John Sharaf
Forum Replies Created
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Tom,
Wrong and wrong, unless you either want to arc weld your talent or spend more on strobe lights than the proper equipment.
The best gear for “lighting” in day exteriors is grip equipment; 12×12′(or larger) silks overhead and grifflins or silver lame to reflect light into your backlit subject.
This equipment needs to be operated by skilled grips for safety and you’ll need rope, spikes and sandbags galore in addition to high roller stands and therefore a truck to transport it all, but one can often get a good price on a proper grip truck package from an owner operator.
The alternative of using lights still requires a large crew for the cable and generator needed on location.
JS
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Ernie,
I’m interested to know your source of information about 10 bit “upgrade” from Nanoflash. In my various queries to them on the same subject they say they have no such plans. Furthermore, because the codec they use is hardware driven (by a Sony card) I find it very difficult to believe that if they were to offer such a feature, that it would not have to be on an entirely different product.
Also regarding your comment about Avid-only drives, I know, because I did it for many years that one could purchase the same hardware Avid did as OEM and by turning off “drive filter” you could save a lot of $$$. You see hacking of all all types of electronic equipment to improve speed, performance and to save money these days, but turning a 8 bit device into 10 bit is a more like alchemy than anything else. I hope to be proven wrong though!
JS
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Mick,
Talent arriving at last minute is fairly typical. That’s why you need to have someone else “stand in” for light adjustment.
As regards brightness in the eyes, you need a way to “diffuse” the hard light source, like a Chimera, a roll of white diffusion hung in front of the light or a white card to bounce the light into. Lighting is the most important part of portrait photography and must be mastered in order to create quality work in the professional environment.
A few simple tools and pre-visualization is all that’s necessary. Look at portraits you find attractive and reverse engineer them, thinking out how they must have been done. Watch the shallows especially, noting their direction and relative softness.
JS
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I’ll try to be gentle, but I think you have a bigger problem with the lighting than the moire. From the double nose shadow and hard shadows from both directions seen on both sides of the neck, I’d describe your lighting style as the “FBI” look; two lights left and right at eye height. A more pleasing placement for the key would be higher and closer to the camera, then the fill on the other side, diffused and of lesser intensity, This will result in a sparkle in the subject’s eye and one less hard shadow.
JS
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Not possible, neither will the mount work nor will the lens cover the imager.
JS
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FYI, Sony controls the pricing of this camera such that all dealers sell at the same discount. Therefore it’s really a matter of trying to save sales tax by buying out of state vs. the cost of shipping. I work with a dealer in San Francisco called FH Video who is very trustworthy so you might consider them as well!
HS
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One other bit of useful information is that there drop frame is only used in 29.97 and 59.94 rates, it does not apply to 23.97 and even if it’s e4ngaged in the camera menu it is overruled by the 23.97/24 setting. In addition it does not apply to non-fractional, meaning interger frame rates like “true” 24 and 25p and 50i.
Drop frame, as I’m sure has been mentioned here many times before originated with the introduction of color in the 50’s and allowed for extra “color burst” signal to be included in the frame such that they needed to create extra room. Furthermore because of the standard, the sound speed was altered slightly too so that it needed to be recorded at 23.97/29.97 to stay in sync.
JS
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Tom,
trust your instincts, their going to be correct most of the time, and the most valuable learning is by making mistakes!
Sure enough the Varicam includes the telecine (aka pull-down) in the HD-SDI stream that comes out the BNC connector, so if you want to just record the 24’s (which obviously uses only 40% of the amount of storage) do check the box to remove the pulldown; you’ll effectively now record 24pN (or native – w/o the repeated frames). This is precisely what the AJA or Blackmagic capture cards do to the Varicam footage when you import to a 24p timeline.
JS
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Tim,
Yes the F900 can shoot 24p in addition to 23.97fps. This way you can use the camera to shoot scenes or shots that when filmed out will drop into film A and B rolls in sync. Obviously whatever sound is on the video would not be in sync.
JS
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David,
Just a few fact checks:
Broadcast is not an “interlaced medium”. There are progressive standards including 720/60p that are broadcast.
For the web, 24fps material has the telecine built in so that frames are repeated in the familiar 2:3 cadence. The only time that 24 is used in its native frame rate is in editing in a 24p timeline, essentially to save storage space while retaining a film look (although the telecine is applied to monitoring otherwise there would be a prominent flicker effect) and for DVD’s for essentially the same reason (that more material can fit on limited storage real estate) where the player applies the telecine cadence to the attached display device.
You’re right in that there is no benefit of “30p over 30i” because there is no such thing as 30i.
Finally, it is generally accepted that the motion is smoother at 30p vs 24p because of the repeating of each frame twice, rather than 2 times and then three times and two times again. As I said, if it were not for the economics of using 25% more film and processing, film would look better in the cinema at 30 frames per second rather than 24.
Showscan was a system that was shot and projected film at 60 frames per second, and other than looking like a crystal sharp television picture 40′ tall it was more than spectacular, but obviously the cost of the additional film stock, processing, printing, shipping, not to mention new projectors, etc. doomed it just for the same reasons that 24fps won out over 30fps in the conversion from silent to sound film.
JS