Albion Hockney

Hey Haydon. so the picture you posted actually doesn't really use soft light much. I think often it is a misunderstanding that dim scenes seem softly lit. the practicals are pretty big here too they are doing a lot. this is motivated with the two lamps and the main lamp is mimicked with a hard source from above maybe like 250 on the doors of the light or something but no big soft source's there. there appears to be a second soft source in the room that is lighting the bottom right of frame with that table but its hard to tell in such a low res photo what is going on. There is also the window glow which is doing some stuff. the thing about controlling soft light is you need bigger flags or more duv or w/e your going to use. One thing alot of people do is use china balls. the classic situation is a skirted china ball over the middle of a dinner table. but you can use that in any situation. Chimera's are also good but you may need to extend out pieces duvetine or flags somehow to control the light. This usually means rigging to ceilings in wide shots with ceiling spreaders or other tools like this. I think a good thing that I have learned is not to be afraid to underexpose. Often times if you look at frames like your reference you'll find the whole thing barley touches 50IRE in scopes. so that means even your hottest parts of the frame may just be at your stop. This of course depends on style your going for, but something to consider. for close ups you can do book lights but they hard to control. You might be better again with something like a large china ball, but really anything can work you just need a nice soft source that wraps. Honestly the light from a real lamp can be perfect size sometimes or a real lamp through some like a 4x4 of 216/250.

is there something weird about the mount of these lenses or are they standard PL mount?

Miguel what is "Depron"

I just base all my setups on dovetail usually and have dovetail on the handheld rig too or if I have a shoulder pad put the the dovetail on my shoulder with no need to switch rigs but im not familiar with aaton's at all.

can you put the camera on a dovetail and slide it farther forward? that is generally what I do to balance a rig.

I think super 8 actually does look videoy sometimes the low dr and depth of field kinda puts it there. its just the grain structure and organic quality of the image that saves it from that. the thing about color space is not just the technical bit rate end but how the camera sensor deals with the color on the front end. 4:2:2 Alexa vs HVX 200 4:2:2 ....its not at all the same thing

there are a lot of reasons. but to simplify it I would just say one camera is a lot better then the other. if your talking like a $2,000 video camera or even the 20,000 camera they shoot the news on for VS a digital cinema camera like the ALEXA which most hollywood films shoot on.... the news camera has very little latitude so very bright things "Clip" and turn white very dark things turn solid black. so basically there is less overall information being captured by the camera, it does the same thing with colors too. its capturing less color information. So you end with an image that although we have become used to is very weird looking really...not at all like what our eye sees. Digital cinema cameras have much more information in terms of both bright and dark and range of colors. They also have a bigger sensor so you have creative control over the background being in or at of focus.

images look great, i think the too much contrast is found in crushing the bottom end of the curve. I would have tried to keep some more shadow detail.

the 2x vs 1.3x call has a lot to do with look. 1.3x lenses don't give you the same strong effect at all.

I think it really depends on what you are trying to achieve especially in terms of mood and tone. The bigger/softer you get the source the more it will wrap around the face and clean up the eyes. I think you need to think bigger then a single kino if you want something softer and rig something overhead. I have done kinos through two layers of diff overhead and that is pretty good. 250 on the barndoors of a 4ft kino through a 4x frame of 216....once I tapped bulbs to a ceiling in a grid array like 6 bulbs in 2 lines over 8ft or so and then draped 216 over that for a wide shot and then for closeups I added in another frame of 250 over the talent to further soften it. An example I really like is Harris Savides work on Birth. He covered whole rooms in an over head book light I believe making a huge soft top source. If there is no other motivation and you want to be subtle I wouldn't add in any other sources other then maybe a low angle bounce....which depending on your floor may happen naturally.... if the floor is super dark then a little bounce might help.

thanks much!

Hey I was curious if anyone could estimate how long an SR3 will keep power with the on board batteries. I'm shooting in some remote locations and can't really find firm answers. Will 4 batteries get me through a day shooting about 1600ft of film?

if you want a warm tone from a kino why use daylight tubes? I'm fairly conservative with colored gels myself. I think I would just consider how simple color is IE You can go warm/cool and everything else is just green/magenta shift. So I would just think do you want any green or magenta in your sources and then add some from there. I think tungsten looks great on skin tone when you shoot at yea around 4-45k kelvin.

Hi I was curious what I should be looking for if I want a servo/power driven focus attachment for this lens. Is there something outside of follow focus type gear I am looking for?

your going to have a hard time with 8mm. 16 and 35mm just go to rental houses and start applying for internships or get to know the owners.

Thanks for explanation David. The film neg analogy makes sense. I think the misconception and you explained it is that the information is not there or will be gone when you go to color grade. It won't be gone it will be buried a bit, and yes if you lift it up and use it it will be noisy/milky ....but often times aesthetically I like using that space. It of course depends on the project. That said I shoot mostly on the red in Red Gamma 3 and never even bothered to ask this are the Red Gammas Rec 709 legal?

this seems like a misconception to me because when you do a color grade the colorist starts with the log and then brings it back to legal. so you are compressing down the log that has all the dynamic range. the rec 709 you see on set not at all what you end up with.

Yea I always wonder this, people who just work with Rec 709 image. Because there is a lot more there rec 709 is very crunchy and high contrast....so if you just look at Rec 709 seems you might wind up with a kinda flater/less dynamic image then you could have or atleast be afraid to take some risks I don't think you need a state of the art monitor for it to take LUT's ...if you can afford an arri raw pipeline for a feature this shouldn't be even close to a problem.

Location looks great to me minus dealing with the reflections.....sometimes best locations always have most problems. As everyone said. Big soft sources are the ticket. you need to control them though as without contrast the sheen thing doesn't work so well. Kinos or big soft boxes is where I'd probably go with this of course without knowing your shots its hard to say how to go about it. no magic fix for reflections either you just have to frame around it. and watch your lights.

I have been reading through this post for a while and just want to say agree with everything David said. I think its very important to take a step outside of the issue of just the film industry and look at what has gone on historically. Workers have been exploited since the beginning of time. The market doesn't work....it never did. If you look at times of less regulation things where terrible. the late 1800's/early 1900's As said Richard you might be an ok boss, but many people aren't and everyone takes advantage of the system from everyside, unions aren't exempt from that. the only solution is every single person apart of the industry being respectful of each other, honest, and fair. HAHA hard to imagine in the modern western world...or well anywhere now something like that being possible. Read some goddamn Upton Sinclair Richard.

Don't be afraid to under/over expose as well. Munich is pretty contrasty/desaturated. you probably want those windows a lot more then 2 stops over .... in modern digital cinema you have about 10 stops or more to play with so you probably want those windows more like 4-5 stops over. I think the solution to shooting on a stage is just ignore that it's a stage and treat it like any other day interior. the only thing is now you have the create sun and ambiance a bit more.... although sometimes in a real day interior you create it all yourself anyways. Your going to want at least a couple sources 5K+ if you only have that one hmi then you shouldn't go HMI. you will want one source creating that ambiance on the windows and probably another source that you use to light the talent even if it is just a back edge. if you go tungsten one thing that is create is using 1k pars. if you don't need a ton a light 1k par's can be bright enough to be the sun in a back light situations and you can use several of them to create broken up patches of sunlight. you'd want ones with narrow bulbs or I have seen david say he uses firestarter bulbs which is the most power you can get out of them

Ah, I was going to say the background looks so good! yea that is a good call on the thinking of it like narrow streets and other objects that naturally break up the sun and could create a darker background, thanks for your thoughts on it.

Hi David, you said that you shot that late afternoon/morning sun flashback on an overcast day with the m90 creating the sun effect. I'm always afraid to cheat non sunny days as sunny as I have had problems with the background matching and it feelings like the foreground and background are lit different. Do you have any tips for getting this right, the shot is very convincing as a sunny day!

They are, they just crop the additional horizontal space, but as mentioned some shooters are working with that super aspect ratios for digital release now.

I'm not sure what you mean? Everyone shoots super 35mm now. regular 35mm just saved space for sound track. The way anamorphic lenses work 4 perf with 2x anamorphic lenses yields a wider then 2:35/2:40 frame and in our current time of digital work you just crop off the extra space.... if your simply suggesting just keeping that space around and getting a wider frame....yea people have been doing that a lot lately actually but not for additional resolution as the end result is a super wide frame that is not traditional as I think you know Vista vision is not a wider frame, it is a bigger overall frame so there is more resolution there because the film is going horizontal. the max resolution you can get in 35mm using 2x anamorphic lenses and ending up with a 2:40/2:35 is shooting 4perf 35mm and cropping in a bit. You could shoot vista vision with the 1.3x anamorphic maybe.... here is an Adidas commercial that does this for example http://www.robertbenavides.com/