Jason Eitelbach

We make a lowcon print rather than transfer the neg so that the film print and video version look the same. It's far more expensive to spend all that time making answer prints etc and then spend a bunch of time in a supervised HD suite matching it up at $400 an hour. hope that helps, je

We shot in and around Terlingua. We shot the shootout in the Terlingua Ghost town http://www.historic-terlingua.com/historic...hostown_001.htm We also shot a little bit in Big Bend National park je

I shot a 35mm short (not anamorphic) intended for optical printing. I highly recommend talking to Jean Fee at Alpha Cine. They are a great lab for student work. They give student discounts are have great customer service. She can shepherd you through the process. They don't cut negatives there, but they have a relationship with a few cutters in the pacific northwest. If you don't have a lot of opticals it can be cheaper solution then scaning and recording. However get you budget square and get all of the money together b/c it's easy to run out of cash doing optical printing. Also make sure and budget for a low-con print for HD transfer(HDCAM 29.97) as many festival will not screen shorts on 35mm (some only screen from 35mm). Almost everything I shot as a student was done through Alpha Cine, they are good folks who do a good job and will take time to help film students out. good luck, je

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/newslett...8/western.jhtml I just wanted to thank everybody on the forum who helped me with my prep on this movie and finding info about front projection techniques, anamorphic lenses (even though we shot spherical) etc. It was a lot of fun to shot. A lot of fun to be talk about in the interview. I highly recommend everyone shoot a western in the west Texas desert. It's a fantastic and humbling experience. There's something very special and majestic about that area and I found it to be wonderful for one's creative process. Just bring powerful radios b/c cell phones do not work! If anyone saw it at the Vilnius student short film festival last week let me know how the screening went. thanks again, je

Got my tests back they look great. Scotchlite makes a great screen, on axis the gain boost is amazing. It also has a nice "texture" to the image and very even illumination, much better than rear projection. Got no flicker on an Arri 35-III without a sync box at 24fps, some at 20fps, none at 6fps and some a 8fps. Did use a speed controller for the camera and kept my Eiki Xenon projector constant at 24 fps. I shot the tests without a beam splitter and just postioned the projection as close to the lens axis as possible, about 10" above the lens to throw any shadows down. I might get a piece of semi-silvered glass to test, but I may just get as close as we can. I know that doing that doesn't take full advantage of the reflective power of the Scotchlite but it seems like enough. Metering the screen is difficult since angle of view is so critical to how bright it is. I measure a 2.0/2.8 falling on the screen (the projector was 20' away) and a 8 refecting off the screen from just above the camera viewfinder so I lit the foreground to a 5.6. Couldn't use an incident meter because it casts a shadow on the screen. From looking at the tests it appears as though getting the background 1 to 2 stops brighter is going to be no problem. If anyone wants more info on my setup, let me know. You can e-mail me at jephotographs....at....gmail dot com. I'll be posting the final shot in three weeks or so. thanks, je p.s. Doing the shot this way is going to save us hundreds of dollars in post-production opticals, interpositives etc., look more unique and cost me almost nothing to set up, so no more "do it green screen advice" :D

It probably is the loop. I?ve shot three shorts with out schools Arri BL-4 and have had that happen twice. The first time was on a film test. One of the rolls we projected had registration problems I called everyone, Camera people said it was the printer, lab said it was the camera. Shot another registration test the day before production, no problem and no problem with any footage in the film. Flash forward 18 months the camera has just come back from Arriflex factory service, we shot a registration test no problem. We get the footage back and we have problems from about half way through our shoot with just one mag. There is a way to set the loop too tight at the top. You must follow the guides even a half frame too tight will compromise the registration. You?ll notice that the camera will be slightly louder, a little ?clickey?. I should have stopped shooting with it, my instinct told me that something was wrong, but I kept hearing that camera tech telling me ?The BL is one of the best registered cameras?.? And I thought that if it was running surely it would be registering properly, not so. Luckily we were shooting a lot of short ends, as well, so by the time this problem arose we were down to our shortest rolls and changing mags quite frequently so not all the shots were ruined. What I?ve found is that I love coaxial mags on 16mm. They seem to be reliable, but on the 35BL they require a lot more attention. We?ve been taking them apart about every 2000-3000 feet to clean them out. Too much emulsion and gunk builds up in that loopty loop inside the mag throat, especially if you have inexperienced AC?s who sometimes reverse the film when loading and then they don?t work smoothly and they need to thread buttery smooth to work right. Maybe someone with more experience can help flesh out my hypothesis further. If you can keep on top of the mags I?ve found the 35BL to be a very reliable workhorse of a camera and I think they?re great for low budget features since they?re pretty cheap to rent. I wonder if anyone has had similar problems with the 535. Thanks, je

Well the film's being finished optically, so I'm not sure how green screen mattes work in a contact print world.

Hello all, So I'm trying to set up a front/rear projection shot. It's going to be a tight interior of a car with moving background generated by a 16mm Xenon projector. I can't seems to find a projector with a hard wired shutter controller to sync to and I can't modify the one that I have access to (not mine). I've shot TV screens before with a Tobin Miliframe controller adjusting the frame and using the phase button to remove the rolling bars. Could I use a similar device to remove or minimize flicker or should I just 86 the shot? The projector I have can also run at 18fps would it be helpful to run the projector at that speed? I've called most folks I think of (Panavision local AV geeks etc.) and have found zero answers. Everybody uses video or green screen now it seems, but the director wants the look of film projection. thanks, je

I once did a shoot where it was all different cheeses. "scene 3 Camembert!" "scene 5 Asiago!" Probably not the most professional though :) je

I've shot three 35mm shorts as a student at UT. I'm doing pickups for my last one in a couple weeks. Send me an e-mail. I know of a guy who is looking to sell some film here in Austin and we might have some leftover film in a couple weeks. I might also know of some post-folks who could help you here in town. Good luck, Jason "jephotographs ----at----- g mail ----dot ---- com"

Yeah but does MPEG noise, 1080i v 720p matter that much when Discovery HD and BBC America are streamed to your $5000 HDTV @ 3.5 Mbs.

I have access to a DVCPRO HD deck anytime that I want. I don't have access to a RAID array.

Is there anyone who has figured out a workflow in Final Cut Pro for laying back dailies to tape in such a way that if all of your HD's crashed you could rebuild your project from the project file. Any tips on backing up that doesn't involve just getting more HD's? thanks, je

Does anybody have a workflow for laying back/archiving in FCP your clips to DVCPRO HD tape. I'm trying to figure out a way I can shoot tapeless and have an editor lay the days clips back to tape, but keep the same timecode. So I don't have to have two or three backups, just one. When I shot a short with this camera we kept one copy of the Quicktimes on the editors computer. One quicktime backup and one MXF backup. Any ideas? je

I've been watching a lot of "Prime Suspect" and "Cracker" lately and I've been loving the look of these shows. Any ideas about the tech specs for these shows. I've heard that a lot of BBC dramas are/were shot in 16mm. Is this true? I've hypothesized that it is a combo of Cooke optics, 16mm and Fuji film that give these shows their gritty, grainy, organic feel? Is this correct? While I do enjoy the highly stylized look of US crime dramas (CSI, Homicide, and Law & Order) I really like the way these shows look. I'd loved to hear from some folks across the pond. thanks, je