[Bob Cole]

[Todd Terry] “actually what I use is from Hancock Fabrics”

Right! I’m so used to hearing about the wonders of Harbor Freight here that I transposed that. I got it from Hancock Fabrics too: “Window Tinting Film,” $3.97/yd, 54″ wide – the opposite end of the price spectrum from RoscoView ($700 for 56″x9′)!

And there is also the camera itself. You can select a camera with wide dynamic range, adjust your camera’s picture profile, and use a lower knee setting to bring that bright window into a better exposure. (Alister Chapman’s video on XDCAM Gamma Curves and Knee, which I believe is on the COW as well as his website and YouTube, has a great before-and-after comparison of how dropping the knee to 85 by itself allows you to see detail in a blown-out window.)

[Bob Cole]

Ah, the window shot. There is brute force, and there is the high IQ solution, as in Mark, John, and Ken’s approaches. (Move the executive, use natural light, or wait for a darker exterior.)

I love John Sharaf’s idea about natural light. Really. The best lighting I ever did was when I sat a farmer down on a bale of hay near the big door in his barn and … just shot! Clearly the way to go if you can. If it was good enough for Rembrandt…

[Ken Maxwell] “Or shoot at dawn, or twilight, or night”

Night – great idea. But dawn and twilight might only work if all the shooting can be accomplished within a few minutes; the lighting outside might change so fast that the background will be different from one ten-minute period to the next.

As for brute force: Putting gel on windows can be a real PITA. You can, of course, go to extremes and achieve perfection with polarized gel (RoscoView?) and a filter on the lens, but I can’t imagine doing that, unless this is going to be a regular set.

In daylight: Unless the window view has to be pristine and beautiful (tropical beach) I wouldn’t be so worried about color temperature; 1/4 blue on the tungstens is fine. Or, use a couple Kino Flos with daylight tubes! If you don’t own a Joker, of course.

I’ve tried Todd Terry’s Harbour Freight version of ND gel – it works. No color correction, of course.

I’ve never tried window screen, but I’d like to. One prep day at an NFL stadium I noticed in the tv announcer’s booth how they must do that iconic first shot, where the two announcers look into the camera with the field behind them. There are a couple of small HMI lights mounted in the booth facing the field. Mounted above the big window is a large roll of black window screen. So I assume they unroll the window screen for the one opening shot; the window screen visually disappears but darkens the background. Looking at the set-up, I could swear it wouldn’t work because the announcers are so close to the screening, but apparently it does. No worries about reflections as with ND gel, either. (One question for Todd: mounting the ND outside the window, you say, helps with reflections. But what about the wind shifting the gel – wouldn’t that cause reflections or distraction of some kind?)

[Bob Cole]

A tough question to answer. 4-banks are great to light a green screen, but you could use cheap broads for that or your 650’s if you had to. Divas are very convenient for lighting interviews. For features, though, I suspect you’d want a lot more light (HMI) so you could back it off a ways, and allow for more freedom of movement within a set. I hope some other folks chime in to give you some help. I suspect that the best answer is to rent all the candidates and try them out first.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

You may also need “negative fill” – if the subject is close to a white wall on the shadow side, you may need to block the light which bounces back from that wall. I don’t think any was used in this case, but it is impossible to tell.

[Bob Cole]

Thanks – great points. I’ll get out the soldering iron.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

[Richard Crowley] “My reading is that the CL2 cable works only with the instrument transmitters, and not the regular microphone models.”

Sorry – don’t understand what you mean by “instrument transmitters.” Do you mean the beltpack transmitter to which we customarily run the lavalier microphones? e.g. SK100. As opposed to the SKP100, the “butt-end” which attaches to the base of a stick mic?

[Bob Cole]

I have the G2 and G3 – prefer G3. I wound up with two different stock mic’s – prefer the one that does not have the big round windscreen built-in. Range is not that great but value for money = excellent.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

Not sure it is an issue of morality so much as compassion, friendship, and the viability of both your and your friends’ businesses.

If I were you, I’d just arrange a sit-down, and ask the couple about business going forward. It doesn’t have to be confrontational – you need information, if you are going to try to reconstruct your business relationship with them. Absent that frank conversation, doing business with this couple could put YOU – or your business — in the hospital, literally or figuratively.

Forgive the whole debt if you feel it is appropriate, but BE CLEAR with one another about the situation, from both your and their point of view.

Some individual words and phrases jumped out at me.

“invoices” (plural) — how many? How much as a percent of your annual income? Clearly if there were outstanding invoices, there were issues that predated the hospitalization.

“a month in the hospital” — that indicates a pretty serious situation. Very unusual these days. Is he at risk of re-hospitalization? Is it a broken leg or a broken something-chronic?

Good luck. You are a pretty nice person even to frame it this way.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

I’m so tempted to list somebody publicly here….

All I should say, I guess, is that I really like what others have said, and that I’m thinking of adopting the policy suggested by Todd: if you want our gear, you have to hire us.

Bob C

[Bob Cole]

fwiw: I wound up getting the FSI 17″ and am delighted. Rarely even need the pixel-to-pixel for focus. I’ve found that clients and directors are very happy to be able to see the image, too.

Bob C