Vital Butinar

How cool! Congratulations! ?

I agree that it can get depressing. But a friend of mine keeps telling me that you just have to push forward and keep on kicking and then things happen.

My girlfriend who's actually a sculptress, but didn't have a studio for a couple of months decided to create some hand drawn illustrations for a children's book. She sent out a couple of shots to a publisher and a lady publisher got back to her the next day. She said that they were super interested and that my girlfriend should get her the first draft asap. But on the other side in the filmmaking world I was lucky enough to find a producer who started working with me to get my screenplay up to Hollywood specs and then we went forward with finding distribution and financing. But the coronavirus threw a little wrench into the whole situation. As far as commercial work I do agree completely because I've been sending out stuff to agencies for years and almost never get a reply.

Well my girlfriend is a DP and shoots on all my or should I say our projects. We've got a similar setup but a Pocket 4K and a Moza Air 2 and she's able to operate the gimbal and pull focus efficiently at the same time. But she's had a lot of practice and yes sometimes it takes a couple of tries to get it done well. She's worked with a focus puller before and said it was OK since she was focusing on framing the whole time and movement but still she says she prefers the control of pulling focus herself. So it can definitely be done. But I think one of the key things is to keep it in mind even when doing blocking or constructing shots. By the way how's the 6K Pro working out with the ND's and screen. This is the main two things we miss on the P4K.

Well my girlfriend who is a DP used to be a makeup artist and she says that in most situations it's really good to think about the makeup when thinking about the lighting. For example a couple of years back she still did some makeup gigs and a group of guys who were shooting a calender with a bunch had this weird lighting setup and then an even weirder color grade makingit look like the eye further from the lens was smaller or something. But because they didn't tell her or talk about it she could not have know so she was really unhappy about it. So yeah she always coordinates with the makeup artist before we shoot sometimes even way in preproduction when we're doing the shot list. But we usually use the makeup artists.

Actually a really interesting question. I'm not sure I can be much help but I do remember one time when I was working as an extra on set of a commercials to get some experience and observe. They had a bunch of tanning beds (don't know if they were real or props) but I do remember talking to a lighting technician and I think the guy told me that they put in kino flo bulbs or something like that and that there were no UV bulbs anywhere. Good luck with your shoot.

So this band for who we make music videos wanted another video but the whole country got shut down for months. After five months of almost now work because all the businesses were under the impression that we weren't allowed to work one of our genius government officials let it slip that we actually could work so the whole country started up again and we decided to try and produce the music video we had started five months earlier. Anyway the look was inspired by the Tony Scott film Unstoppable since we wanted the video to give a creepy vibe so everything from the story line was shot in 12fps and then projected in a 24fps timeline and we used a wide open shutter to create a lot of motion blur. The original plan was to have the girl walk trough a moss forest trough different scenes and to have basically a fake one shot with a couple of cut a ways shots but because of the regulations we weren't able to have as many people on set at the same time so we went another way and shot everything in sections and did some creative editing. I'm a little sad that we weren't able to shoot a one shot because it would have been great.

Wow looks great. I love the warm light from the window because it gives a nice afternoon type feel to the video. Congratulations!

That's great! I've got the Pocket 4K also with the Viltrox focal reducer and a bunch of Rokinon prime lenses. Not much but I love it. My girlfriend and I have some rudimentary equipment that we use when we shoot our own stuff. Tascam DR60 and a boom mic and a couple of red head lights. But usually the basic stuff that we've got is usually enough to start of doing something nice. Well again congratulations again.

Oh that's cool and congratulations on giving yourself a challenge to learn from the experience. I'm actually planing something similar in about a week, just because I and my partner have some down time and I want to play around with something I intend to use in a feature later on in the year. By the way very nice grading. What did you shoot on and edito/grade? (I saw in another post you had a BM Pocket 4K guess you used that one) How much time did you spend on different aspects of the film? Regards

Well as far as requirements go I think they're different and don't necessarily need to turn a profit. I think the requirements are more along the lines as you said like having productions represented by different countries or having the film have special cultural importance for the country. Or something like having a lot of women on your crew. Which in my case is not a problem since my DP, editor and colorist is my wife. Then my co writer is also a woman and my wife's sister is one of our producers and production designer. So we're well covered. This is what I'm hoping to get my film funded this way and sponsor funds or maybe get funded by the streaming service, but the film has to be commercially viable. As far as education goes I think it only has any impact on the project unless with our national fund. But the thing that pisses me of is that most of the people I see who are involved with projects don't have a formal education in film and I think they only use it more or less as an excuse to turn people down who are not from their own little club. Other than that I think education plays a very small role and even worse is that when we work with people on different projects, I find it very frustrating the low level of education of people. I would expect people that have been working in the industry to have more knowledge and what's even more frustrating is the lack of width of knowledge. People seem to be very focused on their job and not much else, even people who you'd expect to be able to do that and at the same time not very enlightened and knowledgeable in their own field. Of course this doesn't apply to everyone, but rather to a very large segment of people which is worrisome. At least to me. I'll send you and article that I wrote a few months ago in a privet message. Anyway I hope I've helped some and I can hopefully tell you a little more in a few weeks time.

Yeah. That is something I agree with 100% and a really good point. ?

My partner and I actually use a three screen setup most of the time because it makes it easier to have the clips, info or scopes open on one screen, the timeline on another and a preview on the third screen. But to be completely honest a few months ago we moved and for a couple of months we only had the one widescreen monitor and we were able to work without any problems. It is beneficial seeing a larger preview of what you're doing.

Hi Austin. Well I'm from Europe, more specifically Slovenia. I won't say that I've got a lot of experience but I do have some experience. For the most part it's a mix of the American system where you find a producer who somehow get's you some A list talent and then some funding and you're good to go. But then you also have stuff like we have here, that's a local streaming service of a tv network which is much easier to pitch them a project and if they take it, you get funding and you're free to do your project. We're actually working on two TV shows that are most lightly getting funded by them and we're working on a feature film. But they usually want to see a proof of concept pilot or something along these lines with regards to a TV show, which can be a problem since you need to produce something initially by yourself. If they go for it you usually get a fixed amount of money and it's not a lot. But they do all the distribution all you have to do is deliver your project. The there's our national film fund, which is intended for independent filmmakers, where you have to submit your proposal for a film and if your film gets picked as one of the projects that they decide to fund, you get a grant and help with producing and distributing your project. But from what I've heard you almost have to be related to someone on the panel who chooses the project to get a project trough or again have some well known talent and an established producer working with you. I've never put much hope in getting my project picked by the national film fund since I'm the new guy and am not experienced enough and don't have a formal film school education, etc., etc. the usual BS. Like I said you need connections for this and if you're a nobody, you het nowhere. Then we have European film grants for co-productio. Which I'm actually looking into right now for a comedy I'm trying to produce. These film grants are supposed to be much easier than the previously mentioned national grant because if you've got a good project they're willing to co-fund your project. Honestly I don't have much experience with these but I'm hoping that I'll be able to fund my film this way. There's also our national TV network which also does production of narrative projects and honestly working with them would be one of the best things, since they've got everything you might need. From access to talent, locations, equipment and even good and experienced producers. But last few years they've been somewhat closed for cooperation with outsiders and focused more on their own stuff. So I honestly wound't put much hope into that, unless again you knew someone who made the decisions personally and they did you a huge favore. Also something that I've done in the past is tried to get sponsors for projects which has worked out great and I'm considering doing the same thing for the comedy feature that I'm planing to produce. In fact we did a proof of concept TV show pilot the same way, where we got a bunch of sponsors to help us with the projects. But it usually isn't in form of financing but rather access to locations, which we got to use for free and in form of food and drinks that we had during production. For the feature comedy that I'm planning, I'm going to try and get some sponsors who will in return also receive commercials for their products that they we will be asking them to donate along with some funding. I'm hoping this will be enough for part of the required budget. Hope this helps and if there's something I can clarify, just let me know. In fact I'm also interested if anyone else has any other experience with this here in Europe. By the way why are you asking? Honestly up till now I've had more luck talking with US based producers about doing projects, than anyone here. Except for the local streaming service that are for now really content hungry. Regards Vital

Well as a director I have the unique advantage that I'm also part DP and my wife is my DP on almost all of our projects. I always try to do is envision the whole thing as a fluid thing and then go deeper into each scene with my DP and then I try to judge how much time an action that I want to show or some dialog takes up, so I usually have to act each part out. Of course it also has to do with how much budget you've got, which in my case is usually not a lot. So our last couple of projects I tried to do a few more complicated shots, like in a music video we had a tracking one shot with a lot of action happening like people crossing the frame or bikes riding past. I got the ida from an old movie I watched and thought that it looked like there were a lot of people there and with the whole pandemic business going on I wanted to limit the number of people on set. So the shot was a nice way to make it look like there were a lot of people there. Then in a film we did we used an orbiting shot around two characters where in the second trun we hid one of the characters behind the camera as if she vanished. We actually came up with the idea when we were thinking on how to make one of the characters vanish without having to complicate too much. We tried it out first and it worked perfectly when cut with a wide shot. In both cases we tried the shot out first and then recreated it on set and I always had a backup shot ready in case the one I wanted wasn't working. I'd have to know a little more about the story and scene to be able to come up with a shot. Hope it helps and good luck.

Yes you can always delete the cache folders of Davinci and it will still work but it will take some time before it will run smooth again. I've had this happen a couple of times on our workstations and I just delete all the cache since the bulk is usually from older projects that have been finished.

Personally my girlfriend and I bought a Blackmagic Pocket 4K and we use it on most of our projects. When we need something bigger for a shoot we usually rent the Ursa Mini Pro but since we got this camera there hasn't been much need for renting because it suffices for virtually everything we do. As for the metadata it transfers into Davinci Resolve without any problems. Even the "good take" info transfers. But we always use BRAW and always with Davinci. So we don't need to transcode. I've never used this with other NLEs and other cameras and file formats.

I've experienced this also. For some reason if I use Handbrake to convert a ProRes master into h.264 it will be more compressed but better quality than if I export in Resolve. I have no idea why.

I agree about Davinci being better. I actually can't even work in Premiere anymore, especially color grading.

Davinci is really great with ProRes and we haven't have had any problems with ProRes. But h.264 is a different story. We've had to export a lot beefier files to get the same result as we did in Premiere Pro. In the end it really doesn't matter. Whatever you have on hand. I use Davinci since we switched a few years ago.

I used to have LTO on a couple of my servers. It was effective but it was years ago. The Sony solutions does look expensive.

See now this is a good solution. I just wish it wasn't that pricey. But I think for now drives will keep the bulk of the data and then later a NAS.

When we're shooting I usually have the assistant mark which take is the best or make a note what I liked and am planing on using in the edit. Most of the time I'm right but then as the editing gets more refined some things might get cut or other things added. But we usually start with the original idea and then refine it from there. But it is a lot of work looking trough everything when you're searching for something that you need but don't know if it's there or not. We've been using the Blackmagic cameras and there's this cool feature there where you can mark a good take. That's been helpful.

Well I was in a similar situation with my girlfriend a couple of years ago. We are also filmmakers and started small. So we used our DSLR at first but we were getting frustrated with getting an 8bit compressed image. So we started looking at cameras we could afford. Let me say that we were not making enough money off it to justify buying something expensive like a Red or an Arri in either case. So I started analyzing stuff and trying to figur out what would be best. We were considering buying a Sony or an EVA1 or even buying a recorder to just record of our Nikon DSLR. But then Blackmagic came out with he Pocket 4K. I actually needed another 8 months to fully figuro out which to choose and in the end I decided for the Pocket 4K. Now here's the kicker why. Any other camera C300 or even C100 or EVA 1 all of them seemed like they either needed an external recorder anyway or we'd be getting only a marginally better result than what we had anyway. But with the Pocket 4K we actually got a cinema camera that just between the time we were waiting to get it started saving data in braw. At the same time we could use it very rigged up if we needed it or we could use it in a very basic way. It has shown itself to be a really great cinema camera for our needs which is motalo music videos and short films. Basically stuff like that and the ability to shoot a form of raw is great. Yes it has it's problems mainly the battery life and that we need to use focal reducer but then again it hasn't been that much of a problem. From what I understand the Red Komodo is something similar but a lot more expensive with a couple of really nice features. Personally I've been thinking of upgrading to the 6K but in the end it would only mean more data and at this point there's no need for that. Best of luck with choosing your camera.

Well a few years ago I needed a laptop to do video editing when we were on the road I found a Asus GL703VD with an Nvidia GTX 1050 and 32GB of memory. An ssd and an hdd, I'm not saying it's the best workstation and the fastest. Honestly when I work on something that's a little complex it feels like a drone lifting off. But I can do my job on the fly. It cost me about a $1,300 but I guess you've got a lot more to spend. Davinci is a software that does need some resources but I still think that if you use it in the correct way it shouldn't matter. Good luck