Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Trevor Ward] ” I didn’t like the way to change ISO. “
Hey Trevor, you know you can assign any of the thumb wheels as the ISO, so whatever is convenient for you. I have mine set as the right handgrip thumbwheel… I probably change it 100 times a day, it’s super easy.
[Trevor Ward] ” I also didn’t like how difficult it was to change color temp. There is a menu and specific temps can be dialed in.”
You don’t have to go into a menu at all to change the color temp… I probably change that more than anything else so it would drive me crazy if it wasn’t super easy… depending on the buttons and wheels you have assigned. I have one assigned button on the “port” side of the camera, push it and instantly one of the same-side wheels dials in my exact temp. Easy breezy.
It has taken us a while to get the setup exactly like we like it, and it’s still a bit in progress….
I promised some photos of our C300PL setup a while back, here is our studio setup…
That’s with Zacuto plate, 6″ rods, follow focus, matte box, swingaway bracket, prime lens.
Here is our handheld setup…
That’s with Zacuto plate, 12″ rods, shoulder mount, swingaway bracket (locked), zoom lens, matte box, and two additional grip handles.
It’s still a work in progress, probably will be tweaked some again…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hey Rick…
They don’t do a very good job of congealing their info all in one place, so I don’t remember if I saw it on their website, or on Vimeo, or Facebook, or somewhere else… but I saw it in a least a couple of different places.
The anticipated price is $3K.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yes, those numbers are the horizontal and vertical resolution.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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If by “optimal” you mean the very best there is… well that would be a 1080 line monitor. Unfortunately though those don’t really exist in little TTF monitors unless you want to spend real money… such as the little Astro monitors like they use on feature film sets. Then again, they are about six grand.
For most of us we get by with 720 monitors just fine. Just look at the specs and make sure the ones you are considering have a vertical line count of at least 720 lines or more.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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It doesn’t matter which side you are on. You probably want to vary them… some facing one way, some the other. But in any case you want the key light on the same side as you are, on the side toward which the talent is looking. I’d put it farther back as well, at about a 30° or even as much as a 45° angle, not so much head-on.
You said you have a “head/rim light above his head”… it’s hard to really tell from the sample due to the overexposure, but do you mean it is literally above his head?… as in pointing straight down on him? If so, you want that farther back, so that it’s also pointing down at about a 45° angle to him.
I think you need to get over the thinking that it only needs to be you and the talent in the room. I understand your wanting to make the talent feel at ease, but you might be underestimating these guys and it seems to me that in your situation you really want and need a live camera operator with his hands on the gear monitoring things at all times. These are guys who have faced enemies literally trying to kill them… I think they should be able to get over the fact that there’s an actual person behind the camera. We’ve done zillions of similar interviews, and never once have we had to completely clear a set of every living soul in order to get a better performance (in fact, it wouldn’t even occur to me to do so).
If you want to just check framing and exposure, that cheaper monitor is fine. If you want to rely on it for razor-sharp focusing, you’d need at least one of those in the previous two links (the one in the last link doesn’t have very high resolution). Of the two earlier ones, they are virtually the same price and the same features, so I’d go with the one that is the most useful size for your. For me, that’d probably be the bigger one. For your mounting purposes, it might be the smaller… I think only you can make that determination.
Happy shooting and good luck!…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I think battery monitoring must be a pretty common issue with Canons.
If I use Canon batteries in my C300, the on screen monitoring and “fuel gauge” works fine. I have some non-Canon batteries though, and with some of them it takes a loooooong time for the fuel gauge to show up, and with one or two of them it doesn’t show up at all.
Guess it’s just a Canon thing….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Obviously it is overexposed, but you know that and are learning how to take care of that issue…
Otherwise…
Framing is fine, I don’t have any issues with that.
Now, lighting is not math so there are no true right or wrong answers… BUT… that setup is not what most people would probably consider optimal…
You have your key light on what most people would consider the “wrong” side. It’s on the left side of the talent (right side of the screen). Usually you’d want to put that on the other side… the direction that the talent is looking.
I think your fill light is also way too hot for my taste. A fill is just, well, to fill a little. The goal of it is not to make the fill side as hot as the key side. You want some difference in it, otherwise the image is very flat. You might try it with no fill instrument at all and see what it looks like… maybe just bounce in a little fill with a white card rather than using an actual instrument. If you do need an instrument, either scrim it down, dim it down, or back it off. I personally don’t like a lot of fill, I like talent very uneven which I think is more interesting. I’ll freely admit that I personally take that farther than is some people’s taste, but yours is very flat, even by other folks’ standards.
I notice this guy is wearing glasses, which can frequently cause reflection issues (although they aren’t too bad with that guy). I’m betting though that if these are older war veterans you are shooting that a lot of them will be wearing glasses so you might run into this issue over and over. If you raise the key up higher (so that it is shooting down on the talent a bit) you can often eliminate those completely, or at least lessen them.
Keep a-shootin’….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, I’m with Rick, who is almost always right (like how I threw in that “almost,” Rick?)…
I don’t think you need the filter either.
To take it a step further, I wouldn’t underexpose or filter it it any other way when shooting, either… aside from because careful with lighting I’d do all of the day-for-night work in post. And yes, as Rick said, use direct sunlight, not shade (just in the right direction).
Some of the best day-for-night work I ever saw was in the movie Cast Away. I would have sworn Tom Hanks was really on the beach at night, but some behind-the-scenes footage (and a look at the raw camera footage) revealed it was all shot in broad daylight with no underexposure.
You can start from scratch in post to build a day-for-night look with filters, but using one of the existing plug-ins will save you a ton of work. I’d readily suggest Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant, which has an excellent day-for-night filter in the package (and tons of other stuff you will like too). Just the default settings on it are quite good, and there are many parameters you can tweak if you’d like to refine it.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well Craig, it may sound snobby, but to me cinematography and videography are pretty much two different things… being that cinematography is a fair bit tougher, requires a fair bit more discipline (and I dare say, talent), and attention to get the good stuff. A great cinematographer that has, say, shot lots of 35mm film or large-sensor electronic footage can easily pick up a video camera and shoot great stuff. But the other way around?… not so much.
That’s why for years I advocated that people learn to shoot real film first, even if they didn’t intend to do that in their day-to-day camera work. Real film is almost a dinosaur now, but learning large-sensor digital cinematographer is a good replacement.
While I do love the C300 (it’s probably my favorite camera that I’ve ever used), ergonomically its not super ideal for handheld or run-n-gun type usage. Configured right out of the box it’s a little unwieldy, like trying to shoot handheld with an oddly-shaped brick. It’s no where nearly as easy for handheld shooting as a “properly” configured shoulder-mount video camera, with a way to easily and comfortably hold it and with a proper and correctly-positioned viewfinder.
If you want to do much handheld or run-n-gun work you really have to configure the camera in a way to make that easier. Actually I’m still working with mine to make it like I like it, and am not quite there yet. Close, but not completely. For handheld work I have a baseplate, rods, shoulder pad and two forward handgrips added at different points. It’s close to being good, but still needs some refining. I’m taking a day-after-the-holiday holiday today, but when back in studio Monday I’ll try to remember to take a picture of it. You’ll always find little quirks come up… for example my Foton’s zoom and focus levers (the screw-in sticks) are too long to completely rotate the full distance they should… they’ll either hit the rods below or the viewfinder above, depending on where they are positioned. A colleague in Belarus who specializes in Russian cine gear is custom-making me some shorter sticks, they should arrive next week and solve that problem. Still, it’s a lot tougher than throwing an ENG video camera on your shoulder and shooting. Fortunately my handheld work is minimal.
Even in a studio setup the C300 is not the greatest thing ergonomically. The odd shape of the camera makes it very topheavy if you put in on one of the taller (and cheaper) baseplates. We went through several configurations before biting the bullet and buying the special baseplate that Zacuto makes just for the C’s… it’s a very thin “pancake” plate that’s just barely thicker than the rods, so the rig doesn’t become top-heavy. It’s expensive (just like everything from Zacuto), but it’s worth every penny.
There are other little weird ergonomic things. For example, the camera has this weird little “lip” on the bottom front. That prevented me from using my follow-focus unit… it wouldn’t slide back quite far enough to engage the lens gears, so I had to buy a different FF unit that had the gear on the other side (and my nice Redrock FF is now lonely and unused). Just several little things like that.
Focus is still the big issue when shooting with the C300, or any larger-sensor camera (just as it is with 35mm film cameras). You’ve really got to pay attention to it. If you are a veteran of only small-chip shooting and you’re not already a good focus-puller yourself, you’ll have to learn to be one. I’m happy to say that the C300’s focusing aids do help a great deal, but it all does re-enforce the fact to me that really great focus pulling is quite an art form.
The ergonomic “up sides” to the C300 is the features, functions and controllability. Almost all cameras let you control the same features, but so many of them make you drill down through on-screen menus to do that. The C300 has tons of physical buttons and dials on it to quickly control everything I need. For example, I’m always tweaking color temp. That’s just a knob on the side that I can dial in the temp I want to the exact degree. I do that so much and I hate cameras that force you to log into a menu to make those changes. Here, it’s easy.
I realize that I’ve listed a lot of “negatives” here… but I sure don’t want it to put anyone off the C300. Like I said, it’s my favorite camera. Its stunning images (and low-light capability) just blow me away.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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VERY nice work, Emre…
[Emre Tufekcioglu] ” If I remember correctly I think Todd did a similar commercial with a single take in a hallway of a college and a lot more actors that was very impressive. Maybe he can repost that.”
Yeah we did… which is unusual for me since personally I usually have a pretty high shot count for a :30 spot, but there have been a couple of instances where I did single-shot spots…
We had one slight issue with that, in that our fake rubber prop pizza actually looked a lot better than the real pizzas they were giving away.
Here’s behind the scenes, if anyone is interested…
Those single-shoters usually have tons of pre-prod, but the shoots themselves go pretty fast, and obviously the edit sessions are not very taxing. In our case it was just a little color grading, some sound design, screen replacement on the laptop, and throwing up the end graphics. Easy breezy.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
