Satsuki Murashige

I think this falls more into directorial territory, in the sense that the coverage they choose will depend on the tone and emphasis they want to deliver. If it’s a Wes Anderson comedy, then the car scene you described might happen in a single wide shot in profile from middle of the street, starting static and then tracking on a dolly with the actors as they make their way down the sidewalk. If it’s a Spielberg thriller, then it might be a oner that starts inside the car, tracks across the rear view mirror, pulls out thru a window, glides across the bonnet, and pulls back to lead the actors down the street. If it’s a Guy Richie gangster film, then it might be four angles in extreme slow motion with freeze frames and voice-overs. If it’s a Ridley Scott movie, it’ll be shot with four cameras! If you get a director who doesn’t have any visual ideas, then you’ve got to dig a little deeper into what the film is about and offer some suggestions.

I think this depends a lot on your particular market. To be honest, I really have no idea how one pulls this off in LA. It seems to me that you can rent literally anything you want there with the preponderance of large rental house inventories and owner operators. And relatively cheaply to boot. In a smaller market like mine where say, anamorphic lenses and vintage re-housed glass options are not plentiful, you can more or less corner the market on a particular type of item. But I’m not sure that strategy works in LA. I would think it really comes down knowing to your client base and what they’re willing to pay for. Re: S35 or Full Frame Full Frame is pretty hot right now. But again, what cameras do your clients shoot on? What lenses do they consistently ask for? If most of your DPs still want to shoot on Speed Panchros or Summicron-Cs, then I think that should factor into the decision. There are just so many sets of lenses out there at all different price points, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s one thing to know what you enjoy personally, and another to know what will sell.

You can use the exact same methods for exposing still film and movie film. The only difference is that the shutter speed in movie cameras depends on the frame rate. The shutter in a movie camera is usually a continually spinning rotating disk with some portion cut out of it. A rotating shutter with exactly 1/2 of the circle missing is referred to as a 180 degree shutter (out of 360 degrees). So the effective shutter speed at 24fps is 1/48 second. However, with Super 8 and some cheaper 16mm cameras, they may have a different shutter angle, or even a guillotine shutter. A lot of Bolexes had a variable shutter angle, but if I recall correctly the maximum angle was often below 180, more like 150 or 135 degrees. I would do some research and try to find out what the shutter angle of your Bolex actually is. Also, there will also be some light loss from these cheaper cameras that have a beamsplitter reflex viewfinder, as a portion of the light gets diverted before hitting the film and goes to the viewfinder optical path. So you’ll want to find out what that light loss is, if any, and factor that into your exposure calculations. Usually, it’ll be something simple like subtracting 1/2 or 2/3 stop from the meter reading.

I’ve owned Canon Compact Cine Zooms since 2013. They’ve been parked at the rental house for their entire life. I would recommend doing that, or having multiple jobs lined up that your lenses will go on before dropping ($)$$$$$ on a set. As far as protection from depreciation, nowadays that is not certain. My Canon Zooms cost around $25K USD/each back in 2013, (including tax, but not including the Duclos PL/EF swappable mount mods, cases, insurance). Now the same lenses sell brand-new for $10K USD/each because they are not full-frame.... At least I didn’t buy Leica Summilux-C glass! On the other hand, I’ve had my Sachtler Cine 30 HD Tripod for almost as long, and it costs and rents for the same as when I bought it. A much better financial investment, strictly by the books. I would say, if you’re purchasing mainly as a business investment, buy what’s hot/new or industry standard and market the hell out of it. If you’re planning on renting out your gear as an AC, then this is the route I would go. Personally, I think it makes more sense to go for OConnor heads, SmallHD monitors, Preston or ARRI FIZ, etc as you can rent them out on every job. Whereas every DP you work with will most likely prefer to use their own set of lenses and filters. You could ask your regular DPs what they want to shoot with ahead of time and see if they will rent from you - but if they see that you’re making a lot of money, they’ll probably just buy their own set eventually. However, if you’re purchasing for your own use as a DP, then buy what suits your taste and shooting style and just worry about making good images. Ultimately, you’re marketing your own taste, so the gear has to work for your particular style. In that case, there are a lot of affordable options these days that could limit your risk. I just picked up a set of DZO Vespid primes, and they are incredible value for the money. They are so cheap, I have no pressure to rent them out at all or sell clients on them so I can just concentrate on making nice images with them. Just my $0.02!

Generally, d-tap ports are unregulated unless specified otherwise. So whatever the battery outputs, that’s what comes out of the d-tap port. V-locks are nominally 14.4v, but after a full charge they can output more that that, 16-17v. You’ll definitely need some kind of step-down regulator for your 5v devices or you’ll fry them. There may be an existing cable with a regulator built-in, I’d check with Tilta. Basically, you want to know how much voltage each device you are powering can safely handle, and also how much current it draws. Amps x Volts = Watts. Add up the Amps to see if your batteries can handle the total load. Most v-lock batteries will specify a maximum current draw, and also the watt-hours (how many watts supplied per hour, basically a run-time indicator). Rencher Industries makes a d-tap voltage meter, which I find really handy for checking new batteries and d-tap plates : https://rencherindustries.com/products/micro-voltmeter

I don’t think the Mambo Combo legs are going to fit unless you skinny them up. You could shove one of the legs into the hedge, as long as the ground is solid. That said, I think it would be smart to reappraise your approach based on what’s available. - Is the light supposed to be sunlight or a street lamp? If the latter, can it come from below? - If the former, is there a nearby building that you can get permission to light from? Or can you shoot it during the daytime? - If not, can you find another location that is easier to light? If the blinds are closed, then can you just paper the windows and have them glow out? That sort of thing.

It’s not magical - there is no shadow detail, so there is nothing to compress. That’s fine if there’s no important detail there to begin with, but it won’t suit every film - films like ‘Her’, ‘Arrival’ or ‘Panic Room’ wouldn’t look as intended with crushed blacks, so it’s not a cure-all. Depending on your disc, the film may have been transferred from a print or some other high contrast source, which would explain the lack of shadow detail. Or it was simply graded to look like a Technicolor print.

This is true. At the same time, it is obviously possible to have shadow detail with minimal compression artifacts in home video releases, as long as the bit rate is reasonable.

It really depends on the quality of the source that you pulled the image from. If it’s a TIFF frame grab from a 4K Blu-Ray, then the compression will be much less than a jpeg frame grab from a web stream. Hence the additional compression artifacts, or lack thereof.

Ok. I’ll order up a carafe of bleach so we can start working on this in earnest. I’m pretty sure my previous President said that was fine...

1. All things being equal, 4:4:4 or raw would be preferable for chroma key work. 2. 4K vs 1080 for 1080 finish. Generally, I would always want 4K since it should key better as the pixels are smaller and also the noise will be smaller. Plus editors always seem to want to punch-in in post these days, especially with chroma key or flat backgrounds. You’ll have to decide if those advantages outweigh the downsides of chroma sub-sampling. But in my experience, they do unless you are shooting very saturated blues and reds where the sub-sampled edges would be very obvious. 3. I haven’t used the C300Mk2 in awhile, so I wasn’t aware it could output 4K 16-bit raw. That would be ideal, however those files sizes are going to be massive. Last time I had to get raw out of that camera, I think it was only 10-bit Canon RAW to an Odessey. Big mistake, never doing that again. Luckily the internal recording was fine.

Yes, although I think it’s more critical with chroma key work for obvious reasons.

Combine that with digitally re-generated actors who have passed on and you’re all set! Seems like so much fun. Yay... ??

This. Or if you want a single gel, you could try something like Lee 241 Florescent 57: https://www.leefilters.com/lighting/colour-details.html#241&filter=cf David’s method will give your more flexibility though, if you’re not sure exactly how much green and blue you want.

I would also consider not shooting Log (especially the super flat C-Log2) in a 422 10-bit codec for studio green screen. Unless you have some bright specular highlights, deep shadows, or super saturated colors that you need to hold, a super flat Log image won’t be of much benefit and you’ll have to stretch the codec quite a bit in post. I’d suggest something with more moderate contrast and saturation like Rec.2020, or at least C-Log3. I wouldn’t necessarily go all the way to Rec.709 since it’s helpful to keep a little bit of flexibility in post to fix skin tones or product hue shifts that may occur with some LED lighting.

I’m not familiar with those lights, but I’ve lit plenty of medium-wide shot green screens with just two 4x4 Kino Flos (just the green, not the subject). So I think if you back the hard lights off for more spread and use heavy diffusion frames in front, then you should be fine. Once you need to see the floor too or multiple people/two camera angles, you will need to light wider and start thinking about rigging overhead lights. Also, the wider you can light the green screen the further you can pull the subject away from the screen, which will help with green spill and also throw any smudges or dimples on the cyc wall out of focus. As Tomasz says, place the lights on the left and right side of the background just out of frame. If you need more light in the middle, you can place a large soft light on the ground under the screen. If you don’t have something like 4x4 Kino for this, then you can bounce a harder light into a large white card on the floor. Often this can be done from the floor, so no need to rig an overhead. I would also black out/flag off as much of the off-camera lit green cyc/floor as possible to kill spill. If the stage has a few folded 4x8 showcards (v-flats) that stand up on their own, those are great and can double as negative fill or a large bounce source for a book light key. Otherwise, you’ll need a few floppies.

I’ve noticed slow rolling shutter flicker with DLSR/mirrorless style cameras. Hard to notice sometimes until you scrub thru the footage at high speed in post. Usually, you can minimize it or dial it out if your camera has a Synchro Scan or Continuous shutter mode that allows you to change the shutter speed/angle in 0.1 increments.

I would go with a clear filter in the matte box and a clear plastic bag wrapped around the camera.

Is post editing with the camera original S-Log3 MXF files? Or will they be editing with Rec.709 proxies? Either way, you can make a Rec.709 LUT in Resolve that corrects for your EI exposure offset. Use 33x33x33 .cube format for FS7 in-camera viewing and 65x65x65 .cube for post. I would start with either Sony’s LC-709A LUT or ARRI’s Alexa Rec.709 LUT, and adjust to taste from there. If they are rendering proxies, then they can bake the LUT in. And if they are editing with S-Log3, then they should be able to apply the viewing globally LUT in Avid, without having to refer to metadata or make clip-to-clip adjustments. I’m not familiar with Avid at all, but it works fine with Resolve and Premiere.

Making your own timecode slate?

It would depend on the camera or the film stock. With modern color negative, I would not be concerned about protecting highlights. On a digital sensor with a very harsh clip point or on reversal film, I would err towards under exposing to protect the highlights. It also depends on the intended look. If you’re going for a glowy diffused high key look, then it’s usually part of the look to not have detail in the highlights. You just want to make sure that your rolloff is hiding the clip point, which is where custom viewing LUTs are useful. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of your colorist to fix it. Same thing if you’re shooting a silhouette or very contrasty scene and want areas of pure black in the shot - there’s no need to protect the shadows then. Finally, it’s situation dependent. If the dynamic range of the scene can be brought within range of the shooting format, then there’s no need to expose it differently from how you want it to look in the end. You have lighting and grip, filters, production design and set dressing, choice of shooting time and location, wardrobe - there are so many tools to adjust what’s in front of the camera to suit the format, that often that is the best choice.

Lovely work AJ! The frames look great, I thought the anamorphic look worked well and the lighting was rich and contrasty. Nice use of hard light, which you don’t see much of these days anymore. It’s an interesting challenge to film a play set in antiquity in a cinematic style without large resources. One often has to get quite stylized and creative to make it work. I personally enjoy the challenge, as long as the actors and costuming are high caliber. Without that, it’s a nightmare. I’ve had experience with both unfortunately!

Great stuff as always Uli! The baby tossing sequence made me laugh. ? You’re gonna have to teach your son to take meter readings for you. Seems like he likes to hold the meter anyway! Your wife is a champ for going along with it too. I think Uli will be ready to shoot Ken Loach films after a few more months of this!

Best of luck to you! One thing you might try is to let your gaffer know roughly how many footcandles you’ll need per scene/location in prep. That’s a level of technical that your gaffer may find useful!

One other thing I would like to say - there is no such thing as a universally ‘proper’ exposure unless you’re shooting tests or working in lab-like environments. What we do is more art than science. You set the target by pre-visualizing what you want the image look like, so ‘nailing’ the exposure is only in relation to what you’re trying to achieve. Put another way - if it looks good, then it’s right.