video Assist

[Landon D. Parks]

Ok, Call me dumb. :rolleyes: But I'v never worked on a shot with a Video assist before. And I was watching the Makeing of the Lord of the rings a few nights ago on PPV B) and I noticed they showed Peters video assist Monitors.

 

Is this really how a Video assist looks? :(

 

http://www.geocities.com/director_by_nature/123.bmp

(Image has been Virus Scanned by YAHOO.... Dont worry)

 

Thanks

[David Mullen ASC]

The link didn't work. So what is your question? Video assist consists of a low-res single-chip video camera (color or b&w) picking up an image in the viewfinding system and sending it to a monitor. It can be recorded for playback but otherwise, it's not used for editing, just to see the framing. Often the b&w taps have a sharper image than the color taps. These days, camera assistants like to have a small onboard LCD monitor showing them the video tap image as well.

[Marty Hamrick]

Haskell Wexler stated that he preferred the type of video assist that was not flicker free.He said the flicker reminded him that the camera was running.Don't feel bad I've never used one either.The few film shoots I've done recently didn't warrant them being budgeted for and when I was shooting film back in the 80's,they weren't as common as they are now.

Marty

[Michael Nash]

Yeah, the image quality of most video taps is pretty crappy. But like David says it's used just for framing and content, mostly for the director, but also for the AC's to see when they need to pull focus from one subject to another. When I'm gaffing it helps me to see what's in frame so I know what areas of the set I need to either flag off or light up.

 

I'm gaffing a show right now for DP Jack Conroy, a great guy but an "old school" DP who doesn't like to use a video tap. He doesn't like everyone huddled around video village second guessing the content of the frame, especially when the tap image doesn't match what the film will look like anyway. He's of the mind (correctly, I'd say) that the cameraman should know if a shot was good, and that the director should trust him. Well, we ended up with color taps on both Panavision cameras but no director's monitor -- only the onboard LCD's. You can guess what happened -- the director, script supervisor, art director, gaffer, and anyone else who's inetersted come close to the camera to check out the shot. Then when the dolly moves, you've got this huddle of people waddling along with the camera, looking like a Terry Gilliam animation from Monty Python or something...

 

After about day three the LCD got mysteriously "broken" and disappeared. But that didn't work well for the director, so by the end of the day it inexplicably got "fixed" and found its way back onto the camera.

[Neal Fredericks]

i have actually DPed several features with no video assist and the directors trusted me and the operators. Of course the directors would look through the lenses on every set up and/or watch a rehearsal through the camera.

 

It was very refreshing to work this way and the ACs loved it too...and we also moved very fast between set-ups...

 

And I have yet to DP a feature where I will get at least one above-the-line production person asking me..."is that how it will look?" when seeing the video assist monitor...

[Mitch Gross]

And I have yet to DP a feature where I will get at least one above-the-line production person asking me..."is that how it will look?" when seeing the video assist monitor...

I assume you me that someone always DOES ask, which happens to me as well. My favorite is when I get into a transfer and some agency child (usually fresh out of school but making way more money than me) will complain, "But that's not the way it looked on the video tap!" I usually say that if all we wanted was the lousy way it looked on the tap, we could have simply recorded that and gone home.

 

I actually like the tap on the camera as it can help things move much faster. I insist on an LCD onboard the camera no matter what format shoot in. Sometimes I even operate off it for certain moves. But often it just helps for me to grab the camera and show the director some framing choices quickly and easily. I also always use a video transmitter instead of dealing with annoying cables everywhere. This makes the video tap fairly painless and quick.

[Matt Pacini]

I've never used a video tap either, but one thing puzzles me:

 

Why do they use crappy video camera for taps?

People say stuff like "because it's only for framing" as if it's not important to have a clear image of what you're framing.

If whatever you're shooting is so important, that everyone has to stand around while you replay it, and judge then & there, based on the video tap image alone, if you need to reshoot, then shouldn't the image be as high quality as possible?

Does it make sense to save a couple hundred dollars here, putting a cheap tap on a $200K camera?

Honestly, I just do not get this at all.

Why would you seemingly intententionally use a bad camera for this?

What possible drawback could there be in using the best cameras available for video taps, especially on big budget films?

 

Does anyone NOT shoot with video assist anymore? (I'm talking about studio films, etc.)

 

Seems like far more time is wasted (if you add up all the time replaying every shot for 1/2 the crew), than the occasional reshoot, which seems to be the absolute worst case scenario for not having one.

 

Doesn't this effectively double the time it takes to shoot a scene? (If not more?)

 

Matt Pacini

[David Mullen ASC]

I've done plenty of movies with a video tap that was not recorded for playback, so no time was spent rewatching the take. Live monitoring and playback are slightly two different issues.

 

Sure, I'd love it if they could cram a single-chip HD CCD into the tap and send it out to a big HD monitor... but then you'd really have to be explaining to producers why the tap image is not the same as what you're going to get back on film. At least with a crappy b&w tap, there's almost no assumption that the final image will look like that except from some of the more idiotic producers. But I think the future will be HD taps on the more expensive 35mm cameras.

 

The advantages and disadvantages of using video assist have been discussed before here. Personally, I like the ability to show the director the framing during a rehearsal and during a take, especially if I am having problems with the blocking or actors hitting their marks, etc. so he can see the problem immediately and go talk to the actors rather than lose time with me explaining when and where the framing problems were. Sure, you can have the director peek through the viewfinder to check the framing, but that doesn't work so well if camera movement and operating are necessary.

 

And now with me having to use operators on my union shoots, obviously I'd like to see the framing during the take as well!

 

As for just doing another take rather than watching the playback, obviously there are times when the actor would rather not do another take unless absolutely necessary for technical reasons (like a big crying scene.) In fact, playback is more of an actor thing than a director thing. We were going to go without recording the tap on my last film -- and the union position that you need to fill to do that -- until we found out that it was in our two lead actors' contracts that video playback must be provided when requested.

 

Our script supervisor sometimes used video playback to double-check actor continuity between takes, as well as taking still frame grabs from the tap.

[Mitch Gross]

Video tap cameras are generally inferior because people generally want them to be very small and not use too much power. Also they have to steal precious light from the viewfinder, so they need to be very sensitive with their gain pumped way up. For a long time industrial/security video cameras about the size of a foldaway cell phone were what everyone used. But the top of the line offerings from Arri, Aaton, Panavision as well as aftermarket companies like Denz offer surprisingly good color images with flicker free image processing (gets rid of that spinning shutter effect), high resolution, low noise, auto color balancing, electronic framelines and so on. They're still not going to look like the image coming off a full sized Betacam, but they are smaller than a $400 camcorder yet yield better images. They also cost $20k or so on their own. A videotap is a means to an end and everyone knows it, so they're only going to go so far with it. If you don't need the viewfinder then Innovision has an amazing fibreoptic bundle system that yields shockingly good images, but that's a very specialized item as one has to hack up the camera to install it.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> And now with me having to use operators on my union shoots...

 

Good grief, am I the only person on the planet who sees anything wrong with that situation?

 

Phil

[Marty Hamrick]

I saw a documentary where a pretty decent quality color,flickerless video tap was used.You could tell when you were seeing the video tap obviously as it was a video image when the rest of the doc was film,and you saw the camera's cross hair and frame edging.They used video from the tap to capture the subjects when they thought the camera wasn't rolling.

Marty

[David Mullen ASC]

Just as with video assist, there are advantages and disadvantages for a DP to use a separate operator. Also, I'm only an average operator. I could operate in a union shoot (like Roger Deakins, Peter Suschitsky, or Robert Richardson do) but I'd have to have someone else on the payroll as an operator.

 

In some ways, having the muscle of the union behind me is an advantage to getting the production to get an operator for me, because on most non-union films I'm told flat-out "there's no money for an operator -- you don't mind, do you?" So it's not exactly like I've chosen to operate for myself over the years.

 

And with an HD shoot, there is even more incentive to be watching the big HD monitor rather than the little b&w viewfinder. However, I'm leaving town in a week and a half to shoot an HD feature in Texas, and guess what? There's no budget to hire me an operator.

 

On "Shadowboxer" I had the pleasure of working with a skilled operator, Dave Taicher, but often we couldn't find anyone available to operate B-camera, so I did the operating there -- and some lucky (and busy elsewhere) union operator in Philly got a paycheck mailed to him. I let the camera crew pick whoever they wanted to...

 

There's no perfect system, Phil. On the one hand, on the non-union film, you've got a situation where you can't get production to pay for a crew member you need, while on the union film, now you've got to hire someone you don't always need. Personally, I'd rather work on the films where I have to hire more people than the ones where I don't have enough people working for me, if I'm going to compromise either way.

 

In fact, the logic of the situation of why the union has mandated producers to have to use a minimum number of crew people -- i.e. every camera needs an operator, and a first and second AC -- should be clear to you: otherwise, too often a producer will say you have to make do with less than you need "hey, you can operate AND DP for the price of one and you don't really need a 2nd AC..."

 

Anyway, if you're too low-budget to pay for an operator, you're too low budget to fall under the union anyway, hence why the under 1-mil feature I'm going off to shoot is non-union, yet the 7 mil. feature I just shot was. If you have 7 million dollars to make a feature on, you probably have enough to pay for someone to operate the camera you'd think...

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Did you just spend an entire posting trying to justify paying someone for work that wasn't done? I mean, if it went into the pension fund or something I could just about countenance it, but to pick someone out of a hat to compensate for not doing it is just laughable. Actually it's not dissimilar to the situation the print workers' union was in, in the UK in the early 1980s, where they would be compensated for not laying out work done out of house (such as advertisements).

 

I'm not quite sure how... no... sorry... brain just can't get around how there could be circumstances where either of these situations was sensible. You'll have to excuse a slightly political tangent here but I'm constantly surprised how a country with an administration that right wing can have such inane labour laws as to allow this to happen. It's ridiculous and absurd and more or less makes a laughing stock of the entire organisation. The print workers didn't get away with it for long; they were deemed to have dismissed themselves after a large-scale buyout by Newscorp. I can only hope that something similarly serious happens to the US film industry because I'm rather chagrined to think that some tiny sub-percentage of my DVD rental fee is going to subsidise some lazy American IATSE member sitting on his couch watching TV.

 

I have it on first-hand account from three different people that union crews in the US are workshy; this was on theatrical work, which I believe is another branch of the same bloated organisation, wherein the small number of imported UK crew that the precious union had so graciously tolerated ended up working all hours while the Americans sat back on endless meal and rest breaks. I have now read and heard enough senseless inanities like this to form the opinion that the union system as it exists in commercial American filmmaking is probably just as problematic as the worthlessly weak and toothless one we have here.

 

This is one of the things I use as comfort when reflecting upon the fact that I'll never work on big union film shoots anyway!

 

Phil

[GeorgeSelinsky]

After about day three the LCD got mysteriously "broken" and disappeared. But that didn't work well for the director, so by the end of the day it inexplicably got "fixed" and found its way back onto the camera.

I find that in some instances video taps can be disasterous. I remember once I was working on a documentary where the producer (there was no director) would physically move me if she wanted a shot differently - during the shot. That drove me crazy. She screwed up so many shots that way, I nearly went insane.

 

I personally feel that the biggest danger of the video tap is the framing by committee tendency it encourages. Once there's a monitor you can't tell this or that person "Don't look at the monitor please, it's just for the director, my AC, and me - thank you!" Before you know it everyone's eyes are glued to the monitor and the fun begins.

 

I'll also never forget the time I nearly got fired because of the way an image looked on the LCD monitor. I then got pissed and rigged a bunch of very powerful fill lights just to prove my point in the editing room how silly this was.

 

- G.

[David Mullen ASC]

I thought I said it wasn't a perfect system, Phil.

 

It's pretty simple to understand the union position: you got a camera then someone has to operate it. If the DP operates it, he is basically doing two jobs for the price of one and therefore is taking a job from someone else. The logical conclusion to this line of thinking is to require that all cameras have an operator other than the DP.

 

I'm not saying there isn't some holes in this line of argument. But if the union said "all cameras must have an operator unless the DP agrees to also act as operator" then almost every producer under the sun would require the DP to also operate to save them money, unless it was a top Hollywood DP with some clout. So the union is saving a lot of DP's from being pressured to operate for themselves. However, like I said, there are some consequences to this line of thinking that the union has not figured a way around.

 

You have a way of fixating on the negative and never acknowledging that there are any positives. Our government has some problems too but the solution isn't to eliminate the government.

[Carlos M. Icaza]

I want to say that I wish that I could have more then one monitor for playback. Geez. The amount of people that gather around the monitor smothering the director is amazing. I personally think that there should only be two people with the Director hovering over the playback the monitor. The DP and the AD.

 

 

I made a lot of joke during my last short, shot in miniDV, about getting more than one monitor to keep all the other people in a different room alltogether. I know that I haven't shot anything in the likes of David or some of you guys over here, but I quickly learned how everyone has an opinion when looking over the playback monitor for the director and they expect the director to take their opinion into consideration. When Mr or Mrs Director doesn't, boy, feelings are easely hurt.

 

My $.02 :-)

 

 

C.-

[Max Jacoby]

I once worked on a shoot with an actor who had a very highly inflated opinion of himself. He was also the only actor I have ever worked with who had an entourage on set at all times, which was completely unjustified, because although he had come to a bit of fame in the eighties, he was still only a lousy actor doing lousy films. Whenever I told people that I was on a shoot with him, their first reaction would be: 'What? Is he still alive?'.

 

Well that actor had the tendency to have the rehearsals recorded on the video assist and then have a look at them to see if they looked to his liking. He was also constantly telling the Dop where to put the camera, etc. One day we lost about 4 hours because we were doing a shot of him lying in a hospital bed and he just wasn't happy with the way the shots made him look, so he had them changed all the time.

 

The day after that, the producer had the VCR on the video assist taken away. The actor had to be content with sending a member of his entourage with a video camera next to our film cameras and recording the rehearsals that way. Which led the 1st AD to constanly joke: 'Are our cameras ready?'

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

If the DP is doing two jobs it would make sense to pay the DP extra; I can't really believe that this hasn't occurred to you. It does not under any circumstances make sense to pull someone out of a hat to pay as some kind of spiteful symbolic punishment to the production company.

 

Phil

[David Mullen ASC]

I agree with you that it would make more sense to give the DP a salary bump when he moved over to operate a B-camera rather than pay someone not there the full operator rate. But I can see why writing that into the union contract would result in producers not willing to pay for a second operator since it costs them less just to bump up the DP to a DP/operator. It would have to be that the DP would receive a full operator salary as well as his own to prevent that, but that seems excessive as well! Like I said, it's not a perfect system.

 

If you have a solution I can pass on to the union, I'd love to hear it - because I'm stumped.

 

Now perhaps one idea would be that IF no union operators are available for the job of B-camera, then the production would not be punished by having to pay that salary anyway. But the trouble with that is that there would be an investigation as to how hard the production looked for an operator (I suppose one could make the burden fall on the union to provide one). And the union would probably insist that at least the B-camera team be each bumped up instead, except that you'd then be short a second AC who'd now be the first AC.

 

No, I agree with you that sending a full day's salary over to someone who didn't work is taking a rule to a ridiculous extreme; the trick is how to make an exception to a rule not turn into a loophole for the producers to drop one crew member. I mean, from the producer's angle, it's not their fault when the local union cannot provide an operator for the day because they are all working or unavailable, so why should the producers be financially liable anyway?

[Mitch Gross]

I have to say that I really love having an operator when I DP. I've only had the pleasure a few times, but it has always freed me to sit next to the director to discuss aspects of the shot and freed me to deal with lighting far more then when I'm chained to the camera. I can always take a look in the eyepiece whenever I wish and on the occassions where I wished to operate the shot myself the operator has never been insulted (at least I don't think so). It becomes a working situation where one needs to be of like minds and it's generally the operator's job to learn the DP's style to produce the images desired. I find it a great way to work.

 

I've also had the pleasure of operating a few times for others, and this can be very rewarding as well. I get to think about little but the frame, and really concentrate on composition. It's so nice to be on set without the burden of being the DP! And I've learned a lot by watching the work of other DPs.

[Landon D. Parks]

Maybee I should Invent an HD tap? I sure would like to be able to shoot film, and still see it in full resolution on a 50" plasma.... although, I dont think I would make much in the video tap business.... $$$$$$ not a HUGE market.

[Matt Pacini]

I have a love-hate opinion of the unions.

 

Not to sound whiney, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why someone who got into being a DP doesn't want to operate, or even looks at it as two jobs.

It seems to me, that the unions have split one job into two.

I mean, what are you doing at the exact moment the camera is running?

And the idea that the producer is just out to spend as little money as possible, makes sense. I mean, this is somebody's money that's being spent.

As we all know, not all films make money, so somebody is losing out when the production is paying some guy who's not even on the film.

 

How do guys like Luc Besson pull it off with the unions?

I mean, he directs, DP's and operates on his films.

Do the unions try to get him bumped off on all his films, or what?

Or does the production have to pay TWO guys who aren't there?

Seems like extortion to me.

 

MP

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> It would have to be that the DP would receive a full operator salary as well as

> his own to prevent that, but that seems excessive as well!

 

Excessive but not as excessively stupid as paying someone who didn't work.

 

Mr. Pacini said:

 

> It seems to me, that the unions have split one job into two.

 

I'm not sure that's true, but the point is this: if it's possible to DP and operate, and clearly it is, then I question why market forces haven't obsoleted the camera operator. It may not be ideal but then lots of things aren't ideal and we make do. This seems to me to be a slightly steadicam-operatorish attitude - there is no god-given right for people to be camera operators, if the work isn't necessary or sufficiently worthwhile, sorry, goodbye. I don't expect people to always automatically pay for for a couple of extra days to produce some flashy graphics on edits I do - if they want it they can pay for it and it will enhance the production, but I wouldn't dream of invoking any kind of situation where they could be punished for having the temerity to not hire me! I believe it is their perfect right to not hire me and have the production suffer as a result.

 

> I mean, what are you doing at the exact moment the camera is running?

 

Well I'm not sure this is such a good attitude to take. In general the more eyes you have on the image the better a result you will get; the more people looking for nasty shadows, stands, mics, flags etc. I should make it clear that I am not inherently opposed to the idea of having an operator; I may shortly be up for a hi-def job with a Pro35 and film primes, for which I will do my best to insist on the best possible crew. I would not consider operating in my usual mode (Light, operate, focus pull) in such a situation. The ability to stand back and look at the shot on a monitor as it happens is useful - but I don't think it's critical.

 

> How do guys like Luc Besson pull it off with the unions?

 

He shoots in the UK. Or, in the US, I can't imagine how he'd manage to not end up paying the IATSE tax.

 

> extortion

 

The amount the American unions charge for membership is certainly extortion.

 

I used to have a love/hate relationship with this setup; now I've realised that all it's ever going to do for me is prevent me getting decent work, I've resolved just to hate it!

 

Phil

[Sam Wells]

I have to say that I really love having an operator when I DP.

I understand this. When I work as a *filmmaker* whch is what I'm mainly doing now then no, I need to have the camera, make the frame, paint the film on the ground glass so to speak - it doesn't work or even make sense having someone else operate it.

 

But shooting as a DP for others, when the goal is ultimately to translate what's in the director's head (as opposed to mine) then, I've found I often feel confined if I have to be on the camera. I'd rather walk around, take in the sense of the space, the light.

 

On video shoots there's no question about this ;)

 

-Sam

[Sam Wells]

Maybee I should Invent an HD tap? I sure would like to be able to shoot film, and still see it in full resolution on a 50" plasma....

No, then the producer would say, "hey can't we just use this, why should we pay to develop all that film" :o

 

-Sam