stephen lamb

I've got an INT. night scene coming up, and I'll be using tungsten sources to light with. I'd like to have a streelamp effect coming through the window. Do any of you have suggestions from your experiences on good gel(s) to use to get the color? I'll be shooting HD set with a Tungsten white balance. I did a search through the forums for this topic, but didn't have any luck. Also, along the same lines, anyone have any good films with a similar effect in any scene? Thanks,

Bryant, Nothing to add about the noise, except that is pretty odd looking. just wanted to say hey and that it is nice to see more MSU'ers on this forum. hope the summer is treating all of you guys back in bozeman we

Karl, I am curious to know some of the films that you did like that came out this year, and more specifally why them? To the rest, i think children of men was absoluetly amazing, i haven't seen all of the films, but so far i would give it to Children. Steve

Thanks for the input guys, Tim thank you for specific instructions regarding the taping of the groundglass. I think this is probably what I will end up doing, and doesn't sound like too painful of an operation, albeit a careful one no doubt. Thanks again! Steve

Hey, I am prepping to shoot a small film in which the director and I would like to shoot with a 2.35:1 ratio in super16 on an SR2. Does anyone know if there are groundglasses out there that will work in this camera for this aspect ratio? Willing to rent or even buy if not too pricey (no idea about the costs involved here). I suppose i could always take the glass out myself and tape on some lines....but that seems a little sketch and I don't want to mess up! I've looked on Arri's website, but can't seem to find anything to do with groundglasses other than for their current 35mm cameras. Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey, I have used Bono twice before and was ok with it the first time, and extremely unhappy the second. Their work seemed a bit soft, had a lot of small scratches on it (could be other reasons of course for that) and the coloring was not only extremely flat, but had some very weird shifts in it on some shots. IE, the left 1/4 of the image had a strange cyan hue to it. The second time i used them was a disaster. They held my footage, which only 35 minutes worth of super16mm, for SEVEN WEEKS. no amount of calling or emailing would make them go faster, and even when i finely did get it, they offered no compensation whatsoever to the production. I used them because at the time they were the only ones who did tape to drive, and i had never worked with any kind of HD before. I got DVCpro HD files from them. I would highly recommend not using them, unless their situation has changed in the past year. I have had absolutely great success since then with Flying Spot Film Transfer in Seattle WA in getting film to disk transfers. Very happy with both their work, and their customer service. Cheers

Hey all, I recently saw the film on a new DLP digital projection system that has been set up at one of our local theaters. I noticed that in some of the shots, the digital noise was minimal to none, and the sharpness of the image was quite spectacular, i also did enjoy the lack of scratches and dirt. However, perhaps about half of the shots in the film, or maybe 1/3, there was a LOT of digital noise. i'm talking, ant race across the screen digital noise. It tended to be in darker scenes, or close ups. Any one know why this might be? Extra DI work for thos particular shots? Anyways, it was my first digital projection experience, and i thought it was ok. To me, i would still rather see a film print, but to an average joe, hey, they probably will love the sharpness and lack of dust and scratches. hard to tell. Overall i really enjoyed the film, and thought they did a good job keeping the Bond franchise afloat. I agree with some on this post, Goldeneye is my favorite bond film too, martin campbell is very adept at handling bond films. Has he done any others besides these two? Cheers

A small point, It seems that since the scene is continuous through story time, that having no moonlight to begin with, and then once they are out of the car, suddenly switching to a moonlit look might be distracting. Depends on how heavy the moonlit effect is once they are on foot, if it is not garrish then it should work fine, but if it is too strong, it could be very noticeable. You say you are going to shoot it very dark though, so i guess that means the moonlit effect won't be too strong....but just something to think about a bit. Good luck Steve

Whad did you all think of Poseidon....or has anyone else even seen it? I thought it was great fun, and actually pretty intense during some sequences. The film is quite empty as far as good characters/acting/script/story etc go. But i felt like that was not such a bad thing. This movie was simply about a HUGE wave (done very well by ILM, with possibly one of the most hilariously great reveals in recent memory, the wave first seen in the reflection of the captain's binoculars) knocking over a ship, and some people getting out. Really was nothing else than that. I liked the look of it in general, nothing too fancy. Once the ship capsizes and water starts coming in from all angles everything starts to gain a blue look, which i liked. With the ship being upside down, they shot it all bottom lit. i felt like it worked, and some of kurt russells great kurt russell-ish expressions were brought even more to life by the near-creepy bottom lighting. Fun movie, what did you guys think? Steve

Yeah, that idea for using mirrors of various sizes to reflect the light is a great idea. so tonight we built an extremely crude mock up of the scene using just cardboard, to block out some shots and see what it's like to shoot this stuff. the very first things i realized was that the close focus on the lens suddenly became a big deal. if in the real scene the camera is one foot behind an actor or object, and then in the miniature plate the camera has to be say, 1 inch from the miniature version....the camera can't do close focus like that at all. it would seem like you have to just avoid situations like that, or cheat it as best you can? still though, after tonight, it definetly made me more optomistic about pulling off the scenes we have planned, the photo's looked great for being just cardboard, handheld, with kitchen overhead lighting. i can't wait to see what this stuff looks like with real miniatures, mounted camera, lit well. it's going to be awesome! i'll do my best to keep updates coming. cheers Steve

Thanks so far for the tips, the miniatures are all going to be environment/background pieces. mostly city type buildings. there is some water, but we'll do that with CG. As for lens matching, i assumed that because the scale of the miniature is obviously so vastly different than the corresponding live action shot that the lens would have to be different in some respect? or do you simple use the exact same lens for each corresponding shot? scott, i didn't understand part of your second paragraph "....depends on your camera. If it will hold a clip near the ground glass then cut a print. Other options are to make a tracing of an enlarged frame onto acetate. Mount this in front of the camera for a guide...." i assume from the sentence that follows that you are refering to a method of checking the shot from the live action while you shoot the miniature or vice versa, i am just confused about what you are talking about. the lighting seems straight forward to me, just match the live action scale wise. i assume there must be small lighting units that are desigined specifically for this? i've looked a bit, but honestly haven't delved much into that area yet. do you guys think 1/8 inch (HO) scale and/or 1/4 inch scale is too small? again, it will be brick/concrete/wood buildings that you would find in a city. we will be getting pretty close to them. do we need to go bigger? i do have an ASC manual, and have read the chapter about minatures. it gave good tips, but was a bit vague. the formula's though seem quite helpful for things like fire/water etc. Thanks again guys, cheers Steve

joeajoyce, i'll leave my two cents of how i might light night scenes out of this. but what i can say is that you should be careful about using long stingers to run your lights. I am guessing you'll be using consumer level extension cords which are fine, but over any sort of distance, they have so much resistance that they will seriously reduce the size of lamp you can have at the end of the line. so these guy are all right, if you run a 1k tungsten over a bit of distnace, don't neccesarily expect to get anything else on it. that's a lesson learned the hard way:) good luck though, hope you come up with a cool lighting desigin, post some stills when you're done, Cheers Steve

I am prepping for a project in which i am planning to shoot some miniatures to be used as background plates to be composited with live action footage. I have never tried this before, so it'll be a fly by the seat of my pants experience. I was hoping to alleviate some of the inevitable pain by seeing if anyone here knows a thing or two about shooting miniature photography or knows of a person/website/book that could be a good resource. Things that come to my mind that i wonder about include: lens choice differencec between shooting the live action plate, and the miniature plate, lighting the models, adding in atmosphere, camera movement, scale of the models, frame rates for shooting and of course lining up the shots correctly. We are shooting super16mm...not the best for steadyness of the image but it's the best we can do budget wise. Thanks for any info you have Cheers Steve

Hey guys, thanks for info and the actual numbers. Helps a bunch. Steve

Hey all, Can someone tell me what the compression specs are like on an HDcam tape? I have searched aorund some, but haven't had any luck. I am prepping for a project in the future where I will have the ability to use HDcam as my transfer medium from Super16mm. I have read some sorts of complaining on other topics about how "crappy" HD cam tape is, especially considering that i will be pulling mattes and doing a fair bit of compositing. The best video format i have previously used has been DVCproHD. how do the two compare? Thanks, Steve

What is your final venue going to be? Home viewing for you and your friends? Local TV? DVD authoring to try and get video distribution? National TV? Theatrical release? Everything you do stems from that, plus of course your budget. you say this is just a test to figure out a good workflow for future projects, so where are your future projects going to end up? If you know that, you can then more easily decide which production/post production route ought to be taken. The simplest thing to do would be to get the film processed, and then transferred to a miniDV or DVCAM tape. You can easily capture that onto either computer you want, and either machine will run it just fine. From there all you can do is go up, Beta SP, DigiBeta, HD of various sorts. In this day and age, i think the only reason you would want to get a workprint made for you to edit on, would be if you are trying to finish your projects on film. Even then, if you are planning on blowing up to 35mm, a DI route might be better than an optical print. Of course, if you just want to learn what it is like to edit on film, the "old fashioned" way, then of course go ahead and get a workprint. So many choices, it gets frustrating sometimes...but at the same time...it means plenty of flexiblity. Cheers Steve

Oh ok. Out of curiousity, if you wanted to have an image that is quite saturated, would pulling be a viable option? In general, how much contrast do you lose? I've heard pulling can make your images pretty muddy? I imagine that different stocks will react differently. Would a faster or slower stock be better for pulling? Or would it be better to simply pick the most saturated stock you could, and not worry about pulling? Thanks, Steve

Pusing also increases color saturation doesn't it? Steve

Bradley, I haven't looked at this topic in a while, hope i haven't taken too long getting back. The footage that i had transferred at the lab came to me as a single 11 minute quicktime file (i shot 1 roll of 16mm film) that was compressed using DVCprod HD running and 23.98 frames per second. I brought that clip into FCP, and set my sequence settings to accuretly refeclt that clip. I then cut up the clip for editing purposes, and cut the picture together. Once that was done, i went into aftereffects, and imported the origanal quicktime file. Because of the DVCpro HD compression, the file is actually a 1280 x 1080 file, but the compression "expands" it to full 1920 x 1080. So in FCP, my original offline cut sequence was actually set to 1280 x 1080 etc. In after effects, i wanted native 1920 x 1080, (for ease of export to Maya for VFX). I made my composition set to 1920 x 1080, 23.98 fps, square pixels. So what i now had was the full original DVCpro HD file in aftereffects, reading as a 1920 x 1080 clip. I did frame sequence exports to maya to complete the CG, and did all the compositing. Then, i using my FCP offline cut as a reference, i went through that original file in after effects, did the color correction per shot as neccasary, and exported each shot individually. This is the step where the video became "uncompressed." I exported each clip as a Blackmagic Codec 8-bit uncompressed quicktime movie, again running 1920 x 1080. Once i had exported all my shots as individual movie files, i then went into FCP and opened a new sequence to use as my online. This new sequence settings were now 1920 x 1080, square pixels, running 23.98 fps. I conformed the color corrected shots against the offline, and had my finished online master. From there i can down rez to whatever file format, and resolution i please. some notes: as mentioned above, the DVCpro HD codec is natively 1280 x 1080. The compressor expands this resolution to appear as a true 16 x 9 image. Which is all fine and dandy for watching the footage as a quicktime movie, and for editing in FCP. the reason i went into after effects and changed the resoluction to actually be 1920 x 1080, is because i needed to export image sequences of the live action plates to use in the Maya 3d animation program. Exporting image sequences direct from my offline sequence in FCP resulted in images that had a 1280 x 1080 resolution and were squished. Because those were an image sequence, and did not use the DVCpro HD codec, they would not unsqueeze themselves. Of course i could change settings in maya to fix that...but it caused many problems due my infancy with using maya. being able to have actual 1920x1080 images was, for me, key. hope this helped cheers Steve

Phil, thanks for the info, great help! Steve

Phil, thanks for the info on the external drives....I'm very interested in the five disk array you talked about in your last post. Could you give some details as to how one would go about contsructing such an array, and how i could then connect it to my Mac G5? Thanks Phil! Steve

Phil, So then according to your numbers, recording DVCproHD over firewire to the firestore would be sufficient? The numbers seem to add up more than fine....I am only hesitant though because i have edited footage as DVCprodHD on my computer using FCP. The footage was on a LaCie external drive, connected via firewire 800. Even with the 800, the footage couldn't be played real time. However, when i brought it onto my internal harddrive, it was able to run fine. That small experience was what made me unsure about capturing the footage realtime to disk via usb or firewire. Thanks for the exact numbers though, very helpful. Steve

Phil, With the small amount of experience i have, i believe that DVCproHD can be either 1280x720 or 1280x1080. I have had film transferrd to DVCproHD and the information listed within the file itself, and what the lab claimed, both stated 1280x1080 (also how i brought it into FCP) Also, shooting on the HVX, i have shot images with a 1280x1080 image resolution....Having said that, the HVX's CCD is not big enough to actually have that much resolution...so i suppose it is sort of a moot point with the Uprezzing....or is it? Can anyone explain a bit "uprezzing"? Thanks, sorry that it is off topic a bit. Steve

Hey all, I have heard rumors, and looked at the webstie for the Cineport hard disk recorder system for Panasonic Camera's using the P2 system. The Cineport plugs into the p2 slot and records the DVCpro HD footage directly to it's drive. This system seems to be much better than the firestore, which connects to the camera via USB 2.0 or firewire. It would seem to me, that neither of the two (usb/firewire) would be handle the realtime data rate associated with DVCproHD. The company i work for is interesting in buying a harddisk system for the HVX, and i am trying to decide which one is better. From what i know, i would say the Cineport. What do you all think? Are there any systems that work better that i don't know about? Thanks for the input, Steve PS. i have used the camera for a short narrative shoot using just the P2 cards without a problem, see my post about the HVX field report. The company just wants to be able to record longer than 8 minutes (or 16)

Hey all, what do you guys think of the handheld shot in the Constant Gardner, when Ralph Fiennes character approaches the body of his wife, it's a POV handheld shot. When i saw the film, i was struck by how powerful that one shot was, it was a beautiful performance all its own. A month or two ago, i was reading AC, and i read that DP for the film (i dont remember his name) actually had Ralph Fiennes operate for that shot! Brilliant move i say. The handholding of it created a real feel of tension, and really put me there in the morgue, and letting Ralph operate gave the audience a view literally through his eyes. Beautiful work. Steve