Frank Hegyi

What's our stop?

I didn't mean to offend or be controversial. The intention of my comment was to encourage the original poster, not be dismissive of others.

The point I'm trying to make is that (in my own personal experience), big budget productions are much less stressful than low budget ones. Of course the stakes, complexity, and accompanying knowledge-barrier-to-entry are much higher on big budget stuff. But you generally have the necessary equipment and (even more importantly) the support of other professionals which allows you to concentrate on your individual job.

By contrast, when I'm shooting indie docs by myself, I'm operating, running audio, story producing, getting location releases, AND focus pulling all at the same time. It's damn near impossible. I guess you could argue that I'm comparing apples and oranges...

There are out of focus shots in big budget movies and tv shows all the time. Remember that whenever the pressure starts to get to you. Also: (somewhat counter-intuitively) jobs get easier with bigger budgets, so if you can nail focus by eye on a stills lens with a 3 inch monitor, you can do pretty much anything. 

Awesome post! I used to be friends with a prolific roadkill forager in Massachusetts. Not my cup of tea, but kudos to you! I'm relatively young, so the only world I know is where 90% of the population lives their entire lives on the brink of bankruptcy. Vote Bernie, I guess?

I've done lots of jobs like this, and I'd seriously suggest getting a camera with XLR inputs instead of a separate audio recorder. It will save you tons of time and headaches. 

Once you go wireless it's hard to go back. Even the cheap teradeks are good enough for simple stuff. 

I know core swx promotes the fact that they're compatible with anton bauer chargers. I always thought they were all interchangeable. Maybe not?

Nice

It looks like the screw on your monitor mount isn't reaching the baby pin? I'd try to find a longer screw or a stand with a thicker baby pin on top. 

The metabones one is solid. The wooden camera one can attach the wooden camera top plate on the FS7 which is nice. Definitely plan to have lens support on your rail setup as well. Heavy lenses and the E-mount don't play well together. 

I read about this recently. I wonder if the vibration isolator (minus the gimbal) would give you the look you want?

Grad school won't teach you anything you can't learn with youtube tutorials. Move somewhere with a film industry and find a PA gig. Your grad school friends will have to do the same thing, but with a mountain of debt on their backs. 

Some places will do an "insurance waiver" and charge you 10-20% more for the rental. Depends on the place. You can also get one-off insurance pretty cheap, like $200-$300 or so for a $20,000 rental. I used this website once. 

https://www.insuremyequipment.com/Home/PolicyInfoDetails/2?Program=REF

The rental house will also have suggestions for insurance. Also look into getting a yearly policy if you're gonna be doing regular renting. Sharegrid has a good deal on an Athos policy if you sign up through the sharegrid website. That's what I have right now. I think it was $400 for either $20,000 or $30,000 in coverage (and that's for unlimited projects through the whole year).

Sold

I'm selling my Bolex EBM in great condition. I'm gonna list it on ebay tomorrow, but wanted to give y'all a chance at it first. You can see photos here. It includes:

Bolex H16 EBM

Battery (new from 2015)

Battery Charger

Handle

Eyecup (brand new)

Kern Switar H16 RX 10mm f1.6 

Kern Switar H16 RX 25mm f1.4

Orange Pelican Case (I'll take $150 off the price if you don't want the case and can do local pickup in Los Angeles)

Asking Price: $1,200

I haven't calculated the shipping costs yet, but it will probably be like $40 inside the US. Also available for pickup in Los Angeles.

I went through this on a project 2 years ago. I tried uploading high bit rate prores files, but didn't have any luck. Tyler seems to have figured it out, but I eventually gave up....

Quick heads up about mounting a GH5 to a car: The floating sensor for the in body stabilization gets messed up by strong vibrations. I experienced it using a tripod on a large ship, but the Top Gear guys described the same problem with their car rigs. If you buy a panasonic make sure to get the GH5S. 

What are y'all'ses thoughts on uniqueness? High-end production values are nice (and that's why I usually get hired, to make something look "good" or "professional"), but that's not a unique skill in Los Angeles. How does one stand out from the crowd? Is there any way (other than personal relationships) for an individual cinematographer to be so integral to a production that it would be impossible to replace them with someone else?

I do free stuff all the time in the name of ART, but I have to have some kind of creative control. Free projects are the perfect place to try insane ideas that "clients" would never agree to. 

Yeah, seems like a faulty unit. I used a pair of the 5" transmitter/receivers last month and it worked great. 

Even with all of Red's proprietary 1st party accessories, their cameras are awfully glitchy....

The tokina vista primes are T1.5. They seem pretty nice. Probably a little cheaper to rent if you can find them. 

In that case, please disregard my craziness. 

When I do DIT gigs on big shows, I like to:

1. Have enough media to make it through a full day. Most productions I've been on don't do this, but it's nice to have the cards as a third backup while the transfer to post happens.

2. Shotputpro with a checksum to two drives simultaneously for an instant backup. The nice thing about shotputpro is that it can transfer to two drives in the same amount of time that it takes to transfer to one. If you go from card to drive1 and then from drive1 to drive2, that will take twice as long.

Most shows will have a big raid on set for the whole show, and then portable drives with enough space for one day of shooting, which get driven back and forth to the post-facility. Most post houses have some kind of big fancy media server, so once footage gets into their system and verified, I consider it safe. But we still keep that on-set RAID just in case post's building burns down or something.

As far as verifying transfers go: shotputpro will verify that what's on the card is now on the hard drive. It does not verify that the footage on the card is right and proper. Every once in a while, a clip will get messed up if the camera shut off in the middle or something. Sooooo, after a transfer is done, I usually dump all the footage into tentacle sync studio and scrub through everything real fast. I find tentacle sync to be the fastest way to do that, with the added bonus of being able to check timecode real fast on multi-cam shoots.

For personal projects, I never do DIT in the field. I just make sure to have enough media for a full day. Then I have a 16TB RAID in RAID 5 at home, dump to that and call it a day. If it's an extra important project, I'll buy a cheapo USB 4TB single drive and double it to that.

I've also set-up some media servers for small production companies, and in that situation, the I've found the cheapest way to do it is find an old iMac or something that they're not using anymore, use that as the server using apple's built in file sharing system (you'd be surprised how well that works). Then get a pair of identical RAID drives, something big, like an 8-bay 32TB. Share one of the RAIDs on the LAN, then do scheduled nightly backups to the other RAID. I used a program called carbon copy cloner for that. It's nice because it will hang onto old files for a while until the backup drive fills up, kinda like how Apple's time machine works. So if someone accidentally deletes a project file or something it can save your ass. There might be a more turn-key solution for that out now-a-days. I set up those systems a while ago, and at the time, that was the cheapest way I could figure out.

I agree with everything Robin said.

One thought: Does something seem off about the contrast curve? It looks a bit unnatural to my eye, like you pushed and pulled the levels around a lot in the grade.

Overall, love the look and texture.