[Todd Terry]

[john sharaf] “The cheapest, easiest and most elegant solution is to simply wire up a pigtail that puts two US household connectors in series…”

I’ve always known that you could do that… but had never tried it myself or known anyone who actually did it that way.

Hats off to John for such an elegant and incredibly simple solution.

Just make SURE your pigtail is wired in a series, not parallel… and as John said remember you will always have to use both instruments, and both must be on (not just connected).

John’s a smart man….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Impossible to say for sure what camera, although I’d wager the Arri ALEXA as a safe bet.

Sound was, I believe, boomed. I have a friend from another forum who is a long-time veteran BBC audio person with the amazing ability to recognize almost any microphone by the sound (she once saw a commercial spot I did and asked “When did you switch from the Sennheiser MKH8060 to the MKH416?” when I had made no mention of what audio equipment we were using). I bet she can identify it, I’ll pass it along.

I thought the spot was solid, but frankly not as good as many other Google spots (many of which just blow me away). Interesting that they were doing all of their Googling in English (or at least in that version of the ad).

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I’m not a RED user, but I’ll address your framerate question…

Typically, unless there is an aesthetic, stylistic, or technical reason not to, you want to shoot at what most people consider a “normal” shutter speed. Normal being, back in the film world, a shutter speed that you’d get in a film camera with a 180° shutter.

The easy math for this is “One over twice the frame rate.”

So, if you are shooting 24fps, a “normal” shutter is 1/48th of a second. At 30fps, it’s 1/60th. And so on. For the 300fps footage you want to do, a normal shutter would be 1/600th of a second (pretty darn fast, certainly not for dim interiors).

Shooting within the “normal” range will give you the amount of motion blur (or lack of it) that is appropriate for your frame rate. If you’re shooting pretty fast action at 24fps, you want the degree of motion blur that the 1/48th shutter speed gives you… your brain needs that blur to interpret the motion smoothly. Conversely, the short 1/600th shutter speed with your 300fps is going to give razor sharp images with virtually no motion blur… which is what would be appropriate since playback is going to have action that is sooo slow.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well yes, but you can’t just drop it on the time line, there are at least a couple more hoops that you have to jump through.

But yes, it works… In the PAL world you can do a 50% slow-mo, changing 50 fields t 25frames. In the NTSC world (shooting 60i) you can do a 40% slow-mo, changing 60 fields to 24 frames.

So at minimum, you have to change the speed of the clip on your timeline… either to 40% if you are going from 60i to 24p, or to 50% if you are going from 50i to 25p. (alternate methods from just changing speed settings are to, in Premiere for example, changing clip properties to re-interpret the footage with a different frame rate)

That MIGHT give you the right results, but depending on what NLE you are using you might (actually probably will) still be seeing separate fields rather than frames.

What you need to do is to be able to extract each of those 50 fields and turn each of them into its own frame. I believe After Effects will do that. To be honest I haven’t had to do this in years so while I know the theory I don’t know the exact practicalities and capabilities of AE or whatever you need to do that.

Keep in mind that while this, when done right, does work and gives you correction motion, but that you still lose a significant amount of resolution because you are only using half of the lines in each frame/field combo.

Also, know that it’s best when you are shooting that if you know you are going to be slow-mo’ing a particular shot, you should shoot that scene with an appropriate shutter speed for however much you are planning to slow-mo it. For example, if you normally shoot 24p then your “normal” shutter speed is 1/48th. But if you shoot 60i, you’re going to be extracting fields to frames later as if you were actually shooting 60fps, so you’d want a shutter speed of about 1/120th. If you left your shutter speed at “normal” you’d likely get too much motion blur in each frame (if you have much action) to give you a really good-looking slow-mo.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Looks to me like that’s what you need… exactly.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I’m not sure how big the Blade screen is, but Hoodman makes several models of loupes, some for larger screens, so one of them might work.

The Deity Mira also might be a large enough loupe (it’s made for the C300, not sure of the C300’s LCD size compared to the Blade). It’s pretty high-end, though, at about 600 bucks.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Oh, as I’m sure you know, Mark, there’s a whole long list of things you should never buy at Harbor Freight….

Or do you have a workshop full of bright orange “Chicago Tools” power tools? 🙂

I’ll have to confess though, I have bought a power tool or two there in the past, though… but my justification is that I’ll only do it if I need something for one job.

I did buy a cheap HF reciprocating saw, when I needed it for one thing. It did burn out… after a couple of years. Yes, my friend with the $400 Milwaukee did laugh at me… but mine was 19 bucks. I could use the saved $381 to buy some other decent tool that I would use on a regular basis.

So yeah, be picky about what you buy there. Machetes, no. Power saws, no. Spring clamps? Yep. Black furniture pads that are almost identical to Matthews sound blankets but are only five bucks? Absolutely.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

By the way, I got curious and looked on eBay. You can find cheap Chinese-made high-wattage rheostats there dirt cheap. I mean CHEAP. I found a 2000w 110-220v for less than five bucks.

If you search, put in a wattage (1000w or 2000w or whatever) and use the search word dimmer instead of rheostat.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Howdy Rick…

Not telling you nothing that you don’t know (but some uninitiated readers of this post here might not, so I’ll bather), but a dimmer for an instrument that big is no different than an ordinary little squeezebox… it just has a bigger rheostat in it. The big difference of course is if you go to an electrical supply shop and get a typical home-lighting 300w or 600w rheostat, it’s about 15 bucks. But a 1000w one is $100+.

Here’s one cheat though that you might find helpful….

Harbor Freight Tools sells a “Router Speed Control” for 20 bucks…

https://www.harborfreight.com/router-speed-control-43060.html

In actuality this thing is nothing more than a 1Kw rheostat. Now it does have a drawback… they “choke” it somehow so that it won’t dial down to zero (since you shouldn’t do that with an electrical motor, which is what it is made for), but I think it will go down to about 20%.

That won’t help you with your 2K instruments, but might be a cheap solution for your 1Ks.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I follow what seems to be the general consensus here, which is that side gigs are okay… as long as they aren’t competition.

The fellow who is on staff as our full-time Senior Editor came to us that way. He was a freelancer, doing most of his work for another production company in town (the only one that we really consider competition, and not even very much at that).

That other company was keeping him busy pretty much full time and had been doing so for months and months… but as a freelancer. He’d begged to be put on as real staff there, but they didn’t want to do that. So, he jumped ship and came here. I understand that we were cursed fairly heavily in the other shop at the time for hiring him away… which made me feel a little bad because the other shop is run by someone I respect and am very friendly with in the business. But hey, they wouldn’t hire him, so I did.

Our only mandate to him before he took the job was that after he joined our staff he could no longer freelance at that other company… and he was fine with that. We have a lot of little production techniques and “tricks” which although aren’t exactly proprietary, are sort of our signature way of doing things… and we didn’t want those things to make their way to a competing production house.

And as I said, he was fine with that. If he hadn’t been, we couldn’t and wouldn’t have hired him.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com