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Where’s your footage coming from?
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[Tim Wilson] “Are you shooting it yourself?
Mostly. Two other staffers also shoot some.
Are clients bringing it to you?
Rarely.
Are you part of an editorial team on the post side of a production, production company, etc?
Yes, local TV station. Doing pre-production, production, and post. Mostly short form, with the occasional long form project.
What cameras/formats are you shooting/receiving?”
We still shoot primarily with a Panasonic HPX370 onto P2. Really an ENG camera (company likes to make large bulk purchases) and lensed as such, but we strive to use good shooting technique and camera settings to make it give us the look we want.System:
Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
Win 7 64-bit
32GB RAM
Adobe CC 2015.02 (as of 6/2016)
256GB SSD system drive
4 internal media drives RAID 5
Typically cutting short form from HD MP4 and P2 MXF. -
Self-employed preditor/shooter for 20 years plus.
Today, I mostly produce, but I also shoot for long time clients and edit everything for internal and external stakeholders.
I hire crews (that typically include shooters, along with sound, light and grip) but it’s rare that I’m on a production where I’m exclusively directing during the acquisition phase. I direct the interviews and set pieces – but for all the B-roll, I tend to let the crew do the primary coverage (mostly shooting Canon C-100/300 these days. Whatever format the crew is used to is usually fine with me and floats up and down the camera class, depending on the project budget.
So typically MXF field acquisition by the A crew. But It’s rare I’m not also shooting B-cam on something weird – which might include a DSLR on a Steadicam or my iPhone 6 on a handheld gimbal – so format wise, that stuff could easily be h-264, h-265 or Mpeg 4. My goal is to expand the b-roll pool and try unusual shots that might not work out – while my A crew is getting the base coverage.
I mostly produce and shoot my own stuff, but have clients that send in everything.
I’ve had projects over the past year ranging from r3d to Alexa to GoPro Cineform.
It’s my new normal.
FWIW.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
[Tim Wilson] ”
Cool! I was meaning to ask this from other folks posting upthread who are working with ProRes and DNxXX — is your footage being shot in those formats, or converted for post”Hey Tim,
I shoot DNxHD on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera and the Pocket Cinema Camera. As soon as BMD releases the 4.0 firmware update for the 4.6k Ursa Mini, I’ll start recording DNxHD/HR on that camera as well. I also tend to convert smartphone footage to DNxHD for smoother editing. Lastly, I will start asking external venders to use alternatives to Prores where possible… I’m trying to lessen my dependence on PR as much and as soon as possible. 🙂
Shawn
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[Tim Wilson] “Are you shooting it yourself?
Heaven forbid.
[Tim Wilson] “Are clients bringing it to you?”
Used to be the case. For the past 10 years or so I’m mostly editing Broadcast shows that I’ve directed.
[Tim Wilson] “Are you part of an editorial team on the post side of a production, production company, etc? (This would cover episodics and features for sure, but also in-house corporate, worship, etc.)”
Yes.
[Tim Wilson] “What cameras/formats are you shooting/receiving?”
FS55 for studio work, recorded onto KiPros as ProRes 422. Canon 300 and various DSLR for field segments. I generally conform all my source material to ProRes before cutting – old hobbits die hard.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin\’ attached to nothin\’
\”Deciding the spine is the process of editing\” F. Bieberkopf -
[Tim Wilson] “Are you shooting it yourself?”
What’s this “shooting” you speak of? Most of our footage is synthetic, coming from Ae/C4D.
[Tim Wilson] “Are clients bringing it to you?”
Yes.
[Tim Wilson] “Are you part of an editorial team on the post side of a production, production company, etc? (This would cover episodics and features for sure, but also in-house corporate, worship, etc.)”
We’re a design studio, largely working for agencies/production companies. We’re not doing a lot of editorial per se, but almost everything we do flows through an NLE or two at some point before we deliver.
[Tim Wilson] “What cameras/formats are you shooting/receiving?”
Real footage from clients has been almost exclusively C100/C300/C500 lately.
Our own intermediate renders are usually half-float OpenEXR.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Neil Goodman] “to ask this from other folks posting upthread who are working with ProRes and DNxXX — is your footage being shot in those formats, or converted for post?”
Its a blend, depends on how much time and effort the upstream production can afford also taking into account the editing platform and what that preference might be in terms of “nimbleness” of the codec. Generally, for long form and drama, we go back as far as we can to camera original, like doing a neg-pull, and then I start linking to XAVC and RAW with all its log profiles, &c. IF the editor is particularly dedicated, they will do a Resolve conform and send me a .drp so I just lock and load, dive straight into a grade with most, if not all, conform issues falling to the production.
Generally part of the post stream involves exporting and re-imbedding VFX, and those are travelling in DNxHR HQX, ProRes4444, and dpx sequences. I also get a certain amount of jpg, png, tiff… as stills and as graphic animations.
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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Yes I shoot but mostly I get footage from clients to grade in Resolve. Current project is a combo of r3d, XAVC from Sony A7s, CGI, RAW still images from Sony A7s and some overseas interviews shot on Canon (C300 I think).
My own doco production I am shooting is a combo of Blackmagics – the 4k and the Ursa Mini 4.6. That is giving me a combo of 4k ProRes HQ and 4.6 cDNG 4:1. At some stage I will also have other camera crews mostly shooting r3d. There is a concert shoot at the end and I can get more REDs than Ursa Minis at the moment so four or five cameras will be REDs and two or three BMs.
Working mostly on docos means almost every job is a combo of two to three different camera codecs and archive footage (mostly ProRes flavours) plus stills. To be honest I would love to avoid quicktime as that is rapidly becoming a weak link in Windows Resolve (thanks Apple for discontinuing Win support) although Blackmagic must write their own QT encode/decode handler for Win & Linux. Adobe has so it is a logical step to avoid the minefield.
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I just saw this… wildly interesting to see what other people are doing/using.
We shoot probably 95% of all footage we use. The other 5% is stock that we purchase. Rarely if ever are we given footage by a client or other source.
I shoot almost exclusively with the Canon C300, PL mount version, with Leitz/Panavision superspeed primes. I have a vintage Russian Foton zoom for the times I need a zoom lens, but shoot almost exclusively with primes. We will probably trade up to the C300 Mark II, the camera we us now is the “original” C300. We have completely retired 35mm film shooting, although strangely enough there are still bunches of cans of filmstock in the fridge.
Probably 90-95% of our work is broadcast television commercials. The remaining small amount is corporate/industrial stuff.
About 95% of what we produce winds up on broadcast television. The rest winds up on the web.
We’re an all-PC house, each suite editing with Premiere and the other toys in the Adobe suite, on PCs with Matrox guts (three machines are Matrox MX02, one older one is Matrox AXIO LE).
About half of our clients are advertising agencies, the other half are clients we work directly for.
With direct clients we virtually always do all of the creative on their projects, from concept to delivery. With the ad agencies it’s about half and half…. for about half of them we do the creative, for the other half (one ones that either know television, or more likely think they know television) we are handed scripts and we go from there.
We’re a tiny company, only three of us full time. I’m the company Creative Director and I direct all of our shoots. I also DP and am always my own camera op, so shoots are busy for me. My biz partner is the General Manager, doing all the bean counting and he also serves as producer on most of our projects. Either he or I will handle all the writing duties. We have an editor who handles the majority of our post jobs, but I will edit as well. We have an Art Director (coincidentally, my better half) who works as needed… she is hired when we need extra art direction, production design for bigger jobs, things like that.
I appreciate Tim for posing these questions, very interesting.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Ha! I meant to write you and ask where the heck your reply is. LOL
I think you may have been regularly shooting film longer than just about anyone here. Do you remember when your last film project was?
And out of curiosity, which film camera(s) were you using?
The Leitz/Panavision primes, iirc yes?
And something like 8 or 9 years ago, you wrote an article for us on Depth of Field converters. Any use for them anymore?
Thanks!
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[Tim Wilson] ” I meant to write you and ask where the heck your reply is.”
Somehow I just overlooked this post and it’s 893 replies. Dunno why, just didn’t see it… but glad I found it, very cool to read.
Last real film project… hmm oh gosh, memory fails me. I literally can’t even remember what the project might have been. It was probably 5+ years ago now, maybe even more. Just no need for it anymore, which does make me a little sad. Film was fun.
I primarily shot 35mm with a Russian Konvas 1KCP-7M, Arri 535B, and Moviecam SuperAmerica. I used the same glass I still use today on those, except the Konvas on which I used Russian LOMO lenses. The LOMOs were unbelievably great lenses, and you used to be able to get them for a song. But then with the advent first of DoF converters and then big-sensor cameras, the demand for 35mm cine primes took off and the prices skyrocketed (and the once-plentiful availability dried up big time). On rare occasions I would shoot 16mm, with my Bolex 16 Pro (a very cool camera that almost no one, even veteran cinematographers, had ever seen… they only made 300 of them).
My primes are sort of a funky hybrid. They started life as Leitz medium format still camera lenses, and then someone somehow got them “Panavised” by a Panavision tech and they were rebarreled and remounted as proper cine lenses. I have 18mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 80mm, all at f/1.3. I sure wish I had a 28mm and maybe a 100mm or 120mm, but alas, I don’t. They are very sharp and contrastly, slightly on the cool side… the pretty much look exactly like Cookes to me (although they are faster, and were a fair bit cheaper than a new set of $100K Cooke S4/I primes). I bought them off a Hollywood DP of some note quite a few years ago. Like everything else in our business equipment depreciates and starts falling like a rock the second you buy it. But semi-interestingly enough, high-end glass is the one exception to the rule… these lenses are probably worth a fair bit more today than when I bought them. Nothing else here is.
And yes, DoF converters were an amazing thing back in their day, they certainly changed the way we did things, for sure. Any use for them anymore? Well, as doorstops, but that’s about it. When we bought the C300 we didn’t have any use for ours any more, so I thought I’d sell it. Ours was (and still is) the Rolls Royce of converters, the P+S Technik Mini35. It was a bit disheartening to see them on eBay for a few hundred bucks (I paid $13,000 for it new). So… it’s still on a shelf behind the studio cyc, gathering dust.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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