Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Very very interesting.
What will the price be? Does anyone know? I couldn’t find it on the website… but then again I couldn’t get the site to fully load.
One observation though… that might be great for 720p shooters, but might not be enough for 1080 shooters if they plan on using it for super critical focusing. It’s still slighty less than half fhe screen real estate of full 1080HD, as shown by using their own illustration…
It’s also just a smidge bigger than most people are used to for on-camera monitoring (such as the little Astros or Panasonics). Might be too big, might not. Interesting, though, would like to hear more….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I think I can pretty much grasp how the two differently colored sides have to actually touch (hence, a seal) before the color seems to change.
I’m still mystified though that although my refrigerator is full, there still isn’t anything to eat. No food, just stuff to put on food. Why is that??
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Wow… I was holding my own tongue waiting to hear what others’ reaction was to that, as I was too dumbfounded to type.
Well said, Rick, very very well said.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Thanks Ron…
Yeah, that was going to be step #2. Step #1 was to see if any of my cyberspace buds in here were in the area that aren’t listed in the Services (such as we’re not… although should be). Always nice to work with people you know… even if “knowing” them is just through a computer screen.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Steve Wargo] “My only negative comment is that I thought his outer shirt was a bit messy looking.”
I tend to agree, Steve. But we did several wardrobe tests and that’s the “Ain’t I a cool young dude?” look the client wanted (which surprised us, since they are a stuffy company, otherwise). In fact, we had to take his shirt off and wad it up a couple ot times to get the “uber casual” look they wanted.
[Steve Wargo] “Maybe I’m just becoming a bit stiff.”
I thought you were a smokin’ cool rockin’ biker dude? Like me. (insert eyeroll here).
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Sean Meehan] “Would you happen to know if renting the DoF converters/lenses is reachable on a student budget?”
The answer is probably, sadly, no… and here’s why. I don’t think the lower-end (and lower-priced) converters are typically available in the rental market. Now, I could be wrong about that, but I’ve never seen any for rent.
The rental-available units are typically the P+S Technik Mini35 and Pro35. Those are $11,000-$26,000 units (depending on the model) so the rental on them is not real cheap… they typically rent for several hundred dollars a day. Rent one for just a couple of days and you could have bought your own bargain-basement converter. Not quite the same product, but at least you’d own it.
A set of PL mount cine prime lenses is going to be worth a heckuva lot more than even a high-end converter, and will rent in the same ballpark… probably about $400+ a day. For a student, that’s the one circumstance when I’d recommend SLR still-camera lenses. Decent ones can be found affordably, especially used or on eBay.
Now if there is anyone out there renting the lower-priced converters (such as the Brevis35 or the Letus35… or maybe even the Redrock M2), they would no doubt be more student-budget friendly since the units cost a fraction of what the P+S Technik does. I just don’t think any houses keep them in their rental inventory, though. Maybe I’m wrong about that….
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Mark…
Yes, just a little…
I believe it’s Magic Bullet Suite 2.0… It contains five plug-ins… Colorista, Looks, Steady, Frames, and some kind of HD upscaler whose name escapes me at the moment.
I haven’t had call to use any of its “fake DoF” effects yet. I really don’t have much need for that since I almost always shoot with a Mini35 and get shallow DoFs when I want them anyway… but some of the other stuff (particularly “Looks”) is pretty darn good. It’s hard to describe in a short post what all it does, but bascially it allows you to manipulate an image the way you would in both the shooting and post stages… but putting different “filters” in the camera’s “virtual matte box,” or by changing the virtual film stock, film processing effects (such as bleach bypass), and post production stuff like fairly robust color grading.
Red Giant has a good tutorial on their website that shows a bunch of the features.
On the upside, I’d say that it looks really great. I’m using it in Adobe CS3. In Premiere it works great in STANDARD def. Not so much in high-def (which I think may be an issue with my Matrox AXIO machine). In After Effects it works fine. I will say that it is a little bit sluggish on the rendering side. I use a smokin’ fast machine, but the rendering is still a little slow for my taste. I’m spoiled though, usually I don’t have to render anything so maybe it seems slower than it is.
It is definitely worth downloading their demo version for a test drive.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Sean Meehan] “my only way to do this has been to position the camera absurdly far from my subjects, zoom in all the way, and then I can use the manual focus to play around with focus.”
Well Sean…. that, plus shooting with the iris wide open, is about the best you can do. Because of the tiny chips and the unwavering principals of physics and optics your depth of field is most always going to be very very deep.
A more powerful or interchangeable lens wouldn’t make any difference… the DoF is restricted by the chip size. Even one of the “big boy” cameras (2/3″ chips) still has very deep DoF.
This has been discussed at length (and at length and more) on the COW. Do a search for “Depth of Field” or “DoF converter” and you’ll get lots of helpful posts.
The best route for that is to use a Depth of Field Converter. Those threads will tell you all about it, and on the COW somewhere in the archives you’ll be able to find a PDF of last summer’s issue of the COW magazine (or was it fall?) where I wrote a much-too-long article about them. A DoF converter ranges from about $1000 for the cheapest halfway decent one, to well over $10K for the top end pro ones. Then you have to add lenses (35mm cine prime lenses, or SLR still camera lenses if you do it on the cheap).
Barring that, other suggestions are to put some kind of diffusion material behind your talent (there was a recent good thread about that), or to “haze” the room if it is interior. A haze machine is much like a smoke or fog machine, but it uses the same fog juice to just put sort of a “film” in the air… it’s usually done just for visual effect but one incidental byproduct is that is can make DoF’s appear shallower. A lot of the grittier nighttime dramas (Law & Order, etc.) haze their scenes a lot.
But for real control just as if you were shooting 35mm film, you need a DoF converter.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I believe it’s the current NBC Nightly News set that does just that… has an ever-so-slightly frosted panel behind the anchor to blur out the newsroom set behind him. If it’s not Brian Williams’ current set, it’s someone else’s… or the last one. At any rate, it looks good.
I’ve tried frosting glass myself just with matte spray. It was impossible to get it even and not see the spray streaks. If I was going to do it again I would either get more professional spraying equipment, or just use real glass and very lightly sandblast it.
One television station that we frequently work for (shooting their higher-end promos that they don’t do in house) has a similar frosted glass on set in front of a monitor bank. It works well, but theirs is very soft.
Seems to work well if the difussion material is very close to the background…an inch or two or three. Farther than that and it’s just a blurry blob, unless your frosting is very light indeed.
I don’t know your setup, maybe it’s a live (moving people) background that you are trying to soften. On news sets that I’ve worked on before though, often there would be a big photograph (usually a cityscape or skyline) that was a background back-lit Duratrans. In a couple of those instances we simply had the Duratrans printed a little out of focus to soften it and enhance the apparent depth. It took a while to get it through to the Duratrans printing company though that we wanted it out of focus. They didn’t quite get it at first.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Jeffrey Gould] “You’re a good guy for sharing that info”
Hey, that’s what the COW is for…
[Jeffrey Gould] “HMI is something I never worked with, but at times it’s essential.”
I used to try to stay away from HMIs, but these days I find myself doing more and more HMI lighting. I just really like the look, and for interiors it’s nice to not be fighting with windows all the time. And for exteriors I like being able to give a little punch or a back or side light that would be difficult to just do reflectively. We don’t have a huge HMI arsenal because they are so darn expensive… we have a 1200w, a 575w, and a little 150w. The 1200w is the only “store bought” one, I built the other two. The little 150w I built out of a cheap PAR can (added a socket, reflector, and fresnel lens) and it uses a growlight ballast. I built that one because we wanted something very lightweight that could easily hang on a grip arm on a C-stand for a hairlight. I built the 575w out of a 1K tungsten Colortran fresnel that I picked up for a song on eBay… it’s a really nice head, focuses well, 7″ lens… I almost hated to canabalize it to make the HMI. The ballast parts (the ballast and ignitor) had to be ordered from some place in Germany and then built into a ballast box with big heat sinks, etc. It works well, although I wish it were smaller and lighter… if I had $6K to throw around I’d replace it with an 800 Joker-Bug.
[Jeffrey Gould] “My Sennheiser ME-66 always sounded tinny to me and the slightest bit of movement from the “boom guy” made the audio unusable”
The 66 is ok, but not great. I would ditch it for a 416 if you can. It has been one of the best tools we have ever bought. Since I started using it I can’t even remember the last time we used a hardwired lav or a radio mic, it just really performs great and sounds so warm and open, not cold and sterile like an on-talent mic. Pricewise I’d say it’s in the mid-range for a pro mic… I believe they are about in the $1K range these days. Not chump change, but not a $5000 mic either. One thing of note, though, the 416 does require 48v phantom power, so you’d need to use it with a camera that outputs phantom (or have some other kind of phantom power source). When we shoot 35mm film we use it with an audio deck that outputs phantom.
[Jeffrey Gould] “I read in article that you’re better off using greenscreen and just insert a white background”
That’s probably good advice, but I just hate greenscreening so much that I stay away from it whenever I can so we did that scene practical. We’ve got all the same keying tools as everyone else in here, but I’ve just never been happy with the keys that I’ve been able to pull (even with a perfectly lit screen). I keep thinking we should add Ultimatte to the mix here someday, but haven’t yet.
[Jeffrey Gould] “do you find that clients are patient with the lighting setup?”
Usually that’s a non-issue because for some reason our clients rarely come on set. I’m not sure why, because if I were the client I’d definitely be there… but most of them just don’t. I guess they have worked with us long enough that they know we’ll get decent stuff, and the “glamor” of it has worn off. When they are there, they don’t seem to mind. I’m definitely not the best DP by a long shot (there are plenty of other people on the COW that could light circles around me), but I will say that I’m really really fast, so that helps. I can generally light a scene and be ready to pull trigger within 15 minutes of landing on location unless it’s a super complicated setup with lots of HMIs and butterflys, etc., so that helps. I could probably kick up the look a notch if I took an hour to light (which I’d like to be able to do), but our projects are typically quite low budget and time is money so I have to work fast.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com