Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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We don’t have enough information to tell you what you need.
You need to know the mount of your camera, and the mount of the lens.
We know your camera has a Canon EF mount.
But what we don’t know is what your lens mounts are. Pentax lenses are available in a couple of different mounts, and that info doesn’t tell us what it is.
Sigma lenses are third-party lenses that could be available in any one of many numerous different mounts (although if your dad used them all on the same camera, they are very likely the same mount as the Pentax).
So once you learn exactly what kind of mount the lens is, then you’ll need to search for a “X to Canon EF adapter”… with “X” being whatever mount is on your lens, obviously.
Be forewarned though, that depending on what your lens mount is, it may or may not exist. Not all lenses can be adapted/mounted to Canon EF with a simple click-in adapter. Many can’t.
And of course even if they do fit they will function purely as a manual lens, obviously, and the camera will have to operate in full manual mode… there will be no camera control for focus, iris, nor any image stabilization.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Jason…
Firstly, I don’t know the exact capabilities of your camera, so some of this is a bit of a guess…
I’d say that some of the choices of settings that you made are probably not what most people would consider optimal for the situation.
We have two things to deal with here, interlacing and shutter speed…
First, interlacing… yes some people shoot 60i specifically for slo-mo footage. You can shoot 60i footage and turn it into the equivalent of a 40% slow-mo in a 24p project (60 x 40% = 24). But to do this you must extract the fields and turn each into its own frame so that effectively you have a 60fps clip (and yes, you’ll lose half the vertical resolution, but that’s the price you pay). Different editing platforms handle this different ways, but you have to do this step. If you can’t extract the fields into frames, at minimum you have to deinterlace the footage or you’ll get that zig-zaggy interlaced look that you’re now familiar with.
Ok, now shutter speed. This is not primarily what is causing your crappy images (although I doubt it’s helping) but your 1/500th speed is probably way too high, so it’s also something you should keep an eye on. Unless you are shooting specifically for a special effect (such as purposely shooting to get the stuttery “narrow shutter” look), you’ll probably want to most always shoot with a “normal” shutter for whatever your actual or simulated playback speed would be. A normal shutter (the equivalent of a 180° shutter in a film camera) is one over twice the frame rate. In the 24p world, a normal shutter speed is 1/48th. In the 60i world, it’s 1/60th (since 60i is actually 30fps). So, lets say you were going to do a field-to-frame extraction so you can do a 40% slow-mo of your 60i footage. Your effective frame rate in that case is 60fps, so a “normal” shutter would be 1/120th of a second. Higher than that and you’ll get a stuttery look.
That 40% slow-mo is the slowest actual slow-mo you can do in your case. You can simulate slower than that using frame interpolation software such as Twixtor. If you use one of those plug-ins, then yes shoot with a frame rate appropriate to how much you anticipate simulating. So yes, the 1/500th shutter speed would be the right choice if you planned to slow the footage down enough to simulate a 250fps frame rate (which would be pretty slow slow-mo indeed…about one-tenth speed).
Can you salvage the footage? Maybe. You definitely need to extract the fields to frames. That will eliminate that jagged look you are getting. The shutter speed will probably look a fair bit too high, but it should be a lot better than you are getting already.
One of the big problems with this is that there isn’t one “best” group of settings that’s good for everything. Folks are often wanting to shoot footage that they might want to view at normal speed, but they might want to slo-mo it as well, and naturally want settings that make it look the very best possible for both. Sadly, there’s no such thing. The best settings for great looking normal footage won’t at all be the best settings for slow-mo… and vice versa. While I know you can’t always do this, the only real optimal settings come from knowing in advance at what framerate you want for playback. It’s not something you can decide after the fact… at least not and get perfect results.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Rick Wise] “Looks like there is no easy way to mount one of these on a light stand.”
Rick, if you’re anywhere near as big a packrat as I am, you probably have a few of these doohickeys around….
…stolen off an old or broken instrument (I can never throw potentially useful bits and pieces away). Bolt that onto the bottom of that rear “leg” and you have a pretty conventional yoke that will fit a baby pin.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well I have to admit Bob that I didn’t jump in with both feet and buy great gear right off the bat (although I always recommend that… do as I say, not as I do)… but we went a bit on the cheap route just to try LEDs out since we’d never really used them before.
We bought several Chinese knock-offs of the LEDZ Brutes, like this one…
https://www.led-z.com/brute16.htm
…except ours all have 20 cells each instead of 16. Now those are pretty expensive (about $2500 a head) but the ones we bought were much less. I’m on location and don’t have them with me but I’ll look up the exact models later.
We did heavily modify them though… primarily power. I opened them up and did a bit of wiring and added a goldmount to the back of each so they can be powered with an AB battery (which is the way we always use them… I never plug them in). I also added a mounting receiver on them so I can attach an umbrella or diffusion frame to each… and I drilled angled holes in the gel frame brackets to create a built-in speed ring so they will accept softbox rods without any additional hardware.
Luckily, for cheap instruments they seem to have an extremely high CRI… we’ve scoped and color-metered them and they seem right on the money at 5600°, and zero green spikes.
For smaller lights (like hair lights, accent lighting) we use the Switronix TorchLED instruments…
They’re awesome, and bi-color… you can dial in the exact temp you need. Now these don’t have enough punch for any exterior use, but they are great for interiors. The only problem is they natively only have a shoe mount since they are designed as on-camera lights, so we had to rig adapters so they can be used on the baby pin of a C-stand or a grip arm.
What I really want is one of the big instruments from Aadyntech. They have an LED fresnel (well sort of fresnel) with the same output as a 1200 HMI, that will run four or five hours on battery. I think the head and battery still top about $6K though, so maybe down the road… not right now though.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Normally you’d block light with flags…
https://www.filmtools.com/24x30flag.html
… but in a pinch anything will do. Easy and cheap is black matte-finish foamcore or art card from a hobby/art shop like Hobby Lobby or Michaels. If you have C-stands and quacker clamps (duckbill clamps) they are easy to position and adjust. If not, just clamp them to light stands with spring clamps… not quite as precision positionable, but it does work.
Lit correctly, you can certainly have your talent wear black if you want… if you make sure you have really good/proper/controllable backlighting to cut them out and make them pop out of the BG.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[David Hala] “There’s probably an option with fedex to insure that the gear makes it over safely?”
Yes. Unlike the airlines.
If you have enough time (and don’t need your gear in use until right when you get on the plane) you can do a three-day FedEx with hold for pickup and the cost isn’t too astronomical.
FedExing is infinitely more convenient for us than checking gear as baggage, and we’ve never had anything lost, misdirected, or broken. I think the last time we traveled a fair distance with a good bit of gear it was from here in Alabama to San Francisco and back. I can’t remember exactly but I think the two-way FedEx bill was something like $1500 for all the gear we needed and more (probably five or six pretty big road-type cases). Not super cheap but worth every penny… and we didn’t have to wrestle anything through airports (which is sooo fun). We landed, picked up our rental truck, and headed straight to FedEx where it was waiting for us. We only had to be careful not to book anything that required any of that specific gear in the couple of days before we left (I believe we did faster shipping for the return trip).
Of course, unless you are married to any of your specific pieces of gear, you can always rent things in your location city which is often easier and cheaper. For example, we never travel with HMI lighting but rent it on location… it’s just too big, heavy and fragile to cart around. Sometimes though you want your “own stuff.” On one cross-country shoot I took my own dolly and jib, but got a tripod from a camera/grip house there. I was cursing that tripod the whole shoot. It was actually a very nice set of sticks and a great head… but it wasn’t the one I was used to and a million times kept reaching for levers and locks that weren’t where I was used to them being. I always take my own now.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Personally I’ve always found black backgrounds to be pretty easy to light, moreso than just about anything else (black limbo is a zillion times easier than white limbo), which is probably why I use it more than I should.
You really only have to have a couple of things: enough room, a black backdrop, and controllable lighting. Ok, that’s three things, not a couple… but still easy.
Black limbo is easier because you don’t have to worry at all about lighting the background or lighting a set… you only have to worry about not lighting it. The easiest starting point is to have plenty of room… the farther back your background is from the talent, the less you will have to be concerned about spill from your lighting.
Design a lighting plot with very controllable instruments (such as fresnels with barn doors) and/or instruments that you can put very close to the talent…such as large soft boxes that are close to the talent, right out of frame. This will reduce light going on the background, as Mark said with the square/cube law (the instruments are much much closer to the talent than they are to the background). If you have a pretty high level of lighting on your talent, when you expose properly for the talent then the unlit background should fall off to nothing. If there are any troublesome light spills, they are fairly easily flagged off.
And yeah, get a black backdrop. As Mark says, yep, you can make even a white wall look black. But it is a heckuva lot easier if you start with black… something pure black, matte finish. Cloth works better than a painted wall, even with matte paint. Our little stage space has a two-sided “L” shaped black cloth cyc on two walls. The easiest/fastest/cheapest thing is a black queen or king-sized bedsheet from Kmart or Target (nothing too high-end). Just make sure you grab something that doesn’t have a “sheen” to it, so some of them do. We usually travel with one or two, just in case (although I can’t recall the last time one of them was actually used).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Music gets complicated because there are so many different kinds of rights… publishing, synch, performance, several things.
The MIDI file gets you past everything except publishing rights… i.e., the songwriters.
It’s the same with bar and garage bands doing covers of pop songs. They’re supposed to be paying to do that… even though many/most don’t.
You can’t discount the value (and costs) of publishing rights. Dolly Parton made a fortune off “I Will Always Love You.” But most of that money came from the fact that she wrote it, rather than from when she performed it herself. She made a lot more money off Whitney Houston’s recording of it than she did of her own.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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The PavTube MXF converter should do that, I believe.
We used to use that in prior versions of Premiere that couldn’t directly import MXF files (fortunately CS6 will now). We weren’t converting to H.264, but I do think that is one of its output options.
It’s dirt cheap, if I recall… almost shareware.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Late to the party here, but I’ll chime in to second some of the good advice so far…
We have a couple of heavy-duty wheeled golf club cases that are good for longish items like light stands, tripod, folded dolly, Porta-Jib, etc. We’ve lined them with foam and put heavier-duty locks and clasps on them.
You might not want to travel with actual C-stands since they are so heavy, but if you do nothing beats shotgun or rifle cases. They are well built, fairly inexpensive, and available at most any outdoors or sporting goods store, or places like Kmart. Two shotgun cases will carry three C-stands… you put all the risers in one, and nest the turtle bases in another (we never figured out a way to puzzle together bases and risers in one case, they just don’t fit that way).
Slightly funny aside, we were shooting at our local NASA installation here once, which is located inside an Army base, Redstone Arsenal. The security watchdogs were going through all our gear that day before entry (sometimes we breeze right in, sometimes they get picky). We had to open some of the most innocuous and innocent-looking cases for them to inspect… but they didn’t even look twice at the gun cases, which is pretty obvious what they are. They even say “Winchester” on the side.
The best advice though is to ship gear. If we travel far enough away that we have to fly, we FedEx everything that we can. Often the only piece of gear I will travel with is my case of lenses (and I always carry it on, never check it… just because that one little case is worth more than everything else put together). You can have your gear delivered to your location or hotel, but we usually figure out which FedEx station is nearest wherever we are renting vehicles, and have the gear held at that station. It’s there and ready to go when we are. I’ve never had anything lost, broken, or misplaced by FedEx. I cannot say the same for the airlines. It can be a little expensive, but worth every penny.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
