Robin Phillips

the thing is, you gotta remember that bringing back a 200ft load may not make sense due to the differences in all these cameras. some are double perf. the a-minima uses a different winding and its old factory loads are not compatible with any other camera without unspooling and respooling in a dark room. And the main cameras that are being used on features are all 400ft mag cameras, and those users are buying the bulk of 16. I think from Kodak's standpoint, it makes much more sense to leave it to owners and renters to take their rolls to a lab for spool down rather than make it themselves. 

2 hours ago, Danner Gardner said:

Do you have a link for the Kamera Doctor HD tap? Can't find the one you're talking about.

you can find him on instagram https://www.instagram.com/kamera_doctor/

1 hour ago, aapo lettinen said:

Haven't set up it yet...  will need to check out which controllers and motors I will continue to make in the future (there has been talks about a Arri16S crystal motor for example. I can crystal modify Kinors and Konvases as well but there seems to be pretty low demand for those so need to consider if they are worth it to finish) and then can decide which ones would be useful to present on a webpage. For now it has been common that I have made couple of pieces of each model and then there were no further orders and I had to discontinue the whole product after the first batch so I think it would be most useful if the products on whe webpage would be ones with at least 3 year lifespan so that people have time to find it and even then will need to know if I can sell single modification anymore after this year or if I need to change the business model to larger custom orders where one would need to purchase from 3 to 5 pieces at a time (the whole batch at a time) if wanting to order something

if you do an Arri 16s crystal motor I'll commit to buying at least one right now. please put me on the list

4 hours ago, Giray Izcan said:

Introducing or re-introducing some film stocks with characteristics, and as an alternative to v3, at a lower price point would be more useful and make film capture more accessible to lower budget productions. This way people can shoot on 35 instead of having to resort to s16 due to economics. There are excellent cameras out there already that we don't need a new camera - especially a new 65mm camera that no earthly being can afford shooting ? 

this makes the assumption Kodak has any interest or even financial ability to create such a stock. it would be a huge investment for a budget item that may have no market at the high end, and might risk seeming unappealing vs V3 16mm. Given that they made a prototype of V4 and then abandoned it, it just seems unlikely they'd go for a low end product with quality compromises when they're faced with competition from the likes of the Alexa 35. 

I suppose its always possible for someone to concoct a chemical breakthrough that would warrant making such a stock, but it seems very unlikely. From a financial standpoint Kodak is likely better off doubling down on their EV battery chemical division 

9 hours ago, Gautam Valluri said:

It's great that Logmar is making the 5/65mm and 15/65mm camreras but apart from Christopher Nolan and a couple of other filmmakers, no one else will use these.

Why not make an affordable, lightweight, ultrasilent Super16 camera body? This is the most demanded market currently and the cost of owning a second-hand SR3, XTR Prod or a 416 is no longer possible for most independent filmmakers. Logmar could be doing what the early RED cameras did for digital filmmakers- offer professional quality, modulable camera bodies at affordable prices.

An ACL-style multi-lens mount system with adapters, 12-48 fps crystal sync speeds, a basic video tap, a basic timecode with light weight, easy to load co-axial magazines is enough. Supported by the possibility of spare parts and servicing, this could be a very profitable market.

Logmar already must have done a lot of research and testing for their S8 cameras that they could transpose to a S16 system.

they proposed this and designed something. many members on this forum piled on with criticisms of the design, such that it seemed to convince them to abandon the idea. 

its also worth noting there does not appear to be a way of making a quick change magazine s16 camera for under $40k USD. Ditch the quick change mag, you're probably still at 25-30k USD (this has been discussed at length on this forum). you can get an SR3 Advanced with mags for 20k USD right now, and those are known to be bullet proof. Logmar had even designed a new Max 8 camera, but didnt get enough pre orders despite only costing around $5k USD. All of these camera designs Logmar had published were modular.

to make a new, SR3 Advanced or 416 compatible camera with spare parts would be a massive investment even if all the fabrication and assembly was done in china. This basically would require buy in from some major rental houses for it to work. The vast majority of 16 shooters on the low end dont want to spend more than 10k for a camera, and at the high end they only trust the Arris or late Aatons. 

Ultimately if the community wants these cameras, we actually have to buy in when someone puts out a design and is taking pre orders. The only other option would be to press Arri to start making more spare parts if not full film cameras again, and by all indications that is extremely unlikely (they may not even have the tooling anymore)

Are you having this difficulty exposing on 35mm or 16mm? 

35mm 500T exposes great at night, you can push it 2 stops if needed.

16mm 500T you can really only push 1 stop (and ideally rate at 800) IMO, and even then you probably want to do some denoising or grain reduction. BUT 500T at box speed often works fine at night to pick up areas already illuminated by street lights or whatever. But to do it right, in a controlled way, you're talking about bringing in a good amount of light. 

Im wondering if you are not taking into account the scale of the lighting that was being used on these movies you referenced. Just because it looks like street light doesnt mean it is, not at all. Before we got better films in the 80s (not to mention the introduction of T1.3 lenses), you had to put a lot of effort into lighting. 

Also there were no shutter "speeds" then, only shutter angle. 180 degree is generally the most open you can go on film cameras (I say generally in case there is some weird outlier camera, but 180 degrees is what almost all film cameras need for the movement to do its thing while the mirror is blocking the film gate). 

as for the florescence, we've had kinoflos for decades now that are used to replace actual florescent tubes. They are color balanced and have ballasts that prevent the flicker you get on normal tubes. 

But film night time shoots use to be big. really big. done right these days they still are if you want total control, but again you can get away with a lot on 500T if you're in a city and just want to use available street, sign, and window light. Throw Master Primes in for good measure and you'll have a nice picture.

Also, IMO dont push 500T in 16mm 2 stops. it basically just turns to confetti. In my experience though you can degrain a 1 stop push on 7219 with something like neat video, sharpen it up a bit, then mix the grain back in. But a 2 stop push things go so nuts that its not really salvageable. You are, after all, using only a fraction of the surface area of 35mm.

And as has been pointed out, many transfers have been cleaned up. They can be reflective of how clean the negative was, or they can be artificially cleaned up. The actual film prints were most certainly grainier.  if you check out project 4k 77, an effort to restore the original star wars from located and scanned film prints, you'll get a VERY good sense of what a film print looked like back in the day. 

I have the visual products IVS replacement, and unfortunately it has a notable delay/lag when compared to other HD tap solutions I've used (and when compared to what I've used on my 435). Mine is #003, so I dont know if they have changed the camera unit or board its on to improve this since then, but after experiencing even a gopro hero 11 black bolted to my 435 (for high speed preview) its worth noting that even the go pro appears to outperform the VP tap in terms of latency. 

Its fine for video village or recording digital dailies, but Im not really comfortable operating just from the monitor with it. you do kinda get use to it and can anticipate the lag, but after having run both the Oli Millar and AZ Spectrum elbow optic camera on my 435 and seeing how near 0 latency they are, I'd say you may want to consider the other options out there. My understanding is that the AM elbow camera tap is superior to any option out there for the SR3 if you have the optics to support it. I also know people who have been very happy with the Kamera Gear IVS replacement, of which Daniii now has a 3rd generation one available 

17 hours ago, Cengizhan Cebeci said:

Rated 1250 means, they exposed 1-1/3 under? And thank you for this very very good example Robin. 

 

if they had not pushed, it would be 1 and 1/3rd under exposed. but doing the push, rating it so low vs the 2000 speed the 2 stop push did means its now over exposed vs the pushed speed. you will not get these results at this IE rating without the 2 stop chemical push

you might want to check this out, 5219 2 perf 2 stop push, rated at 1250 

4 hours ago, Peter Connell said:

I got my first roll back using my new Arri SR. I'm a hobbyist and was doing lighting, camera, sound, acting all on my own so please don't judge ! Audio very tinny was using a H1N for ease of use but had to filter heavily. On this youtube video is an assimilation of clips including the practical effects I recorded using the tips discussed here. Just thought some of you might want to check it out. I also got the film processed at Pinewood studios kodak lab which was so exciting. If any of you want the practical effects footage I'm happy to share !

bw,
Pete

 

 

I'd love to see the source for the particle stuff. did you use particularly small materials or was it a sizable water tank?

Havent done it myself, but I've seen an SR3 run at motion control speeds upside down with no problem. somewhere theres some BTS from a Matt Smith era Doctor Who episode where they did dry for wet with a submarine and they were rocking an SR3 upside down. At 24fps or high speed it might not hurt to run 100ft through with the camera upside down just to make sure there are no surprises, but one imagines it should be fine

It strikes me that its now fairly necessary to sort out either developing locally or shipping to your destination or lab as oppose to carrying film in luggage now. Obviously that doesnt help OP's scenario, but given I've seen TSA agents confused by some computer and camera hardware before, I wouldnt expect most to be trained or even realize that they are suppose to offer hand inspection of film

4 hours ago, John Shell said:

Any chance you could share some of the images you've shot. and compared??.

I'd also be interested to see a test where we actually took lenses of comparable sharpness to say master primes but that could cover the 15/70 area (I dont think such lenses exist). would be very interesting to see what the line pair resolution is compared to a digital body (ideally with any internal sharpening turned off so its actually a reasonable test). 

Unfortunately this is probably a cost prohibitive test

I'll be honest, Im kinda baffled by folks who think the movie was self indulgent and not a compelling story. I thought it was engrossing and moved along at a somewhat amazing clip for a 3 hour picture. But as they say in the legal profession, reasonable minds can disagree. 

Of relevance to the projection, I just saw it yesterday morning at the theater in Dublin CA in 15/70, and for the life of me I have no idea why this random theater near Livermore has a 15/70 setup, but I was very surprised by how clean the print still was and how good the projection was. Very glad I managed to see it in this format, given the disastrous projection of the 70mm 5 perf Interstellar print I saw back when it came out (I'd basically written off film projection entirely as a result). Interestingly I didnt pick up on any of the green tint concerns with the B&W with this print. I wonder if there are variances in either the prints of the wavelength reproduction of some of the bulbs that caused that for some folks.

I'll also say, it was a lot of fun seeing cloud tank work done in this format. Some good details on the guys that actually did the VFX in the recent before and afters article if anyone is interested https://beforesandafters.com/2023/08/17/spinning-beads-cloud-tanks-and-crucibles-of-molten-thermite

Action VFX has some burning steel wool stock footage that could be useful https://www.actionvfx.com/collections/burning-steel-wool-stock-footage

I think a lot of stuff in Oppenheimer was done with a large variety of fuels and material tricks, including flares and other moderately dangerous things if not done safely. They were running some photosonics cameras that could do over 2000fps, and at those speeds if you get clever with burning embers and the like you can get super interesting stuff. Hell I remember Ian Hunter saying he did a bunch of random reflective debris on interstellar that made it into the picture as the spaceship fell into the black hole, and he did that by orienting the model upright, the camera below it, and just dropping shit at it. I could imagine you might be able to even get cool stuff with some 3m scotchlite tape shreds illuminated by an LED flashlight and experimenting with different frame rates, including long exposures.

Im not sure there was an official anamorphic viewfinder for the 416. The only one I've ever seen was the custom one Vantage has that they'll sub-rent you if you rent a 416 and their hawk super 16 anamorphic lenses from them. There is a x1.33 adapter element that was made for the universal viewfinder that went on the Alexa Studio, but I dont know if it can be added to a 416 viewfinder. B&H still lists that element, but its unclear what film camera spare parts Arri is still selling to owner/operators

the link for that 1.33 desqueeze element is here: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1288132-REG/arri_k2_72080_0_1_3x_de_squeeze_module.html

Jorge Diaz-Amador might still have some conversion parts but I dont know if he will do the conversion. I think the last time he and I talked about it he basically had 1 kit worth of conversion parts minus the s16 fiber screen. hes kinda sorta retired from doing film cameras, but he has been servicing a few cameras up in the SF bay area for a few of us still despite what his website says. his public facing email from cinematechnic.com is cinematechnic@mac.com

15 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

What is the potential for features shot on Super 8 in your opinion, including films for showing in cinemas? Regarding feature-length Super 8 films I've only ever heard of Steven Spielberg's first movie (which was shown at a local privately owned cinema) which I think was called 'Firelight'. With modern post improvement of Super 8, getting rid of jitter and weave, etc, and with top quality audio, I'm thinking that a feature in Super 8 could work. 16mm for feature movies doesn't have the clarity of 35mm, and it can come across looking like a soft, not so good version of 35mm. But Super 8 is so definitely low definition and grainy that it would be obvious to all that it wasn't trying to look like 35mm. It would be marketed as shot on Super 8. That's a name that has meaning for many. Does that make sense to anyone else? It does to me.

Obviously, it would only suit certain scripts.

I think you'd be surprised how far you can push S16 if it comes to it. I've convinced a few people some s16 work was 35 with a combination of a perfectly dialed in flange depth, ultra 16 lenses, and maximizing the crap out of Neat Video's denoiser (where you can deniose, sharpen, then mix back in with the original to bring back some grain). Mind you, I did that using two Radeon Duo cards in a mac pro (so 4 GPUs total) and it still wasnt running in real time, though I suspect if you ran a 4090 on windows or linux it'd go faster. I know Neat Video made a compatibility update with the apple chips, but I dont know if it can leverage the machine learning parts of it to accelerate things or not.

Personally I've recommended to people before that if they want a more lowfi look to consider shooting N16 with a 1.85 crop, since thats a pretty heavy crop and will get you more clearly intentional grain while still having the ability to get 400ft loads and lots of crystal sync camera options. If you go with some really old S mount lenses too, you'll reduce the line pair resolution compared to say ultra primes and that may help.

That being said, there are some crystal sync and crystal sync modified S8 cameras out there. Most I've seen seen to run crystal at 25fps. But I do think you'll find shooting s8 is basically gonna cost the same or slightly more than shooting 16, and you'll be blasting through cartridges vs having 10min runs on even an N16 body

7 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

Does anyone know if image stabilization of Super 8 in post production, getting rid of the vertical jitter etc, leaves behind tell-tale traces/artifacts such as blurring in the image? It would be great to do some tests of Super 8 footage and then view it in a movie theatre and see just exactly how it looks on the big screen.

Also, how does one get hold of a Logmar Super 8 camera? I wonder if they ever become available.

if the camera registration is the problem, there will always be a little blur from that. but it was possible to manually stabilize s16mm overscans using the perfs 20 years ago, so Im sure its not a problem on s8. I think the main question is if you'd want just to do optical pin reg in the scanner, or if you'd want optical pin reg + a overscan so you can manipulate it more if need be

modern keying tools can handle a lot, but the reality is that this is probably going to require rotoscoping. granted, even that is not a big deal anymore with some of the advanced roto tools out there. even after effects has a rotobrush that can get most of a human figure (or parts if you do the mask in layers) set against even complex backgrounds. 

Action VFX has a bunch of basic tutorials that are really good at getting across the basics, check this one out to get an idea of how some of these roto tools work 

As for the shadow cast, honestly the green screen isnt the concern so much is do you want to have that shadow projected onto the TV plate. Thats a little more advanced, but is a pretty common thing to do. the usual cheat is to take a copy of the mask, make it dark and transparent, then warp it till it looks right on the bg plate. You might also be able to salvage the shadow that spills onto the green screen too, but I wouldnt get my hopes up on that. Regardless these are things even junior artists should be able to accomplish these days. 

One thing to note, make sure your scans are optically pin registered. most scanners can do this now, but you dont want to use like an earlier spirit 4k that doesnt have the feature, otherwise your compositor will be fighting the scanner gate weave. The Scanity (fotokem has one), the regular Scanstation (lots of vendors have this one) are examples of scanners that have optical pin registration. The arriscan has a true physical pin registration and that feature was always the gold standard for film VFX, but a true physical pin registered scan costs a lot because the scanner cant run at full speed.

Back in the day it was always also nice to get an overscan so the compositor would have the perforations to stabilize if need be, but that shouldnt be vital so long as you're using a late era film camera with good registration (others here can speak to movement registrations better than me) and an optically pin registered scanner. Though if you're using like a 1st generation BL, you might want to get an overscan.

the light streaks are made by the physical pull down of the film during exposure, so even a rotary shutter digital camera like the Alexa Studio can't do this. replicating this is going to be a post effect. I havent looked for one, but its entirely possible if not likely someone has made this as a plugin. Your other option is to just shoot film for the relevant shots, say with a 435, and find a vendor with the timing box that lets you do this offset, but unless you shoot short ends its gonna be pricy. 

On 7/24/2023 at 2:00 AM, Giray Izcan said:

I wish Nolan cared more about the content rather than the format and style. It comes off as very self indulgent.. I wish he wasn't so obsessed with his no cgi stance, i mean remember Dunkirk beach scenes with 100 soldiers standing around on the beach?... I haven't seen the movie yet but, in consensus, from most reviews, apparently  the explosion segment did not look like atom bomb explosion but just a gas explosion. Imagine how much more powerful it could be if he enhanced the practical effects with some cgi. I will be the judge myself after seeing it for myself but I don't have high hopes unfortunately. 

have you seen the footage of the actual trinity test? its basically a flash and then a mushroom cloud similar to a properly executed gas bomb. you can see one of the color shots of it here 

Here is also some black and white footage which held its dynamic range better

Much of what we got use to seeing publicly were either vastly larger bombs, or footage turned on stuff that we wanted to observe during detonation. Those test shots of the trees being hit by the shockwave or the houses' paint burning just before the structure blows are far more terrifying than a straight on look at a gen 1 US nuclear bomb. 

I believe it was the H-bombs that really introduced the moisture cloud shockwaves that are associated with the tests in the pacific. Weirdly I think that also just depends on the conditions in the air around the detonation zone. You can see that sort of burst shockwave in the 2020 Beruit explosion, which was, and I emphasize we're talking relative here since we're talking about nuclear weapons, a somewhat small detonation but the nature of it and the moisture in the air resulted in one of those dense cloud shockwaves. 

So I think that if this had been approached digitally, the look dev would have been the actual trinity test. As you can see above, it kinda looks like a gas bomb with a center that went a little faster than its outer component. So if accuracy was part of the goal, I dont think it would have looked any more impressive. 

is there a list of locations showing 70mm 5 perf? seems pretty easy to find the list of 15/70 locations but searching for the non imax 70mm version just brings up search results for... the imax 15/70 version

Its Greig Fraser, and hes put in the work with his collaborators to really dial in digital and make the most out of a given sensor and make something unique out of it. I dont think that can really be said for a lot of the work thats out there. And yet they still saw value in printing to film and re-scanning it for the final image. 

Film cameras are more or less just a box that holds the film. Your "look" comes from which stock you use, how you expose it, what lenses you use, how you color it, what gauge you're using (65mm, 35mm, 16mm, 8mm) etc. This assumes you're shooting with what we'd consider a typical crystal sync camera for production use. 

Now if you have film registration problems that can introduce excessive gate weave. There are hand crank cameras whose "look" will be dependent on consistant turning of the crank. You can get a very slightly different vibe from the cameras if the shutter is more side mounted than bottom mounted. But thats really about it. 

As for the digital cameras having their own look, the truth behind that depends on if you're using proper color management and how much time and money you want to spend manipulating the image to look a certain way. As David pointed out with Yedlin's demo, its certainly possible to match different systems to either film or whatever look you're after. But What Yedlin's demo doesnt demonstrate is the work required under the hood to really nail that. If it was as simple as he suggests, everyone would be doing it and Arri would have pre-packaged their cameras to perform in that manner as a turn key option. One reason to shoot film if you want the film look is to just avoid having to deal with all that potentially costly post processing.