David Mawson

24 minutes ago, Phil Connolly said:

But if you have no lenses and are building a set from scratch then there are some options in the 10 to 16mm bracket - much less then say 18 to 24mm. But its doable without a speedbooster - nothing at this price point is perfect.

Yes, but those options are expensive - at least compared to a $2000 budget. He's now being told to buy a $1500 body, a $500 wide, plus the body needs a decent power source, rigging to shoot hand held, a tripod, more lenses, ideally a monitor - that's a $3000-$4000 bill. The budget's $2000. Budgets are things to stay inside of. (And no one has even raised the question of whether the OP has a computer powerful enough to make edit and grade 4K pro res..)

Instead he could just buy a $500 apsc body, a $100 wide, a couple of other - probably even cheaper - lenses. And he'd still have excellent quality with the right body. He could even buy a 5dii, shoot full frame raw, and come nowhere near blowing his budget. Yes, a $3000 BM build would shoot better - but it's out of budget. And he'd learn just as much with the right cheaper camera. Which is the point - this is a camera for learning on. The BM buys more image quality than a $150 EOS-M with Magic Lantern, but no more knowledge.

As no one else is responding, I'll give my extremely inexperienced opinion. Which is that I'd doubt the China ball has the oomph alone. If it works out, fine. But I'd be ready to put a heavily diffused 120d on either side of the central camera and backlight with something else - maybe just a reflector. 

11 hours ago, Phil Connolly said:

 

I'm not saying a electronic kit lens is great, but is a workable tool when your on a tight budget.

Actually some of the m43 kit lenses are great - a lot of samples of the 12-32 have excellent image quality.

But you can't pull focus on them. So as a camera for learning, they're pretty awful.

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The nice thing about M4/3 is its quite cheap to adapt to fit other lenses - it gives you options. 

Well, yes: you can fit almost any lens. But so what? Without an expensive XL speedbooster you're going to have a very limited choice of focal lengths. And the point of accessing a large range of lenses is primarily to get those focal lengths. An aps-c mirrorless is much less limiting. The crop is less severe and you can get the original focal length of any 35mm stills lens back with a cheap generic speedbooster. You get a much wider real choice of lenses this way. Even without a speedbooster you can use an old 24mm stills lens to get a wide angle on aps-c, but on an m43 it will be a normal lens.

Plus there' are a lot of cheap good-enough modern Chinese lenses for aps-c with mechanical focus rings and even de-clicked aperture. You can often get these in m43 too, but again the crop factor messes everything up.

11 hours ago, Sam Petty said:

ok your right. bmpcc4k is a great camera. 

I said that you can't afford to buy a BMPC - not once the cost of a speedbooster, lenses and power are added. Again, you really need to read what people are telling you.

On 5/23/2019 at 6:40 PM, Andrea Matranga said:

5. Did the rental cost of film equipment go down now that digital is available (presumably the existing stock of film cameras is still in working order)?

 

Given how complex film cameras are and how precisely they have to work, I'd be careful about making assumptions here. They're very different beasts to 35mm stills cameras and do a very different job - think how much film they need to expose and how carefully the exposures need to be synched with the film advance. To be reliable they will need regular maintenance. And even a basic clean and lube can be $500-$2000 of skilled work:

10 minutes ago, Sam Petty said:

Well g95 is new to the game that brings great image quality.  But the black magic pickiest cinima 4k is also tempting. May be a dumb question what is a speed booster and what is wrong won’t he bmpcc4k

I think you're missing all the more intelligent points being made in this thread. I strongly suggest that you understand the points made before spending money. If you're learning how to shoot like a pro, then certain features are essential - eg repeatable focus pulls - or very near to it - eg waveforms and vectorscopes and much more per-pixel data than than a G95 gives.

As for what a speed booster is - you really should google that sort of thing, yes? Questions to humans should be saved for when you really need them.

(And the g95's IQ doesn't look that great to me, even for the price. It's more of a vlogging camera - it prioritises features like IBIS over a decent codec.)

9 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

I was wondering how much filmmakers pay to have it done.

Wow, that is pricey. I thought it would be a few hundred $$. Especially for a short 4 min. I guess more must go into it than I thought.

It could easily be only that. Or even less. Grading is priced by the colourist's time, not the running time of the project. A one hour documentary might get graded in a day while a music video with lots of cuts and fancy grade with lots of masks might take several times longer.

16 minutes ago, aapo lettinen said:

 

By my opinion those cheap-o plastic thingy lenses are not good for any kind of cinematography learning. Can be handy for stills and as a backup but not very usable for narratives or any other use than low budget doc work..

If you're referring to native m43 lenses (which are often not cheap or plastic...) then they do a very significant problem. Which is, with very few exceptions, they're focus-by-wire only, without a linear focus mode. So you don't get repeatable focus, which is a pain.

In fact come to think of it, given the cost of XL speedboosters and manual focus wide angles for m43, I'm a little shocked that the OP is considering m43 - I'd have thought his school would have warned against it. There are lots of very nicely priced asp-c cameras that can be used with and without a speedbooster (and you only need a standard model, not the expensive XL) to get a full range of manually focussed lenses. A GH5 might be a good choice for weddings or corporate video, but AL is right - it's a bad one as a learning tool. You really need to go aps-c or fullframe.

54 minutes ago, Sam Petty said:

 I want to learn on somthing cause it is my first cam. Is g95 good in your opinion? It’s ether that, or the gh5

Just out of curiousity: Why? They're not exactly the only two cameras in existence...

And PC's point about output format is a very good one. A "thick" image (meaning one with more bits per pixel) at lower resolution is often a lot better to work with than a high resolution thin one. There's a big difference between log and good log.

I can't believe that the cost of sending film to be developed was a large of the budget of a major studio production. But the cost of re-accessing locations for re-shoots could be a problem. With digital you know when you've got the shot and keep on until you have.

Btw - I think "dailies" were delivered daily, but often lagged several days.It was more a question of going to a location or re-building a set to shoot if there was a problem.

I'm not a professional, but I'd suggest that the biggest change to costs with digital is lighting. Modern sensors need a lot less of it than film.

1 hour ago, aapo lettinen said:

If I were a film student again I would take a good onboard monitor over a camera body every day. They tend to be more difficult to borrow and more useful than camera bodies and the blackmagic is worth nothing without good lenses and a speed booster which are expensive. So I would purchase a good monitor first (daylight viewable, scopes, hdmi and sdi) and then consider my camera options again with rest of the money

The current BMPCC doesn't need a speedbooster for m43 lenses. It's an active mount too, so you get OIS.  However, I think your general point is a good one. And $2000 isn't nearly enough to get a working BM16K set-up when you consider the external power you need and lenses.

My own suggestion would be to get a used EOS-M (the original model) for $150 and put Magic Lantern on it. Mirrorless super-35 gives you a huge range of lenses and ML gives you raw, false colour, waveforms, and a vectorscope. Shoot with it for a couple of months then buy the expensive camera knowing what features you really want. Either sell the body for what you paid or keep it as a b-cam - you an even put a viltrox speedbooster on it for another $150. 

Otherwise for $2000 I'd go for a used Fuji XE3, vintage lenses (maybe Minolta, because they all tend to have the same look) and a cheap speed booster and a basic 5 inch monitor.

20 hours ago, Max Field said:

Get a Sony F3 they're only like $700 now

Used ones start at four or five times that price.

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I tried a Pocket 4K at a tech demo and the thing almost burned my hands, are they fixing that overheating issue?

That seems to be a similar degree of exaggeration. I think checking reviews would quickly show that BM users aren't melting.

Have you thought about setting up lights outside the room window to create your own daylight?

I appreciate the suggestion, but no. Between rain - this is the UK - the need to put someone outside to stop gear being stolen, it really wouldn't be a great idea. Plus it only works if there is a window and you can the subject near it, in which case either of those two cameras could get the job done without lights. The point of using lights is to handle the worst cases in a way that gets a consistent look.

And psychologically, I think the problems are even worse. Gear on the other side of the window is still gear, but now you're shooting near a window and drawing attention from neighbours aimed at that window.

...and now you have a light that only works in one orientation.

Yep. That's the biggest problem of all. And getting it up high would be appalling business.

You could steer the light with reflectors and fresnels, I suppose. But honestly, if I thought a system like this was viable outside of a few very special niches - eg a low budget film that needed a lot of light and had a tech savvy crew - then the last thing I'd do is talk about it publicly.

There are two concerns. First is that the liquid coolant is really only useful for getting heat from one place to another, by heating the coolant with the load, then moving it with a pump. If you don't pump it through a radiator, it will eventually heat up to the point where that's a problem.

No, with the right tank design you should be able to convection cool. The LEDs would heat oil and it would rise to the cross stroke, where the large surface area would let it cool fast, then it would sink again. To aid flow I'd put baffles in the tank like those shown in the convection cooling system here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_immersion_cooling

And I'd probably make the top of the tank much wider than the body - think of an L rotated through 90 degrees, or maybe just a T. That way you'd have a lot of air-cooling at the top. The baffle design would need a little modification for that. And/or the top could have the fluid rising into a system of fins or you could half immerse a system of copper fins in the liquid.

It could be built but the risks of leakage and unreliability seem too much to bear.

Those would be my concerns, yes.

Excellent editing. Doesn't look low budget at all. The only ghost of a problem was that some of the dialogue in the early corridor scene was indistinct.

Bruce Sterling especially Schismatrix, Holy Fire and short story collections. James Ellroy, especially the original LA books. Chester Himes. Walter Mosley. Bulgakov's Master & Margarita. Nabakov. Babel's Red Cavalry. Seth Morgan's Homeboy. The Godfather.

 

 

50W LEDs run without enormous heatsinks, or heatsinks with fans, will catch fire.

 

dnbof.jpg

This is probably a crazy thought and I'm certainly not willing to try it, but sometimes PC builders fill the cases of overclocked machines with cooling oil. Really - this is NOT a joke. Perhaps an aquarium filled with oil and LEDs would work. The LEDs would need attaching to the glass and a heatsink attaching to each to transfer the heat to the oil, after which convection cooling should kick in. You'd want to keep the case vertical and direct the light with reflectors or fresnels.

Good luck getting insurance... (And I hereby disclaim all legal liability if someone wants to try this.)

UK lighting prices are shocking. The best deal seems to be Aputure - good CRI, no reports of fan noise. I'm thinking of one of these

https://fenchel-janisch.com/cheap-led-lights-aputure-amaran-528-review/

..If it's a bit anemic, I could aim two at the same diffuser or bounce. And it has some convenient softbox options, although they seem a little small -

https://www.aputure.com/products/ez-box

Yeah its still sort of you get what you pay for.. I have the Astra that doesn't have a fan.. its 2 X the strength of the first generation 1x1 lite panels .. thats all I need.. bi color is also handy ..you can warm up the face a bit.. .. maybe just rent lights if you dont want to shell out.. I bought mine as a set of two that came with the pelican case/stands etc.. from B&H... very easy to work with.. your in the UK which is notoriously exp for gear.. the price in pounds is often the same as the dollar price outside the UK !!

 

Sorry if you know this.. but its surprising now many times you see it done wrong.. as a rule.. you want your subject looking into the light.. so you get a fall off on the non leading side of the face.. ie camera, person conducting the interview.. then the light next to them.. your on a full frame sensor camera too.. so getting the background soft (presuming you want to) will be pretty easy..

Unfortunately renting won't work out well - the plan is for quite a few short interviews on different days.

That's an interesting point about bicolour - something I hadn't considered at all.

And I appreciate the reminder!

Thanks - that helps a lot too! The other thing I'm discovering, coming from stills land, is that cheaper LED systems with decent CRI often have nasty fan noise...

 

ah ok got it.. yes bouncing will do the same.. but harder to deal flagging off the background and its just move actual "stuff" around your subject .. which you you say could be a problem..and set up time.. a battery powered LED with a soft box and a built in grid is about as basic as you can get.. as long as they are not right next to a white wall you shouldn't need the neg fill.. just have it classic ¾ portrait Rembrandt position and you,ll get some warp around but won't be flat..

That's excellent. I started with that plus a reflector for fill and a rim light, then when I found the set-up I posted, I never considered that I could get the same outcome by simplifying the LED softbox system. And I could still carry a combined reflector and flag and get someone to hold it or tape it to something in an emergency. Thanks!

Established pros don't use them yet. They're still on Canon or Nikon DSLRs.

But probably not- they still make some sound.

No, they really don't - not the ones with an electronic shutter and a "stealth mode". However, the e-shutter can suffer from jello. And Sony have an appalling reputation for support among stills photographers, although I think they're trying to fix that for pro's now.

Do rooms in Scotland not have any electrical room lighting as it is?

The shoots will be in day time. I'd consider blacking out windows to avoid mixed lighting too intrusive.

And shooting with an inconsistent lighting look, high ISO, and mixed lighting sounds like a recipe for a disaster, even with an A7s.

Sort of catch 22 as you need the source to be close, if the light is small.. or a bigger source further away .. for the light to be soft.. to me the diagram you have is actually a bit of a hassle to set up.. and the light in question is a tungsten light that will get very hot..you need 2 stands or more for the 4x4,s..

Sorry: I should have said that I wasn't planning on using that exact light. It's the overall set-up. Ie

- Light bounced off the reflector to make it big and soft

- Flag to protect the interviewee from distracting light and increase contrast

- Those small tweaks to the flag with white paper

Re stands, I was planning on using large folding reflectors or stitching together something custom. It's indoors, so no winds. There's no problem putting together something out of instamorph and kite spars to hold them up while looking less intimidating than a normal stand.