Bill Davis
Forum Replies Created
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Daniel,
My advice would be to amend the Arri Kit to the other standard configuration which is 2 650s and 2 300s.
This gives you two balanced “sides” of fresnel lighting. This will do primary lighting for both interviews and larger venue issues like recording a more formal presentation where you need to set up the camera at the back of a room and cover a speaker or presentation. With suitable bounce cards, you can also cover dual persons 60 minutes style interviews.
You’re losing the 1k and the softbox. To replace that buy a 1k Lowel Tota and extra 500 and 750 lamps for the Tota. This with a Chimera Small will replace the 1k with a more flexible soft key at significantly less cost and gives you the option to downlamp it and better balance the light to today’s far more sensitive DV cameras. The 1k Arri open face is about the only fixture Arri Makes that I don’t really like. Unless they’ve changed it since I last used one a decade ago, the housing isn’t well matched to the heat of that size lamp and the plastic of the fixture is nearly always singed or partially melted in kits I’ve come across. Plus with today’s new light sensitive fixtures, 1k is too strong for most lighting setups smaller than a warehouse. The Tota lets you opt to the 1000 watt open face config if you need to blast light into a big open area more efficiently than the Arri.
I’d expect you can light for a good 5-10 years of an early career with just these basics.
Add as needed as the jobs come up to support further investment.
My 2 cents anyway.
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Understood.
Seen them for years in the Markertek catalog – just never connected them to this particular bit of jargon.
Back probably 15 years ago, I hit a “clearance” sale with a lot of Bogan ususual grip gear. They had four of the FORK style foamcore holders and since I was flush at the time, I bought them all in a “one money” deal. It represents the best system (albiet foolishly expensive at list!) I’ve ever seen for holding foamcore sheets in place, so that’s all I’ve used since.
See, no matter how long you’ve been in the industry – theres always something more to learn.
Happy holidays all!
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The micport wants to see a Mic level on an XLR mono connector.
The RCA outs of the cassette deck are undoubtedly LINE level.
So you need to to two things. Mix the stereo line level signal from the cassetted deck to Mono.
And convert that resulting mono signal to mic level.
A Radio Shack Y cord with two RCA male plugs and a single RCA Male or female will do the first step.
The second step requires PAD somewhere in the general range of 30-50db that has an RCA input (to match the mono end of the Y-adaptor) and that you can adapt to feed the XLR-Mic input of the Centrance. RS Used to carry small RED in-line attenuators that did this – but RCA to mini – NOT RCA to XLR. So you’d need to further adapt mini-plug to XLR which might be a hassle. XLR balanced Pads are significantly more expensive than non-balanced pads – but would do the same thing at the XLR end.
Probably $50 bucks worth of off the shelf parts at Radio Shack and if the holiday season temp help teens can’t guide you to the right pegs in the store – find a manager or assistant manager who likely can.
Good luck.
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This is personal, but I for one think this is a REALLY BAD idea.
I have a son who’s had issues that has seen him in group therapy situations. And my wife and I have participated in same.
This is CRITICALLY SENSITIVE material. The whole point of group is to get people who need REAL help to open up and trust the group to the point that they can share painful truths IN THE SECURITY AND SANCITY OF THE GROUP.
Bringiing cameras/microphones will TOTALLY change the dynamic of such a group. You’ll get egos who want to play to the larger audience for sympathy. Count on it. And in that process, you’ll likely get people to say/express things in the moment that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.
Save the money on audio, and spend it LAWYERS. Because you WILL spend the rest of your life trying to defend against lawsuits trying to pierce even the best crafted releases.
This approach may be OK for Dr. Drew in Hollywood videotaping a small group of already narciscistic wanna-be reality stars. But for at-risk civilians, I’ve got to say that I can’t think of a qualified board-certified therapist who gives two shakes for his or her patients who’d go anywhere NEAR a project like this.
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Rick,
In all my years, i’ve somehow never worked with someone who used the jargon “platypus” – is this a west coast term for a Cardillini clamp or similar?
Just curious.
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Interesting.
I’ve come to see the whole issue of rights enforcement as essentially unsolvable. For a while I thought the iTunes model where access was made so simple and the pay per use fee so insignificant that the pendulum was swinging back a bit towards rights compliance. But now I’m feeling that even a system that makes it trivially easy to comply with paying the creators can buck the human desire to simply get what we want NOW without regard to who gets paid anything.
It’s sad. But inevitable. And I’m afraid “lottery penalties” where some poor 15 year old suburban girl gets hammered for downloading songs every now and then is about the ONLY thing that can have even a small chance of effecting behavior in practical world where any creative construction that’s digitized can be cracked and posted for the worlds masses in 10 seconds flat.
Without that, we’ll inevitably have a world where a composers beautiful, touching musical creation is synced with pictures of the Holocaust by some neanderthal in DeMoines without the creator having any say in it whether that’s OK or not.
Tough subject. Two sides with legitimate desires, the freedom for one eternally and directly kicking dirt on the perceived rights of the other.
Sigh.
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They’ll help some – but probably not enough. The mechanical noise of an ice dump is pretty substantial and that kind of low rumble noise is pretty penetrative.
Unless the refer is literally framed into the wall, I’ve never seen one that you can’t pull out by simply sticking the lip of a common 2-wheel hand truck under front – then angle the lip up to pull the front leg-adjusters up and then roll the refer out a foot or so. That should allow you to reach behind and pull the plug.
The other option is to find the breaker panel and look for a larger breaker labeled APPLIANCES. Unless you’re trying to simultaneously pull power from the kitchen circuits, the breaker switch will do the same job.
In any case, temporarily killing the power is really the best way to deal with the noise.
That and some gaffers tape on the door to disallow anyone from opening it and letting the sealed cold air out should give you at least a couple of hours of shooting time.
Good luck.
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Yes, I’ve “creased mine. As I indicated, with proper lighitng it just doesn’t matter. With im-propper lighting it probably will matter. So there you go.
You say “interviewing 1-2 people. Those are two TOTALLY different things.
IMO Lighting a single person is at least 4 to 6 times easier than lighting two people. For a single person, a soft key, a bounce fill and a back light will nearly always do the job.
For two-shot, you’re talking 2 keys, two fills and two rim lights. A MUCH more complex lighting plot with much more opportunity to control individual elements.
(There is a technique of lighting where one can set up crossing keys such that you can used half-scrimmed spill from the key to provide fill for the second person – but that’s pretty sophisticated and not much done in my experience.)
If you just want a boring flat single camera shot from the front, than I suppose you could say that you don’t need much more greenscreen to do a 2-shot than a single. But that’s an awful way to shoot dynamic interviews.
Much more typical is to use two or even 3 cameras – one with the wide establishing shot, then two cameras crossing to shoot the individuals reasonably head on when they are speaking. It’s nice in a setup like this to use OTS (over the shoulder) angles to include a bit of the head and shoulders of the second party when the first party is talking. Rigged like this, the field of view for a two person interview greenscreen either needs wings or needs to be REALLY wide to accommodate the two crossing wide angles.
To do both good subject lighting AND good greenscreen lighting for something like this you’ll need a pretty LARGE open space, and you really can’t scrimp on the lighting kit.
Finally, hard lights work the same on a green screen that they do on a human face. Which is to say that as a light approaches a point source, that light’s cast shadow from anything, a fold, a stray thread, a facial blemish, or a human wrinkle will be EXAGERATED.
Conversely, soft light hitting any green screen surface from MANY angles – (precisely what large soft sources do) will FILL IN any stray bumps or imperfections and leave you with a smooth appearance.
Good for your greenscreen. Good for your actors. Good for your video.
End or story.
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It’s actually worse than that.
The “live view” video sent out the HDMI cable during 5dMkii recording is SEVERELY bandwidth and raster size limited. This is because the stock camera can’t write to CF and export full raster at the same time.
There’s been some talk of Tramm Hudson hacking the camera firmware to enable this – but as far as I know, it’s not been done yet.
The correct workflow is to take the Canon’s clips and transcode them to ProRes 422 inside either Compressor or directly as Quicktime Pro Export from within the FCP timeline.
Editing 5dMkii native files in FCP is possible if you have very ROBUST hardware setup – , but it’s NOT currently efficient.
FWIW.
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In this economy, few but the largest corporations will have in-house video departments. And with those, the folks who have the gigs now will be holding on to them so tightly that all the blood will have left their fingers months ago.
Just remember, corporations are arrangements of people. A “corporation” doesn’t hire you. A PERSON at a corporation does. Just as a PERSON at a small business, a government agency, or any other form of organization hires for them.
In order to be hired, you must find a way to put yourself in front of that PERSON (or those people). Recommendations, cold-calling, discovering which bar the video, or marketing, or advertising, or human resources department drinks at after work on Friday – all of these are perfectly reasonable ways to wheedle face time with a person who can hire you.
But if you don’t eventually get face time with someone. You’ll never work for them.
Simple as that.