Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Erik Anschicks] ” I have read conflicting info with that…here is AbelCine’s comp chart comparing how the mm appears on a C300 vs a 5D”
Exactly… that’s what I was saying, people are comparing apples and oranges. You’ll hear so many people obsessed with “full frame” shooting like they get with the 5D, and for some reason that makes those that don’t know any better think that makes a Super35mm film frame (which is indeed smaller) inferior. It’s not… that 35mm frame is the same size frame that motion pictures have been shot at for more than a century now, and continue to do so. Again, that difference (when comparing it to the celluloid world) is because still cameras shot film horizontally and cine cameras shoot the strip vertically.
In practicality, what that means is it really just changes the field of view of a given lens at a particular focal length. You can consider the regular 35mm cine format the standard, and the other ones the oddballs. If you ask Roger Deakins, Tak Fujimoto or some other bigshot DP to frame you a 50mm shot, they are going to consider what that 50mm lens looks like on a 35mm-format camera… not the bigger sensor of a 5D, or the smaller sensor of a 2/3″ camera.
In the cine world for motion footage, that S35mm frame is the “norm” or the base standard. Whereas in the still photography world, that bigger frame like the 5D shoots is the standard.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Erik Anschicks] “Duclos does not service or modify Russian lenses at all “
As suspected, not surprised by that. I think that once people discovered the great LOMO primes that Duclos was flooded with them, and since they fall into the vintage category a lot of them needed a fair bit of service and it was hard to predict just how much they would have to put into them.
[Erik Anschicks] “Combine that with the fact that these Canon lenses have a 1.5x crop factor on the Super 35 sensor…”
Not really… it’s not really a “crop factor,” it’s a bit apples and oranges there. People (especially those using the jumbo-sensor Canon DSLRs) seem obsessed with “full frame” sensors these days. They seem to forget that “full frame” means different things to different formats. A “full frame” of 35mm film when shooting stills is completely different than 35mm film when shooting cine footage. Why?… people seem to forget that a still camera shooting 35mm film shoots horizontally, a wide image down the strip of film… whereas a cine camera shoots vertically on that strip of film. So, the two “full frames” are different depending on the format. The C300 has a Super35mm sensor, and shoots exactly the same field of view as any S35mm cine camera. Put it side-by-side with a top-of-the-line Panavision Millennium XL2 and the fields-of-view for each focal length is exactly the same.
[Erik Anschicks] ” I was also told was the traditional NFL Films standard length on their end zone cams “
Are you talking about NFL Films today (which shoots electronic), or classic NFL Films from their film-shooting days (when the voice of John Facenda could make the most boring matchup sound like the game of the century)? When NFL Films was shooting real film, that was always 16mm, not 35mm… so the 16mm field of view is going to mean those telephoto lenses are even much much more telephoto than compared to 35mm, for a given focal length. I’m just wondering which shooting format the person who told you that was referring to.
[Erik Anschicks] ” shooting 60fps…long of a recording time do you have compared t”
The recording time is exactly the same. That’s because even though you’re switching from 1080 to 720, the bitrate for each remains at 50Mbps. That’s assuming, of course, you’re shooting at the highest bitrate (you can also shoot at 35Mbps, if you choose). You can do the math, but the easiest thing to do is just put an empty camera card in the camera and turn it on at whatever settings you want to shoot with. Within a couple of seconds the display will show you remaining shoot time.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Bill Davis] “Sadly, I think that was me.”
Might have been, Bill… I honestly didn’t remember. I don’t think any less of you, though… ha.
[Bill Davis] “My problem with umbrellas is that they’re pretty much uncontrollable”
Totally agree… boxes are infinitely more controllable. I just found that after years of using softboxes, that just as often as not I really didn’t need to control them for a lot of environments and applications… I just needed a big soft source, with no need for eggcrates or much flagging or control. This is usually in larger interior locations where spill or a little bit of stray light doesn’t prove to be an issue. If softboxes were as easy and fast to set up, I’d probably use them exclusively… but umbrellas are 10x easier and faster, so in those situations where I would get the same results, that’s what I use.
Fortunately the heads we use in our softboxes (when we use tungsten heads, that is) also have little umbrella holders on them, so we can easily use the same instrument in either application.
[Bill Davis] “If you’re using solids, you’re double the distance from a light source to the object via reflection”
Very true. I almost never use the solid ones. Out of the probably eight or ten umbrellas I have only two of them are solids (black with reflective interiors… one silver and one blue). I honestly never use those, I can’t even remember the last time. I shoot through umbrellas 99 times out of 100, using the silk or translucent ones.
I use them purely for ease and speed, but Bill is right, there is definitely a cost factor if that’s an issue. The cheapest softbox is still quite a few bucks, while most umbrellas are pretty cheap. If you want to go the eBay route, you can readily find mid-size ones for literally five or ten bucks.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Didn’t forget, Stephen… I just don’t like to brag.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Sam Lanes] “anyone else care to share their career paths to this point?”
Happy to, although my career path has been extremely short and relatively straight. I’m betting this is wildly unusual, but at 50 years old I’ve had exactly two real employers in my professional career (and one of those is myself).
After leaving college with a film degree, I actually started in the journalism side… working as a news reporter for an NBC-affiliate television station. I did that for six years, and hated every minute of it. This is where I learned that much of television news is a joke. I had a sign on my desk that said “I’m not a journalist, but I play one on TV,” but the news director made me take it down.
Throughout this time I was also an occasional working film actor, doing little parts in the occasional bad movie, or very good TV show (I’m lucky that while the movies were baaaaaad, the TV shows were excellent, and a great experience). I learned a lot about filmmaking while doing this. As I have said before, I learned more in my first four hours on a real film set (especially about DP work) than I did in four years of film school. No lie.
After I couldn’t stand it any more, I fled the news department for the other side of the building to the promotions and marketing department, where I became the Creative Services Manager. There I concepted, wrote, and directed station promos, etc… everything from daily topicals to the big image stuff, news and show opens, etc.
I continued as a working actor now and then throughout that time.
After six years in Creative Services, I had an opportunity to leave broadcast TV and form the company I have now, Fantastic Plastic, where I have been for 16 years. We do most anything in the video/film/television world… but mostly we produce broadcast commercials. We’ve never officially counted, but I think I’ve directed something in the neighborhood of 3,000 of them.
And there you have it. Very glamorous.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Sounds like admission should come with a coupon for an angioplasty.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Mark Suszko’s word of the day:
GROINAGE
Nice.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I wouldn’t anticipate any flack for playing that at any time of day in the US.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Solid direction, and very good DP work.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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The key to the bright look you get from the Staples commercials etc. is very large light sources at eye level… very large silks, bounces, etc., down low… not up where there store’s ceiling fixtures are (which gives you a sickly Bela Lugosi look no mater what the color).
Much of the time when you see those big shots in a Staples, Target, Home Depot etc., the overheads aren’t used at all, often they are replaced with SpaceLites to give a good bright even palette everywhere, and then individual scenes are lit working off that base exposure.
That might not be practical in your situation. The existing lights probably are a poor color, as others have suggested. The “right” way to do it is to replace all the flo tubes in the ceiling with proper tubes (Kinos or whatever). That might be impossibly hard and expensive. So the next best bet is, as was also suggested, to leave them as is, and “poison” all your other lighting to match it… then you can correct it all uniformly in post. This is definitely the way I would do it. I never have time nor budgets to do it the other way.
I think big bright sources at eye level for the scenes is probably what I would concentrate on most. Probably small HMIs (1200w, so as not to overpower the base lighting) and 6×6 or bigger silks and/or whiteboards as bounces.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
