Rick Wise
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COW Coin
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My sloppy reading! I read Windows 7, when your clearly wrote FCP7…. Apologies.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
Which PC-based NLE do you use, Mark? Vegas? Adobe? (I’m a big Vegas fan.)
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
You have to buy this video. This is in effect an advertisement and does not belong here.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
Mark, the judder effect is I believe quite different from the jello or rolling shutter effect. The jello comes from the scanning of a CMOS chip during a pan. The judder comes from moving the camera horizontally faster than one should for the subject. Subjects such as vertical picket fences are the devil to shoot, while a large flat wall poses no problems.
There is a tutorial on how to remove the Jello effect here: https://lesterbanks.com/2010/03/rolling-shutter-fix-in-after-effects-with-no-plugins/. The “free” method for After Effects is long and when working with a lot of footage shot with this problem it would be more effective to buy one of the plug-ins.
The only cure for judder is practice panning slowly enough to prevent it. 24p is worse than 30p, which is worse than 60i. When shooting product shots in 35mm one trick we latched onto was to shoot at 60 frames/second. Then transfer to video at 60 fps. Since we were transferring to interlaced video, the result was that each film frame was one field of video, providing twice as much visual information as we would have had shooting 30 fps. We never shot 24fps for these table-top shoots because the 3-2 pulldown at the transfer (to 29.97 frames/second, which is what video runs at,) added artifacts.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
The math/physics is wrong. The inverse square law applies to all waves, such as light and sound: The intensity changes as the inverse square of the distance.
Intensity = 1/(relative distance change)squared
Example: the light is at 10 feet. You move it to 20 feet. The distance is now 2 x what it was. The inverse of 2 is 1/2. Square that, you get 1/4. The light’s intensity has been reduced to 1/4 of what it was. Each time you reduce the light by 1/2 of its former intensity, you get a change of one stop. Here we have reduced the light by 1/2 and again 1/2 to 1/4, so the light loss is TWO stops.
Equally, if you moved the light from 10′ to 5′, it is now at 1/2 the distance it was. The inverse of 1/2 is 2. Square the 2 and you get 4. The light intensity is now 4 times what it was. That is TWO stops.
On a simple, practical level, the inverse-square law means that when you move the light a small amount you get a relatively large change in the light’s intensity. Sometimes that works to your advantage, and sometimes not. Example: You have two people sitting side-by-side on a couch. Your key (direct, diffused, or bounced) is 4-5 feet away coming in from one side. The person closer to the key will be substantially “hotter” than the person further away. If you could move the key to say 15′, the relative difference in their light intensities would be mostly negligible. But you need a strong light to be able to do that; otherwise the light’s intensity on both will be too low for a proper exposure. If you can’t move the key you would have to fly a grip scrim, probably a double or even triple, so that the scrim(s) cut the light on the nearer guy but leaves the far one in the clear. With a soft key coming in quite sideways placing the scrim this way can be tricky.
Moving the key so that it is next to the camera and at the same distance from both guys produces even illumination that is utterly flat and uninteresting.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
She could go with one of the DSLRs, perhaps a Canon Rebel T2i or Canon 60D. However, she might be better off with one of these:
- Canon XA10 HD Professional Camcorder
- Panasonic AG-HMC40 AVCCAM HD
(not as good in low light)
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
If you are placing full CTB on the tungstens, you are over-correcting. Try 1/2 CTB and see how the balance works. If the faces are still too warm in relation to the projected images, try adding another 1/4 CTB. But first try adjusting the color of the camera to the faces — the screen may look a bit bluish but that may work.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
Perhaps you could be more exact about the price point. One person’s “breaking the bank” could be another’s “cheap.”
$2000? $3000? $4000? more? less?
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
John, if memory serves me (which it does not always do accurately) Vegas from the very start was ahead of FCP. And it stayed that way right up to today. So I don’t see “timing” as much of a factor, while marketing was.
Back then, Vegas was a small company run by some dedicated folk who probably thought they would make things better both for themselves and their NLE by selling to Sony. I’m not so sure that was a good decision. Any more than FCP being bought by Apple was good for FCP.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com -
If you have some diffusion such 1000H (paper) or 1/2 grid cloth and a C-stand or two, I’d place two of the 150s to one side of the board and at an angle about 45º above the board. Then I’d fly the diffusion inbetween the lights and the board, adjusting its position to produce the least amount of shadow. The more distance between the lights and the diffusion, the less intense the shadow.
I’d take a piece of white foamcore or showcard and place it on the opposite side of the board to bounce the key back from that side.
If you do not have any diffusion, you can get shower curtain liner at Home Depot and the like for about $6. Figure you a way to fly it as above. Their liner comes in “clear” and “white.” If you can afford it, get one of each. The white will give you a much softer look but chews up about 2 stops of light. If you go with the white, you might want to add the 3rd 150. Try to focus all beams, on flood, on the same rough area of your diffusion.
Finally, you might want to experiment with an alternative to placing the lights and diffusion to the side; try instead placing them coming over the top of the board, with the bounce card at the bottom, though this position might be in the way of the artist.
Rick Wise
director of photography
San Francisco Bay Area
part-time instructor lighting/camera
Academy of Art University/Film and Video (grad school)
https://www.RickWiseDP.com