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Spectre mixing film and digital


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I just asked a manager at a major grip & electric house and he said non-union productions can rent trucks and drive them off as long as the drivers have right classification on their license; it's only union productions that need union drivers.

Well, that's good news then. It's interesting that my line producer, the many truck driving friends I have and even the vendors I've talked with, have said the opposite. Maybe they all need to make the same all you did! I bet you some shops are relaxing rules due to the lower budget nature of our modern shoots. I've struggled with this problem for years and have always used smaller trucks as a consequence. Thanks for the info and maybe you can send me over the company you talked with so I can throw it in my line producers face. :)

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I just asked a manager at a major grip & electric house and he said non-union productions can rent trucks and drive them off as long as the drivers have right classification on their license; it's only union productions that need union drivers.

 

Well exactly, that's what I've always been told. I rented two big packages from PS in Toronto for both The Dogfather and Against The Wild part 1, never had any union drivers. Of course I know LA is a much stronger film union town than Toronto is.

 

If I was Tyler I would skip filming anywhere in CA all together. Plenty of more friendly non-union states to film in.

 

I lived in Utah for five years and the Mormon church does a ton of motion picture work there every year, not a single union member is ever hired. Somehow the productions go forward just fine. Of course I doubt even the union bosses would want to challenge the power and financial might of the Mormons on their home turf.

 

R,

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Probably Tyler's producer just doesn't want to be confronted by some Teamsters should they stumble across a street with a bunch of 5-ton production trucks and honey wagons parked there. Plus odds are high that one of the drivers hired would be a Teamster or know a Teamster.

 

This is one of the reasons that non-union shoots tend to avoid putting up those yellow production signs around town, and many film further out on the outskirts. But the thing is that for most low-budget non-union features with something like a 3-week schedule, they generally manage to not get noticed before they wrap, plus they naturally don't have a lot of big trucks; it's more a problem for the longer productions or the "big" non-union shoots.

 

But that issue is a separate one from the rental house issue.

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If I was Tyler I would skip filming anywhere in CA all together. Plenty of more friendly non-union states to film in.

Ohh for sure.

 

Still my point from earlier was only in reference to bigger shows, not spending the money to build sets or even shoot much outdoors due to the cost. If the cost of shooting on location AND set building was decreased, we'd most likely see more films that aren't being forced to use special effects. That was the whole reason for brining "union's" up in the first place.

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  • 9 months later...

 

The absolute worst offender of this is Gangster Squad. I saw it in the theater with a friend who has no knowledge of film making at all and during the final act's night shootout and fist fight she leaned over to me and asked why the movie looked weird like a TV show. It's because the motion blur was so blatantly not film, it was pulling her out of the movie. Most regular audiences can't seem to tell or don't care about the difference between something shot on digital or film, but when your format is pulling a regular audience member out of the film's immersion, you're doing something wrong.

 

In what inherent way does digital motion blur look different to film motion blur?

 

Isn't it just down to how long the shutter is open?

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In what inherent way does digital motion blur look different to film motion blur?

Well, part of it is a consequence of how people use digital cameras. You can make digital cameras look more like film cameras but it requires more light and higher shutter speed. It's just, very few people who shoot digitally do that. Most people who shoot digitally want the sensitivity that they gain by running a more normal 180deg or higher shutter angle.

 

So what is that "look", well it looks like high frame rate video. Most of the digital cinema cameras used for making big productions, have rolling shutter as well, so that's another "effect" which makes it look very digital.

 

The mechanical shutter digital cinema cameras do have less of this issue, but it's still there.

 

Isn't it just down to how long the shutter is open?

There are only a few cameras with shutters. Almost all cameras have a digital shutter, so the imager is constantly pulsing data, which the processor turns into whatever flavor you want.

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I don't think there is a significant difference between 180 degrees on a film camera versus an electronic shutter with the same exposure time. There is a subtle difference though just due to the nature of a mechanical shutter moving over the gate to cover it, which is actually a form of rolling shutter.

 

When people object to the motion blur of digital cinematography, it's almost always due to either a longer exposure time being used, or some sort of post work done such as image stabilization or heavy noise reduction or for some TV sets, the motion interpolation that gets switched on to smooth out motion (though that would have the same effect on material shot on film.)

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As we say in After Effects,

wiggle(24,0.5)

...produces 0.5 pixel instability each frame.

 

If you want to do it different amounts in the horizontal and vertical,

h = wiggle(24,0.5);
v = wiggle(24,0.75);
[h[0],v[1]];

 

Well there you go.. problem solved.. I will alert my people on the coast..

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Not in my view. I'd almost be willing to accept that there's a very slight difference in motion rendering between mechanical and electronic global shutter (forget rolling shutter, we know the problem with that). There's a plausible mechanism for it - the fractionally uneven way in which the shutter wipes across the frame, even given that it's very out-of-focus, and the way motion blur thus fades in and out along part of its length, and not entirely evenly over the frame. That could, and some people think does, affect motion rendering, and I tend to agree, although it's very much in the eye of the beholder.

 

A mechanical shutter on an electronic sensor should produce the same results, assuming the sensor is allowed to accumulate charge during the entire period that any part of the shutter is open. That may not be the case, however, and there's mechanical issues as well. In a film camera, the shutter forms part of the viewfinding system and is thus commonly at a 45-degree angle to the film, which will affect the way it allows light to fall on the film. In a camera such as F65 (but not the optical viewfinder Alexa, which uses a mirror shutter) the shutter is parallel to the plane of the sensor.

 

I don't know how much difference this makes, although the various mechanical layouts of film cameras could also have produced variable motion rendering. I would suspect the difference caused by mechanical geometry is extremely subtle.

 

I think most of the shutter smear people complain about in digital is in people going beyond a 1:1 duty cycle, that is, beyond 180 degrees on a film camera. In my view that is certainly very ugly and doesn't suit many subjects. I would cautiously agree that a narrower shutter can promote a slightly less electronic look, but I suspect that's only because it moves the image away from a specifically electronic-looking long-shutter look, rather than that it simulates a film shutter any more closely.

 

P

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"Cafe Society" was one of the first times I felt I was watching something that looked way too clean and sharp – and was jarred by the diffusion in the close ups of Kristen Stewart. Maybe it has to do with Storaro's harder lighting style that brought out these aspects of the F65 imager (many contemporary cinematographers tend towards soft light, which might give digital footage a gentler feel?). This is pure conjecture, but I personally found "Cafe Society" to be shockingly crisp, if really nicely lit.

Edited by Kenny N Suleimanagich
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A mechanical shutter on an electronic sensor should produce the same results, assuming the sensor is allowed to accumulate charge during the entire period that any part of the shutter is open. That may not be the case, however, and there's mechanical issues as well. In a film camera, the shutter forms part of the viewfinding system and is thus commonly at a 45-degree angle to the film, which will affect the way it allows light to fall on the film. In a camera such as F65 (but not the optical viewfinder Alexa, which uses a mirror shutter) the shutter is parallel to the plane of the sensor.

I have a feeling your correct about that. The "shutter" may have zero actual effect because the imager has already pulsed it's data. I would assume Sony wouldn't make a mistake like that, but you could be right.

 

I don't know how much difference this makes, although the various mechanical layouts of film cameras could also have produced variable motion rendering. I would suspect the difference caused by mechanical geometry is extremely subtle.

I would agree because the Alexa with the standard ol' film camera shutter, doesn't really look any different then the Alexa without it. Again, I think their design was to give an optical viewfinder, rather then a mechanical shutter for the imager.

 

I think most of the shutter smear people complain about in digital is in people going beyond a 1:1 duty cycle, that is, beyond 180 degrees on a film camera. In my view that is certainly very ugly and doesn't suit many subjects. I would cautiously agree that a narrower shutter can promote a slightly less electronic look, but I suspect that's only because it moves the image away from a specifically electronic-looking long-shutter look, rather than that it simulates a film shutter any more closely.

Exactly, which is my point from above. People are pushing the sensitivity levels of the cameras, so they're running lower shutter speeds/greater shutter angles. I don't believe anyone made a film camera that runs angles higher then 180 deg.

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Well, Panavision and Mitchell cameras often were set to a max 200 degree shutter angle, but the difference between 180 degrees and 200 degrees is barely 1/6th of a stop.

Do you mean the days of non mirrored reflex?

 

Or did they make a mirrored reflex with 200 deg adjustable shutter?

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I think the original rackover Mitchell could go to a 200 degree shutter angle, and the Panavision reflex cameras from the PSR to the Panaflex can too, probably because they are based on a Mitchell-style movement. But as I said, 200 degrees is not significantly more than 180 degrees.

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Exactly, which is my point from above. People are pushing the sensitivity levels of the cameras, so they're running lower shutter speeds/greater shutter angles. I don't believe anyone made a film camera that runs angles higher then 180 deg.

Don't know about pro stuff, but during the XL phase, at least a couple Super-8 cameras had a 230-degree shutter. Seems to me the GAF sound cameras with Chinon 1.1 lenses from around 1975 went this route. Just more useless trivia from a brain that can't bring itself to forget Pete Rose's batting averages for his first 11 seasons.

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