heard it'd be like $2500.00 or so, but it might have changed. And yes, you would want the SB, because most S16 lenses (that aren't already in PL mount) are in Arri Bayo mount. - nathan