Bill Totolo

Well I'm of a different mind. Gridcloth is the same material used on many softboxes so you'll get a very similar quality of light. The only difference is size. And you can compensate for that by hanging gridcloth off the front of a 650 or 1k with the bottom leaf open and get a pretty large source. But I have another great solution that I stole from Brian Reynold's: Use something known, in the United States, as Liteboard. It's liteweight diffusion material that comes in large sheets, about 3 feet by 5 feet. It's a little rigid but fairly flexible at the same time. You can clamp this to the front of a 1k (or 5k or whatever) and get a HUGE SOFT source of light for $12. You can get sheets of it at Leonetti. It's fast and very flattering, and hey, it worked on NYPD Blue. Give it a shot.

I'll take a stab at a few of your concerns. As far as aspect ratio I understand you get the full resolution out of the chip set in "Squeezed" mode. Letterbox simply overlays black bars on top and bottom but Squeeze takes advantage of the 16:9 chips. And it doesn't squeeze anything, that's a misnomer, it just shoots in 16:9. Scene files: Cinelike D is designed to give you the most exposure latitude preserving highlights and shadow detail. Probably best for your low light scenes. If you need to use gain I find that I can minimize the effects by going into the Camera Menu under 1. SCENE FILE and selecting OPERATION TYPE : "VIDEO CAM" then going down and lowering "Detail Level", and "Vertical Detail Level", as well as lowering "Master Ped". Increase "Detail Coring" while lowering "Auto Iris Level". Try using GAMMA: "B. Press" (Black Press), KNEE: "Mid", Matrix: "Norm" and keep V. Detail Freq on "Thin". Save this as a scene file so you can access it in the field. If you don't you'll lose your settings when you swap batt's. Cinelike V is the camera's strong point and is usually the desired setting to go with, overall. Of course this is a subjective statement but you can't go wrong with it. Bring the manual with you as, with any camera, there are a few quirks particular to this model. Good luck, Bill

Wow, four weeks of prep. What's that like?? What's been the most impressive about the camera so far? What's been the most challenging about the camera? 640 iso? Sheesh, not bad. Are you playing with vertical detail or coring to minimize gain?

This is for a segment on E! News. We're using the same suite of Dr's from one of our other shows, "Dr. 90210".

Interesting observation, Chris. I'll have to ponder that one. I like all your evaluations, very technical and specific. Much appreciated.

...or for $7.95 just put some Grid cloth on your barn doors. What I like about using a Chimera though is the ability to attach a fabric grid to help control spill. I just lit an interview today using a combination of 1 Chimera box and a couple units with grid cloth attached. Works great.

I got an assignment to shoot one of the Dr's in the same suite as Dr. Rey of Dr. 90210. It was a good introduction for me as it was a very quick and easy procedure. I shot a woman getting a saline implant inserted into her upper and lower lips. It's a new procedure and took less than an hour. The procedure itself was pretty straight forward and mercifully free of blood. *For those with week stomachs do not read on.* Actually it wasn't bad but I don't want to offend anyone. The Dr. began with a local anesthetic. Once the woman's face was numb he opened a path into her lip with a scalpel and proceeded to insert a pair of scissors and cut a tunnel through her lip. Once the canal was created he was able to insert the saline implant and inflate it to a predetermined size, kind of like a sleep number mattress. It was pretty surreal and I was grateful to have a b/w viewfinder to help remove me from the procedure. But you do have to keep peaking with your other eye to get a sense of what's going on. The biggest challenge was exposure. Once they swing in that intense surgery light you either expose for the Dr. and let the patient go nuclear or expose for the patient and let the room go dark. I had to dial in ND just to shoot around F8. It was a first for the producer and myself and we kept checking in with each other to make sure we were ok. My audio guy was a season regular on Dr. 9 so this was a walk in the park for him. My hats off to all you surgery shooters.

Thanks for the feedback. I certainly appreciate the collective insight. The director studied with the F64 club and has a very creative/non-traditional eye. I have an arri 650 fresnel in the b/g (upper right hand corner) w/ xsmall chimera and gel lighting the door and acting as a 3/4 back on the subject. We wanted to let the f/g go under. I asked the subject to step back but the director was willing to take a hit in sharpness for the framing. In hindsight I would have taken out the full CTO from the litepanel on the camera and only gone with 1/2 correction. Thanks for your feedback, no better way to learn.

Shot on the HVX200 480/24P letterbox. Tons of compression: saved as H.264, frame grabbed as a tiff, imported into photoshop, converted to jpeg. Minor adjustments to color and sharpness. This is JEL, from Anticon, for a promo piece I shot for Low End Theory: Welcome critique of lighting f/g, b/g, subject, framing, etc... Thank you,

If you go with the HVX make sure to get a body glove for it, they're not dust proof. When I had my camera serviced I was able to see a camera torn apart and being serviced after being on the beach, not a pretty sight.

I'll second Visconti's "The Leopard" and add "Mildred Pierce".

I've yet to see Christopher Doyle post on here ;) That was awesome! :lol:

Unwatchable. Good camera work though!

16G cards are dirt cheap to rent so there's no reason not to own one and have 3 on backup. Re- Z1 vs. HVX200 consider: Sony = 19-25mb/s vs. Panasonic DVCPro HD = 100mb/s.

Have you projected the scene from a print? I think it's the only way to determine if you're looking at a bad telecine or not. Also, take the same footage to another facility and see what happens. To me, it looks like video noise and not film grain but it's difficult to tell on an LCD monitor.

EVS in Glendale, ask for Ben, tell him Bill sent ya'. Get the 16G card now and save up for the 32 coming out in November.

Technically speaking your execution is excellent. You're very talented with the camera. I loved the tilt down in front of the twilight sky. Content-wise I felt you were a little on-the-nose. A topic like this may have been better served with more abstract/poetic approach. It's subjective so it's difficult to critique. But I think a method that allowed everyone to walk away with a different interpretation would have been more effective. I thought that's where you were headed with the opening shot, which I loved, by the way. What kind of jib/camera did you use? Congrats, Bill

Thank you for sending us that difficult update, Anne. Your father was much admired and his loss will be felt among this community and many others. Please accept my sympathy at your loss. Sincerely,

John will be missed, my sincere condolences to the family.

Interesting concept and a good deal for the client but from a filmmaker perspective it really doesn't add up. Refer to the old Cost/Benefit ratio from Economics 101.

How about a pizza box?

We miss your daily presence, hang in there, John. You're in our prayers.

I shot a set visit last week for a Denise Richards/Scott Caan comedy called "Deep in the Valley". Couldn't figure out why security was so tight, then Janus Kaminski walked over during lunch. Ahh. I get it, they were filming Indy 4 on the same lot!

Anyone have any experience w/ this light? Here's a link to BandH.

I just came back from a day of shooting, sat down and watched a package I shot air nationally only to be utter deflated when the press kit for 'Bourne' ran directly after my stuff. Now that's camera operating!