Sean Cunningham

Lens choice is going to be as important as camera, if not more so. The more clinical, less dimensional and very even performance of Leica is definitely a plus in this situation. Having virtually no chromatic effects even wide open is going to help ensure a precise edge between your subject and screen.

And don't ever let someone tell you that comedy or certain genres don't warrant, aren't compatible with or otherwise "shouldn't" be done wide.

It's not my video, but it's basically using a tone mapping technique similar to what you see folks using in Photoshop to create the HDR look with a single exposure, like if you were going after a Dragan style. Often these techniques involve blending at least two copies of the footage together using the OVERLAY blending/transfer mode. Micro-contrast is pushed and highlights become almost metallic.

This is exactly right. Not only that, the buyer for the film, the company who buys from the producer, since producers don't sell directly to consumers (though that is starting to change) and major retailers like Wal-Mart don't buy directly from producers, they will do everything in their power to never pay the filmmaker another dime once the initial deal is made. Whether it does gangbusters or sales are decimated by Chinese knock-offs and torrent rips, they're going to try and keep everything the film earns from that point on. Whether you're dealing with a ghetto distributor or Lion's Gate. Piracy isn't the biggest threat against the independent, however, it's the fact that audiences aren't going to look for small films with nobody in them that aren't being advertised. Even though today's technology has made it easier and easier to make a film and there are more varied possibilities than ever before for some kind of legitimate distribution, without the money to market your film or ensure some kind of preferential placement at a retailer the true enemy is obscurity. It hasn't always been that way. Back in the '80s and most of the '90s if you did manage to get your movie nobody had ever heard of into a major retailer the browsing scenario for VHS and laserdisc was more sympathetic. All you needed was a good cover. Many an awful movie was bought or rented based on having a great cover. Now think of how sterile and tedious it is browsing the DVD/BD section of a major retailer. Or video rental stor...oops, they've gone the way of the dinosaur, now it's little red booths and horribly designed online browsers, many of which don't even display all available titles for a given category.

The camera used for VFX photography doesn't have to be the camera used for the rest of the film. This sounds like it could be a case of the tail wagging the dog. Of course, it also doesn't matter if you have 5K and you're shooting through glass that gives you a poor edge at the actor/screen border. Or if the footage is noisy as hell. I'm doing work with Epic footage now and though I'm getting improved results by exporting from RED Cine-X myself to ACES EXR, rather than bang my head against the wall with the really awful state of the footage from either default or filmmaker meta+grade settings, it's still really noisy and wholly unimpressive after working with scanned film for most of my career. I start poking around in the blacks and it looks very similar to underexposed GH2 footage.

You guys sound like you have a lot to talk about. It's still not the folks I'm talking about.

Practically nothing you said related to the people who actually provide the source of the media contained on various hosting sites, distributed through multiple means. Here, let us count the ways: Did you see that in a movie? So hyper intelligent whiz kids are ensuring that if I want to, I can see every episode that's ever aired of So You Think You Can Dance for the challenge? Or because it was there? Um, no, it's not, not for the people I'm talking about. You're talking about hosting sites and aggregators There are totally conflicting motivations here, different skill sets and only one of them has the potential for any direct or tangible reward for their efforts. Hint: it's not the guy actually providing all the honey for the honeypot. Again, not the same people. You're talking about different people than I am and there's no mystery with who you're talking about. Here's another hint: people don't click and never really did and the foundation of almost all online ad sales is a lie between the person paying for ads and the person hosting the ads and guess what, none of these people are acquiring the content. The failure of click-thru ads has S.F.A. to do with the folks who make sure within hours of a new episode airing in Japan for Dororon Enma Kun it would be translated and subtitled for non-Japanese regions with no legitimate access at that time or maybe ever. Nope. Again, different people. The folks doing these sorts of things are not who's recording and then uploading shows. The folks gathering the content do not benefit from, own, operate or otherwise benefit from any of these schemes. You're conflating quite a few different folks here as well as incorrectly generalizing the way multiple types of sites and distribution methods actually work. It's like I'm reading about this stuff in a mainstream media article or something. Anyway, have that discussion about the scary hackers and scammers and people making or trying to make money off illegitimate media. But you quoted the entirety of my post without actually having a relevant thing to say about any of it and I'm not interested in any of that and was responding to Keith who expressed curiosity about something I've long been curious about myself.

If you're panning across the greenscreen or your subject is being hit with strobe lights I suppose.

You're conflating multiple parties here, either oversimplifying what's happening intentionally because you're not interested in the phenomenon or motivations of the people Keith and I are referring to or because you legitimately don't understand the number of parties involved and the mechanics of something making its way from DVR to hosting site. Regardless, I'm not talking about or concerned about the hosting sites. That's not an interesting or complicated issue. It's the anonymous army that, at expense to themselves, gather and publish just about everything that is or ever was. They get nothing from the ads, they're not the hosting site. They likely have no interest in the ads or even see them. If they're like me, they have software that blocks all that crap and pop-ups. And you can't embed a trojan or malware into a video stream, one that may or may not be re-compressed by the host site. And these aren't sites that pop up and then down. That's not how any of this stuff works. Thieves steal things they directly benefit from or that they can resell to other people. This is something different. What you'd be looking at would be an epidemic of thieves who are stealing at their own expense and inconvenience and with no compensation but with a level of efficiency, completionism, reliability, breadth and depth that is unmatched by the combined efforts of every multi-national media corporation, their legitimate outlets and offerings for paying customers. I'd say there's a pathology here.

I've wondered about this myself. Within an hour, maybe two, of a popular show's new episode being aired the episode is ripped from someone's DVR (several), possibly re-compressed and then uploaded for either download through torrent sites or to be streamed in a browser. They're not being paid for it, not collecting any ad revenue but they perform this "service" every week and most likely on more than one show. If I miss NBC's Hannibal this Friday night I know that on Saturday I can watch it on the licensed stream from HULU. If I don't want to wait until sometime on Saturday I know exactly where I can go to see a list of often two dozen streaming sites that will have the new episode up generally by Midnight that same Friday evening. The sites that host the streams, like putlocker or divxstage likely make money off ads but the folks supplying them with the content make nothing. It's conceivable some of them pay a subscription to the hosting sites for preferential bandwidth on all transactions. Perhaps the ripper+uploader has some kind of "stick it to the man" agenda but I don't think that's the case here. I think this is a pathology closer to The Collector. There are scores of people who collect who's sole satisfaction comes from the collecting. They might rarely if ever consume or appreciate what it is they are collecting because that's a totally different activity with its own drive and/or potential for satisfaction or pleasure. This isn't unrelated to window shopping and other activities that stimulate the now mostly unused hunter-gatherer drive in us, or perhaps your cat killing a mouse but not eating it. It's evolutionary drives playing out in odd behaviors. Perhaps their satisfaction comes from being quicker than the other guy getting it posted and knowing other people will be seeing and enjoying their efforts.

You wouldn't be making a bad choice with either camera. Lenses are half or more of the concern. Here you do not want a lens with "character". You want a lens with as close to zero chromatics as you can get (ie. Leica).

It looks like a translite in that picture. I seem to recall thinking most of the similar views didn't really look like location photography.

More than that though. Only a few moments into any film you care to select at any random spot you care to pick will quickly present you with a shot that would be impossible to do with a dual-focus system. Going dual-focus immediately makes that lens the center of the universe and it informs what you can and cannot do with the camera now. It also imposes a more restrictive kind of performance on your actors. My point is, it's not simply an aesthetic decision to be taken lightly. Most films are more than just the sum of their close-ups and insert shots, aren't they?

Visual effects sequences would be a likely split.