[Blaise Douros]

Move the camera back and shoot a longer focal length, and it will matter a lot less. If you’re on a 50mm lens, it’s pretty noticeable, but on an 85mm or 100mm, that few inches won’t make too much difference.

[Blaise Douros]

Yes, you could do this–you’ll just need to block the scene carefully. Lens choice depends on camera and sensor–for APS-C/Super-35 I’d be looking at 28mm on the wider shots, and 35mm for medium shots. No longer than 85mm for the whole scene, I’d say. Wide lenses could make it so your victim is (a) isolated in the frame in a sea of black, which is effective, and (b) allow you to get closer to your victim while still showing enough background to bring the killers into the background-to-midground in clearer focus. As for getting to a park, you have plenty of opportunity to show this–porch lights would easily motivate some spillage light as we see her run into the bushes. Or have her pause under a streetlight on the other side of the street, look back, and see the killers come running around her house. Then she ducks into the bushes, and boom, we’re in the park.

Good location scouting and storyboarding will help you to plan this stuff.

[Blaise Douros]

It fully depends on the scene. If you’re smart, you’ll choreograph it so important moments happen under streetlights and by buildings that could plausibly create opportunities to light your subjects. That’ll give you a lot more flexibility.

Shoot wider lenses. That’ll help with your DOF. I know you have some Kurosawa thing as the model, but you need to change plans if you have five people in frame.

You can also plan the scene carefully so your focus puller has set marks to hit.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a couple of robberies staged in the daytime (or at least, fully lit) that make full sense in context of the movie’s script:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqvbv-SB4bg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-oVuQpjG3s

And one at night that leans on splashes of light and a partially lit environment to illuminate the characters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhvqTSzt2LQ

As the script writer, you have FULL control of when and where things happen. A night shoot isn’t going to work for technical reasons? Then find a reason for the robbery to happen during the day! A couple of lines will do it:

“Shouldn’t we be doing this at night?”
“Yeah, we should. But my regular alarm guy is in the middle of a two year sentence for B&E. That’s why we have to break in at noon: the owner locks the shop when he goes to lunch, but doesn’t set the alarm.”

Boom, you’re in business. The film isn’t in charge. You are.

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[Blaise Douros]

I didn’t say that was a GOOD option. Just that if you have decided that you must shoot at f11, those are your ONLY options. So something’s gotta give. Change the way you shoot it, change the time you shoot it, or spend more money.

You persist in coming here and arguing with people who know what we’re talking about, since you’ve decided that It Must Be A Certain Way. Reality often doesn’t line up with what you want.

Shoot at night, and open up your aperture. If you need deeper depth of field, use wider lenses. If you must have long lenses, get ready to do a lot of takes so your focus puller can get it right.

Otherwise, accept that it is physically impossible for you to shoot at f11 at nighttime without more lights than you can afford.

[Blaise Douros]

Get one of the many dedicated recording hardware solutions from Blackmagic, or Atomos.

[Blaise Douros]

Yep, there’s definitely something you can do: don’t shoot the scene at night. Either change the script, or shoot day-for-night.

[Blaise Douros]

As a very happy customer of Bob’s, let me jump in. You’ve said that you’re inexperienced in networking. How much is your time worth in your “real” role with the company? How much will it cost your company, in your lost time, mistakes, hardware problems, and downtime for the whole team, for you to build a half-baked solution? Especially since you’ll end up having to buy a fully-baked system soon, since the half-baked one will not last you long. How much time will you then have to spend troubleshooting that system, and moving media around to support it?

You have one advantage; you’ve already established a price in the heads of your higher-ups. They think this kind of system costs $30-40K for the functionality you need.

So here’s the thing–now that they think that, you can be the hero. You can tell your bosses that you’ve found a system that fulfills your needs for 1/4 the price of that crazy systems integrator who was OBVIOUSLY just trying to gouge you.

I have a team of three right now working on a QNAP 871T that Bob set up for us. Our total hardware cost, including 10g adaptors for the two machines that needed 10g connections and a couple of spare drives, was $6200. Bob’s fee is reasonable, and he got me up and running almost instantly, and has been available for support ever since. For a small team, this system has been all but flawless, and I could add quite a few more seats if and when I needed to.

I highly, highly recommend going this route. Let Bob help you, so you can just get back to work. If your bosses need to know why shared storage is key for your production team, you can give them my number–like, seriously, PM me and I’ll give it to you. I will be happy to tell them that there is probably nothing that could increase your team’s ability to productively cooperate more than a fast shared storage solution. Sneakernet? Gone. Reconnecting media? Never again. Backups? You can centralize them now instead of piecemealing your media drives. Handoffs between team members for different production roles like audio mix and color? As simple as saying “okay, I closed the project, you can go ahead and open it now.”

Here’s the other way to lay it out: I’d estimate that in a team of four, you could probably reclaim a full man-hour per day, maybe more, when you don’t have your team dealing with that stuff–fifteen minutes per person per day seems like it’s not out of the question when it comes to project handoffs, reconnecting media, etc. If you reclaim one man-hour per day, and your editors are making $50/hour, you recoup the cost of the QNAP system in 144 working days. At $25/hr, it’s 288 days. After that, the increased productivity starts paying for itself. If your bosses can’t see the benefit of that, they’re nuts.

[Blaise Douros]

I wouldn’t take that bet–I know how resistant to change this business is!

On a side note, for $10 a month, Photoshop is super stable, unlike the video side.

[Blaise Douros]

Not everyone uses Premiere and After Effects, as there are very viable competitors, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t use Photoshop.

[Blaise Douros]

With some planning, you can get better results in a variety of ways. Would something like the below work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I228O-8gzZo

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