[Russell Calkins]

Like many, i’d say Butterflies and Bounce Boards.

A couple notes

1) if you’re a post guy, please don’t go trying to run 100-200 amps out of a 3-phase genny with distro unless you know what you’re doing (or have someone there who does). If you don’t know what a whip or a bates plug are, you should probably think twice before planning on 4k/6k/12k HMIs.

2) for a group of 8 people dancing in a wide in direct sun, 1000 watts or two will get you absolutely nowhere. For comparison, direct sun is gonna give you 30-100k lux (think of this as brightness). A 1.2k HMI at 12 feet will give you about 1k lux(5k if you spot it and hit one person). For those of you at home, that’s at least 5 stops under, and probably more like 6 or 7. If you’ve got a camera with the latitude care about an additional fill source that’s 6-stops under key (when the bounce off the ground will probably be 5 times that) then please don’t tell anyone…because all my years of knowledge would be made totally worthless.

3) my gut would tell me to shoot into the sun, butterfly above and bounce for your key from the front. You shoot into the sun so you get a nice rim for depth, and the background will be darker and be more interesting texturally.

Pull the butterfly for the wide, and get more bounce boards…a lot more. The 4×8 insulation boards are a great place to start. I’ve used them tons of times. They’re cheap, and bigger and more rigid than pop-out reflectors. 3 or 4 of them is not too many. I’d use the shiny side for the wides, the white side for the MS and CUs.

4) Depending on how sunny it is, i would recommend thinking about some 252 or 452 so you can spread the bounce off the silver side. The insulation is pretty slick, and can look a little like a mirror. The potential problem with a mirror is you’ll get a perfect beam of 4’x8′ light coming back. The white side probably won’t give you the throw you want, so ideally you want to split the difference. You don’t have to set the diffusion up on a separate frame, you can tape it right to the reflectors. It’ll break up the mirror a little bit, while retaining some punch. 252 is 1/8th diffusion and 452 is 1/16th diffusion…but if you tape it right to the silver side, remember the light is going through it Twice, so 252 will act like 1/4 and 452 will act like 1/8th. They sell rolls of it for about a hundred bucks, and the rolls are 4’x25′. That sounds like 3 boards and some gaff tape to me…all for about $130 bucks ($140 with the tape). That’s less than the rental on a single HMI…and you didn’t even have to power them. If it’s really sunny, those bounce boards will act like cannons, and you’ll get a ton more light out of them than you ever would have gotten out of a couple little HMIs. (if you wanna do the calculation, it’d be the refractive index of the shinny side times whatever the sun is…and i’m guessing that’s a lot more than 3%)

5) If it’s windy….watch that butterfly. It’s also a sail. Bag the hell out of it, or have your crew stand on it. If it gets really windy, just ditch it.

[Russell Calkins]

this isn’t the article i read the first time…that one had a behind the scenes video that i watched. But in this thread, the DP says they lit the interiors with just 4 Ringlite minis.

https://www.cinematography.com/index.php?showtopic=37887

[Russell Calkins]

I think i read about it on a DP forum.

Here’s some footage…i don’t understand a word, it’s in french for canadian television.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2CLf5L10_A

Notice how her skin tone is almost the same value as the sky outside. The plates on the table are blowing, but outside is nicely controlled.

for the newbies, this is the product i’m talking about:
https://www.rosco.com/us/video/roscoview.cfm

on this shoot i’m pretty sure they used the panels (not the rolls), and then just rigged them to the outside of the moving train.

[Russell Calkins]

I remember seeing a doc shoot on a train car they used the rosco gel to polarize all the windows. Then they slapped a polarizer on camera. When they were shooting at night/dusk/beautiful sunset, they left the camera polarizer open. During mid-day/harsh conditions, they flipped the polarizer on camera and just knocked down all the windows. I thought it was about the coolest setup i’d ever seen. They balanced inside/outside sources for all conditions in about 2 seconds with a simple turn on camera.

[Russell Calkins]

“Apple has just EOL’d my workflow and software investments. My business plan calls for equipment upgrades next January. Unless FCPX blows me out of the water at that point, and I don’t think even the most ardent supporter thinks it will be fully on par with Avid and PPRO by then, I will be back in the land of wintel. And I don’t think I will be alone.”

You’re 100 percent right. Apple obviously dropped an atomic bomb on any previous FCP workflow, and started from scratch. They also dropped a big FU on anybody who was married financially to their existing workflow. They’re betting that what comes of it a year from now will be compelling enough to reestablish FCPX as the industry standard for the foreseeable future.

They’re bitches because they didn’t tell anyone this was coming, and provided no roadmap for the future for companies like you to use for planning.

Additionally, they’re not reliable. They’re arrogant. If their product isn’t the best in any market, they axe it. If the package that comes out of this is clearly inferior to Adobe/Avid offerings, they may very well make the decision for you, and axe the platform themselves. (then again, they may just not tell anyone, and let it die slowly on the vine for 3 years).

But that’s what they do. They’ve ridden the secret and nuke strategy to the 3rd highest market capitalization of any company in the world. Getting upset about it is like getting upset that a tiger has stripes.

Now they’ve asked for an industry wide referendum over the course of the next year or two. And how they’ve handled it has basically destroyed any effect of customer loyalty on the process. It’ll probably just come down to people like you making rational decisions based on the competencies of the various platforms. I’m just saying it’ll be interesting how long people will wait to make up their minds, and if the anger they’ve created will factor into that timeline.

[Russell Calkins]

[Chris Stevens] “I think it’s a mistake to assume that Apple chose to strip-down the FCPX feature set out of malice for a ‘pro’ user. From my perspective, as an ‘indie’, it looks different: What has happened is that Apple has concentrated on providing a solid foundation for editing, while (relatively) niche functionality has been implicitly outsourced to third-parties… Apple did the same thing with iOS. Rather than attempt to provide a complete feature set themselves, they implicitly outsourced that to third-parties. Consider that the iPad didn’t even ship with a calculator app. Let’s wait and see how the industry addresses the plug-in possibilities here.”

I would feel better about this if Apple had explicitly involved third-party developers (as they have done with iOS).

Apple has been just as secretive and closed with important third-party FCP developers as they have been with customers and users. Only a select few were privy to pre-release development. If Apple were seriously focused on professionals, I think they would have done a much better job involving major developers in the process.

New to the forum, but i think this conversation is exactly on point….for a couple reasons.

1) Apple wants out of the Mix/Grade game
Sountrack Pro flopped (i don’t know anyone who uses it for anything other than quick and dirty clean-ups), and they probably deemed Color wasn’t worth the money they were putting into it. They clearly want to get out of the Mix/Grade game.

If that’s what you need, Apple is going to make you go to 3rd parties. Automatic Duck is doing backflips, but the price point will not remain at $500, or due to 10-fold volume, somebody is gonna seriously undercut them.

Regardless, the workflow from Cut to Mix to Grade didn’t get cheaper with FCPX, it got more expensive…mostly because Apple doesn’t find it profitable, and didn’t want to support it with volume sales that they (probably rightly) assumed 80-90% of their consumers didn’t use anyway. Get over it. The software solutions for professional workflows will roughly double or triple (my estimate). But really, software costs that amount to a grand or two a seat are less than a drop in the bucket for total post costs.

2) Apple is now focusing on “platforms”, not software.
iOS is the perfect example. It’s been beyond successful for them, and at this point, i think it’s a universal corporate strategy. They’re not going back, and they’re not giving in. Name the last time Apple backtracked on something bold. If we like FCP as a general platform, we better hope this works. They’ll terminate the platform before they’ll move backwards.

3) The backlash is due to the exclusion of 3rd party participation from an earlier stage.
Apple chose the splash. They kept the wraps on this development (in classic Apple style) so they could make headlines with something “revolutionary” that no one had seen before. The only way you can do that is to keep non-Apple involvement in development to an absolute minimum. Otherwise forums (like this one), would leak everything.

However, the shift to reliance on 3rd party support without 3rd party access to early designs leads to a half-baked release. FCPX really can’t do anything right now, it’s a bare platform. I can cut (granted in a new way), but i can’t Mix or Grade to anything resembling a professional standard.

That DOESN’T mean it wont happen. Just like with iOS, Apple just laid down a pot of gold for developers like Automatic Duck, Black Magic, Red Giant, Aja, etc. I bet these people are hiring. They’re racing for solutions. But they’re also at least 6 months to a year away.

They obviously underestimated how the pent-up demand for the new platform would turn to vitriol and massive backlash at a half-baked release. They fanned the flames for this for at least a year…and then didn’t deliver something that was ready to go.

It’ll be interesting to see if cooler heads prevail, and wait for the 3rd party developers to catch up before they jump ship. I’m betting the vast majority of gaps in the professional workflow will be filled within 12-18 months. The only question is whether Premier/Avid is superior enough to FCS3 to make that year matter.