David Mawson

Ok... Then speaking as an ex-graphics programmer, I wouldn't call that "purely mathematical". All renderers "use maths" for last stage of the rendering system - there really isn't any alternative! A purely mathematical system is one that uses maths to create textures too - that way they can't be over-stretched.

You mean that it's a procedural system like Renderman? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar_RenderMan_(software)

Probably the weirdest example of a film's cultural status growing years after release is this one: https://www.copyrighttrademarkmatters.com/2015/12/17/when-a-quirk-of-copyright-law-creates-a-christmas-classic-its-a-wonderful-life-and-the-public-domain/ ...Before the copyright lapsed, It's A Wonderful Life was virtually forgotten. But then TV stations found they could show it for free and it became the new Christmas Carol - through sheer familiarity.

I don't think it fell short of anyone's expectations - I don't believe even the studio felt it would make enough in the cinema to justify the ridiculous production costs, especially after the awful mess RS made out of the Alien franchise. I know several hardcore Blade Runner fans and none of them are willing to see the film. Prometheus and Covenant were too awful and even though RS isn't directing, the film's image has been tainted - especially when people hear how long it is. Good reviews don't help because people don't trust reviewers any more. I think we also have to remember that the original was a box office flop - but most of all, there wasn't a coherent marketing campaign for the film. Young people do know what Blade Runner is - most of them have seen it several times - but they don't know what this film is other than very long, Scott-tainted, and a sequel. That adds to a message of "Pretentious, empty and boring". ..Bets seem to be split between "Studios do stupid things" and "It will pay for itself in the long run on DVD and streaming."

You probably know the trick of using a wheelchair, but just in case - "Some people use a wheelchair for dolly shots"

..If you do go with a monopod, NEVER extend a section all the way - always leave 2 or 3 inches overlap or you'll get wobbles at the joint.s Another useful video

There are two sorts of tripod screw; 3/8 inch 16 and 1/4 inch 20 UNC. You can get adaptors either way on ebay and amazon. Cheap tripods, especially cheap fluid heads - for smooth panning - are usually a disaster. Buy higher quality and used. An option you may not have thought of is a really solid monopod with a video foot and fluid head. I really like my Benro. If you are on a budget you may be able to get away without the fluid head, depending on what you want to do. (A video foot is a thing that kicks out three legs and has a fluid damped joint for camera movements.) This type of thing -

The other problem with throwing lens flare around all the time is that you lose the ability to use it as emphasis for a certain type of emotion, which is how Spielberg used it in CE3K: "This is a moment of wonder - LENS FLARE!!!"

Comrade Detective looks strange, but isn't it meant too? The joke is that it's supposed to have been filmed in the Eastern Bloc in the 80s.

The fewer elements you have and the better they are coated, the less flare. (But lens elements are there for a reason.) Reflection off the inside of the lens barrel is also a factor. Obviously, zooms tend to have more lens elements.

Once you're dealing with hdmi you have a standard format. I've heard some people buy cheap car entertainment screens with hdmi and use them as monitors. They need a USB powerbank, but that shouldn't be a problem.

Have you tried helicopter tape? It's made for helicopter blades but people use it for protecting bike frames. It will be a devil to apply to sticks but you should be able to manage it with some care. I don't know about sheen - maybe try a small piece and see what you think. Eg http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Extra-Clear-Helicopter-Bike-Frame-Clear-Protection-Vinyl-Tape-all-sizes-/360383674689

The white blobs on the lens are Sugru - a cross between rubber and glue. Good for tweaking contact surfaces, but too weak and soft for much else.

Given my lack of experience in video, this may be the only useful contribution I ever make here - I hope I at least put it in the right forum. Instamorph aka polymorph and some more brand names is the next big step up from duct tape and I now wouldn't go on a shoot with out it. Another way of thinking is that it's the instant coffee of plastics - you carry a pack of granules, add hot water, and you get clay. You mould it and then when it is cool its rigid. You can cool under a cold tap if you are in a hurry. It's useful because - - It sets quickly if you use cold water - It's very tough - you can make a useable mallet out of it - It holds shapes precisely. You can drive screws in to it while it is soft, unscrew them when it is cold, and you have a long-lasting threaded socket. You can make screw adaptors, threaded bolts and nuts out of it it too. - You can tweak it by re-heating - you can even throw a component you don't need any more into hot water and use it as raw material You can dye it, but so far I've always used it plain. This is an emergency rig I made for my GM1 when my GX80/85 fell apart. (The camera is held together at least one key spot by tiny plastic tabs - I mean about one mm thick - there really is a reason it's so cheap.) The butt piece goes against my rib cage just below my throat, one hand wraps around the tripod head as a pistol, and then the screen is reasonably level with my eye. The butt piece is a domed disc of morph that works as a stand to let the rig work as table tripod too - it was molded on to the end of a cheap flash bracket using a storage jar as a mold. It's extremely tough. The magnifier is a cheap one I grabbed from my girlfriend's drawing tools, I stuck in hot morph with a layer of foil to stop it bonding to the arca plate and screw a tripod thumb screw in place. It's not the greatest optical quality, but it works - I don't get eye strain focusing on the screen. (And I can probably make a much nicer looking one if I ever get the whim.) You could easily make a decent rig out of it and some 15mm rod without using cheese plates - a blob of morph will be any cheese plate you want, including ones that don't exist. Although the rig probably will look nasty unless your craft skills are better than mine and maybe dye the morph black. So think of it as a bag of granules you can carry to make emergency - or permanent camera rig components out. Or doorstops, components for lighting rigs - as long as those components are not exposed to any heat - moulded handles. You could improvise a tripod out of three monopods or walking sticks using a blob as a hub. It's not as glamorous as a 3D printer, but it is cheaper, doesn't need CAD files, and you can carry it in a corner of your camera bag. You can even carry it in the form of components that you can recycle in the nearest Starbucks if a more urgent use appears.

This is the most useful link I found for using a tablet as a monitor https://www.reddit.com/r/Filmmakers/comments/3soed6/did_you_know_you_can_use_your_phone_or_tablet_as/ ..To get a waveform doesn't strike me as easy. You'd have to write a new app that sucks in the data, which might - probably will - come over the USB cable in a proprietary format. The new app will have to display the image, which isn't too bad, but those simple calculations will need performing for every pixel in the image, ideally at shooting frame rate. That might seem easy compared to a lot of things that tablets do with 3D graphics - but they usually rely on dedicated graphics processors for that sort of thing. You might have to send the data to that processor and then get it out again, in which case there could be bandwidth issues. I'm not a tablet programmer, but I have written similar code - and writing something like that could end up being a nightmare, depending on a lot of factors. The most powerful looking app I can find is this Canon only one - https://dslrcontroller.com/about.php ..And it doesn't seem to offer waveforms. And if I was the developer and I could add waveforms, I'd do so and charge a big premium for the "Cinematographer" edition which included them, because it would still be cheap compared to the alternatives at $50 or $100. So I'm afraid that the problem is nasty one.

I don't find that a meaningful statement. There is no one process for shooting fashion stills and each frame here is a still. That's it. If you think the tripod is redundant you need to explain why - because speaking as someone with a degree in theoretical physics, highschool maths should tell you that it if distance, orientation and position in the frame are constant, the images will match. They may have done all sorts of things - like using a gold covered helicopter to make a journey they could have made in a van. But that has nothing to do with whether using peaking, the grid and scale will work. Generally, people do the simplest and cheapest thing that will work rather than the most complicated, which is why you see more vans than gold helicopters. Certainly that's the smart thing to do if you want to repeat the result. If the subject is in the same apparent position in the frame and at the same distance each time, the images will merge. Getting position right is easy using the grid - or you can mark the positions for the eyes on a screen protector. Then narrow peaking and a wide aperture will let you keep distance the same within a limit of better than 2% with a fast lens. That's it; you're done - no software required. It's basic geometry. You could even do without the focus peaking if you match positions for a decent size triangle of points - say the shoulders and belt buckle. As for "allowing variation", that's even easier - you just align using the above method then move the camera a tiny amount, using the position of the pupils on the screen relative to the dots on the screen protector. Probably you'll draw a line between those two marks and add a perpendicular. You could another marker for a position on the torso if you wanted and draw a line to that. Or if you want a very controlled shoot, you could have an animator draw the key frames in a tracing paper flick book - just using stick figures. You stick them over a tablet connected to the camera with wifi and the model just matches the pose. ...I write software, and I used to work in a videogames company that specialized in motion capture. And honestly, there is no way I can imagine the software giving a better result - and it certainly wouldn't be easier to use. (I mean, you track the image, input the data into a 3D animation package where an artist has configured a model to exactly match the subject, then the artist adjusts the model to get the next frame and you try to match it? Why? Drawing keyframes on tracing paper would give the same result at a fraction of the cost and pain.) It isn't meant for applications remotely like this.

But how can anyone know your needs better than you do? For event shooting, the zoom is the obvious answer - so obvious that you must have a reason for not buying it automatically. So the 24mm must have some value to you, based on your shooting style and the conditions you shoot in. Which you know and no one else here does. No one else can really make this decision for you - it's not like asking which of two lenses of the same fl are better. Or even asking what fl lenses you should have to cover a football game, because that's a highly defined task. "Event shooting" is much vaguer and "music video making" even more so.

If you can't answer this question for yourself, then perhaps don't spend the money? Save the money until you feel a burning need - that will be the piece of gear to buy?

That's how I'd have done it with film. But with digital, give they were shooting in quite crowded areas - and on some surfaces where tripod alignment may have been difficult, maybe not. Instead shoot with room to crop, import all the frames into a stills editor one after the other, align and crop. If you use the grid and digital level you won't have to crop much, and it's better than try to defend a tripod. Oh - and if you want to main constant subject distance, lock the focus and then use focus peaking and magnified view to position the subject with the lens wide open. Then close down to whatever aperture you want. ..If camera subject distance is always the same, and the subject position on the grid is, and the camera is always level, then I'd say a tripod is redundant. (But I may be reacting too much from my experience of shooting street fashion stills - which taught me to do almost anything to avoid deploying tripods and light stands, right down to building softboxes I could hold with one hand while shooting the camera with the other.)

I'm probably the least qualified person here to comment technically, so this is more of an ordinary viewer response - - Your skin tones etc still look great with the green cast. It made feel like I was watching through a pair of sunglasses like the ones the athletes wore. Was that the client's idea? - I'd have had no idea that it wasn't a big budget shoot. None. And sound was up to the quality of the video. - The one thing that didn't work was some of the editing. The jumps in the first 11 seconds seem pointless and they made me stop the film and re-start because I thought there was a problem. Ditto the jumps while diving - they just break up the smooth motion for no reason I understood and while I was wondering what the message they were supposed to convey was then I was ignoring the video. There are a couple of seconds slo-mo while swimming that had the same effect.

...The point being, that I wasn't clear enough about, that standard meters measure overall light intensity, but what you need to know is whether any one of red, green, or blue is too high or too low.

But so does a histogram. And a lot of cameras have colour histograms, at least for stills review, which is quite adequate for setting exposure. Your light can look fine on a meter but you can still be blowing a channel and polluting highlights. Probably the best way to make any digital sensor look "like a Red" is to use ETTR and build your lighting around getting everything you care about in the top 4 stops of DR. But a meter won't give you adequate information to do so optimally. (Warning: I'm extrapolating from stills experience! In particular I often shot bayer and foveon sensors on the same shoots, which made for both tricky metering problems and a unique opportunity to see what happens to highlights if a channel blows.)

The em5 is an interchangeable lens camera. Or just set the iso and do the maths - that's a 3 stop difference. So a room that would be 1600 at f3.5 would be 200 for the Yashica at f1.2. Crudely - ignoring dynamic range for one thing.

Macks - thanks; that's really nice of you! At the moment I'm just trying to get a feel for overall possibilities and de-program my brain from a lifetime of seeing films shot in studio sets. And decide what focal lengths I want to use - I wanted to stick to (FF equivalent) 50 and 100, but looking at Loach's work makes me think that will give a claustrophobic look. So it looks like I need a 24 or 28 equivalent. As someone who has done a lot of this, are there any specific things to especially avoid? Or a couple of key points people over look?

That's excellent - I'd have thought all of these were studio shoots. That gives me plenty to work with.