Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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The one I bought didn’t have grommets, but did have a sewn-in pipe pocket along one edge (which was fine since that’s how I used it anyway). It would be easy enough to fix that with a ten-buck grommet kit from Home Depot.
I was pretty dumbfounded at the quality of it… very nice and heavy cotton muslin and perfectly dyed. We bought it just for a temporary setup, but it’s actually nicer than the black cloth cyc we have in the studio permanently installed around two sides of the stage. I might just buy a couple more and swap them out.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I think those pieces recommended by Matthews would work. My only negative thoughts would be that it is cobbling several pieces together that keep getting your camera farther and farther from the pipe. Should work, though.
And yeah, I’d still attach it to the ceiling. But that’s me. Easy of course in a studio space, I understand though that if doing a temporary set-up in a room in a home that is used for other things, there’s a different set of considerations.
As for buying a cheeseplate… I really don’t know, other than to just see what is out there… maybe from Filmtools or whomever. If I was going that route I’d honestly just make my own. I’d buy a piece of aluminum stock (probably from Aircraft Spruce, my favorite source for all that kind of stuff), cut it to the exact size needed and drill and tap just the holes I needed exactly where I needed them. That might be easy beans for you… if not and that is outside the scope of your comfort zone (or tools that you have), a machine shop could make it easily.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Not totally sure why paper won’t work or is impractical… it’s definitely the way I would go. You said a that was a “waste,” but a roll of seamless is probably far the least expensive and most flexible of the solutions that I can think of. You could put a white roll and a black roll on a background roller on the ceiling, even swap others out if needed. Seamless paper is dirt cheap, disposable, swappable, etc…
BUT, you said that you don’t want to do that for whatever reasons, and I respect that.
The only other thing I can readily think of is just a standard pop-up collapsible background….
https://www.amazon.com/Fancierstudio-Collapsible-Backdrop-backdrop-background/dp/B0047FF13U
…which would seem to be fine since you said this was for 1-2 talking heads. But then again, you were asking about pull-down shades that were twelve feet wide, so it’s probably nowhere near big enough if you are trying to cover that kind of area (most seamless is not that wide, either… 10′ wide is the norm).
For black you could just get a large grommeted backdrop and put it up as needed, keep hooks in the wall to hang the grommets on. White would be harder, since unlike black, wrinkles would matter… You can get a 10×20′ cloth backdrop very cheaply, especially on eBay. I bought one for next to nothing last year and was really surprised at the quality of it… even just how they could sell that much cloth that cheaply….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Couldn’t make a guess about the D810, not really familiar with that camera (I’m totally a Canon guy, for both stills and video). But I’m going to assume it’s a modestly-sized DSLR, so I’m sure it’s a safer bet than the C100.
That one from Adorama looks to be a steel pin… but I’ll freely admit that I purely base that on the color in the picture.
I only would be a little concerned because I did once have the threaded part on brass pin exactly like that break off… but it did have a fair bit of stress on it, I think probably more than you are putting on it. Mine was used to attach a grip head to the speed ring of a fairly large soft box. Brass is very soft, though… compared to steel.
Unlike the C300 which has both 1/4″ and 3/8″ receivers on the bottom, the C100 only has one receiver… but it can be either 1/4″ or 3/8″… it just depends on which plate you install on the bottom, your camera should have come with both. I think I’d put the 3/8″ plate on, I think it would be a little more reliable combo in that position.
If you swap that to the 3/8″ plate, you can use a 3/8″ to baby pin like this…
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/644304-REG/Arri_570113_Baby_Pin_5_8_with.html
I’ll admit though that pin has very long threads on it… it might bottom out before it fully seats in the camera. Instead I’d go with this dual pin that has both 1/4″ and 3/8″ threads, I have a couple of them, I think. Plus it’s a third the price…
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1046027-REG/tether_tools_rs465_rock_solid_dual_5_8.html
It’s a special order though, 7-10 days for delivery.
Also, you can always take the top handle (and hey, even the side grip) off the camera to save a little forward weight. Not much, but every little bit will probably help.
And hey… what’s a little hole in the ceiling. You’re making art, man.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah, with a DSLR I think that would be fine, but the C100 is a different animal.
I think technically it should work, but I too would be a little concerned about all that weight on just the little 1/4″ receiver on the camera. If you were using the 3/8″ receiver, I’d feel a little bit better about it, but not a great deal. I use a Zacuto base plate with my similarly-sized C300 and have no qualms about pointing it straight down on a tripod head… but I’m attaching to the plate with both the 1/4″ and 3/8″ receivers simultaneously.
You could attach the camera using both mounting holes to a plate, what they call a “cheese plate” as it has bunches of holes in it, and then attach the cheese plate to the Mafer clamp… or even two Mafter clamps on the same rail. My other concern is sometimes you’ll find baby pins made of brass, and those are kinda soft and I’d almost be worried about the threaded part of the pin shearing off, especially the quarter-inch version. If yours is made of steel, stainless or otherwise, it’s probably fine.
Honestly what I would do myself is not a very elegant solution, but it’s dirt cheap and would work about as well or better than anything else. I’d put a hook or screw eye in the ceiling right above the camera, and run a safety line or cord down from the ceiling to the camera handle, just to take some of the weight and stress off of it. With a setup like that, I wouldn’t worry about the camera one bit.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Great stuff, wish I wasn’t on the wrong coast.
Love the wood and rusty bolt.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Is this a daytime robbery? I’m assuming so since you said “robbery,” indicating there would be people there. If so, I think the GoPros would be fine.
We’ve done some work with companies that do security monitoring, and in this day it still dumbfounds me how bad the video quality is on even high-end security systems (and so many still B/W), so you’ll definitely want to degrade the footage… and maybe add fake supers indicating camera numbers, time of day, etc., maybe even timecode.
On the other hand, if it is not a robbery but a burglary, nighttime, no people there, then a lot of security cameras have that night vision IR look… so you might want to simulate that.
One easy and cheap way make the footage truly look like security cameras is to, well, shoot with security cameras. I wanted a better way to monitor and control all the Halloween goings-on that I stage at my house every year, so last year I hit eBay and bought a security system… which included FOUR little IR HD cameras, for EIGHTY BUCKS. And the system will record files to a USB drive. And yeah, it looks exactly like security camera footage… because it is…
Here’s the one that I bought (and it’s awesome), which now seems to be 10 bucks more…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/4CH-960H-H-264-DVR-Video-Recorder-Outdoor-Waterproof-CCTV-Security-Camera-System/252217340187Another thing, many WebCams are also IR cams for low-light shooting, which would give you that same look.
And I know… I was being a picky grammarian about robbery vs. burglary…. a holdover from my days as a TV news guy a zillion years ago…
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Ah, I’d love to… but I think my film shootin’ days are long in the past.
Although just this morning I did discover four big cans of 5279 in the refrigerator… in a bottom drawer that I hadn’t even opened in God knows how long. I never liked using that stock because it was so grainy, but sometimes we had to. It’s amazing how things change, “back in the day” we thought 500 ASA was so smoking fast and 50 or 100 ASA was more the norm… now my camera’s default speed is 850 ISO, and will go up to 80,000.
Kids today are so spoiled……
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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But Rick… wouldn’t that give you a very stuttery look since with the duplicated frames your playback would effectively be 3fps?… seems to me that while you’d get a big amount of motion blur in individual frames, it would still be just like watching a very fast slide show. Maybe I’m wrong about that.
The thing is, unless one just WANTED to do it all in-camera just for the sake of being able to say you did it old-school in camera, that’s definitely not the easiest way to go about it. Personally I’d probably shoot it at maybe half speed with a wide open shutter, and during the phase of re-interpreting it back to 24fps I’d use Twixtor or some other interpolation plugin to recreate the “missing” frames… and then I’d ghost a couple (or more) layers on top of the original footage, each successive layer shifted forward by one frame. I think that would give a fairly close approximation of the target look.
Probably several different ways to do this….
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Hi Charlie…
I appreciate your inititive, and I applaud ANYone who who shoots real film (I don’t anymore, but even after a zillion feet of 35mm I still love film and would love to shoot it again)…
Unfortunately though, shooting at an uber-slow shutter speed with your Bolex is not going to give you that “smeary” effect. Yes, your exposure will be fairly slow (1/16th of a second if you are shooting 8fps), but that’s not really really slow, not slow enough to get real exposure smears like that. More importantly, though, the frame rate is not going to give you that look… I think the end result, played back at normal speed, will only succeed in getting you fast motion… the action in your film will be 3x as fast as it was in real life. Now, if you want to play it back at actual shooting speed (using your footage at 8fps), you might get a little bit of motion smear, but it wouldn’t be too much, and obviously the footage would have a very choppy look.
How to do this? Hmmm… good question, without an easy answer. One starting point would be to ditch the Bolex and shoot with a camera that has a variable shutter (the Bolex shutter is fixed), and shoot with it absolutely wide open. That would give you a bit more smear. But it still wouldn’t give you that much… it’s technically impossible for a shutter speed to be greater than the frame rate, so the theoretical maximum shutter speed when shooting 24fps is 1/24th of a second… and even that is not really possible even with a variable-shutter camera because obviously there has to be time when the shutter is closed in order to advance the film.
I think you are looking at a post job here, not an in-camera job. I can think of several different ways to somewhat replicate that effect fairly easily in post, but I’m just not sure it’s possible to do purely in camera.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
