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Brent Powers

Basic Member
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  • Occupation
    Student
  • Location
    Bandon, OR
  • My Gear
    Nizo S560, Cannon 814, Beaulieu 4008 ZM2
  1. Just got an Elmo SC-18 super 8 projector. I’m wondering about camera settings. I’ll be using a Sanyo Xacti. The projector has two fixed speeds: 18 and 24 fps. To avoid flicker what is the best fps rate and shutter speed setting?
  2. Well, theatrical movies are not where the greatest creativity seems to be happening today. TV series are far more interesting. They take chances that movie producers wouldn't dare. I very rarely go to a theater any more. The last movie I saw at the local complex was the new Star Wars thingie. Not a good experience. The last movie I remember enjoying was The Martian ... but I saw that one streamed. There have been countless TV series I've enjoyed, admired, wished I'd been a part of, etc., starting with The Wire, and later Breaking Bad, True Detective, and Rectify come to mind at once but there have been several others. This seems to be a Golden Age of TV.
  3. Oh, I'm flashing back to the 70s when I worked at Audio Brandon Films as a QA guy. At this point we were just beginning to address the issue of recycling waste. I'm seeing garbage cans filled with damaged film. And I'm thinking of take after take with perfectionist directors or actors who've forgotten their lines on the few sets I've visited. I'm sure we've gone beyond simply tossing all the out takes and damaged footage into the dumpsters with the flop and the leftovers.
  4. Thanks for all your input. I’ve learned a bit. For example, I was afraid to ask what a LUT is, so I looked it up only to discover that LUT means Look Up Tables. I am old. I don’t feel like looking up any more. I may at some point have occasion to make use of LUT but not so far. Film is venerable. Digital is a relatively new, upstart medium. It saves us a lot of money, and it saves the planet from tons of celluloid waste. It can be quite beautiful. It won’t go away. Neither will film, judging from the current situation. I see now that many of you professionals are under political and economic constraints that don’t affect me at all as an amateur. I honor you all for having the heart to go on in the face of such obstacles.
  5. Well, the more of us who press for film, the better. It needn't be an armed uprising or rallies and candidates, just keep the old (and soon new) cameras rolling, and film will continue to be an option. I am an amateur, an enthusiast. No one is standing over me, telling me what format I should use; I can shoot with an old Kodak or a refurbished Beaulieu, anything at all. But then, I have no influence on producers or the content providing establishment. It's up to you chaps in the profession to bring your influence to bear upon the matter. There seem to be some passionate members here. Unite and fight, etc. You know, we do have to thank Guy Maddin, but that's another thread I intend to start.
  6. Some of what I'm talking about here comes out of heritage and social inertia. The heritage of digital cinematography is live TV and video tape. In the '50s of the last century we saw live broadcasts of shows and plays, sports of course, and often prerecorded shows which looked the same as live, and I remember always thinking this was second best, especially with dramatic programs. Of course it was TV. We didn't expect anything like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones back then. We went to the movies. To the theater. We wanted movies to look like movies, like film. This is an earlier mind set which is where the inertia comes in. We resist change, always, because it is usually change for the worse, or it is perceived as worse for quite a while. I don’t think the debate of film vs. digital will continue for very much longer. I give it a decade.
  7. Oh, but it will. Everyone misses film. Digital isn't fake, by the way. It's another medium.
  8. I have no doubt that digital will finally replace film altogether. Either we'll stop noticing the difference, or digital will become sophisticated enough to wander into any old look as needed to further the narrative project and no one will even care. For me, for now, I like the look of film and will stay with it.
  9. Yes, it looks like digital throughout, although there were a couple of exteriors where I thought I was seeing film momentarily.
  10. I just had a fast turnaround from Pro8. Film was back out to me next day. However, I cheaped out and opted for ground shipping. If I were in a real hurry, I'd have gone for next day. I was exaggerating in my original post, of course, to make a point. I went to Trump University. I'm delighted that film is catching on again. There is a magic to it that just hasn't been captured on digital thus far. It is encouraging that Kodak has come back to film with their new camera and stock options.
  11. That's it exactly. It takes a lot more judgment, and a little bit of Zen, to shoot film. In school, one of our first projects was shooting an in-camera film, meaning you have one chance for each shot, also keeping in mind that you are editing while you shoot. It is very much like performance. It's good to go for broke on every take, to trick your mind into thinking that you only have one each time.
  12. Actually, I was confusing Knight of Cups with The Revenant, which he did shoot in all digital.
  13. Whoops! Just read somewhere that it was digital. It LOOKS digital.
  14. I am old enough to have seen many a revolution: oil paint to acrylic, 78 RPM to 45 to 33, monaural to stereo, analog sound recording to digital, and finally film to digital. All of these have been resisted by purists, giving rise to niche markets and special interest communities. I went to art school at a time when acrylic paints had recently been introduced and many of us students hated them at once. They dried too fast, couldn’t be worked, and the finished product had no depth. 78 mono records sounded fine, 45s less so, and 33 RPM was too slow for quality sound. Stereo was of course just a novelty — like 3D. To this day many audiophiles prefer LP heritage albums released at 45 RPM mono and will pay high prices for this. As for digital, well … My own first response to CD was horror at their lack of spaciousness — they sounded like they were recorded in a vacuum. This was later improved somewhat with various oversampling schemes but it wasn’t until quite recently with SACD discs and HD downloads that digital approached the fidelity of analog. Now we have the film vs. digital video debate. Most people don’t notice the difference, especially when cinematographers are at such pains to mask the analytic quality of digital with fog filters, soft focus and the blurring of backgrounds in an effort to create a filmic look. I can usually see the difference but as time goes on it is becoming increasingly difficult. I find this pleasing because it is much easier — and vastly cheaper — to work in digital. Movie cameras are bulky and clunky, and the process of classical filmmaking is wasteful and time consuming, with the long waiting times between shooting and editing, and now there is an additional step with scanning to digital, which is enervating in the same way that oil painting can be with sitting out drying periods between layers. I gave up on film entirely for thirty years, mostly due to poverty. It wasn’t until I bought a Flip to conduct some interviews in the mid 2000s that I discovered I could do everything I had wanted to do in the 70s with this little toy camera and iMovie. But the Flip was only stepping stone back to film. Soon enough I was up on Ebay buying 8mm and Super 8 cameras at a fraction of their original cost. Now I’m moving into 16mm, as who could resist? Of course, the camera is the cheapest element of the whole process. When I was a student, film was. (Recently I bought a Nizo S560 for $70.00; film, processing and transfer runs $160.00 at minimum.) As I write this, I am watching episodes of Game of Thrones. This whole epic was shot digitally. Most TV series, and more and more feature films are being shot digitally — e.g., Knight of Cups and The Revenant, both by the amazing Emmanuel Lubezki, just to name two. I know these works are digital but I don’t really care. My enjoyment of them is not compromised by the format. Knight of Cups is one of the most visually compelling features I’ve seen. In fact, without Lubezki’s digital cinematography it wouldn’t stand up at all. As narrative it sucks. The characters are silly, for all their existential posturing. Yet I found myself completely swept away by the delirious tracking and dollying camera. This is what keeps you watching a rather offputting movie. It is helped by some wonderful editing and music, both original and repertoire. That said, I still prefer film and I still can’t quite say why. Well, I’ll make the audio comparison again. I was very excited by high resolution audio formats when they appeared in the ’90s. These have reached the point that digital video is now approaching. A 24/192 music file SHOULD sound as good as analog vinyl or tape … but it doesn’t. I can’t say why but it doesn’t. I always hear a slight edginess to the music. I will listen to the same recording on a vinyl LP or tape that I’ve just heard on di and I can always tell the difference. For one thing, I relax when I’m listening to analog. Digital makes me nervous. Not quite the same experience as digital video. Both can be described as analytic. Etched is another good word for it. The image is somehow too precisely delineated. I feel like a voyeur, like I’m right there, up close and personal, and I shouldn’t be. I need that slight distancing glamor that film provides. And even though I’ve had a lot of fun shooting, uploading and editing complex videos in a matter of hours, I am about to launch my first 16mm film project — while I’m waiting for some Super 8 footage to come back from the lab so I can sort through it and send it back to be scanned so I can edit it on my computer. Go figure.
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