Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Hi John…
Those monitors that you see on news sets often don’t look very good to the naked eyeball if you walk onto the set and view them… because they are set to look good only to the camera.
If your monitors look over-saturated, that should be an easy fix… just turn it down. While viewing the monitor on camera, use the TV controls to crank the saturation down (in the TV menu it will likely be called “Chroma” rather than saturation) until it looks good on camera… ignoring what it looks like to your eye.
The bluish tint may be a difficult fix, or it may be an easy one. Many (most) monitors have a color temperature more akin to daylight, around 5600°. Your studio lighting is probably tungsten, which is more in the 3200° neighborhood. Therefore your studio lighting is much warmer than the monitor (or you could say the monitor is much cooler than the studio). What you need is lighting and monitor that are the same color temperature. On many pro monitors and on some higher-end consumer monitors you can change the color temperature. It is by default probably displaying the more-or-less daylight color temp. Dig into the monitor’s menu and see if you can change that. It might be a setting called “temperature” or just “temp” or maybe even just “picture.” Try that. If you can’t do that, then you’ll have to work harder, because you’re either going to have to change the color of your lighting, or change the color of the monitor in other ways.
One way of changing the lighting would be to use daylight instruments instead of your tungsten ones. In a studio setting that would probably mean flo or LED instruments. The easier/cheaper way would be to put blue gel on the lights, anywhere from 1/8 to 1/2 CTB, depending on how much correction is needed. One downside to that is that it will cut a fair bit of the light output. OR… you could change the temp of the monitor with gel. In that case you are trying to warm it up, so you’d put orange gel on the monitor, anywhere from 1/8 to 1/2 CTO. I’ve seen that done with some success… the last time I saw it in person the gel didn’t look that good on the monitor (it wasn’t applied very flat or smoothly) but on camera it looked pretty good.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I agree with everything Bill said…
But as for…
[Joseph Hung] “…you weren’t operating…”
Keep and mind that while the terms “DP” and “cinematographer” are interchangeable, the terms “DP” and “camera operator” are not.
It’s definitely very common for a DP to be his or her own camera operator, but they certainly don’t have to be. Probably on a lower-budget project they will likely be one in the same… but on a higher-end project, maybe yes, maybe no. Just looking at a couple of bigshot DPs… I believe Haskell Wexler always is his own camera op. Roger Deakins, on the other hand, rarely if ever is.
I have a friend from LA who is the best cinematographer that I personally know (and I hate him because he’s only like 26 or so). He was telling me a little while back that he did a DP job on a feature where he actually had a camera operator for the first time, and didn’t have to run the box himself. He said this was such a luxury, and let him worry 100% about the cinematography, and leave the pure mechanics of running the camera to someone else.
All that’s to say, yes, you certainly can list yourself as DP or cinematographer even it you weren’t physically operating the camera itself. Two different things.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well first I’ll note that your subject says one issue (blue tint) and your actual post says another (glare). I’m guessing the glare is the problem you are asking about.
This is largely simple physics… assuming it is a flat screen monitor it’s going to act as a mirror and simply reflect the lights to the same degree that light is hitting it, in the opposite direction.
If you have the lighting where you want it and can’t move the instruments to a point where you aren’t getting glares, then you are going to have to deal with the monitor. One easy solution might be just to tip it forward a bit. You see that all the time on news sets, etc… what looks like a perfectly vertical monitor is actually leaning forward a bit. That might eliminate your reflections.
Another option would be to put some anti-reflective gel on the monitor, but that’s going to fuzz the image a bit so I would only consider that if moving the orientation of the monitor doesn’t work.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Anthony…
For the umbrella holders I bought and cannibalized a couple of these…
Most of these parts are discarded, I only used the umbrella holder part. They are mounted on my lights basically inverted from what you see here. I took that top shoe off, there are four little screws that hold it on. When the shoe is off, the flat surface that is remaining is what got screwed to the top, using tiny bolts through those four holes. I did sand on the surface with a belt sander to make it more angled so that the umbrella would point slightly down and the light would hit in the center of the umbrella. I also, of course, cut off the tab that fits into the baby pin holder.
So basically, the rig just uses the umbrella fitting of that piece of hardware, everything either above or below that was either removed, unscrewed, or cut off.
These are made out of that hard plastic that’s fairly easy to saw and sand.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Anthony I just bought a couple of really cheap Chinese-made softboxes off eBay. I knew I was going to have to hack into them and rework them to get them to fit (and I thought there was a fair chance that they wouldn’t work at all and just get thrown away), so I didn’t get anything too nice or expensive. I’d usually recommend Chimera or Photoflex, but in this case I went the dirt cheap route.
Two observations about them…
1) They work well
2) I never use them.
After spending quite a bit of time taking the instruments apart and taking care to drill my perfect holes in them to receive the rods, I just rarely if ever use the softbox setup. The umbrellas are so easy and fast to use, that I just almost always use those instead. The umbrellas I have are big enough to avoid any spill at all, so in this particular case the extra control you get from softboxes really isn’t needed… at least not in the way that I use these particular instruments.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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No problem, just wish that software you found was Android compatible.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thanks… as I said though I don’t need to buy one or even any parts to build my new one, got all that.
I did check out the software link though… it’s dirt cheap and looks like it would do about what I want it to…
except it appears to be Apple only. So sadly, no joy.T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Mark, I do hope you taught her the value of the star wipe.
Lisa Simpson: “Dad, there are other transitions besides the ‘star wipe.'”
Homer: “Yes, but why have hamburger when you can have steak every day!”
Will you do my homework for me???
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thanks guys…
Yeah Bill, it’d definitely be Android. That’s just what we already have tons of, and zero Apple anything. I’m not at all concerned about building it, I can do that in my sleep with almost zero time/money investment… it’s just decent software I’m looking for.
And yeah Al, gotta tell ya, rods are the way to go. I haven’t used a prompter in six or sever years that didn’t just ride on the rods. I’d wager you could adapt most any (lightweight) prompter to a rods system. You’d just need a 15mm (or 19mm, depending on your rods) bracket. The best place to buy those bits and pieces is eBay where they are plentiful and dirt cheap.
The one improvement I do want to make to my present setup (besides going wireless with a tablet) is to add a swing-away bracket so the unit will, well, swing away… like a matte box. I invariably shoot primes when I’m promptering so that’d make lens changes easier.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mark Suszko] “…the best Lincoln impersonator I know…”
Gosh Mark… how many do you know?? I barely know a dozen, maybe less.
Or, make that zero.
Sarcasm aside, sounds fun.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
