[Todd Terry]

[Rick Wise] ” I’ll have to stand up for the film school where I teach. “

And rightly so, Rick… it all depends on where you go. I’m not hatin’ on film school by ANY stretch… just hatin’ on my school. I know many people who say their collegiate film experience was excellent. Mine, sadly, was pitiful.

I don’t think I had even one instructor or professor (and again, I’m not exaggerating) that had set foot on a film location, a soundstage, or even in a television station in the previous 20 years. Probably 30. In some cases, maybe 40. They brought zero practical knowledge to the table… and weren’t any better at teaching out of a book, either. Heck, there was more than one instance where I wound up getting called up to teach a class myself because I already knew more about it than the so-called instructor. I know that sounds pompous (and yeah, it is), but it’s true.

In hindsight, I would have (or should have) killed to go to USC or NYU or any one of a half dozen other schools with legitimate and respectable film programs. But I was an ignorant kid who didn’t know any better.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Rick Wise] “I’d add to that list: working with smart gaffers and grips who know much more than you do.”

I’ll second what Rick says. You can learn so much by osmosis just from hanging around people who really know what they are doing.

I’ve told this story before, but it’s very true… I learned more useful and practical knowledge in the first four hours on a real movie set than I did in four years of film school. And that, sadly, is NOT an exaggeration.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

The C300 will shoot what I guess I will call “usual” 24 (actually 23.976fps) and true (or “real” 24) which is an actual honest-to-God true and actual 24fps.

In this case you’ll want your C300 to be shooting 23.976 in order to match with your C100.

In fact, you’d almost always want to be shooting at 23.976. The only real reason to ever shoot at the “true” 24fps setting would be if you were planning to strike a real celluloid film print from the footage to allow for exact frame-by-frame conforming of the footage. Most of us never have to worry about this or ever do it. In fact most cameras won’t even do true 24fps, they just call it 24fps and it’s actually 23.976.

Unless you are shooting for a real film print, you can pretty much forget the true 24 setting is even there.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[jeff arballo] “what are you talking about default?”

I was addressing shutter speed. I wasn’t speaking at all (at least not in that post) about whether you need to reinterpret your footage speed on a timeline. That one’s easy (and different NLEs behave and handle that differently). If it comes in on the timeline at the speed you want, then fine. If it doesn’t, reinterpret it to the speed that you do want. No big deal.

No, what I was talking about was your camera’s default shutter speed, which is a separately and entirely different thing than framerate. One of the original questions was basically why not shoot everything at 60fps… then you can slow-mo it if you want, or play it at normal speed if you want. The reason not to do that is because the shutter speed (by default) will be way too high (1/120th of a second) and much faster than normal (1/48th or 1/60th of a second) for normal-speed footage. Therefore motion footage will look a bit staccato because there is no motion blur in each frame. If there’s a situation where you think your shot will be slow-mo, but you just might also need it in normal speed, then sure, shoot it at 60fps and sacrifice the motion blur for the sake of flexibility. But you shouldn’t take the route of shooting everything at 60fps when you know most of it should be normal speed but just in case you might want a slow-mo shot out of it. That’s just not a good path to the best images possible. It’s not an iron-clad rule, but whenever possible you should shoot at a frame rate (and corresponding shutter speed) appropriate to how the footage will be finally used. There’s no single “let’s cover all the bases” setting that will look best for everything. Something will suffer.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[jeff arballo] “i shoot all the time in 60 frames no 30 and it looks fine, so I’m not sure what he is talking about.”

You must not be shooting scenes with very much action in them then, or you would very definitely notice the difference.

Unless you are purposely changing it to something else, footage shot at 60fps will default to a shutter speed of 1/120th of a second. If, for example you use this in a 24p project you’ll get a nice smooth 40% slow-mo. If, however, you wish to see this footage at normal speed and interpret it to play as such, you will indeed get normal speed as measured by time… it would be as if the footage was shot at 24fps. BUT it would be as if you shot it at 24fps but with a 1/120th of a second shutter… which is a much much higher shutter speed than would be considered “normal.” As I tried to spell out above, a “normal” shutter (that is, one that emulates a 180° shutter in a film camera) will be “one over twice the frame rate”… or 1/48th of a second for 24fps (or 1/60th of a second at 30fps). A speed that slow will give a fair amount of motion blur in each individual frame. That might sound like a bad thing, but your brain needs that motion blur to interpret this series of still photos into smooth motion. The higher shutter speed of 1/120th will give sharper stills with each frame. An individual frame might look great… but seen at speed the action with look staccato.

If you have something static, or a talking head, you might not notice it. But if you have an actor dancing or jumping or running, you definitely will.

As I said, sometimes this effect is used on purpose… it can make action look more “actiony” which is why you see it used in some scenes of many movies. You also see this narrow-shutter look used more-or-less accidentally by a lot of local news and sports photographers who either think they are going to primarily be shooting for slow-mo, or because they just don’t know any better.

That’s what I’m talking about.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

[Mark Suszko] “maybe we’re over-thinking”

I honestly don’t think we are. If anything, we’re under-thinking it. 🙂

As far as I know Wells didn’t have anything to do with the physical nuts-and-bolts of the production, he was an actor on the show, and a contributing writer. He might have chimed in about some other things, but it was his DP Gregg Toland who was really responsible for all those inventive shots and camera tricks, like on Kane… and I don’t think he had anything to do with The Third Man (especially since I believe he was already pushing up daisies by then).

A flat mirror is going to do nothing to change skew perspective, only the flat orientation. To do that purely optically/mechanically, it’s going to require a non-completely-vertical cylindrical lens. It could happen at the camera or optical printing step, but it must be cylindrical. And non vertical. Neither anything flat nor spherical will give that effect, whether they be mirrors, filters, lenses, or whatever.

I’d almost bet the farm that this effect was discovered by accident, some DP accidently putting on an anamorphic attachment a little crooked, or by the DP who happened to be looking through the viewfinder while an anamorphic lens was being mounted and noticed the effect. As noted earlier, this was a spherical-lens production not an anamorphic production, but the DP could easily have seen, used, or been familiar with anamorphic lenses as they had actually already been around for years… just not used for features yet.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

And to all of you as well…

We are late this year (darn you, late Thanksgiving!), but the lobby is finally at full 1963 aluminum tackiness, just barely in the nick of time…

Hope everyone has a very merry… and the most prosperous of years in 2014!

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I don’t think so, Mark… a tilt-shift lens is going to shift (and/or tilt) the focal plane, but isn’t going to give that corner-to-corner skew that Richard mentioned. It will really just affect focus only. That’s going to take some kind of cylindrical-but-non-vertical quasi-anamorphic lens.

I have to admit it’s been a loooong time since I’ve seen that movie. I’ll have to check it again.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well, in actuality you only need the .MXF files, there’s no need or reason to import the .CIF,.SIF or .XML files into your Premiere project or have them in any of the project’s folders.

The easiest way to do that is using the Canon XF Utility right off the bat, and use it to merge and rename the .MXF files, or just copy and rename the .MXF files by themselves. No need for those other files, which are apparently just causing you problems.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

It’s hard to say, but that could have been done either during shooting as a practical in-camera effect, or in post during the printing stage.

If you are shooting anamorphic rather than spherical lenses, as you know the anamorphic lens “squeezes” the image from left to right. Now, if someone didn’t have their lens mounted at a perfect vertical angle, it would also squeeze it a little bit from corner to corner as well as left to right. That would give you the “skew” that you are referring to. The same would be true if you were using spherical lenses but shooting anamorphic with a front-of-lens anamorphic adapter… if you didn’t put the adapter on straight but rather it was cocked a bit, you’d get that skew. You could even change the amount and the direction of the skew by rotating the adapter during the shot.

Here’s the kicker though… we know that The Third Man was not an anamorphic film, it was definitely shot with spherical lenses (the first anamorphic feature was about five years later). It still could happen though, with a “sort of anamorphic” front-of-lens adapter, not put on quite straight. It probably wouldn’t be a true anamorphic adapter as that would be way too much (and too early for that anyway), but some kind of slight cylindrical (rather than spherical) lens attachment in front.

If it wasn’t done in camera, then it was done during optical printing… with a similar lens setup… just done at the printing stage rather than the camera stage.

Of course, these days we’d just do it in post in about two seconds.

I’m not sure if this effect has any particular name, at least I’ve never heard one. I’d just call it a “skew.”

T2

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