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Michael Rodin

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Everything posted by Michael Rodin

  1. Kodak 7203 2/3 stops overexposed, 10 bit log from Arriscan. http://dropmefiles.com/q2DDp
  2. I think in US "show card" refers to a small (less than 4x4) cardboard reflector panel. You can also use styrofoam, depron, basically any white hard foam. You tape it to wall or hold with a clamp.
  3. Really depends on your shooting style. I'd say these days you stop down more to show the environment :) - if it's a location interview. And even if it's defocused - 90% of the time, it seems, when you find a perfect (compositionally) BG for your subject, that BG is much too contrasty, more contrasty than your subject will be under your lighting. That's kind of opposite of what you want - drives eye away from the face. There's a good old convention in portrait lighting that BG contrast range should be within the range of the portrait - makes sense to me, in interviews at least. So I light the BG shadows some 2 stops over black, make some "window light" streaks or whatever. I'd still carry a fill light. Too often a reflector doesn't give you enough and it's easier to shine an extra light into it than try to, say, double purpose the backlight so it reflects and gives fill. Get a couple show cards. White and silver. Super useful in small interiors. You can have no place for a light but you can always tape a card to a wall. If it's possible to shoot mostly in darkened interiors or at night, tungsten Dedos are the easiest to use. They're the fastest lights to set up as they almost never need flagging and have virtually no spill. No flags means you carry half the grip hardware. Light, dimmable, decent output. Useless for shooting against windows but for that you're looking for a 1,2K HMI at least, for key, and on a bright day 1,2K is pushing it. For day int. in general there's sadly no cheaper alternative to HMI.
  4. As to 1-2-5K fresnels... Arris use bolted aluminium castings. Easy to disassemble and don't rust. Mole and LTM are made from welded/riveted sheet steel. Heavily used lights selling cheaply sometimes need a welding job and almost always a repaint. Sachtlers are cast aluminum. Harder to service than Arri, probably a bit stronger. Strand/Ianiro/Desisti are bolted/welded sheet steel. Got a very complicated focusing mechanism with pulleys and cord. Well-designed as pole operated studio lights, not so a location lights. If you buy one, make sure the electrics are intact: switch doesn't get hot, insulation isn't damaged on cabling inside the lamphouse, all crimped connections hold strong and grounding is there (test with an ohmmeter). Or better yet ask a film electician to inspect it.
  5. Actually a HDR scan of Vision 3 will have much, much more overexposure latitude than HDRx RAW.
  6. RGB offsets in DI are equivlalent to printer lights, except they're linear and the H&D of a print stock isn't. Add a soft knee in highlights and shadows and you've got a pretty close approximation of photochemical timing. How grading works (on the technical side - (non)linearity and things like that) can't really make or break an image. What really does matter is color contrasts - super important in color cinematography, #2 thing after lighting. And primary grading, unless extreme, doesn't affect them anyway. BTW, to me it seems the very thing that makes color negative superior to video - the handling of subtle color contrasts.
  7. There's minimal diffusion. A rather hard key and generous fill, sometimes a kicker gets used.
  8. Digital projection is way more damaging to texture than a high-resolution scan (3K+ with sharp optics), and since how much - 99,9% I'd guess - of projection is digital, grain structure will be a bit blurred anyway. And prints weren't as sharp as original neg either. What appears as "deepness" is likely how tonalities are distributed and how colors saturate depending on lightness. Arriscan's color science seems precise enough to preserve it all - and in scans I can see all the subtle color contrasts that only modern negative can reproduce.
  9. Seriously, do you really think it's always a DoP's - or director's - creative decision to shoot film or digital? Can't say about Hollywood... In ex-USSR, in low- to mid-budget production, I'd say, it's almost invariably a producers' choice. And it has nothing to do with script or aesthetics. One recent example: a production (moderately big budget, BTW) opted for a particular digital camera because - a pure coincidence - there was a couple full, expensive packages at a rental owned by a producer. Guess what the DoP asked for (some strange numbers - 5219, 5213..).
  10. Obviously I'm talking about DI, scanning in particular, regarding your "the moment you make film digital" comment. DI actually only helps in creating a smooth, painterly image many of us associate with traditional cinematography, thanks to very precise contrast control in grading software. Digital projection indeed sucks, but less than digital capture.
  11. Tyler, please, save this talk for producers. I understand it's an argument for saving the photochemical process, but from cinematography POV it's plain wrong. A proper HDR scan holds more properties of the negative than a print (not talking about low contrast prints - one doesn't watch them in theatre anyway). One can argue color information gets lost in scanning, but even a Spirit HD scan of color neg reproduces finer color contrasts better than any Alexa or F35 or F65 out there.
  12. The only metadata in EDL is timecode and reel name. Don't mess them up and relinking should be straightforward, but not necessarily automatic - in online, you'll need to link each reel from the EDL to a folder with DPXs. Camera timecode is used extremely rarely nowadays. If there's timecode on a film shoot (and smart slates are used), it comes from the sound dept.
  13. I actually quite clearly see a green shift and loss of color contrast in skin highlights with Alexa, while the negative, given it's Kodak '05 or V3 in general, looks like it's slightly too thin. But, well, I'm also one of those people who use a 1/8 Coral Grad, so take it with a grain of salt...
  14. It's tastefully lit and the contrast is nailed. These days few know how to deal with fill light...
  15. No. Used HMIs are close to that, but they make sense when you're a working gaffer or come from G&E and know how to service them.
  16. Or the 7-63, which's arguably the best performing S16 zoom.
  17. Tyler, you can't be serious... If you're teaching film cinematography, your knowlenge of DI and properties of film should be high enough not to spread this nonsense. Actually, DI allows to pull out more detail and color info from the negative compared to printing. Basically you can utilize the whole density range (given you've scanned on a decent HDR machine) of your negative. Printed or scanned, film still reproduces color better than any digital. Hugely better. Any current video color science is crap when it comes to properly saturating colors depending on their lightness. Arri have made an approximation of film saturation response but it's still a rough one. By the way, ALEV was developed from a Kodak sensor, so Alexa's primaries/CFAs were likely chosen by a film stock manufacturer - that says something... Digital can't reproduce the same suble color contasts modern color neg can. It makes flesh tone (the one we're the most sensitive to) look flatter and in a way paler, makes skies one solid hue or a set of saturated hues, etc. Extremes of color spectrum suffer the most. And you can't grade it so that these color contasts somehow magically return - they were not distinguished on the imager (intentionally compromised primary and filter choices... don't get us started on imaging engineering, please :) ), the information is lost. Film isn't perfect either, but with basic things like flesh, skies, foliage that we always see (and are consequently very sensitive to) it's precise enough that it gives consistent results under basically any lighting.
  18. It was a sharp stock so held up on big screen in S16... quite grainy in small gauge but grain still bothers me less than color in video. What's that Chinese film - ECN2 or B&W?
  19. You can't buy fresh Eterna Vivid. And I'd rather compare it to old cognac :) May have elevated base fog, lowered contrast and (very) slight color disbalance, but I'd take an expired roll of S16 Vivid 160T over any model Alexa any day.
  20. Is it that they miss marks as a result of focus shift... or are they so soft you can't focus off a ground glass?
  21. It's not that you light the background to some specific stop below/above key... it's more about lighting the space around the actor (your subject in foreground, in general) so that he stands out or "melts into" the background/middle ground to a needed degree. You always take the subject into account - i.e. if you want a dark haired/clothed person to stand out in frame, you might want to include an overexposed area behind them. And unless you're shooting B&W, color relationships between fore- and background are just as important. With exposure you also control color saturation in BG, which gives you varying amounts of color contrast.
  22. You don't usually want super thin depth of field, at least half a meter DoF or so is needed to see sharp hair and hands if they appear in frame. How much to stop down depends on focal length. Test different kinds of lens diffusion to find a right balance of halation and softening. Often a white halation and a lenslet (or mist or contrast) filter used together give the best result. Soft/sharp filters in Flame aren't that useful for portraiture... at least they can't replace lens diffusion. Why would you rent a Briese just to shine it into a silk? Defeats the purpose of that light - for that you could have easily used a PAR with a flood lens, open face, whatever.
  23. Haze will reduce contrast and slightly "smear" the dirty beam pattern of a VNSP globe. It'll be still a tiny source with a strong hot spot. You could try a frosted NSP globe instead. Or a fresnel if you want a single broad beam - the farther away and more powerful, the better. 10Ks are cheap if you have sufficient power on set.
  24. I'd take PAR64's. Open faces give too much "parasite" light and flare your haze. Reduce front light to minimum. If you absolutely need it (like to add fill to a portrait), flag it off where the beams should be seen.
  25. Soundguys always use blimps outdoors, foam screens are only for interiors. They'd put on a fur windjammer even in a rather light wind.
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