Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah, PT’s really great, one of my favorite people to work with, ever. I don’t get to use him too often, maybe once every couple of months or so. Always insists that I call him directly at home, probably makes his fatcat NY agent cringe.
We’ve become pretty good long-distance friends. Turns out that Peter’s wife Stella is from my city, and that his late father-in-law actually worked with my mother in the same NASA office a zillion years ago.
Very cool old guy.
And one of those cases where his “regular-guy-just-talking-to-you” voice is so totally unlike his “narrator” voice. So different than guys like Hal Douglas or the late Don LaFontaine that pretty much sound like themselves all the time. The first time I talked to Peter on the phone 12+ years ago, I had a hard time believing it was him… and then he “turned it on.” Magic.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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No, not the sequel, that’s the original… Peter Thomas Sr.
It dumbfounds me that at 83 he has kept the voice of a middle aged man. And a nicer old fellow you’d be hard pressed to find, he’s the definition of the word “gentleman.” He always does great work for us, and is soooo accommodating. Sometimes too much so… once for a commercial quite a while back he re-did a session three times in two different studios because he just wasn’t happy with it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we used an early take from the very first one.
PT Jr., as a great voice as well, but he sounds nothing like dad.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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We might, Del… thanks for the tip!
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Bob’s right…. a lot of potential clients tend to not be visionaries. You might have a killer reel, but if you don’t have something similar to their business, some of them just can’t see it.
Our little company started out with one client… a grocery store. After that we were able to get several chains of grocery stores… I think our max was one week when we produced 42 commercials for grocery stores all over the country. We couldn’t get a car dealer for a long time, because we had nothing to show them but groceries… they just couldn’t comprehend it. But after we nabbed one, a whole bunch of others jumped on board. It took a while to snag the first plastic surgeon, but after we did it was fairly easy to get more, and now we do fairly high-end (usually 35mm) spots for 12 different plastic surgeons at last count.
No matter how smart they are business-wise, some clients just have zero vision about advertising and marketing. With those, you pretty much have to show them something like what they do.
I’ll only take one exception with Bob here…
[Bob Zelin] “If you are a famous TV commerical director, no one is going to offer you a feature film deal, even if you make millions in commericals.”
In actuality, this has happened quite a few times. A fair number of commercial directors have moved from selling soap straight into big-budget feature directing… sometimes with surprising success with their first features. Most recently Josh Gordon, Will Speck, Joseph Nichol come to mind… and quite a few more through the years. And it’s even more common for commercial DPs to move into features.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Jason, the “gotta shoot wide open” biz is largely a restriction to some of the lower-end adapters.
When I was writing an article on DoF converters for the COW mag a while back, Redrock sent me footage with their M2 stopped down to f/16. No grain.
Personally, for quite deep DoF I’ve used my P+S Technik with lenses stopped down as much as f/11 for exteriors, with no grain. For interiors, I can go up to f/8 (although inside one would rarely if ever need to go that high unless you have a room full of fairly high-wattage HMIs).
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, Chris is right… through the years lots of filmed television programs were shot at 30fps.
I shoot almost nothing but TV commercials, and have done both. Frankly I couldn’t tell much difference in spots I shot in either 24fps or 30fps in both 16mm and 35mm.
And yes, film is falling out of favor just a little bit for primetime dramatic series, as more and more are going HD (although the big-budget dramas are still predominently 35mm). Actually S16mm is doing well for primetime these days. Check out the HD network feeds on a good large display of S16mm shows (“My Name is Earl,” “Scrubs,” and the COW’s own Todd McMullen’s “Friday Night Lights” just to name a few). The quality is phenominal.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Some guys might chime in with some technical/electronic explanations, but I will take a stab at the aesthetic explanation…
Watch a good 60i monitor sometime and compare (properly) telecined film with 24p video. Step though frame by frame, and you’ll see they are technically exactly the same… 3:2. That is, you’ll see three progressive frames followed by two interlaced frames, which then repeats indefinitely.
So… technically they are much the same. So why do they often look different?
Film has been shot at 24fps for darn near 100 years. It is “stuttery.” Just as much as 24p video. One of the chief differences is, cinematographers used to shooting 24fps know exactly how to do it. Some care must be taken to do it right. Fast pans, the wrong kind of action crossing the frame at the wrong rate, etc., will yield just as must stutter as video. Practiced cinematographers know how to avoid this. Pans, for example, ideally shouldn’t exceed a specified rate. Charts in the ACS manual will tell you “do not exceed” pan rates (expressed in degrees per second) for specific focal lengths, etc. Old schoolers rarely actually refer to these charts… do it enough and you can do it by eyeball.
A lot of 24p video, though, is shot by those who are used to shooting for video (and may have never even shot real film), and therefore shoot 24p video the same way they’ve been shooting 60i video for years and years. That often yields very poor results, especially in scenes with a lot of motion. 60i is very forgiving of motion artifacts like that… 24p is definitely not. You must shoot 24p correctly or the motion flaws will show.
Secondly 24p video is usually shot with 2/3″, 1/3″, or in some cases 1/2″ chip cameras (with the exception of “big chip” video cameras such as the Panavision Genesis, RED ONE, or cameras using a DoF converter). This “target image size” is much much smaller than a film frame, ergo the depth-of-field is much deeper. Sharp foregrounds and backgrounds are much less forgiving than even ever-so-slightly soft ones, and the “stutter” or “judder” seems much more pronounced.
Shoot 24p exactly as if you were shooting film, and the stutter and judder won’t be any more pronounced than if you are shooting real celluloid. It can look very good, indeed.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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It’s our goal here to keep everything forever… and we are pretty good about it. That’s not to say that sometimes things “just happen” though… a data DVD might prove corrupt, a drive fail… and sometimes for some reason you just “can’t find something,” no matter how carefully it’s archived, backed up, and cataloged.
We have always tried to keep materials saved (going back 12 years now), but honestly I’ve never felt it was my responsibility to do so, we just did it mostly out of convenience for ourselves. Nor did we ever charge for the service.
In fact, in one corner of our least-used suite still sits our very first NLE… a behemoth DPS Perception system in a gigantic Windows NT tower, that cost half as much as my house at the time (remember those days?). Still works. And we still keep it around because nothing else will read the super-proprietary Perception .pvd files that were the mainstays of our first couple of years in business. And yes, on occasion we still have to fire up that bad boy to retrieve some long-forgotten video.
However lately after years of burning countless archival data DVDs that take up space on the shelf, we are now archiving all projects onto drives… identical copies of each completed project goes onto two redundant 1TB eSata drives… which go on the shelf when they are filled. Since we started doing this, we do now charge an “archival and storage” fee. It’s not much, but enough to cover the additional expense we now have of buying lots of drives. So I guess now we do feel a little more “responsible” for it.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Richard Herd] “Do you think Canon will adopt a tapeless camera for their line of cameras?”
I’m sure hoping so. It’s the only thing that keeps my XLH1 from being my favorite camera ever.
It would be a logical progression… but unlike Sony, Canon plays things very close to the vest and you never hear anything about their upcoming products until they are on the shelves.
I had intended to move from the Canon to the EX3, as soon as P+S Technik developed the attachment kit for it. Unfortuantely when they did a couple of months ago, it mates the EX3 with the Pro35. So… that would mean buying another $20,000 converter (yikes) instead of getting to use the much less expensive converter ($12,000) that I already have. Can’t justify that, so I’m hoping that Canon will go tapeless in the next generation.
Another option is using the little Convergent Design box to do direct-to-flash HD-SDI capturing.
All that being said… I’ve never had any issues with HDV. The only real downside we’ve run into is the time it takes to capture footage. Being able to instantly ingest it would be very nice.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I guess I’m one of those guys… I’m definitely a DoF converter evangelist, and fairly well-known as such.
I pretty much couldn’t live with my P+S Technik converter, use it every day (and leaving to direct a shoot with it in mere moments).
I don’t use it to get shallow D0F. I use it to get controllable DoF… shallow, deep, or somewhere in between.
It just depends on what you are used to… and having shot a few zillion feet of 35mm back in the day (the “day” ending about 18 months ago, the last time a client asked for 35mm) to me that’s what an image is “supposed” to look like. And now I can get that without noise, without changing mags every three minutes, and spending a couple of bucks to shoot an hour rather than a couple of bucks a second.
I’ve seen great looking video, of course… but it looks like video (even 24p). If you want it to look like film, you can either shoot film, shoot with a big-sensor video camera, or DoF convert. And it seems that these days most of my clients do want it to look like film for their particular projects. Well, pretty much all of them, in fact.
We don’t do any back patting here.
Clients do it to us pretty often, but we don’t. 🙂
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com