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Dream 'job', massive budget - would you shoot digital or film?


Stephen Perera

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15 minutes ago, Mark Dunn said:

As I commented on that item, Kodak's turnover is 2% of what it was in its best year, 1996.

Because everybody owns a printer now.

The Number is also not related to the produced Film Stock. And sure in 1996 every stupid Soap, Musicvideo and Highclass Porn was shot on Film… there was no other real option. Nowadays im sure nobody will care what porn or the daily latino housewife soap is shot on… but we´re talking about cinema & dream jobs here right?

Edited by Philip Reinhold
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25 minutes ago, Philip Reinhold said:

I wonder how many people would jump out of an window if Mr. Deakins say so…

So if I was to post that even the legendary DoP Philip Reinhold ,says that Digital looks better than film in most cases, on an established  web forum about cinematography, that has ASC etc members   , and you were a very well known Oscar winning  DoP.. you would thing thats ok..  even as its actually the opposite of what you really think..  you would not except someone who knew your work and read your articles to flag that up..?..  as with Arri Alexa minis well known faults .. Sony camera,s its impossible to get a good picture.. digital skin tones always look like crap.. and various post about very high level DoP,s not knowing how to shoot.. when my own experience is no budget shoots  with a pocket camera or an ancient Aaton.. and any day rate was a sandwich ..  you might not take that forum very seriously .. 

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12 minutes ago, aapo lettinen said:

How many ASC members we actually DO have here regularly posting? 

David is active of course but I haven't seen Shelly J.  post in a long time. Any others?

I counted two with a quick search.... David Mullen and Paul Maibaum posting actively (newer posts than couple of years old). 

most of the ASC members don't seem to have been very active here in the last 10 years. Maybe visiting sometimes but not posting anything. What happened in the 2010-ish that drew them away from the forum? too much work to concentrate the spare time on internet forums? ?

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I am just waiting the Shyamalan-like plot twist where both Roger Deakins and Lawrence Sher would join at the same day and would first like to see what this "Dream job, Massive Budget" -thread is all about ?

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1 hour ago, Philip Reinhold said:

ah no sorry @Robin R Probyn i did not consider this a playground for trolls…

 

Yeah thats my point exactly .. I don't want it to be one.. so I have to flag up the never ending nutty posts and mis information  by Tyler ..   Im still waiting for an answer to the "well known" Alexa mini power board faults .. let alone all the false quotes and miss information about Sony camera,s that he had little to no knowledge of..  and its hard reading when he says other DoP,s with vastly more experience than himself dont know what they doing.. its literally nuts..   you probably havnt been on this forum long enough to really know  .. but it gets tiresome very quickly ..

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21 minutes ago, Philip Reinhold said:

this is so 2015… now you need all over Adidas, Nike, Astera LED´s and a Bolex.

Oh snap... I only have the Bolex. Everything else of that is missing ?  

I think I will just shoot a roll or two with my Konvas, I think my Eastern Bloc winter jacket is here somewhere...

 

though I think that if you want to shoot something with a Konvas camera you must buy one from web without never asking instructions, then make a YouTube video about how you THINK the camera works and should be loaded (total BS content of course and the camera would jam in real life) and then disable comments so that no one can post real instructions how you could get it working.       ...unfortunately I am not an uncivilised Youtuber with 20K+ followers who does not want to learn anything new or even do basic internet searches to find out how stuff actually works. So I am really not qualified to shoot with a Konvas camera ?  He did a BS video about front projection too among many other things ? 

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6 hours ago, aapo lettinen said:

most of the ASC members don't seem to have been very active here in the last 10 years. Maybe visiting sometimes but not posting anything. What happened in the 2010-ish that drew them away from the forum? too much work to concentrate the spare time on internet forums? ?

Also probably because they don’t like to be told by ‘random internet guy’ how they should have shot their movie... ?

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2 hours ago, Satsuki Murashige said:

Also probably because they don’t like to be told by ‘random internet guy’ how they should have shot their movie... ?

This was Larry Fung’s ASCs last post back in 2017:

“It's true I hadn't been to the forum in a long time, and when I did I was confronted by a rather insulting post regarding a project I poured my heart and soul into, which reminded why I don't sign in more often.

All cinematographers work extremely hard to do their best and it's unfortunate when our community is disparaging rather than a source of encouragement and support.”

Guess who had made the insulting post? That’s right, the invaluable contributions of a world class DP were lost to the forum in exchange for endless posts full of misinformation and fanciful “opinion”.

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1 hour ago, Dom Jaeger said:

This was Larry Fung’s ASCs last post back in 2017:

“It's true I hadn't been to the forum in a long time, and when I did I was confronted by a rather insulting post regarding a project I poured my heart and soul into, which reminded why I don't sign in more often.

All cinematographers work extremely hard to do their best and it's unfortunate when our community is disparaging rather than a source of encouragement and support.”

Guess who had made the insulting post? That’s right, the invaluable contributions of a world class DP were lost to the forum in exchange for endless posts full of misinformation and fanciful “opinion”.

I rest my case .. Walter Mitty is single handedly  turning this forum into a joke.. 

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11 hours ago, aapo lettinen said:

How many ASC members we actually DO have here regularly posting? 

David is active of course but I haven't seen Shelly J.  post in a long time. Any others?

Shelly Johnson ASC used to post once in a while, but hasn't been here since Nov 2014, where he would have encountered posts like this from Tyler, giving Christopher Nolan some advice:

On 11/10/2014 at 2:16 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

The Anamorphic stuff looks really bad. They didn't even bother lighting, they opened up the lens and yelled action. I'm under the belief, if you have to use 500 ASA stock (I assume they used Vision 3 500ASA) for critical dialog scenes, you've for sure under lit too much. Roving camera, master wides, heck even medium shots or quick dialog bits, fine. But when every single emotional moment has an actor out of focus and dark, it gets tedious. Besides, the IMAX stuff looks so different, it's almost like too movies.

 

Nolan should have taken a cue from PT Anderson and shot THE ENTIRE MOVIE in 5 perf 70mm. It would have required them to light more and as a consequence, it would have looked a lot better.

I don't know if that sort of post is what turned Shelly off, like it turned off Larry Fung, but it sure wouldn't make anyone of that calibre feel like participating. 

David Mullen responded with:

"Long-time forum member Gregory Irwin was the focus puller that you seem so intent on disparaging. My first thought is that you should try doing the job if you think it is so easy. It's a little too easy to sit on the sidelines and point out the flaws in a very ambitious production without knowing fully what the challenges were."

Unfortunately, 5 years later, there are no lessons learned, and this kind of crap is still going on. Tyler was recently lecturing Greg again on what he felt was happening on a set that Greg had actually worked on. Unbelievable, more interested in hearing his own voice than asking questions of someone who was there. It's a testament to his patience that Greg has stayed around.

So it's really no wonder there are precious few ASC members or other professionals with mainstream release experience on these boards, when their hard work can be so insultingly dismissed by someone who really doesn't know what they're talking about. Most people here are quite respectful but it only takes one goose pretending to be an expert and posting rubbish daily to turn what should be an encouraging learning environment with reliable information and occasional input from experienced professionals into the equivalent of a youtube comments section. 

To pre-empt any accusations of elitism, I'm not saying professionals or ASC members are the only voices worth hearing, there are plenty of amateurs, enthusiasts and students who also contribute wonderfully to the general knowledge base here, but what we don't want to do is to turn off people with exceptional experience because of ignorant and unwarranted criticism of their work and misinformation presented as fact. There are plenty of other nooks of the internet where people can do that. 

This will be my last post on the subject. Sorry to lower the friendly tenor of the forum but as illustrated, this has been going on for a long time.  I'll go back to simply trying to correct the misinformation that Tyler regularly posts that's within my area of experience (and hopefully get corrected myself if I accidentally post something erroneous) and I'll continue to try and refrain from making it personal. I just wish there was some evidence of change, for the sake of the forum itself.

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On 11/10/2014 at 5:16 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

The Anamorphic stuff looks really bad. They didn't even bother lighting, they opened up the lens and yelled action. I'm under the belief, if you have to use 500 ASA stock (I assume they used Vision 3 500ASA) for critical dialog scenes, you've for sure under lit too much.

 

On 10/28/2019 at 5:20 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

I can't think of any true "cinematic" situations where you'd need more than 1000 iso and 500T can be pushed to 1000 iso without much of a difference in quality. I shoot IN THE DARK on 500t all the time, in situations I can't control doing documentary work, where I don't even bother bringing out the meter because I know it's going to say "under" even if I rate the stock 1000 iso and it ALWAYS comes out really nice. Add a HINT of noise reduction (all digital cameras do this in-camera anyway) in the green channel and you're all good. You need to watch "The Favorite" if you haven't already. That was shot with candle light in some cases without any issues. 

 

On 11/9/2019 at 8:54 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

There isn't a single instance on a normal, budgeted narrative feature where a "film" camera of any kind would NOT work. People push 500T two stops ALL THE TIME and it looks great. If you really need 1500 ISO, maybe you should watch Taxi Driver, which was shot on 125. So really the only excuse is "cost" or "the lab isn't near us". 

OH WOW this is great, finally I got some scientific results! 

 

We can see here that Tyler's attitude has changed 3 FULL STOPS in only couple of years ? 

First he said that 500T was too grainy. So he wanted to use 200 or 250 ISO stock instead normally exposed. That was good and nice. OK.

THEN, he switched back to 500 ISO.  AND right away pushed two full stops to 2000 ISO. 

Sadly, just pushing film does not increase latitude in the same relation than it lifts the middle tones up. So he is underexposing a lot, then lifting if back up in post but just gets lots of unwanted grain and noise and lifts the shadow detail but his tonal range gets shallower. 

I really need to try NeatVideo on his comments, to see how it goes! I believe it would make wonders and tune the noise levels back to an acceptable level ? 

Quote

I didn't particularly like the look of the Anamorphic scenes. I would have personally use more light but of course I don't know what the exact shooting conditions were so this is only hypothetical. To me it looks like they wanted to shoot wide open as an artistic choice. I think that 200T stock is better suited for critical dialog scenes because it has slightly less grain.

OMG it worked great!  Maybe we can switch the noise reduction permanently on in this forum?

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1 hour ago, Dom Jaeger said:

Shelly Johnson ASC used to post once in a while, but hasn't been here since Nov 2014, where he would have encountered posts like this from Tyler, giving Christopher Nolan some advice:

I don't know if that sort of post is what turned Shelly off, like it turned off Larry Fung, but it sure wouldn't make anyone of that calibre feel like participating. 

David Mullen responded with:

"Long-time forum member Gregory Irwin was the focus puller that you seem so intent on disparaging. My first thought is that you should try doing the job if you think it is so easy. It's a little too easy to sit on the sidelines and point out the flaws in a very ambitious production without knowing fully what the challenges were."

Unfortunately, 5 years later, there are no lessons learned, and this kind of crap is still going on. Tyler was recently lecturing Greg again on what he felt was happening on a set that Greg had actually worked on. Unbelievable, more interested in hearing his own voice than asking questions of someone who was there. It's a testament to his patience that Greg has stayed around.

So it's really no wonder there are precious few ASC members or other professionals with mainstream release experience on these boards, when their hard work can be so insultingly dismissed by someone who really doesn't know what they're talking about. Most people here are quite respectful but it only takes one goose pretending to be an expert and posting rubbish daily to turn what should be an encouraging learning environment with reliable information and occasional input from experienced professionals into the equivalent of a youtube comments section. 

To pre-empt any accusations of elitism, I'm not saying professionals or ASC members are the only voices worth hearing, there are plenty of amateurs, enthusiasts and students who also contribute wonderfully to the general knowledge base here, but what we don't want to do is to turn off people with exceptional experience because of ignorant and unwarranted criticism of their work and misinformation presented as fact. There are plenty of other nooks of the internet where people can do that. 

This will be my last post on the subject. Sorry to lower the friendly tenor of the forum but as illustrated, this has been going on for a long time.  I'll go back to simply trying to correct the misinformation that Tyler regularly posts that's within my area of experience (and hopefully get corrected myself if I accidentally post something erroneous) and I'll continue to try and refrain from making it personal. I just wish there was some evidence of change, for the sake of the forum itself.

If only I could have put it so eloquently ..   this internal sabotage of the forum really has to be stopped .. this one man torpedo of madness just has to be reined in .. I thought he might move on.. but he doesn't ..

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