Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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[Dennis Size] “I like adding a “hint” of CTO to my backlights all the time…”
I sort fell into doing something like that by accident myself. Probably about half the time I do tungsten lighting for interiors (usually smaller locations) and about half the time I do HMI. When daylight lighting I have a small 150w HMI that I built specifically for back/hair lighting (very lightweight so in can hang on a grip arm easily).
One day its ballast was acting up and the darn thing wouldn’t strike. I threw up a 300w tungsten Pepper fresnel as a hairlight and was about to gel it for color when I noticed “Hey, that looks pretty good.”
I normally wouldn’t mix the tungsten and HMI, but in that case it was just enough to give a nice warmth to the backlight. I use that setup often, now.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[daniel persson] “What do you mean by deck i don’t know that word.”
deck = videotape deck, the machine you stick a videotape in to play it. Such as….
[daniel persson] “You mean when i capture into a non-linear editing program i have to use the camera if it’s on tape?”
Well, obviously something has to play the tape for your non-linear editor to capture the footage. Yes, you can use the camera for playback while you capture the footage. Or, you can use a tape deck… if it is a machine that can handle Canon HDV 24f footage, such as the Sony M35 shown above.
[daniel persson] “What do you need to record with HD-SDI, a normal harddisc or?”
No, you must use a device specifically made for recording SDI video. Convergent Design makes one, there are others as well. If it is a studio setting (as opposed to on a remote location), you can also feed the HD-SDI signal from the camera straight into your non-linear editor and record “live” rather than recording in camera (provided your NLE can accept an HD-SDI signal in). The Canon does not embed audio within the HD-SDI signal, so audio must be captured another way (usually by setting your NLE to capture video via HD-SDI, but audio via analog inputs or firewire).
[daniel persson] “you don’t have to do anything in post to get the 24p afterwards?”
No, you don’t have to do anything in post to get 24p. It just comes in that way.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I shoot with the XLH1 every day. Don’t sweat the “24f” vs “24P”… they look, behave and perform identically.
The only stumbling block I’ve seen with the Canons is that if you shoot in HDV mode and 24f framerate, not all (in fact most) decks cannot play the footage. You would have to capture footage using either the camera as your source deck (or another Canon camera, such as the little HV20 or HV30), or use a deck that will be able to handle the footage, such as the Sony M35.
If you shoot in standard-def mode, then any MiniDV deck should be able to handle the footage, the peculiarity is limited to HDV only.
Whey you shoot standard-def footage in 24f, it is actually recorded interlaced and will import into a project as 29.987 footage (but toggle through it and it still retains the 2:3, so it is bascially 24fps progressive footage but in a 60i wrapper).
On the other hand when you shoot HDV footage in 24f, it is recorded as true progressive 23.976 footage and imports that way.
The XLH1 is a great camera… and has about two-dozen different adjustable parameters so you can really paint the image properly just as you can with much more expensive cameras. It also has lots of physical knobs, buttons, and switches so you don’t have to wade through endless on-screen menus to adjust the things you most often use. It has HD-SDI output so if you want to record to an external recorder you can get true HD that way and bypass the HDV compression. And an absolutely stunning picture. I’ve never understood why this camera wasn’t more wildly popular… except that when it first came out it was one of the more expensive (if not the most expensive) of the small HDV cameras, so I think many people opted for less costly choices.
After a couple of decades in the business and having used dozens of cameras (from DV to 35mm), I have to say the H1 is among my very favorites.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Mike Cohen] “I consider adding Twitter and Facebook accounts for my company’s online presence.”
Just a slightly funny aside that happened the other day…
We’ve had three edit suites spread over two floors in our building for years now…. mine is on the ground floor, the others are upstairs. We just added a new HD suite up there, and my senior editor Joey has been bouncing back and forth between the new one and his old suite next door to it.
I never seem to know where he is working and I’m constantly calling up to him (because I’m too lazy to climb stairs) and am almost always ringing the wrong room. Ergo, he drops what he is doing to scramble and catch the phone in the other suite.
I said “I need to put a bell on you, I never know where you are.”
He dryly replied, “Obviously you’re not getting my Tweets.”
Now there’s usefulness!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Poor deck… with that old gal, just best to consider it euthanasia.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Don’t get upset… yet.
Are you gonna get screwed? Possibly. Probably, in fact. But you don’t know that just yet.
Set up a meeting. Go see this guy, this friend-of-a-friend. Spell out your wants, needs, concerns, and all that jazz… calmly and face to face.
Maybe you’ll get what you want and need. Who knows? People are not necessarily unreasonable. You simply won’t know until you talk to him.
If that doesn’t work out well… at minimum, too bad those “certain video and graphic elements” happen to have gotten lost… because it certainly sounds like you had no actual contract to archive them (or do anything else).
Don’t fly off the handle just YET… talk to the guy. THEN depending on the outcome of that, you’ll be better prepared to define a course of action.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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That’s good advice for fixing the shot… but I be just as worried if not moreso about getting the shot. If the vibration is as bad as you say (“…the camera head looked like it was going to vibrate off”) that just can’t be good for the camera.
In the “olden days” (Betacam era and earlier), the cameras were full of circuit boards that could fairly easily become unseated, thus vibration wasa real no-no. Now, cameras aren’t designed quite like that anymore, but I’m sure vibration still isn’t good for them.
Sounds like you’ve gone to good effort to attach the jib as securely as possible to the truck bed. That might actually be part of the probem. If the bazooka (or whatever stand the jib is riding on) is bolted down firm to the bed, it is simply transferring all the truck vibration straight to the cam head. Is there any way to dampen that? I’m thinking something like a thick rubber mat (like a bar mat) between the mounting points might help matters a little. Probably not completey, but perhaps some.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Harlan is absolutely right in all the points he makes.
So is Grinner… kind of douchy.
I think Harlan needs to seriously consider breaking the pills in half. Or doubling up on them. One or the other.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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This doesn’t help much at this point since this is after the fact… but just reiterates the importance of spelling out clearly in advance to you client what they can and cannot have.
Similarly, just yesterday we had a client request some raw footage from a project we had shot for them. Upon pointing out that under the terms of their contract they were not entitled to it (at least not for free), they were fine with it.
As for the After Effects project… maybe that’s the way more and more of these jobs are working. We usually do everything here in house ourselves, but recently due to workload constraints we did sub out an AE project to a very talented young guy in Chicago (whom we met right here on the COW, by the way). When he delivered the finished pieces of animation, he also provided us with all of the elements as well as the After Effects projects themselves (which we didn’t even ask for). I sort of gathered from him that was the normal M.O. for the big clients he is used to working for. Maybe that’s more the norm these days, who knows?
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I’ll keep this brief…
Don’t want to be too much of a cheerleader, but I’m a HUGE fan of the XLH1. We’ve been using them since right when they first came out, and I must say it’s just about my favorite camera ever.
Tons of features, stunning picture, more than two dozen tweakable parameters so you can really paint the camera, and lots and lots of real physical buttons, knobs, and switches that control the most-used features so you don’t have to try to wade through endless on-screen menu items that much. It’s just a great little camera. Not cheap, but great.
I hardly ever use the stock lens (I almost always shoot cine primes), but even on occasions that I did, I found the stock zoom to be a pretty nice lens indeed.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com