David Mawson

Macks - I'm considering it as an option. But even with an A7s... this is the UK we're talking - often the NW UK. And some of the shoots will probably be in winter. Some of them may be in ***Scotland*** in winter, and the only reason that vampires don't overrun the streets of Glasgow 24 hours a day at that time of year is that they can't stand the taste of deep fried Mars Bars in their blood.

My girlfriend is working on a project with high functioning autistic people. (She's HFA herself.) They're being asked to talk about subjects that are very personal to them and a lot of them hate bright light and have big problems with people invading their social space. Autistic people also often have strong ideological feelings about what they see as insincerity - so the use of intrusive lighting gear to create what they might see as a lie could be a problem. But most of all I want to avoid - Bright, concentrated lights - Complex looking set-ups - Intimidating gear close to the subject's face - Long set-up or take-down times I also need a soft, friendly lighting look. And we're shooting in the UK, so window light is about as unreliable as it gets. Interviews can be shot entirely seated and the camera will probably be a Fuji XT2 or Sony A7 series. At the moment this looks like my best bet https://www.provideocoalition.com/the_simplest_fastest_interview_lighting_setup-ever/ ...But I'd love to find a way of not having those 4x4's close to the subject. (Also, any flags and reflectors etc have to fold away so the entire set-up can fit in a single case that looks reasonably like "civilian" luggage.)

There's a double problem that bothers me here - 1. Appalling logic. 2. A lack of concentration on actually making good films. The film industry is increasingly restricted to shooting toy commercials; TV is producing some of the finest drama in human history. And people are obsessing with how to get slightly more pleasant tonality rather than asking the question of how grown-up films can be made again.

Again from the article that you linked but apparently only skimmed for points that confirmed your biases: That works out to a relatively affordable $2.5 million per year for its current 50-PB holdings. ..Petabytes are not a problem. Not even now - and 5 years from now, that cost will be a fraction of what is now. The economics of storage will at some point force lazy film companies to update how they store data; they won't force them to go back to film and get hit by that billion dollar a year print cost. Because there is a huge difference between lazy and actually stupid.

I refer you to my answer above.

So your point is that a digital camera won't show exactly the same images as a film camera if the actors are several decades older and the lighting is different... Did you actually expect otherwise?

You're missing both relevant points. Which are 1. If the cost of archiving is a problem, then the film companies just need to update their archiving methods and 2. The current method was chosen in the stone age - it isn't the one that would be chosen today What's likely the case is that the cost isn't a problem - people have more important things to worry about. But if it is, then it can be cut to almost zero by modernising. There simply isn't a case where the cost of storage makes it attractive to go back to film and incur that extra billion dollars a year print cost. Also if you read the article carefully instead of cherrypicking, you'll see the current longterm cost for hard drive storage: For 20 years of storage, including power, supervision, and data migration every 3 years, USC charges $1,000 per terabyte, or $1,000,000 per petabyte ..So even if you want to store a TB of data per film, that's $50 a year. Not the $7000 of 2007 technology. If some film companies haven't modernised - well, that's another example of film companies throwing money away.

Yes, but what seems to be true - especially when it is the answer you want - is not the same as what is true. Google "confirmation bias" and then never do this again...

No, you won't see why storing digital is expensive from that article. You'll see why it WAS expensive - films were stored on physical media which had migration costs. That was because when the films were stored hard drive space was something like a thousand times its current cost. You might as well be using an article about steam engines to explain why horseless carriages will never replace the kind you are used to. Once a film is on a drive, there is no migration cost. Even if you need to change the file format, that's a job for a program not a human being. Even if the film companies haven't caught up with this yet, they will do - storing digital is not a cost barrier.

That's someone justifying their job and budget. It's not the real cost of storing the data; it's as artificial as $50 sandwiches on set. There is nothing special about digital film data: you put it on networked drives and the job is done. ..And even 20K a year is cheap compared to $2M for making prints!

Utterly wrong. Firstly, that figure was from a 2007 study. Secondly, it was quoted as being 11 times higher than film. (I've never seen a $7000 a year figure - that sounds insane. How can you spend that much on storing that little data??? Literally HOW? Do you buy a diamond encrusted blueray disc?) But the cost of digital storage has halved every 18 months since then. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who buys hard drives. So the cost of archiving a 4K film NOW is lower - much lower - than storing a physical film. You put it a networked drive, it's copied to another couple of drives elsewhere in the world using a check sum to make sure there are no errors, the process repeats every few months - that's it. Unlike the physical film it can't be wiped out by a flood or a fire at a vault site. ...And the cost of storing that 4K film will continue to fall at something like that rate for the next decade or so at least. The long term cost of storing a 4K film is effectively zero per year. I really do see a lot of wishful thinking here. Because really - people don't know hard drives are cheaper than 10 years ago? They've noticed google gives away GB of storage for free now? Please! 2007 was the stone age.

That's very poor logic. If you've check my posts, I've quoted multiple ways in which film is superior to current digital sensors. I just don't let my preferences override my intelligence: film projection will not be making a mass comeback; the film industry is an industry and the economics don't favour it. The studios will not throw a billion dollars a year away. >>Have you noticed how Hollywood is failing in quality film production? That quality will continue to erode if film is pushed totally out. Some very 'big' and powerful people are saying it. Are they all wrong?<< And even bigger and more powerful people are pushing film out or it wouldn't be going. And also, no, no one who matters blames the decline in script quality on digital being replaced by film. Again, Deadwood was shot on digital; any episode is a match for There Will Be Blood in script quality and is just plain more compelling. Film is a nice thing to have... But it isn't really that important. It's a slight boost to one aspect of film making - cinematography - which doesn't matter as much as story, direction, casting or acting. And then wardrobe, design, music and audio pull something like equal weight to cinematography - not to mention sfx and stunts. So we're talking about a slight tweak to something that realistically accounts for 10% of the quality of a film. It really isn't going to matter. ..It may even help. Because although digital isn't as good, it is cheap. That opens up new possibilities outside the studio system, for the people with the will and the wit to take them.

Growing from a very low level to a slightly higher low level doesn't really matter in a business sense. And, yes, total digital does make "mega bucks". Print duplication is expensive and a major bottleneck for the industry. Re-using hard drives instead of making prints saves literally billions a year (and billion is about a thousand meagbucks, yes?) And zapping extra hard drives to meet unexpected demand is much faster than making prints. ...The film industry is about industry first and film as a very distant second. The clock will not turn back. >> realise that that's the one thing you can't get at home Other than a large screen, the social event of seeing a film with other people out of the house - you know; all the things the audience actually care about.. Really: you can't wish away business realities like this. Well, you can wish- but it won't work. Film projection is dead.

I like Bergman and Tartovsky and Kurosawa. Slow is not a problem. But time is weight in film and only very strong shots - both aesthetically and in terms of meaning - can survive for the durations that you attempted. Long shots don't create poetic cinema by themselves; that shot duration is something that you can attempt when everything else is right - I'd suggest that it is something you gradually have to work up to.

Say that often enough and Fuji will make a copy... https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/camerapedia/images/6/67/Rst3.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20110914150827 https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=fuji+xt2&safe=off&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG2KX79-3WAhUF1BoKHfkhAn0Q_AUIDCgD&biw=1267&bih=821 ..Being one of Fuji's camera designers must be an especially easy life.

...As in per year.

That's an army of straw men. Practice quality digital doesn't have to be expensive - a GM1 or GH2 will work very well. You rarely have to change lenses. And in fact you don't have to upgrade - the GH2 achieved practice quality levels years ago, so why not keep it? I've never met anyone who plans to shoot at 1000 to 1 and don't believe you have either - and it's irrelevant to Tyler's point. Why on earth would you want to store all your takes for the type of work Tyler is talking about? You shoot; you edit that day's footage that night; you delete the rest if storage space is an issue. And the BMPC is indeed used on paying jobs - it was a B-cam for the Transformers and is still an A camera for indies like Bob And The Trees. And yes, you can keep a film camera for 30 years. But during that time it will need maintaining and shooting a reasonable amount of practice material will cost, what, $100,000 for film and processing? All of which you would have to store physically, applying your logic. Buying a GH2 - or even a GH5 - every three to five years seems much cheaper. Buying a used GH2 and shooting until it falls apart will probably cost $250 for 5 years shooting. That's, what, 10 to 20 minutes of practice footage on film?

...I think the fairly obvious answer is "Because most projects don't have the budgets of the above." ??? Also, how many of those are imax? A trend among super-high budget imax productions shouldn't really be used a predictor for other types of production.

Film and digital (other than Foveon) handle highlights differently. If you look at this article about Foveons http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/photos/Foveon2/foveon-highlights.html it should explain. But basically, as Bayer sensors go into highlight they do this (this is a picture of an over-exposed colour wheel) Film, the eye and Foveons do this ...Actually the eye and film would be cleaner again than the Foveon. If you you shoot on film and then convert to digital with reasonable care, you avoid the highlight spill of the first example - because of the curve the film naturally applies. The image from the film will be in digital's safe range. (You may still lose some other benefits of film though - it typically has a fatter mid-range.)

Foveon sensors for stills are impossible to tell from film. A lot of the problems people associated with digital are problems with Bayer sensors; foveons behave quite differently: Eg http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/photos/Foveon2/foveon-highlights.html ..They're also a huge PITA to shoot because of the limited ISO etc. But eventually a usable video Foveon will appear - Canon seem to be working on that technology. Or a curved sensor with a random rgb pattern instead of a bayer matrix would avoid a lot of problems.

No, you just need bigger lights. And actors with asbestos skin... Or you could find people who are absolutely epilepsy proof and use flash 30 times a second. Seriously: no it's not ready yet. But it seems an area of obsessive interest to Canon as well as Sigma. I suspect that the problems might get easier with curved sensors. Naa... I have a lot of "laymen" non-technical friends who also visit the cinema and I ask them questions about their experiences. 9 times out of 10, people do notice that cinema looks like TV. They can't place the reasons why, it's not ABOUT the technical reasons, but they do notice it. Well - 1. The way you ask such questions can highly bias answers 2. It doesn't matter. For marketing purposes, only easily communicable appeals count - "It's Marvel!", "This film is a real ride!", "So scary!", "Her head spins around and she throws up!", "It has b**bs in. Big ones!"

People were fine with 28 Days Later and that was shot on 720 ENG cameras. To be honest, I think cinematography often seems to get in the way. The people who don't want Marvel want actual story with good performances and sometime so much time is spent on lighting setups and fussy camera work that there is no time left on lower budget shoots to get those performances right - or the fussing over everything else destroys the performers rhythm. Everyone remembers Al Swearengens's monologues but no one remembers a single shot from Deadwood. My own feeling is that tolerable adult film-making will be saved by going back to Godard. Shoot Breathless cheap, with Breathless grade story and performances, and one camera person shooting run and gun style, distribute online.

As no one else is commenting - - Your mother's acting is subtle and professional - You've done a great job in post and technically generally - The video seems to 2 to 4 times too long for the story content. Being diluted this way really diminishes the power of key shots and makes the story harder to follow and less interesting. The first 4 minutes can be summarised as "Woman walks through woods" without really missing anything, and that's something that can be shown in 30 seconds, surely?

Actually, British TV used to be about as good as modern HBO. The original House Of Cards was peak TV; Blake's 7 had variable episode quality but the best were superb and set the rules for modern plot-arced genre shows; Callan is still probably the best spy drama; When The Boat Came In was a long running sort of super-soap that hasn't been matched; children's shows like Noggin The Nog (laser armed vikings...) and Rhubarb matched Adventure Time very well. There was the BBC RSC Shakespeare project, Tom Baker's run on Dr Who, Fawlty Towers... ...Then at some point it disintegrated for complex, obscure, British reasons.

On average television is better written. Because it gives you a unique look that simply separates you from the world of digital. It makes your product stand out in a crowd instead of it looking like every other show. Maybe something easy to do in post, but ya know... people do notice those things. You are confusing what you care about and notice and what the audience care about and notice. And still more with what you can use as a marketing message to get the audience into the cinema in the first place. (Also, one of these days Foveon style video sensors will arrive. And you really can't tell Foveon from film - it has the same highlight behaviour as well as the lack of Bayer interpolation. The most frequent questions I get asked about my Foveon stills are "What film did you use?" and "Was it a Hasselbad or a Rollei?" Although actually the shots look more like they came from a Mamiya to me...)