[Andy Lewis]

Your problems with “soccer”:

1. It’s slow
2. Referees make mistakes because decisions are not reviewed – “It’s not for nothing that we happily accept 5 minute waits while refs review and often overturn wrong calls.”

Got it.

[Andy Lewis]

Thanks for all your help. I’ve got a t-shirt with ARRI on the back from somewhere – I’d now like to get “frontlighting is for wimps” printed on the front.

They still have another few rehearsals left so I’m going to film properly next week. I went to the last rehearsal just to practice camera movement. I’ve spent too long doing static interviews and could-shoot-it-in-my-sleep b-roll. At one point I was tilting and panning the camera in time with the dancers and having trouble. The choreographer said “release your hand” so I completely relaxed it and the movement was much smoother. Of course, she was talking to one of the dancers.

I like the coloured gels idea. That kind of thing is cheap here so I’ll definitely try it.

“Live on the edge, you’re lighting for shape and form, not to mention mood. It’s not a newscast.”

I think this is a good point. And the purpose isn’t even necessarily to show the performance – it’s to promote the idea of the performance.

I know that everything you’ve suggested is extremely cheap and basic by lighting standards, so you’ll probably roll your eyes at what I’m going to say next but there really is no budget and I’m not having a great month financially to pay for it myself.

My provisional plan is to rent 2 Source Four PARs and put them at one end in each corner, or one above the other. At the other end will be the ceiling mounted halogens and maybe the kino at waist height. There are no barn doors on the halogens so I might improvise some with tinfoil. It’s basically an attempt to do a super cheap version of what Dennis suggested. Dennis, does that sound like a reasonable compromise or is it missing the point of having 2 Source Four PARs in each corner?

I will also try the 2 Source Fours at either end, crossing over as in your diagram, Mark.

[Andy Lewis]

Thanks Mark,

We’ve got the 4 ceiling mounted halogen lights working so that has improved things slightly. I’ve put tungsten lamps in the Kino.

I like your idea of using a silk, I’ll try it with the other 4 halogens – probably bunched close together. We are now just about at 1250 ISO f4 so another stop or 2 would be nice but it’s not critical. I’m more interested in the light adding to the drama and sense of space and depth in some way. I will try putting a black curtain on one of the white walls to make the shadows darker. The light falling off into darkness wouldn’t necessarily be bad. I think that at the moment it just looks a bit…. flat.

Another thing I considered is using the halogens at waist level (behind silk or direct) and hanging the kino and the ARRI LED from the ceiling just in front of the black curtain, pointing down, to provide a bit of backlight.

“then use lekos/ source four’s to more dramatically light specific “zones”, based on the input of the dance master/ show director, who can point out the “spikes” where a certain solo is expected to occur, or where an “entrance” is staged, etc.”

This is an excellent idea but the performances are very much follow-your-gut improvisation. At one point the choreographer starting randomly banging on the floor with her hand. I asked her later what she was doing and she said she was trying to get the dancers to stop thinking and be a bit more in the moment. So I don’t think I will have this kind of stage direction to work with.

I can rent a couple of source four pars for 30 US dollars a day. It could be worth paying for them myself just for the learning value. I might try and light with specific “zones” and see what happens. If the action happens in a dark spot maybe it won’t be so bad. A beam of light with the performers behind. Better than flat light. Or maybe it will look terrible – what do you think?

My first idea to try and film this was to be very up close to the action (almost dancing with them myself) filming handheld with a 50mm prime. The wide shot would be a Gopro mounted on the ceiling looking directly down on the rehearsal space. I would obviously be in that shot. I mean the whole thing would have looked ragged and strange but at least interesting – was my thought.

I think I’m going to go with something a bit more conventional though – especially given that (as you said) the wide shot is key for dancing, not the closeup. So 3 cameras:

gopro on ceiling
wide (28ish) on tripod
Medium/close-up (70-200) on tripod

[Andy Lewis]

Shoot interlaced
Don’t use lighting
In post, apply the opposite of an s-curve
Sharpen
Delete all of the footage with Kevin Spacey in it

[Andy Lewis]

I loved SoundSoap back in the day and maybe it’s still great but RX is the closest thing to magic in my applications folder.

I always use it standalone.

For noise removal, I usually try only removing noise from about 300 to 8000 hz. Especially when removing air con noise, it seems to leave a lot more of the desired room noise in place.

[Andy Lewis]

I haven’t used SoundSoap 3. I used earlier versions and liked it a lot. Then a couple of years passed and when I had to remove some background noise all the internet talk was of Izotope RX. So that’s what I use now.

RX is amazing. I haven’t done any kind of comparison though.

[Andy Lewis]

How about requests? You hum the melody and I’ll remove the background.

[Andy Lewis]

To paraphrase Herb:

Subscription, Stodginess, or WTF: The Debate

[Andy Lewis]

OK, if I select “show multi-camera preview monitor.” I can see both angles and ALSO the interview footage at the same time. Nice.

Multicam in PPro seems a lot less flexible than in FCP7 though. It would be nice if multicam clips behaved like normal clips and you could see multicam angles on tracks other than v1. It’s as if it has been designed for a very limited number of use cases and workflows.

I can see everything fine now but I have to mess with track targeting every time I cut in some interview footage. Then I have to switch it back again so that everything displays properly.

It’s surprising that apple made an editor which is less dictatorial in terms of how things can and should be done. That doesn’t sound like apple at all – I suppose it’s cos they originally bought it from someone else. And obviously they’ve “fixed” that with FCPX.

[Andy Lewis]

Also, just to add one thing. The flexibility of the UI now makes PPro by far the best NLE to use on a laptop. In my experience at least – mostly FCP3-7, FCPX and PPro.