John E Clark

As mentioned pointing the capture camera at a monitor of the current capture will produced a video feed back image... infinite mirror regression...

Old school... take a old school transparency overhead projector, fill a glass bowl, sitting on the projector's 'transparency' area, with water and oil based inks, make ink droplets in the bowl of water... shake around, etc.

Overhead projector, with bowl and colored inks... it ought to be in a museum...

Vintage 60's look...

I appreciate 24 and all, and realize the advantage of LESS data, but 60, 120, can't get here soon enough to me. Bring on the clearer, better looking visuals. We've been stuck in the past too long with THIS technology while everything else has advanced.

As far as I've read, the only 'theatrical' frame rates that are under realistic discussion are the traditional 24 fps, and 48 fps, which apparently 'helps' 3-d viewing... since I'm not a fan of 3-d, I've not been to too many presentations. But I recall the "Hobbit being shot @ 48 fps", and for 3-d, projected at 48 fps. Since I've only seen the 2-d at 24 fps... can't comment on the quality difference, if any...

For 'Video' (hey there's that Video word again....), 25 and 30 are the traditional frame rates, and there is some movement perhaps to 50/60p (modulo the NTSC color madness for 60...).

But I suspect most people will be watching at 25/30 if playing standard Blueray/DVD/InternetStreaming.

Do you mean using the mains frequency as a sync reference?

The reason is that to place the color burst information between the luminance and the audio of the NTSC broadcast signal, a slight adjustment was made to the horizonal line frequency. NTSC used a 6 MHz bandwidth, while PAL used 8MHz, and did not 'suffer' from having less bandwidth, so the color carrier could be placed further away from the audio carrier.

Had the US used 8MHz bandwiths for the TV channels, where would have been a better placement for the color burst, and not had to compromise...

 

I don't hablo español, but Spain here i come! :)

 

 

Just kidding (for now), but who knows...

 

PS: Google translate said "hablo". I though it should be "habla".

 

Yo no hablo Español...

hablar

hablo

hablas

habla

hablamos

hablais

hablan

Since in Spanish the pronoun for verbs is indicated in the verb form, one can delete the 'yo' or other pronoun and one has...

no hablo Español.

I also think there is something to be said for the whole thing of spending a long time dedicated to your craft and trying not to give up but I don't like stuff that glosses over poverty or makes out its all a bit of a laugh as is the trend these days.

 

Freya

One has to develop a zen/buddhist attitude towards the material world, as in it all illusion... that or use some form of chemical modifier, to deal with 'being an artist'...

And worse than being an artist, especially a poor artist... is being an artist's muse... one who expected to be the muse... leads to either acquiring an even deeper zen view... or more chemical assists...

Now we have "It's not video anymore because of the CMOS sensor".

I think you need to ask yourselves why you have this need to not call it video and why you get annoyed by that.

I would expect video to continue to develop as technology develops so it isn't surprising that it isn't based on vacuum tubes anymore.

 

A lot of what you guys seem to be pointing at is how video has moved away from older television standards but video has always had a life outside of broadcast television. The argument seems to be more that it's not television.

 

It's still video technology at the heart of modern video cameras tho.

so why feel this need to call it something else?

But... the digital cameras that were intended to replace those tube based analog systems used criteria and implemented features that were specific to analog video...

For example, the use of camera adjustments in terms of dB values rather than ISO values, was because it fit into 'video' camera people's way of thinking. Video cameras were and are still spec'd in terms of lux response, to indicate their sensitivity. The use of a 'light meter' was less used, if at all, for most 'video' productions, because the camera was hooked up to a signal processing and monitor system which had a waveform monitor and vector scopes to analyze the 'shot' and set the camera correctly for the situation... The field units that developed in the 70's and 80s didn't change this.

Electronics of course is the 'heart' of digital image capture... but the goals of digital cameras for either stills or motion pictures have been quite different from 'video'. For example to get something other than a Rec 601 or later Rec 709 out of a camera dedicated to the 'video' market, one had to tap in to the signal and use a separate capture device, as the manufacture designed the 'native' output to be in a broadcast television standard. The business about 7.5% IRE for 'black'(*), or the digital equivalent of a count of 16... is a 'video' requirement, not a 'film' requirement. (*But then one has 0% IRE for Black in certain Japanese NTSC systems...). And correspondingly, a limit of 236 for 'white', again due to how 'video' was limited to avoid the NTSC signal (don't have too much experience with PAL but presumably the same reason), since over driving the signal 'white' could cause older TV's to lose sync...

The D-SLRs were designed to replace film cameras, and so, while using 'electronics', the goal was to produce a camera which matched the former film based photographer's expectation and described in photographic terms. About the only term that has taken over the digital photography world is the use of the term 'dynamic response', which is a general electronic signals term (as well as being used in other areas of engineering...) but was not a typical Film photographer's term. That would have been 'latitude'... sometimes used ambiguously...

Red and ARRI developed their cameras specifically for replacing Film based motion picture capture... as opposed to reperposing an existing 'video' camera to that goal.

Here's the spec for the DVX100A on the topic of exposure adjustment and light sensitivity...

----

 

Funny because I feel the opposite. "digital film" is a really stupid name for starters, only invented to try and confuse matters. Thankfully it seems to have largely fallen by the way side. I am okay with the term "digital cinema" but it is still video, that is the technology that drives "digital cinema cameras" and all this nonsense about not calling it video is just a bunch more snobbery from people who feel weird about it's origins. It will get to the stage if it hasn't already, where only people over a certain age and with a certain disposition will have this thing about not calling it video.

 

As to interlace and 30fps (or therabouts) what does that have to do with anything?! Honestly!

No it is not snobbery, it stems, at least in my case, having worked with such specs as RS-170/170A, there is a world of difference between 'video' and attendant devices which capture and produce signals in that format, vs. what is being done with such cameras as the ARRI, on the high end, and DSLR or the Blackmagic cameras on the low end, which can capture motion picture sequences at popular frame rates.

Even such things as square vs rectangular pixel issues have been left in the dust for most capture work, and if required, along with 'interlaced' formats, placed in the final packaging phase of productions which would have been 'shot on film' in the past.

There are 'video' cameras of course which are ready to be plugged into a broadcast system, monitored with the usual 'video' equipment, and concern made for conforming material broadcast video standards.

While some cameras do capture relative to a 'video' spec, such as Rec-709 or the like, in many cases one need not capture in that mode, but rather such modes as 'raw' mode, or other non-broadcast format.

As for what 'interlaced 29.97' has to do with anything... that is a 'video' format, and shooting at 23.976 is a 'concession' to eventually putting something out at a 29.97 frame rate.

Well, lets be frank here... modern digital cinema cameras are not really "video" cameras. So today, if you don't have any digital cinema material on your demo reel, if it's all 16/35, you may not get hired. Trust me I know because I came to hollywood with a 16/35 reel and didn't get hired until I put some digital stuff on there.

One of my biggest beefs on 'terminology' is the use of the term 'video' to include 'digital film' or 'digital cinema'. Even with my DVX100 I did not view it as a 'video' camera, despite that it clearly was... but for me it was a 'low cost' digital film camera, so I never shot anything in interlace mode, 29.97 frame rate, and did consider getting the grey market (relative to US sales...) PAL version so I could have a few more lines of vertical resolution @ 25 fps.

I also never worried about making NTSC values... such as the 7.5 IRE 'black', unless I was forced by the camera to do so...

There were other video specs that limited 'slew rate' or the like as well, based on the analog specs... in addition to NTSC 'legal' colors...

Ive just completed a short film and giving a dollar figure to the equipment budget is not really straight forward. During the production phase, I used a lot of equipment that I already had in my possession. For example some of the things I had bought several years ago and other things I bought decades ago - for example some of the lenses used in the film. Should they be included in the budget? Or only things that were bought specifically for shooting material for the film? Basically, I want to give a more or less honest answer to the question: "What was your film's budget?"

Even if you 'own' your own equipment, you should get rental house estimates of what it would have cost for that equipment.

In the future, if you do a bigger project, you then have references for what this one cost you, and so you can better estimate how much you need.

If you ever do get 'outside' funds, it is good to have a history of working out such details, when an investor asks 'why so much for X item in the budget'.

In any case, even if you do own your own equipment you will eventually need to buy more or new, so that money that a product 'pays' for the use of the equipment should be put in the bank for that event...

 

There are tons of feature films shot entirely on Super8.

Kung Fu Rascals, Sleep Always, A Polish vampire in Burbank, The Last of England etc, etc, etc

I'm wondering... at least in the case of Jarman... whether 'super8' was an aesthetic choice, or a budget choice... Given that Jarman was not a go to 70's/80's filmmaker for getting big budgets... I suspect that super8 was a compromise between wanting to get a visual work 'out'... uh... and having it better aesthetically than the then current 'cheap' medium of consumer video cameras... as well as the use of home/amateur editing capability that 8mm film provided, vs the non-existant 'quality' editing that consumer provided. (personal opinion time...) I consider 8mm to be a crappy image by almost any of my standards, but I will agree that for editing, and relative 'quality' of image for the same priced video equipment, one obtain superior results with 8mm... but for me it's a difference between shitty and shittier...

I suspect that Jarman would have jumped on the digital bandwagon with a DVX100... or the like...

Of course Jarman could have been a Film film aesthete...

As noted, The Zone System is predominantly a Black and White process. The scene and resulting display image was visualized in terms of B&W materials, from negative to final print hanging on the wall.

Ansel Adams himself stated he never got an effect way to think of 'color' such that he would have the same control as he did with B&W... other have applied the Zone System to color, but the system is still described in terms of 'grey values'...

What is the core of the system is what is called 'previsualization', that is the photographer is at the point of taking a picture (or pressing the run button on a motion picture camera...), and because of the process will 'know' with in reasonable confidence, what the resulting image will be when displayed to the viewer.

There are other systems for doing that but the Zone System has had perhaps more success. One of the reasons for the success is that it is based on understanding the capabilities of the medium of capture (negative, but Adams also applied his system to Polaroid... even a consumer camera like the 70's vintage SX-70...), the medium of presentation, in the case of stills The Print.

The question you pose is really only the first step in the Zone System process... that step is 'how does the recording medium respond to light'... Film may have had the capability of recording detectable differences in light intensities up to '14 stops', or perhaps even more... until the silver 'crowbared' into less density, yielding 'black sun' effects...

However, in the print material, one was stuck with about 7 stops of range capability, so the goal was to find out how to expose, process, print and yield a print which was within that range.

In most formal Zone Systems classes that I had way back when, one would find the change in density of the negative by using a densitometer, and reading out the density changes produced by varying the ISO, or ASA as it was termed back in the olden days, or the f-stop of the lens. A series of negative was taken, tedious hours processing, more tedium reading the densities, etc...

Then there was printing, tedious hours printing, finding that density in the negative which yielded that 'hint' of difference between 'black' and 'less than black'... likewise for finding that 'hint of grey' just be fore 'pure white' in the print...

The spot meter was recommended because one could read out the relative values of 'shadow', and 'highlight' directly and so, once one had calibrated the process one could read out the meter for shadow, know that the exposure would be X, read out the highlight and know by process and printing the result would be as one desired.

Some of the Zone System would not 'work' for motion pictures, as in the case of stills, there was a variety of ways one could modify the development process, a variety of 'papers' to use which allowed one to compensate for different contrasts, etc.

But the main goal of 'previsualize' and know that the exposure and process will produce the desired results could be achieved... albeit with some resignation that one could not control everything to any level desired...

In the modern digital world the IRE waveform display can replace the 'densitometer' and so, one can use that to evaluate the capture medium characteristics... and far more easily... than using a densitometer. But that is not the end of the process... the next step is to know what the presentation characteristics are...

And here one has a plethora of options... most of which don't have 14-stops worth of display capability... perhaps for some display, one has only realistically 5 or 6... with more money... perhaps 8-9... and in some beatific future... 10+...

So back to your question... if your capture medium has 14 stops worth of range and your output display only has 7 steps... you have to chose some 'curve' which compresses the capture range into a 'pleasing' display range...

For most people who are not funded to support professional services... it means that they will need to learn some package sufficiently to get their desired results... Of the popular prosumer packages there's Adobe products, such as Premiere, from Blackmagic Designes there DaVinci Resolve, and of course Avid has had a long standing industry presence...

For those working on the cheap... Blackmagic does have a 'free' version of Resolve... but I subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud, and so I use both Premiere and Resolve for dealing with motion picture processing.

For stills I use Photoshop, and occasionally Lightroom... but mostly Photoshop...

As far as I know, the Blackmagic cameras have supported deeper bit depths, even when production ProRes, and also have RAW modes. In the case of the Canon 5Ds, I think Magic Lantern is the reason for Canon popularity, also providing a RAW mode.

I Don't know where the Sony line stands on such things, but a quick review seems to indicate there is some firmware update that allows for RAW modes.

For me, after getting the GH-1, being impressed with that price/performance point, my 'requirement' for any thing new was deeper bit depth. I can live with 1920x1080 or obviously 2K, but I really did not like the use of 8 bits and lossy compression. Even if one did not make major color changes, getting the exposure 'right' or filming in certain conditions, led to more complexity to get something 'good' out.

Also, while I do like the ability to shoot at ISO 1600, shooting in absolute darkness has not been one of my goals... so the 'low light' response has not been a much of an issue for me. While it is a 'still' example, I shot the Daughter's wedding ceremony in the San Francisco City Hall. I shot mostly 1600 and didn't once feel a need to use the flash. The Wife on the other hand shot at 800 and did use flash occasionally, mainly as a security blanket... but in the olden days of Film we would have always had flash no matter what...

For the evening reception at a private home... I found that even at ISO 6400 it was 'not enough' so I used flash through out the evening, but still used 1600 to get more of the 'background' rather than having 'deer caught in the headlights' looks... That was with Nikons... but applicable to any other still camera these days...

In terms of price points, I think the Blackmagic series wins. The problem with DSLRs is that often a photographer will have a set of lenses that they don't want to buy over again for a 'new' camera. So that 'new' camera has to have some incredible advantage which would induce the photographer to buy their favorite set of lenses with the new mount requirements.

Since the Wife and I have been shooting Nikon for years... uh... where does the time go... we would have to invest not only the 2-3K or so for the 'new' camera but also about 10K for 'lenses' to match what we currently have...

I'm sure Canon users feel the same way...

As a note my first SLR (note the lack of D...) was a Minolta camera... but within a few years I moved to Nikon...

Well our USP is the "fat unattractive woman" we found off craigs list to be the main part with no previous acting experience.

 

We wanted to go against the grain so completely. It's a massive gamble but we felt it would make the thing stand out.

 

Rightly or wrongly.

Well, you could have gotten a fat unattractive gurl, as John Waters did in casting Divine for several of his films...

I was shooting with the phantom 4k at 1000fps all day with HMIs (18k and 6k) on flickerfree ballasts.

 

All was fine until towards the end of the day when they started pulsing. I figured it might be a power surge or something?

 

Anyone experienced this before?

From this site there is mention of 'arc wander' which affects HMI lights and may be produced independent of the power source. Don't know if this is your problem... but it could explain at least one pathway to 'flicker'... that is not based on power supply variations.

http://www.lovehighspeed.com/lighting-for-high-speed/

Paulson says "He is the only client who is always there from day one, starting with dailies grade and going through the whole film every day alongside me. He genuinely enjoys seeing what we can accomplish during the DI process. Deakins who is currently prepping a Blade Runner sequel for Denis Villeneuve, says the Coens' enormous amount of preplanning sets them apart from the "fix it in post" mentality."

Deakins and Coens were 'pioneers' in digital DI with "Oh, Brother where art thou?"(2000), so it does not surprise me that Deakins would be involved if he could with most of the processes to the final screened image.

I had the VHS tape of Dante's Peak which had some very interesting bonus content that was shown after the main feature - basically a bts doco. Ive also got a TB snowboarding tape which has a little surfing film that plays after the main film finishes.

I think some VHS releases did have 'extras'. Also, within a few years 'letter' box versions became available for most films as well... but in that era, it was the 'laser' disk aficiondo who got such bonus features...

There was also Video CD or VCD or was it CD-video... in any case it was MPEG-1 video... And there was an item called CD-i for 'CD Interactive' using an operating system called OS9, not to be confused with the Apple Mac OS-9...

 

Wasn't exactly sure where something like this goes but I went with general.

 

So with audio, vinyl has been having a resurgence because of its lossless sound quality in contrast to MP3. While not technically superior, Super 8mm has found its place due to various elements that give it a distinctive "look"

 

VHS stands to Visual Fidelity as a windup wax cylinder Edison phonograph stands to 1950's High Fi...

Film film is the 'analog' capture method of best fidelity... In the case of Analog TV signal recording, there were filters put into place which limited the bandwidth of the signal to conform to NTSC, PAL, or SECAM signal levels. Even with 'specialty' analog video processing, such as direct to 'disk' analog recording, for early forms 'instant' playback, all signals were 'munched'.

In any case, Analog TV was 'sampled' with scan lines, even if during the horizontal scan the signal was 'analog', and there were 480 (or so) active scan lines for NTSC, and slightly more for PAL (I never worked with any form of PAL...)...

And then there was the temporal sampling and the interlacing of two fields, which introduce additional artifacts beyond that produced by the frame rate, 30/29.97 in NTSC Monochrome and COLOR respectively...

Because this forum is often referenced years later and shows up frequently on search results, I can't allow Tyler's misinformation to propagate.

 

From an archived post on his forum:

 

"I think anyone who reads my views as I express them on this site will know that, whilst I love film, I see no advantage to shooting film over shooting digital"

I'm interpreting these recent remarks to be directed to the fact that Film film processing has become a very limited business activity, and fewer resources to supply processing, or even film stock. Even if one was a Great Yellow Father die hard fan, there was always Fujifilm if one needed to have a competitive option.

As it is, the Wife and I switched to Fujifilm because of the color of skin tones was better for us, given the color negative film stock, the processing, and the use of Fujifilm paper... I have liked films shot with Fujifilm motion picture stocks as well...

In the interest of full disclosure... the Wife did get a lot of support for her seminars in the 90's from Fujifilm... but that was after we had switched and she struck up a conversation at a trade show with the Fujifilm team...

Deakins says:

 

"You can’t even process differently these days. You don’t have that option."

 

What does he mean?

 

Most labs will still push/pull process the negative, cross process and bleach bypass. OK, maybe ENR/Oz is gone, but that's print only.

Not Roger, never put motion picture film through a process... but for my stills experience, there is no 'face-to-face' lab in my area where I can talk to the people who manage the process and if I want 'push' or 'pull processing' or go yet-another-round of test film(*) because I want to verify the process in the first place, there is no such facility for me.

Likewise for printing the result on paper...

*The note here is that I mostly shot Tri-X or Neopan 400 at ISO 200 in the first place, so 'push' and 'pull' were different from the manufacturer's recommendations from the start. Furthermore, we would run test rolls of film through the process very so often to verify that we and the lab were still in sync. I don't recall paying for a 'test roll' being processed it was just the lab 'keeping the customer happy'...

We occasionally used non-pro labs, which basically only follow the narrow manufacturer's setup... and that was like pulling teeth to get anything out of... these were emergencies but necessary on those rare occasions. The 'lab' staff would look at us like we were idiots... we sometimes rejected a whole batch of prints because of the crappy control. I'm sure 'happy shots shooters' would have been fine with the output...

We also had to explain to our customers why we couldn't use a 'cheap' lab such as Costco, or the local drugstore processor...

I just found this article via twitter: http://variety.com/2016/artisans/in-contention/hail-caesar-roger-deakins-celluloid-1201687528/

 

In it, Roger Deakins is said to have stated the following:

 

 

 

 

I find this very interesting. Surely everyone that has used celluloid has had stock issues, or lab problems in the past? Seems to me its a bit heavy handed in saying all the technical problems with film? And about the infrastructure of the lab? Isn't more being done about setting up mobile labs? I think that's a fantastic modern use of technology to support a given medium.

 

While I can't speak for Roger, I too would have worries about using Film film these days. We had this come up in regard to shooting the Daughter's wedding. She wanted the Mother to shoot film with the Hasselblad... the Mother was pretty adamant about not shooting any Film film.

The reasons are... The Hasselblad hasn't been serviced in over 15 years now... all the local labs we dealt with in the past are closed and one has to send one's film 'out'... in the olden olden days we use to process her B&W film by hand. We then found a service in town which did B&W and worked with them to get the processing to what we use to do by hand. She would then print the B&W herself and did that until the lab she used closed. We then had to start sending out work... and were never quite as satisfied as when printing by hand.

We made the transition to digital, and found service bureaus which produce the B&W quality we desired... and so she transitioned to spending time with Photoshop than working in the lab.

In any case, the infrastructure for still photography Film film processing is gone.

As a note we never processed or printed our own color work, but the labs we used were 'in town'. They are all gone...

In the case of Wedding coverage it is very stressful to put film in a shipper and hope like hell the truck doesn't burn up (happened to associates...), film gets lost (also happened to others), film damaged (others as well)... the way we dealt with this was I would deliver the exposed film to the lab directly, and pick the results... if I was killed in an accident and the film lost... well... I didn't have to worry about what happened after that...

In the case of a big film production if some of those Film film disasters occurred, I'm sure they would do a pick up shoot... at some expense... but for events, while one can reshoot some formal shots... one can never recover the 'event' coverage.

Though I can't see how sitting in a room with 100 other students looking at {porn}.... websites.... could be... ok... thought over. back to coffee.

In my opinion that is due to the fact that many people in many regards are 'stuck' at the 7th grade 'sex ed class' level of just talking about sex... let alone filming sex for 'art sake'... or even pecuniary reward...

The same sort of 'back of the class twitter (actual bird twitter...)' happens when unsuspecting college students are confronted with erotic greek pottery work, or the 'erotic' art of Pompeii or Heracleum... as in 'you mean the romans had these sex pictures on the walls of their homes???'...

I'm guessing you didn't grasp the sarcasm. The Oscars were started in a time of very scarce political correctness, the actor/actress separation that exists today is purely out of tradition, not necessity. As in, using "separate gender awards" doesn't work as an argument in this scenario.

 

 

Actually, there was a Political Correctness in operation in the 1929 era... it was one of 'separation/segregation'... anyone who spoke out against that situation was ostracized...

The Hays Code of the 1930s, which became a force to be reckoned with, codified certain types of films, ways of discussion certain subjects, and even excluding certain subjects from the discussion altogether.

 

I remember some posts here from some years back, from a guy who ran a studio that only produced Porn. It all sounded very matter-of-fact, really no different from shooting commercials.

The amusing thing was, they'd just set up the studio with all-Red cameras. There was also a thread about it over on Reduser, which suddenly vanished like a popped soap bubble :rolleyes:

I have read elsewhere that crews that crew for the Chatsworth porn studios, don't like to put such on their resumes. There seems to be the perception that there may be a backlash against people who work, even on the backside of the camera... uh... anyway...

There definitely has been a backlash against people who have performed in sex films in the past if they have shown up in non-sex films or commercials.

I've not looked at the posting rules here but some fora have explicitly stated 'no mention of porn' in postings.

Other than that, I can only conjecture that as a business porn producers use as much as a variety of cameras as they have the budget for... with probably an eye for 'low cost'...

In the 1970's there was a large number of porn productions which used traditional 35mm film camera techniques. Simultaneously with the demise of the 'other side of the tracks' movie houses, and the growth of the multiplex targeting 'family' or 'youth' markets more narrowly, most of the movie houses that could 'show' X rated films, closed down, and the areas 'gentrified' and made safe for 'suburbanites' wanting a 'safe' slumming entertainment opportunity... and also simultaneous with the growth of home video systems, 'porn' production moved to video within a few years, and using 'as cheap as possible' production.

Perhaps "Cafe Flesh"(1982) was the last gasp attempt to make a 'classy' porn film shot on Film... There have been a few films since 2000 that have had explicit unsimulated sex sequences which have played at major fests.

"The Brown Bunny"(2003) -- From the wiki shot on 16mm Film film and transferred to 35mm.

"Short Bus"(2006) --- IMDB lists 16mm and several Kodak Vision2 250D 7205 and 500T 7218.

"9 Songs"(2004) -- Shot with a Panasonic DVX100A and transferred 'by hand'(as I recall... ) to film.

Were I to shoot a Porn film... I'd use an Alexa... but then I don't even have the budget to hire sex performers to shoot with my eye-Phone...