Andy Jarosz

I have an ESU-1 kit I can rent you, I’m based in the US though. If you don’t wind up finding a closer source, I’m willing to ship it overseas.

We actually did this a while ago, we rented a Mini and also used my personal Classic as a second camera. You can see the footage here: I don't remember the exact settings, but as you can see they cut together basically seamlessly.

I think the difference is projectors can be massive in size, allowing for huge motors with AC oomph behind them. Cameras are expected to be portable.

I've done a reasonable amount of research into this, and the challenge is acceleration. You can absolutely get super precise stepper motors that can go very fast--but they can't go from 0 to 100 in milliseconds. And with a film travel mechanism, a millisecond is a huge amount of time! Another challenge is the simple fact that film is kind of fragile. Any mechanical interface needs to move the film in a way that doesn't cause a huge amount of friction or any potential for tearing or rubbing, as it could easily scratch or damage the film.

Inexpensive DLP projectors don't play well with camera shutters. LED/LCD are the same thing, just different illumination sources.

Unless the projector is the only light source in the room, it will be very difficult to shoot. If you plan on using other lights to simulate brakelights/streetlights, it will be nearly impossible to not affect the screen. We used 20k lumen projectors for rear projection on The 4400 last year, for daylight driving scenes, and we were still having trouble with light spill.

Most of the time screens are replaced with VFX. Im not sure if it’s possible to genlock a macbook, it’s definitely not possible for a phone.

You’re not doing anything wrong, the refresh of the screen simply isn’t synchronized to the camera shutter. Even if they’re running at the same frame rate, if the phase is offset, you will get double frames. if you can’t sync the screen and camera via genlock, there’s nothing you’ll be able to do.

https://ledstages.info/

Phil—are you taking into consideration the dual-gain sensor path? Its likely achieved from two 60db-ish data pathways merged together.

The PC component market is in a rough state nowadays. The silicon shortage has driven prices up and availability down. It may not be that those companies are ignoring you--they might literally just not have product to sell. Anyway, nowadays it's very easy to build your own PC--only takes about 30-45 minutes to get all the hardware installed, and there are tons of great build guides on youtube.

Dana dolly!

Currently, it's Unreal--that wasn't my point. The point was that the tools being used now are being used out of necessity, not because they're good. In 5-10 years, we'll be using dedicated engines and software packages specifically for virtual production. To continue my analogy, we need a few years before the RED ONE or Alexa is developed.

I work in virtual production, both on set as a consultant and on the tools development side. Asking if cinematographers will learn Unreal in the future is a bit like asking if they will become familiar with tape broadcast cameras, after AotC came out in 2002. The sentiment is correct, but the implementation will be wrong. Unreal is a fantastic tool, it's very powerful. But it was never meant to do the kinds of things we're doing with it in VP. The more you get into large setups with multiple clusters and multiple editors, the more evident this becomes.

I don't really understand people who are mad at this camera...if you don't like it, don't buy it. Why waste time hating it? The other thing people are missing is they've already said there will be a Ranger version of this camera. If that's not everything you want in a production camera, I don't know what is!