James Madrid

Your best bet is to call the union office at 212-647-7300 and speak with Mark or Robbie. They both handle new membership and can answer any of your questions. I don't really know what the requirements are for a DP but they'll almost certainly tell you to not join the union until you have union jobs lined up (joining the union as a DP costs about eleven grand!). You can also check out the website at www.cameraguild.com.

I typically see pickups slated as "P/U" and located after the take number, so, for example, you would say something like "scene 6 apple, take 3 pickup." Then "take 4 pickup," etc. I've even seen it then go back to straight "take 5," "take 6," etc. if you go back to shooting the whole take again and not just a part of it. Whatever it is, I always just defer to the Script Supervisor even if she gives you something crazy to put on the slate like (and I'm not kidding, this actually happened) "Scene X 33pt./34pt. apple, take 3 P/U." I'm not really sure what the editor made of this but as long as your getting the info on the slate that the Script Supervisor wants, then you are doing your job as a 2nd AC. I don't know why the AD tried to get involved, it's not really her concern.

I've used the Letus Extreme once before and don't recall seeing a mark for the film plane but the film plane does line up with the back of the rail mounting bracket so you can use that as a point from which to place your tape measure. If you are using still lenses though, be careful as the distance marks don't seem to be very accurate from my experience. I would definitely take the time to remark the lenses, it'll make your life a lot easier.

Yes, the moviecam compact and both the Arricam ST and LT will allow you to set the shutter to 172.8, the moviecam does it mechanically (with the supplied combitool) and the arricam does it electronically

I was told by a rental house tech that in order to properly set the loop size on a BL4 while loading it, one should actually pull the film two perfs beyond the index mark located on the magazine, otherwise your loop will actually be too small. Although this technique is not mentioned in either the Fauer book on the BL4 or the Carlson book, it seems to be correct as I've never had any problems with the camera with the extra two perf loop while I have had problems with the BL4 without the extra two perfs. Has anyone else heard of this?

I was on a shoot the other day using an SRII with a J-bar type video tap (I believe it was a Jurgens video tap). I set up the camera as usual by powering the video tap and the on-board monitor from the camera and running a BNC cable to the larger monitor for the director. This worked for about five minutes before both monitors lost picture and the camera itself lost power as well. I then went about the systematic process of changing batteries and changing cables until I could get the camera to start and stop again. I then removed the on-board monitor figuring it was drawing too much power and killing my batteries which I fugured must not have been fully charged. Again, everything seemed fine for about five minutes before the director's monitor lost picture again. It was at this point that I noticed a little bit of smoke emanating from the video tap. I then pulled the cable that was powering the video tap from the camera itself and instead ran it straight into it's own battery pack. Unfortunately, this didn't solve the problem as there was still no image on the monitor and the video tap was still generating a small amount of smoke. Figuring that the tap must have been fried, I just pulled power from it completely and we went about shooting that day sans video monitors. We sent the camera back to the rental house that had installed the video tap to get it fixed but I was just curious if anyone on the forum had ever had such similar problems or knew why this happened. I'm guessing that I shouldn't have been running the video tap off of the camera in the first place but I had used similar SRII's with the same video tap and had always powered it off the camera without ever having any problems of this nature. Any insights would be much appreciated. Thanks.

I'd also like to keep my account active. I check out this site everyday to learn something new.