Satsuki Murashige

Sounds solid, best of luck Ben! Let us know how it goes.

Lol, the new Prince of Darkness. ? Lovely frames!

This looks great Miguel! My lower budget method for this is to paper the windows with 1000H tracing paper and put Kino Flos or HMIs behind them. Your method is much more elegant though. ?

3. Build the room as a set on stage. ?

Hi Ben, sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. Is the 20 page scene continuous? And does the director want to shoot in sequence? Is there no way to talk the director into a different location with north-facing windows at least? If not, then I think the first thing you have to do is flag off all of the hard sunlight coming thru the windows and either recreate it with HMIs or just recreate the ambient with the Skypanels. There’s not much you can do about the quality of light on the deep background, it will be what it is. So hopefully you get consistent weather over the three days. Maybe you can run multiple cameras to cut down on reset time? The only other options I can think of would be: 1. Put a large green screen outside the windows and put the background in later. 2. Shoot night-for-day, put a large backing outside the windows and light it with the Skypanels.

Eamon, best of luck to you!

To be honest, the autofocus is the main reason I’m going with the FX6. Too many jobs without an AC these days - I’m looking forward to being able to operate certain types of shots with dynamic focus again without having to be on a tripod head or have the horizon go slightly off on the shoulder as I move my hand from grip to focus wheel. And my own focus pulling skills are not what they once were. It’s a perishable skill.

I see. What if you just hired an experienced 1st AC for the prep day only and had them set everything up correctly for you? If you explain your situation, some of them might be willing to help you. You might also ask your school contacts for alma mater DPs who might be able to recommend their local ACs to you. Not sure what rates are currently in NYC, but I know they are generally lower than SF - productions from NYC are always quoting lower rates to us. We are $750/10 here. I would be surprised if you couldn’t find someone competent there for $500/day to help you with this. Re: prep Its ideal to get all of your gear (or at least camera body + lenses) from the same rental place. There are flange depth settings for both camera and lenses that can affect proper focusing. Generally, a rental house will only touch their own gear, so if you get your camera body from your friend the rental house will not adjust it for you. Same with lenses. Whereas if it’s all from the same place, generally they will adjust everything so it works together properly. Also, you’ll be prepping at their facility, so if there’s a problem with their gear, you can just let your prep tech know and they’ll fix it for you on the spot or swap it out for something else. It gets a lot tricker when the gear is coming from multiple vendors and the prep is happening at another location with no support. Unfortunately, it’s a common occurrence even on many professional shoots these days. That’s when an experienced 1st AC will really come in handy, as they’ll know various ways to work around the limitations If your shoot is only a weekend, then it will only be a one-day rental if you get it all from the rental house anyway. Prep Fri AM, Shoot Sat-Sun, return Mon AM should be a one-day for most rental houses.

Nice, looking forward to your report Ben! Am also curious what FE lenses people are using these days for autofocus?

Sounds like you really need to hire a 1st AC and give them a prep day to deal with this. I can recommend a few NYC 1st ACs if that helps.

As a fellow Moviecam SL owner, this is very good to know. Thank you!

800 ISO + 4 stops of ND would do it. I take your point though, it does not take much lighting to make an acceptable image these days...

Wendy, You may find this video helpful, as it does a good job of illustrating the issues with compression, bit-rate, and bit-depth:

Vespids 25, 35, 50, 75, 100, 125mm fit on my Arriflex 3C.

Mark, thanks for the detailed write up! I am planning my own FX6 build at some point this year, so this was very helpful. My current plan is to go with the Tilta Advanced Cage with top rods + Bright Tangerine Axis viewfinder bracket for the Zacuto loupe. The rear battery plate seems like it won’t obstruct the media door. The bottom plate also has a mount adapter support post built in from below, so hopefully that will work for me. I don’t need studio VF extension mode, so hopefully I’ll be ok with the short cable. Is it about as long as the F5/55 LCD VF cables? The Clip Naming and Frame Marker issues are ones I’ve also run into on FX9 jobs, it certainly is a step backwards from the F5/55. There also needs to be a ‘clean frame’ with metadata in the look-around mode like Alexa/Venice. I’m hoping those are easy Firmware fixes. We should start a Sony petition for those additions!

I mean, it’s a large variable ND, so it has the same drawbacks as other VND filters - double reflections, color casts, ‘X’ pattern shadow if rotated too far, can’t use polarizer filters, etc. It would probably work ok for digital cameras since you can preview the exposure, but I’m not sure how you would get a correct meter reading on film. I guess you would have to spot meter thru the filter each time you changed the orientation to check the light loss. Seems like more of hassle than it’s worth to me, but YMMV.

Damn. I haven’t thought about Wipeout since, (checks), 1996 or thereabouts.... I think one level or so was included in the PS1 demo disk bundle.

I’m assuming Mark is just using the FX6 at its lower Base ISO (800) for the normal stuff?

There’s also just plain time, budget, location, and actor restrictions too. How do you shoot a car dialogue scene if you don’t have a permit to do car mounts and close roads? Or get a shot of the hero returning home to his family after you’ve wrapped the main actor? How do you film a couple’s argument scene if you’ve only got a loud MOS camera? Sometimes, out of limitations comes creativity.

Agree with Evan, PCAM is great and worth the money. The Kodak app is good too.

When editing motion pictures, most of your work is actually done on the timeline, not on the image in the viewer like with Photoshop. So it helps to have the extra space on a second screen so you can move back and forth and zoom in on the timeline without constantly adjusting window sizes. That gets very annoying when you have to scroll back and forth thru the timeline constantly. You’ll also frequently be looking for and pulling clips from the bin, which is a basically a browser window with folders where all of your clips are stored, before adding them to the timeline. There’s also usually an Effects and Metadata panel that you’ll constantly be searching thru. The more real estate for these windows the better, it’s awful when you have to resize these windows every time you want to look for something. It’s also nice to have a dedicated monitor just for the picture so you can see the image as large as possible. So often you may have 3 monitors for editing or color grading.

Looking forward to this episode!

I would only keep the 85ND filters if you plan on shooting with tungsten balanced film stock. Otherwise, sell them and buy regular NDs. You’ll be much happier in the end. For use with both film and digital cameras, I would suggest ND filter brands like Schneider Rhodium, Nisi, Formatt Firecrest, or Mitomo TrueNDs that cut IR without adding a green cast. Some of the older NDs like Schneider Platinum or Tiffen IRNDs will add green. I would also avoid stacking ND filters if possible. It will make your image softer and can create double reflections around bright areas of the frame.

This must be how Michael Mann felt while shooting ‘Collateral’ back in 2004. ? I’m very curious to hear the rest of your report on the FX6 after you wrap. Are you shooting in Prores RAW or XAVC?

Gels (or RGB LED lights) allow you to add color to individual lights. So if you want a warm sunlight effect combined with a cooler or more neutral ambient fill light, just gel the light. If you want an overall color cast, similar to changing the color temp in camera, then you’d use a filter on the lens. For example, on a wide day exterior shot where you’re just using natural light, you would use a filter or change to color temp to get that warm look. You could also use uncorrected tungsten lamps or gold reflectors if you just wanted a warm key light.