Mark Bonnington

Short films aren't really something anyone wants to buy. Your average viewer looks at a short and thinks "long trailer".

Sundance is a pretty high bar to shoot for, they don't let indies into that festival anymore, do they? Isn't it just high-budget Hollywood cousins allowed in? I'll give it a go but I suppose it'll be kind of like buying a Lotto ticket. The nudity and blood recommendation; I'm not above that sort of thing, I'll look into it.

Wow, so I should expect no profits at all. That's not good news. Is there ANY way to make money on a low budget movie? What do I have to add in order to make it a salable product? How big would the name stars have to be? How much extra money do I need to put into the project and what aspect of the development should get that money? Should it all go into advertising costs? Is 4-walling the movie a viable option to get some sort of income from it?

As a poor guy with very little money, my indie movie creation will likely cost me all of my savings. Before going into production, I need to figure out how much of my money I'm going to lose for good, and how much might come back to me from sales of the movie. The characteristics of my planned movie are as follows: a genre of romantic comedy (pseudo-typical plot); average acting by as yet unknown people (mostly friends); few if any special effects; very good sound; very good picture quality; a bit of sex appeal from the female cast (no nudity though); and an almost non-existent advertising budget. The total spent on the movie (excluding recording gear) MIGHT get as high as $10k, but more likely will come in under $5k... essentially micro-budget. The question then is, what's the typical income brought in from a no-budget independent movie with the characteristics I've mentioned? Is there a standard sales path that provides a fairly predictable return on investment? What kind of sales figures have other low-budget movies had in the last year or two?

I think you mean diode instead of resister. Or maybe they used NPN transistors instead of PNP!

Well I just started teaching myself electronics a few months ago, and was surprised to find that electronic components are fairly loose on matching their documented specifications. So if you haven't already done it a billion times, grab the ol' oscilloscope and double check to see that each component has the correct voltage going across it. Hopefully you've designed the boards to use balanced pairs of components so that weird environmental stuff is less likely to effect the board behavior. Oh, and if you were using protoboards, they have a tendency to act as small capacitors because of the sizable metal plate that connects the holes... apparently the different capacitance can cause unforeseen problems when migrating the circuit design to regular etched boards.

I use Celtx. It's free, so how wrong can you go with that. Plus it has a lot of extra features that can be useful for when you go into production. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't handle simultaneous dialog, but then I think they're currently working on adding that feature to the next release.

Don't know about everyone else, but I'd still buy the RED at twice the cost of the Asian companies. I've grown weary of the Asian Oligopoly overcharging people... and it pisses me off to see them turn a profit while intentionally holding back technological progress. And if RED ever falls out of the market, the oligopoly would go right back to their old, over-priced practices.

Oh, okay. So, what kind of signal is being sent out of the camera's DTE port? Is it sending out a 25MB stream, or is it up near 150MB? I'm concerned that the DTE stream is going to be the same data as what's being written to the tape... which would make the DTE a pointless addition for my needs.

Is the GY-HD100 capable of sending out uncompressed 4:4:4 720p, or is the camera compressing the stream before it reaches the DTE outputs?