Jaan Shenberger

the best way for higher than 10-bit format footage: import footage into after effects, interpret the footage correctly, then export the frame from the comp timeline as a 16-bit psd file. for 10-bit or lower: open in quicktime player, go to the frame you want, cntl-c (copy), then paste into a photoshop doc (for 10 bit footage, pasting into a 16-bit doc is better) so you can resize to make up for the aforementioned non-square pixel aspect ratio. if it's dv25 (aka. dv / miniDV / dvcam), you will need to change the quicktime player display quality flag to "high quality" (qt player by default displays dv footage in a kinda blurry state to ensure that all computers can play it back in realtime, which isn't really relevant for any computers made in the last six years). you can change the high quality flag if you have quicktime pro by going into "movie properties" (command-j) and clicking "visual settings" and toggling the "high quality" checkbox. or you can download a free utility that will change the flag for you (whether you have qt pro or not)... it's called "HiQual". http://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/hiq/index.html hope this helps.

my apologies for misrepresenting your project. haha. and to be clear, i don't think there's anything wrong with making films like that, but it's hard to understand that you can't see cinema as anything beyond just business. and you have my sympathies on that sales tax.

very good point by phil. video noise will hinder your ability to heavily color grade footage that has noise in any greyish/unsaturated areas because there is a random changing of hue and saturation on a per pixel basis amongst the noise and it will become pronounced if you push the color characteristics too far. hope this helps.

if you think those animators are getting rich from their nfb grants or they aren't working hard to complete their projects, then you're crazy. i know of animators who've worked on big nfb-sponsored projects and the pay isn't really competitive-- they take the gigs because they wanna work on something with merit that'll turn out good, rather than make bank working on a sani-flush commercial. would you rather the nfb be funding movies about creatures chasing bikini-clad women around an abandoned prison? last time i checked the video store, there were plenty of those to choose from. besides, you can always write your equivalent of a congressman and let them know how you feel about it. the nfb contributing to the growth of the canadian anim/post/vfx industry has been largely via education & inspiration, not actual funding.

though i meant more along the lines of stuff you'll see here http://nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/, your post brings up a great point... the state-funded efforts of the film board has indirectly resulted in a growing and successful commercial animation, post & vfx industry in canada (aided by the tax breaks attracting US productions).

i have to agree with Max. a great example is the film board of canada and its legendary animation program. simply put, canada is the best in the world in animation and has produced numerous incredible works of genuine art in that medium, largely thanks to state subsidies. on the flipside is the flimsy american "independent" film industry/community. it kinda runs on capitalistic trickle-down reaganomics... all the low-brow and ad/commercial projects result in enough work that some people/prodco's can save up funds & network in order to work on their personal side projects. but there is virtually no state money anywhere to fund film/cinema projects of artistic merit, and when there is, it's a general arts grant that's priced out for painters/sculptors, meaning the sums are nearly irrelevant in regards to film budgets. it's no wonder that more and more film students are using their thesis projects to make slick spec commercials for sneakers or soft drinks, rather than making something of artistic merit... and every year it seems to get worse, and it just grosses me out. and to be honest, if you compare the two, i'd say that canadian animation has american "independent cinema" clearly beat when it comes to overall artistic merit and output... though it's worth mentioning that almost no one anywhere has ever seen all that great canadian animation work.

isn't that because italy had quite an export cinema industry back then (genre & drive-in fare being dubbed into a multitude of languages)? ...not at all meaning to sound snarky.

hey Phil, in what way exactly were things so different? just curious.

dude, david, that stuff looks great. i totally felt the lynch/welles vibe before i even read your post. it's nice to see old super8 stuff from talented pros. also, you should post the karaoke video... i have a weird perverse love of karaoke music vids-- i can't stop watching and analyzing them every time i go to a karaoke bar. my fav is all the ones from the 80s that are shot on 16mm at 8fps and triple printed, for a "stylization"/budgetsaver double punch.

direct to hard drive HD transfer, from a spirit (or comparable), at 4:4:4 is probably tops for anything that's ultimately going to end up on any flavor of video. and when you do all the math, you'll likely find that it's a very good deal (no need to pay for tape stock and rental of vtr)... though of course, there is more post work/time needed. hope this helps.

try calling freyer lighting... if they don't have it they probberz know who does. or jcx might know where. hope this helps.

was it a daily/print or the neg that was telecined/scanned? because the blowing out of the areas around the doorframe area looks too inclined for neg, even for direct sunlight... unless it was the choice of the colorist. for footage with so much context/creative-sensitive overexposed area, i would maybe opt for a flat transfer and handle the color grade in post if you can't afford a nice sit-in session. hope this helps.

i'm pretty certain saudek used hand-tinting. emulating this look is going to be very post-heavy. there are generally two ways to achieve this... 1. lots and lots of moderately skilled labor doing quick & dirty roto to give you the fields of color. 2. a moderate amount of work by a very very skilled colorist (using complicated conversions/extractions involving colorspaces that contain the luma & chroma in separate channels) working with thoroughly art-directed footage. it might help the colorist if you do a saturated/overexposed pass in telecine. either one of those will require a healthy post budget. but there are numerous ways that you can achieve results that are fairly similar (at least to the average person's eyes) to the saudek look, that will be easier and cheaper. it might be a good idea to ask the director specifically what it is about the saudek images that they like and hone in on recreating those attributes... like if they only really care about saturated pastel colors, soft-but-contrasty lighting, and some kind of diffusion, then that'll probably be obtainable with just the shoot and a lil' telecine work. but again, getting 95%+ to the look of hand-tinted b/w is going to need a lot of post work. hope this helps.

for the sparks, use stock footage composited over the shot. compositing sparks is probably the easiest thing possible to composite. there's stock of sparks all over online. shoot the radio in the tub with interactive lighting coming from the yet-to-exist sparks. keep the water moving a little, or shoot it an angle so you don't see the lack of mirrored reflection of the sparks. but then again, if you have the interactive lighting, it's so fast that you can still get away with no sparks reflection. hope this helps.

if you don't have much budget/gear/crew, then your best bet may be to "light via timing & location scouting"... meaning find places, angles and sun positions prior to the shoot that will get you as close to the look you want. of course, this is less feasible for long scenes that need consistency. for CUs and medium shots, you can get away with having your actors in shade, or near a white building (large bounce), or under moving tree-shade, and as long as the background shows direct sunlight/highlights, the shot will usually "feel" like a sunny day to the viewer, even if there's no hard sun source on the actors-- just as long as the actors aren't too many stops under the background, and having the background out of focus will usually help.

as david mentioned, there are two separate factors: parallax and field of view. usually any disagreement in the "what lens is like human vision" question is because different people are placing more emphasis on one of those two. i believe there's no existing format where you can have both parallax & fov coming close to matching human vision. to me, there is something powerful about matching the parallax of human vision, though it will of course feel like the pov of someone mentally "zoomed in" on a portion of their vision.

there's stock footage of such things that you composite over your footage. very easy. look under "film effects" or "film leaders" when you search.

aside from the obvious drawback of lacking 24/30p, it also only records audio at 32khz, 12-bit... which can be a minor headache/speedbump in post, depending on your workflow and how picky you are about audio quality (because of capturing and/or conversion to 44khz or 48khz). i've shot hundreds of hours on them and the image quality is good, even though it's from 1995. definitely a good bargain camera for 60i needs.

best of luck on your endeavors.

Daniel, here is some incredibly low-priced & useful fire/explosion/etc stock footage... http://detonationfilms.com/ best of luck.

Phil, have you considered making a "seed" film, a kinda means-to-an-end project? something that you likely won't be very proud of, but may help lead to the kinds of projects you want to do? because this is generally the standard procedure in the US. i understand that the default way of thinking in most of europe is to find state assistance for film projects, but really man, we live in a time when film/video production (and post) is incredibly accessible and affordable. i think anyone living in a first world country is silly to complain about the difficulties of getting a project off the ground. get a "no interest for a year" credit card, buy a modest DV/HD camera package, pay a low/fair rate to a skeleton crew and make some sort of creature feature that also contains some sampling of what you'd like to be doing full-on with a feature (inject some art into it), and trim your expenses by purely finishing for video. creature features are really the no-budgeters' only hope, and the good thing is that they usually have relatively good international distribution potential. just make sure you take a lot of high quality marketing/publicity photos (the key art is arguably more important than your actual film with a creature feature). sell off the gear after completion and put those funds into an online interest bearing checking account. use those funds to make your minimum payments on the initial credit card expenses, while you get another card with 0% interest on balance transfers for a year/etc. rinse and repeat. it is possible to eventually (though it would take a long time) pay off the initial credit card expenses with just the recouped equipment sales money, though you will have to pad the interest bearing checking account with your own funds to garner enough interest to make up for the monthly payments. but at the very least, it makes funding a cheapo feature attainable with minimal risk for financial devastation. but above all else, the project would likely lead to something else, in some way shape or form. i'm sure this is all old news to you, but based off what you have stated over and over on the board is that there is a surplus of production people & talent in the UK. they are probably dying to work on something interesting as well. i sincerely hope you do some kind of project. god, i feel like such a cliché american for feeling like this.

i've had my share of shooting in hellish "small white-walled room" conditions, so you have my sympathies. here are my humble suggestions, based on my limited experiences... it's great that you're capturing uncompressed, because i think the added headroom in post will help a lot. if it was me, i would first decide to "cinematically" make one of those side doorways into a window recieving direct-ish sunlight-- so you can side light the actors and flag the light off those white walls. you'd also then be able to shoot from down the room both ways, giving the option of having a kiicker or frontal light on the actor's heads, which might work great for the drama/character dynamic. this faking of the doorway as a window would likley require an early wide shot to be a vfx shot... though a relatively easy one. you would place any sort of diffuser covering the whole visual area of the doorway (ideally on the other side) and add some simple tracking markers on the doorframe (if the camera is even moving). you can probably even have the actors walk in front of the "door window", as long as the window isn't too blown out there isn't significant lightspread over the actors. then later, shoot another window at the same distance, but zoomed in, with it lit like what you want the "door window" to look like. shoot bracketed 20-second shots of it from darky-dark to blown out. in post, you can take these window shots and easily track them to the doorway (it's technically a 2D key, so it can easily be handled in after effects), and use a luma key for the actors stepping in front of the "door window". a little roto and synthetic halation might also be needed. obviously, the fewer, quicker, and more simplistic these shots are, the better. another benefit to having a side direct-ish light window is that you can deal with the changing light of the real windows (which would read as diffuse reflected sun onscreen) by increasing/decreasing the output of the "door window", though you'd have to sporadically check the ratio with an incident meter, and there is potentially significant changes in your stop/dof. also, if beneficial, you could have a subtle difference in color temperature from the "door window". and the potential of using cookies on the actors (to fake the curtain or window frame) might work for the drama/scene. one more thing... something i've done in the past to deal with locations with too much red is to gel the sources varying degees of cyan and manually white balance accordingly. it'll essentially darken (and desaturate) the reds, and this has sometimes been beneficial when the actors are fair-skinned, since it will essentially decrease the luma of thier skin, which helps a little when shooting on video. of course, you will need to do some color correction in post to get the skintones right (adding red), but even then the more saturated reds of the location will have lost a lot more of its saturation (does that make sense?). hope this somehow helps.

this probably doesn't help at all, but these kinds of cell phone product shots are almost always done CGI nowadays.

heard about this, but have yet to test it... http://www.scopebox.com/ i don't think there is any software that allows you to control the image remotely (i assume you mean gamma, chroma level, knee, etc.), but maybe i'm wrong.

if it has artistic merit, then you may at least be able to get it into the ann arbor filmfest, even at an awkward running time. they are huge 16mm proponents and they are partial to things like custom processing. if you opt for expanding to reach a feature running time, you can do a long, moody opening title sequence to tack on up to 10 minutes (if the size of cast/crew permits, of course). also, if it's scifi, you might wanna try shooting some longish, atmospheric miniature effects establishing shots to use throughout the film. in addition to the added running time, the added spectacle of the miniatures may add commercial appeal and help in getting distribution, if that concerns you. finding someone good to help/do the miniatures will be easier with the rest of the film already completed. hope this helps.