Michael Rodin

Look into wind-up stands. Italians of Avenger made some of the tallest, i.e. the Long John Silver.

With a mill and a lathe you can build a working camera movement. It's not that complicated unless you try to make it precise & eficient (and get into twin-cam designs, registration pins, adjustable parts et cetera) or, worse, silent - which is a whole engineering problem. But buying an old beaten up 35mm MOS camera might be cheaper.

Looks like mine. Does it have 3 rotating filter stages? Seems the so-called adjustment rod is missing. One of the rod holders on the side of Production MB was larger than 15mm in diameter. You put an adjustment rod there. It was a two-part rod, one end 15mm (goes into the arm), the other end was larger in diameter (goes into the MB), and the parts are not coaxial but eccentrically mounted. You cold rotate that rod to finely adjust the position of MB so it's horizontal and in line with the lens.

Can't see the pictures, but I guess I have the same mattebox. It's called 6x6 Production Mattebox. No longer supported by ARRI. I had a talk with one of their engineers a year ago, he said they don't even have complete documentation (i.e. tech drawings) for it. The trouble with them is that they were sold with 15mm studio rod arms and it's almost impossible to buy a 19mm arm. I wanted to cast a couple of 19mm arms, but at the moment no one else needed them and it was too expensive to cast just one. I will be machining 19mm-studio15 (the Chinese don't make 'em) adapters this year though.

Have you considered doing the "roof" shots in the studio? It won't be hard for the art dept to build a "roof" set and for you to light it with some 20-30kW of tungsten, or even less. Will likely turn out much cheaper than shooting on a real rooftop. And there are numerous ways to fake the city in the background.

Schneider and Tiffen for everything and especially diffusion, Formatt for anything but diffusion, and Mitomo for their NDs.

There is some proper and affordable scanning done in Moscow - Cinelab Digital and Cinelex have Arriscans, Mosfilm also has one plus a Northlight and telecines. You pay as low as 50-70 euros for a 122m roll of S16 in Russia, and that's for 2K 16 bit scan. HD telecine is 20 euros a roll, SD costs close to nothing.

Compessing Super-16 footage to MP4 for grading is nonsense. If it's shot on film with nice glass to go on a big screen, it deserves a proper post format. Quicktime 4:2:2 wasn't too good in the first place, but don't go into any further compression! I've just had my Super-16 footage sent for scanning to DPX 16 bit, and that's a low-budget production for TV.

Thanks, interesting - that's similar to how our DPs used to flash, though, they changed flash amounts on a roll-to-roll, not shot-to-shot basis, being limited to post-flashing.

Did you use the same amount of flashing for the whole movie?

You should test various kinds diffusion before buying anyway. I find 1/8 Frosts too thin for closeups, even with additional softening.

Well, I didn't mean you switch stocks for different contrast or color (other than shooting expired film, you can't: one brand/lineup of color neg these days) - you choose exposure & processing. You can overexpose any Vision 3 stock from '03 to '19 by some 1-2 stops and the result will be basically the same: more saturation, tighter grain and "seeing" more into the shadows. Do you use flashing, David? It was a very much loved technique in Soviet and Russian cinematography. Our DPs used to control contrast and shadow detail with flashing. But now it's a sort of lost art. The only remaining lab in the former USSR won't flash, neither camera neg nor prints, and they say I'm the only crazy DP who requests post-flashing in 2016.

I used to put the good old Schneider White Frost on a Sony F900 when shooting HD. 1/2 for close ups, 1/4 for medium, 1/8 for wide shots. Used lighter grades on 35mm digital cameras. The main reason was smearing highlights so that clipping is less obvious. When I had a strong backlight or some lights in frame, I changed to HD Classing soft. I think I've hardly ever shot without diffusion on digital. Film is different story: I use very little diffusion on that. White Promist can be used to remove that artificial digital sharpness, but I'd rather pick a Frost if I want halation. Black Promist halates less, but Soft/FX looks a bit more natural to me. Sadly there are only 3 grades of them and the thickest one is pretty useless. If your shooting style is to diffuse everything, you need some 'invisible' diffusion like Black Diffusion for wide-and-bright exteriors. You might try low-contrast filters, a Soft-Contrast for instance. Shoot some sunny exteriors, underexpose and see if you like the results.

The Video Tap is only for framing. You can't use it for critical focusing: the resolution is way too low. Even an HD tap on an Arricam or 435 is not good for judging focus.

If you want saturation, you overexpose 200ASA and process as usual (so you get more of those colour dyes in the emulsion to react). If you need to preserve as much highlights as possible, you load that '03 stock (50ASA) and expose normally. And if there's also important detail in shadows, you have flashing and low-contrast filtration. When I was shooting a documentary last month I had Kodak '03 overexposed 2/3 stops, mainly because the Arriscan "prefers" some .1D of extra density.

They're doing their best to make their life easier. I would say everything printing below 10 is garbage, but there's also something to the way a thin negative looks.

Alex is talking about densities not printer lights! In terms of negative density 0.15 roughly equals one stop of exposure, given that your stock's gamma is 0.5. The general formula is, (Density) = gamma * (log exposure) + base + fog Yes, Alex, you're gonna be safe with 2 stops overexposure. Even 5 stops over is not a disaster, Vision 3 can tolerate it. It will be near impossible to print though, since the lab will have to use "trim" settings on the printer.

With an electronic ballast, I guess?

Hi! Since it's a tradition here to introduce oneself in the first post... I am DP based in Riga, Latvia, doing mostly documentary work and web/TV ads, also making a short and a feature this year. Shooting a lot of HDCAM on F900, some Beta SP and Super-16/35, gaffing as well. Native Russian-speaker, so excuse my English. Powering moderately big fixtures off household circuits has already been discussed on the forum, but everybody was talking 120V US-standard. Maybe we should have a thread for 220V power? In Latvia we've got 230V/16A on some of the wall outlets and generally 230V/10A. The wiring is 1,5-2,0mm2 (14-16AWG) of severely overloaded aluminium in flats and 4/0 alu house feeder everywhere but in the newest buildings. 2K tungsten and 1,2K HMIs work fine, but what about the bigger lights? Do I really risk burning the location when doing a tie in for say a 6K, if to take that the wiring is such rubbish? On the next show I'm going to run an LTM Cinepar 2500W in a Soviet block of flats. The ballast is magnetic Alimarc 2,5K, so no problems with power factor and harmonics. It draws 14A on 220V when running, but what's the usual HMI startup current - 1,5-2x the "paper" amps? No genny this time so we're tying in to a 16A "private" line. I'm quite sure it'll trip the 16A breakers, but will it basically ignite from a 16A circuit? One of my colleagues says yes, should I beleive? What about a 4K off a 25A stove outlet?