Dieter Vansteenwegen

Hi, I'm a bit embarrased asking this question here, as with some research this question could be answered by myself. I have no time, nore the software right now with me and need to come up with an answer and I can't find a clear answer right away. For a fashion show I need to project 2 HD streams and 3 Picture-in-Pictures layered on top of that. MPEG2 (in a Program Stream) would be the coding of choice given the used soft-/hardware combination. The HD is no problem, but the three pip's (925X694 pix, 462X809 pix and 925X520 pix) seem to be a problem. I thought we could just encode MPEG2 movies with these resolutions. It seems now, one can only code specific resolutions like SD and the HD resolutions. I've done a quick test with procoder transcoding a videofile on my hdd, and it indeed gave problems in playback. The other option would be to put each clip in a HD frame, but that would add up to 5 simultaneous HD streams. As said, I don't have time to investigate properly right now but need to come up with an answer in the next hours. I'm hoping someone with some expertise could shine a light here... thanks.

We've done it in school, it works fine als long as you remember to use the right settings. Shutter time should be as close to 1/50th of a second, mostly 1/60th is the closest. To use it as an incendent meter measure using the spot meter function on a graycard. Worked for me...

Hi, I'm starting as 1st AC and just finished a small documentary shot on s16. One evening we were out shooting sundown when the cameraman asked to put on an 85 filter. I was wondering... Troughout the day, the colour of the sunlight changes because of a longer path throught the atmoshpere, right? So "daylight" is something subjective and not always the same as the 6500K that the 85 converts to 3200K I guess... When one has only an 85, are you supposed to use it all day long, or how is this done? When the sun is under the horizon it seems to be more blue, which justifies the orange filter, but right after sunset it's really yellowish, is the 85 needed then? And when for instance an 81 and others are available, but a colorimeter isn't how do you know what filter to use? Thanks !

We did it once for a student film, shooting on an Aaton A-Minima. We ran out of film stock (which we knew would happen and told production but... well you get the picture :) ). They couldn't get hold of the spools for the A-Minima from Kodak as soon as we needed them, but found the same stock on 400" rolls. Watch out to keep the perforations & emulsion on the right side, or you might end up wondering what that sound is coming from your camera :) Took me a while to figure out how to do it right the first time, but it worked and we could continue shooting in about an hour... Good luck!

That figures, thanks...

It's probably something really simple, but I've never understood why an image (as seen by the operator in the viewfinder) is darker when ND's are added of when filming in low-light situations. The thing is (I think), if you're shooting on ie. 200 asa, you have to expose your film for 200 asa, so the amount of light going through any filters and the aperture should be the about the same whatever you're shooting, in order to get a correctly exposed film. Right? Or am I completely missing something?

What's this lens blimp? A blimp is to avoid sound coming from the camera right? Like a jacket-thingie used when recording live sound? Is it some kind of jacket wrapped around the lens or am I completely off here? And is it specially related to the 16BL? Thanks, Dieter

Hey, that's actually a nice list... I was looking for something completely different since I will do a first AC job for the very first time in a couple of weeks (nothing really serious in fact), so I'm quite nervous, and it's nice to accidently find this thread about learning through experience :)... Anyway, back to the theory now...

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, but at "video" there was a note stating that post-production related things where nog supposed to be posted there. I was wondering some things about codecs... *MiniDV uses MPEG2 compression, right? DVD also uses MPEG2. Does this mean they are in fact the same format? Or how does this work. So why is transcoding necessary when going from MiniDV to DVD? To change the bitrate? *Is it wrong to think that the MPEG2 format is a progressive format? As far as I remember, MPEG compression works with macroblocks rather than lines, so the interlaced/progressive thing isn't relevant? A friend of mine is thinking about buying a camcorder to film holidays and those things, he asked me which would be best, a MiniDV or a camcorder which records on DVD. I would go for the MiniDV, but I started wondering about which of those two would have the best quality/lowest compression. I suppose dvd has a higher bitrate then MiniDV? At the moment I'm making a small film for a company (I know.... it's to pay the rent :) ). I have been shooting on MiniDV (due to production budget). Editing is done in Premiere Pro. After rendering and exporting as uncompressed AVI, DVD authoring is done with Adobe Encore. Even when using Progressive, high quality 2Pass encoding, the image is quiete bad. Maybe I should have posted in the Newbie forum after all... Thanks! Dieter Vansteenwegen, Gent,Belgium

After the death of my beloved Psion yesterday (we're still mourning over here), I am thinking about buying a Palm T3, T5 or an Ipaq 4150... As an AC, I've seen quite an array of programmes for Palm (such as those from David Eubank amongst others). I found only one for PocketPC. I like the Ipaq a bit more, so I wonder if there aren't any good alternatives for those palm-oriented programmes? Any other pro's/cons are welcome as well... Thanks, dieter

Is this really something you should worry about? I mean like check the condition of the sun before send film? Never heard anything like that before. Never thought about it either to be honest...

I just graduated cinematography, and i recall another student a couple of years who wrote an essay about a plugin for after effects which was meant to make video-images look a little more like it was film. I don't really recall the name right now. They used it for a short movie and it turned out quite good. Haven't seen it though... If you want to, send me an e-mail and I'll look it up for you...

Thank you! So far I've been using my changing bag to load and unload the spools into the magazine, since I didn't feel exactly save loading them "in the open". I haven't been doing this job for more than a year so there's a lot of thing I don't feel certain about. thanks for the quick reply!

Hi, I'm looking for useful software for pda's like Psion, Palm, maybe Pocket windows. I mainly work as a camera-assistant. A collegue of mine has a psion 5, and found a programme on the Spanish Kodak Site. I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows some other programmes? Thanks!

I'm currently working on a studentfilm as camera assitant. We're supposed to shoot some scenes tomorrow, but there's almost no stock left. I managed to get hold of some recent stock 250D/7246 from kodak, but we are shooting on the Aaton A-Minima, which uses daylight spools, and emulsion out. Can I manually rewind the negative from the normal roll to the spools, if I take care that it goes on emulsion out? There's some info on the site from kodak, but I can't figure it out myself. thanx ! dieter