[Todd Terry]

Google “front surface mirror” and you’ll find a lot of resources and vendors.

Honestly, I wouldn’t use stands… I’d just hang it from the ceiling or grid or whatever you have. That will be a lot more stable and keep valuable floor space clear. Buy or build a wooden frame for the mirror, one trip to Lowes or Home Depot to get some various hardware (hooks, wire, etc.), and you should be in business. A hooks-and-eyes arrangement can give you a sturdy semi-permanent setup that should be stable, yet easy enough to put up and take down on occasion.

If you want to go the stand route, I don’t think this is a job for lightweight aluminum stands… C-stands (and sandbags) I think would be the bare minimum. Once you buy some real C-stands, you will curse your aluminum tripod-style stands. Don’t get cheap or knock-off ones though, get “real” ones, such as those from Matthews.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

I should add that if this camera isn’t dedicated solely to this shot and it is needed for other shots too (and you don’t want to do a lot of mounting and re-mounting), you can always go the old cooking-school route of suspending an angled mirror above the shooting area instead, and shooting into that.

A front-surface mirror is ideal, but you can probably get away with a regular one. And obviously you will have to flip the image in post to correctly re-orient it, but it frees up the camera.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Should be easy enough to mount a beam of some kind (maybe just a 2×4 stud) at the right height across the area… either supported by large stands, or even homemade supports since it is semi-permanent in a home studio (i.e., pipes set in concrete buckets, etc.). Depending on the size of the room and the permanence needed it could even be attached to the walls or dropped down from the ceiling.

In this beam drill an appropriate hole (either 1/4″ or 3/8″ depending on your head) and use a bolt to mount your head horizontally.

There are scads of ways to do this, but this is one easy “Home Depot way”… shouldn’t be too hard, especially with such lightweight cameras.

Let us know what you come up with.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yes, Nick… yes you do.

Funny, though.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Now now, Tim….

You’ve known me long enough to know that I only hang out with the big shots….

Sometime I’ll tell you about spending the night in Frank’s penthouse suite on the “Chairman’s Floor” at the Golden Nugget… God knows how many square feet, ’bout four bedrooms and twice that many baths, bar, grand piano in the living room where I kept imagining Sammy playing, anything that wasn’t marble was either mirrored or gold, terrace balconies with hot tubs and unbelievable views…

Ok ok… Sinatra had already gone on to his reward by then, and we only got the suite because we were a late midnight check-in and the place was overbooked and had accidentally given our room away, and those were the only accommodations left and we had to be out by 10am…. but still……..

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Yes, I knew it would be expensive…. actually that is a fair bit cheaper than I figured it would be, although that size available from B&H isn’t wide enough to be super practical. I would say that if 4x4s are available, as the blog says, that would be a minimum, and even those would be useful only a fraction of the time.

I do think it is interesting that in the blog they also talked about using it on a light source, with the author saying “HMIs, which can never dim, have a way to dim now.” I’m not sure where the author gets that… most if not all modern HMIs with electronic ballasts will indeed dim (I know that mine do). Many will dim to 50% and of course all can have their outputs dimmed with conventional wire scrims.

Now if they made this stuff in a big wide roll…….

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Never heard of that… but it does sound like a fairly semi-genius idea.

I’d be very curious to see if anyone else has heard of this, or done it.

Seems to me that if the gel is readily available… there’s no need for a “kit” containing both the gel and the lens polarizer… especially considering there is such a wide range of filter sizes and types that would need to be covered (for example, I would need square 4×4 polarizers for my matte box, like most cine lenses mine have no filter threads).

Interested to hear…..

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Well, I think I’ve tried them all, from the free to quite expensive.

There are a lot of really REALLY useless ones out there (even some they charge a lot for). To me the only one that is halfway worth having is the free “Prompter for Android”….

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.georgesdick.prompter

It works pretty well. We use it with two identical Samsung tablets, one as the prompter, one as the controller. We load the text into the controller tablet, which slaves (and reverses) to the prompter tablet which slides into the prompter housing I built (I need to do a little how-to video on this which I have promised for a long time, it’s a full-blown prompter that can be set up in less than four seconds… literally).

The developer is a friendly guy (somewhere in Europe, don’t remember exactly where… Denmark, maybe), who will promptly answer emails and readily takes suggestions for improvements and features.

The app is free… EXCEPT… you have to purchase an app upgrade if you want to use two tablets and slave them together like we do (via Bluetooth), and you have to purchase the upgrade for BOTH devices. But… it’s something like $1.95, if I recall. But if for some reason you do a force stop or clear the cache or uninstall and re-install, then you have to purchase it again. We’ve done that a couple of times… but again, it’s only like two bucks.

I’d say it works pretty darn perfectly, EXCEPT that I wish the speed control was a little easier and more intuitive. I need to make some suggestions to the guy about that, but haven’t. Also, if you don’t know what you are doing it’s easy for the speeds of your devices to get out of sync (the key is to NEVER change or even TOUCH the speed control on the “prompter” device, always just launch it and leave it as default, ONLY change speeds on the “controller” device… and then you’ll always be in sync).

You can also, say, use a tablet as the prompter and your Android phone as the controller (we’ve done this), but to make sure both are in sync you really are best having two identical screen sizes (even better if you have identical devices like we do… the tablets we have for prompting are identical, except we bought one black one and one white one so we could easily tell which is which, we always use the white one as the controller).

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Just an update, in case anyone was interested….

A tech with the computer company that built this machine was in today, prodding and poking around for a long time, checking drivers, trying this and that, all to no avail for quite a while.

It was then finally determined that of all the various things they did to upgrade the computer, that the video card (replacing the Nvidia Quadro with Invidia Quadro M4000) might be the culprit…. and that the new card wasn’t happy with Premiere, Matrox, nor was allowing GPU Acceleration with the Mercury Playback Engine. The new card was removed, the old card was put back in, and voilà, the system now works as it should.

At least so far there have been no crashes, the windows are now working right with none of the weirdness that we experienced earlier, renders are now fast again, and basically all that we hoped the upgrade would bring.

Since apparently this system didn’t need a new video card (and in fact suffered greatly from it), I asked the tech guy why then was that suggested, right off the bat. I could see him searching for an answer for a moment, and then said “I think this is one of those times when our past experience failed us,” and admitted that the new card was expected to improve performance, and that no one there had suspected that it would be incompatible. He also admitted that while the system was “fully checked” when on the bench in their shop, that basically consisted of just launching programs… no one had actually tried to use it as we would.

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Hopefully the good times will keep rollin’…

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Todd Terry]

Hi Vince…

Thanks for the observations. I’ll reiterate that I am not a computer guy in even the slightest sense, but I can say what I know in re your questions and comments.

They definitely did not replace the motherboard. It wasn’t even suggested, so I’m assuming that was not a concern of theirs. I have no idea about reconfiguring the BIOS. That’s Greek to me. There was not a clean install, the old SSD system drive was just cloned over to the new one. At least I’m assuming that’s the case, once booted up the upgraded system looked/contained everything exactly as before, we did not have to restore any files or reinstall any of the various software, plug-ins, or anything that had been added to the machine. As stated in the original post, the machine runs Windows 7.

I understand even the most robust computers may struggle with 4K a bit. That’s not a huge concern nor the primary reason we upgraded it. We’re just shooting a bit of 4K now and it would be nice. Working with proxy files is fine by me, but before the upgrade our machines struggled to even make those. All said, 4K is going to be a very minor issue, not overly concerned with getting a machine that can handle that flawlessly.

What we are concerned with is that plain ol’ everday 1080 editing is much more problematic than before. Previously, it wasn’t really an issue, our suites handle 1080 just fine and pretty much in real time, it’s just that the systems seemed to gradually be getting a tiny bit more buggy which led to the upgrade… if you can call it that. It’s simply not working nearly as well as before, it was definitely a giant step backward.

These machines are aging a little and I realize some would consider them already to be dinosaurs in the computer world… but we plopped down about $30K for both of them three years ago and would love to get a little more life out of them.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com