Scott Fritzshall

I'm quite in favor of exhibition eventually moving up to 4k, but I'm saying that there is more important stuff than resolution, and that currently I feel that we're at a place with resolution where we could comfortably plateau for a little while in order to address other concerns. This would also allow hardware to catch up with what's required for finishing shows at 4k without huge additional expense- pushing out hundreds of vfx shots at 2k right now is hard enough. Keep in mind, very few shows finish at 4k currently. That's probably going to start to change, but of the films I've worked on so far- many with budgets of over $100m, only one has posted at higher than 2k, and it did so at a massive premium.

That's not at all what I was saying- If I had several thousand dollars laying around, I would love to buy one of these for myself. It's just that it seems clear that the ability to shoot video is a bonus feature on the camera, rather than the primary one, and that it's not really designed for this purpose at all, so you end up jumping through all of these silly hoops for it, all of which could easily be sidestepped by just shooting on a format designed to be used that way.

As far as I am aware, a 16bit file can contain all of the image data that's in the RAW file, and you can do all of the same image manipulations either way- I think the difference is in the math used- ie; there is no "color temp" slider in most color correctors that work on RGB data, but you can still tweak the settings to get the same result. And stuff like sharpening, which isn't baked in, but I'm not sure how that's different than just writing out an RGB image with no sharpening and deciding how much to add later. So, unless I'm totally wrong on this, the advantage in software is that you change the point that you're tweaking this stuff- rather than doing it in-camera or at the end of post, you're doing it at the beginning of post, as a "development" process, which I guess can be beneficial from a workflow standpoint if you incorporate it properly. But other than that, I'm pretty sure that the main reason pro photographers shoot RAW is that, as David said, it's either that or .jpg, because it's just too much processing time to decode everything to a high-quality RGB file, and way too much storage space to keep them on a card. And, finally, they're using it because that's what they've been given to work with- the manufacturers decided to do it this way for whatever reasons made sense to them, and everyone adapts to that. Tons of resolution is cool, don't get me wrong, but I'd rather we get over this "x"k thing, and focus on improving latitude and color reproduction. I personally would be perfectly happy if we all paused at whatever resolutions we're currently at for a few years so that we could focus on improving our sensors in other, more important directions. But, of course, most of RED's marketing is based on 4k, 6k, whatever, so that's what we're going to get.

This is one of the reasons I cannot comprehend why anyone would want to shoot a movie on a DSLR. Why not shoot with something that's designed for this application?

Hmm, I wonder if the effects on those shows were done at 4k as well, or if they were 2k and upsampled for the DI. As far as I know, very few people have started doing effects at 4k.

Argh! Who wants to sponsor me on a trip to London ;) Thanks for the writeup.

Super16, because it is a smaller format, is naturally kind of grainy. An HD transfer preserves more of the image, and more of the grain, so it will look closer to the original. SD is much lower resolution, obviously, and whichever method you use to squish your footage down onto it, you're going to lose fine detail, which in this case means grain. HD does not accentuate the grain; it should look fairly similar in resolution to what you'd get if you made a print of your negative and projected it. Find a grainy or noisy image of decent resolution online, bring it into Photoshop or any image manipulation program, and reduce its dimensions to 1/3. You'll see that while you can still tell that it had been grainy/noisy, it is much reduced, along with the rest of the high-frequency detail.

The Pixel Farm makes PFClean, which looks pretty cool, although I've never used it. There is also a tool in Furnace to remove dust automatically that is fairly decent. But ultimately you're going to have to paint at least some of it by hand, in Shake or After Effects or Silhouette or whatever.

I recall that in Predator, they actually shot those POV shots with an actual thermal imaging camera or whatever they are called. There really isn't any set of filters, either in-camera or in post, that will easily recreate the look you're going for. It's going to be a lot of work to do it in post most likely.

Yes, i picked up that the youtube video was an ad for the test, and not the test itself ;) I was saying that a friend had linked me to that clip earlier today, which was the first I had heard of the test.

Are you referring to this: I just found out about that today from a friend on Facebook. I'd definitely like to go see it if possible, but I don't know where and when it's screening.

Retiming can sometimes help out in a pinch, but only to a limited degree, and only if you know how to properly apply it. Retimers that use optical flow, such as Twixtor or Kronos, analyze the movement of each pixel in each frame in order to determine its motion, then use that to create entirely new frames. But if you've got things that cross each other, or things that move in different ways at the same time, they don't know how to interpret that, so you end up getting a weird, unpleasant warpy result. The only way to avoid this is to roto each element separately, feed then in one-by-one, and composite the results. This can work, but it's quite a lot of manual effort, and there really isn't any way around it. The other thing is that you're limited by what was shot. Let's say you want to make the bouquet toss slow motion. If it was thrown pretty fast, and it's only on screen for 3 frames once it starts moving, then that's the only input you have, and it's not much. Even if you separate it out by rotoscoping it, you're probably just going to get a blurry streak that moves incongruously slow, because that's all the program can see.

If anyone who is going could take notes and post them here, or at least type up a summary, I'd really appreciate it. Also tell them to come to LA ;)

I really hope that they will release their results online once they have finished touring around. I'd really like to see this but I'm in LA.

Could you elaborate a bit more on what exactly you want to stabilize? If you're jumping out of a plane with a camera strapped to your body, I'd imagine that the image would be pretty shaky to begin with. Are you just looking to remove gate weave or small high-frequency vibrations, or are you trying to do something much more drastic, like taking the skydiving footage and smoothing it out completely to remove the sense that the camera was basically handheld? Lens distortion is always kind of a tricky thing. I do know that there are models for dealing with fisheye distortion- take a look at the bottom of the Examples page for PTLens, which is a Photoshop plugin that does a pretty decent job at removing lens distortion: http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/ I've got some ideas about how to handle stabilizing it, but I'd like to test them out a bit before I recommend them. If I get some time once I get home tonight or tomorrow I'll post them.

Print stock is really slow, I don't remember offhand but I think it's something like 2 ASA. The idea is that it's got a really fine grain structure that will be minimally apparent on top of the image's original grain. It really shouldn't be much different for film that has gone through a DI versus film that has been photochemically finished in this regard, other than any processing of the grain that may have gone on during the DI or VFX.

There's no reason to use a greenscreen for this. Just use a frosted white piece of glass and light it evenly from below.

How on earth did this thread end up here? Who are you even talking to? Why am I one of like 3 people who actually addressed the question that was asked? Aren't there countless other threads that you can fill with this crap?

What the hell happened here???

Converting linear 12bit to log 10bit is not mathematically lossless; you do in fact lose data. The thing is that you lose brightness data in the bright areas of the image- where the eye doesn't really perceive brightness differences very well- and keep more brightness data in the darker parts- where the eye is very perceptive about changes in brightness. In the real world, .dpx files have been used without anyone really telling the difference for a long time, so it's generally not of any practical concern. At the same time, storage and processing has improved over the last decade to the point where this sort of thing shouldn't really be necessary anymore. I haven't involved myself in RED workflows too much so far, but I don't know why you wouldn't just want to skip this whole problem and just use 16bit .exr files, which are able to contain all of the information that the RAW file has. They're totally linear as well, which is nice once you figure out the proper workflow for something that's truly linear.

You don't necessarily need a degree in film in order to get a job in film. It's a matter of working your way up either way, and I've pretty much never heard of anyone being asked about their degree. What film school can potentially get you is experience, contacts, and maybe a reel. I went to film school, and it's worked out fairly well for me, but I also had a very specific focus, and I spent all of my personal time outside of school learning it. Film school got me access to equipment, experience working with people and making films, a fairly decent reel, and it let me meet people who would go to bat for me. If you've got the drive and determination, you're able to honestly evaluate yourself and think that you're competant, and you think that you'll be able to impress the hell out of enough people so that you'll stand out ahead of all your peers, then film school may be for you. It is absolutely not a guarantee that anyone will ever want to hire you once you graduate. Many, many film students (in fact probably the majority) never get anywhere in the industry. It's a really big gamble. I guess I'd say that most of the time, film school kids who do well in the industry are those who would be successful even without having gone to film school- for them, school is an alternate route. The scary thing (or at least what was scary for me) is that pretty much everyone thinks that they're really good and will be successful, because most people are pretty poor at evaluating themselves. I don't know anything about either of the schools you mentioned, so I can't comment directly about them other than the fact that NYFA is incredibly expensive, holy crap. That's over twice what I paid for my incredibly expensive private film school. If you're going to do either of them, I really would recommend that you either do all of your gen-ed classes at a community college or somewhere cheap, or, even better, that you get an undergrad degree in something else first, before you go to film school. You really do need the background in other subjects even if all you want to do is film, and film schools tend to be a really expensive place to take really crappy gen-ed classes. If you don't really know what you want to do, it would worry me a bit. A lot of people come to film school because they like movies and like the idea of making films themselves, but end up finding out that the reality is much different than what they imagine, and end up changing their minds. At my school, it seemed that most of the successful students were those who had transferred in from elsewhere; those who had done other things before deciding that they wanted to dedicate themselves to filmmaking. Many of the students who came in straight from high school ended up switching schools or switching majors because they found that it was different than they had envisioned it, or because they just weren't prepared for it. Hopefully some of this helps.

"HD quality" is a meaningless marketing term. I think many of us are getting the impression that you're pretty inexperienced. That's fine, everyone starts somewhere. Here are my suggestions for you: 1. Your first order of business before you even pick up a camera is to start educating yourself about the whole filmmaking process, and in particular about cinematography and cameras. There's a link to Recommended Books and DVDs at the top of the forums; check out some of those books and start learning before you pick up a camera. 2. You haven't mentioned what your level of experience is with regards to filmmaking, so I'm going to assume that this is your first dip in the pool. Here's what you need to know about starting off as a filmmaker: Your first film- hell, your first several films, probably even your first several years worth of films- will be total crap that you'll be embarassed by. This happens to pretty much everyone and it's normal. So don't expect your first movie to be brilliant and don't expect to submit it to festivals. Rather, your first several films will be, and should be treated as, learning experiences. 3. Because of #2, you're really not doing yourself any favors by dropping $4k on a nice HD camera to start out with, unless that money is just burning a hole in your pocket. You want a decent camera that you can learn on. Here's my personal recommendation: Get yourself a decent, and cheap, digital camera that has full manual controls. Maybe a used DVX100, maybe a used GL2 or whatever. I just checked ebay, and either of these cameras should be available used for under $1500. What matters is not so much how it looks, because these cameras look fairly decent to begin with, and again this is more about being a learning experience. The key thing is that it's got full manual controls and that you learn to use them. 4. At the same time, if you're really interested in learning about film, and about how to compose and create images without pressing buttons on a computer (which is a really useful skill to have, and I'm saying this as a guy who creates images by pressing buttons on a computer), then in addition to the digital camera, buy yourself a cheap film SLR camera, a slide projector, and some reversal film. Shoot reversal, then get it processed and mounted as slides, which you can then look at on the projector. This is a great way to learn about every aspect of creating images, including lighting, exposing, composition, color, focus, etc. What's really great about it is that you can see exactly what you shoot, with no intermediate steps and no ability to cover your mistakes with digital twiddling. 5. Either way, make sure you set aside some money for other necessary gear like a tripod, lights, production design, and other essentials. A surprising number of people forget these.

Yeah, putting HD material online is fine; people will either download it or they won't. But physically sending them data files on a disc is a recipe for disaster- it requires way too much work on their part, and there's too much room for error. Everything about your reel has to make it as easy as possible for people to watch, enjoy, and contact you. And yeah, I've got some HD material I'd like to use, but I've also still got too much material that only exists in SD for it be worthwhile just yet. Hopefully soon.

There really is no good way to do this; everything is too de-standardized and fragmented, and lots and lots of people are still unable to really watch HD material. If you send a Blu-Ray, you'll find that many won't have a player to watch it with, and if you send it as a data file, you're going to have trouble with people who don't have updated Quicktime software, or don't have the hardware to play it back smoothly, or aren't computer-savvy enough to figure out how to do it, or just plain don't care to put the effort in to watch it that way. DVD is really the only standardized format that everyone can definitely watch. What I would say is to send out DVDs, have both standard def and HD available for download on your website, and have Blu-Ray available if anyone requests it or if you happen to know that they've got a player. Or if you've got a lot of money for it you can send out both DVD and Blu-Ray to everyone and they can choose for themselves.

That will teach me to post before looking it up. I checked out Photosonics site and, man, 16mm cameras can go really fast! Never would have guessed!