[Todd Terry]

Well, I’m embarrassed a little to admit this in a place where the real lighting designers and DPs can see it…

But… yes, while you can buy “real” China Balls made for photographic purposes (Chimera, etc., makes them), you mentioned the Pier One paper Chinese Lanterns… and those are exactly what I use.

Even the very biggest one is something like 10 bucks… are fairly durable… and when they wear out just throw it away and buy a new one the next time you need it….

Here’s an old behind-the-scenes photo montage that I uploaded to the COW years ago about another project, you can see the China Ball in a few of the shots…

For the lamp I use these bigass flo tubes… I mean BIG ones…

These are 200w mogul base tubes… now, that is not 200 “equivalent” watts the way you’ll often see flos listed, they are 200 actual watts, so they are very bright. I have them in both daylight and tungsten temps. They aren’t wildly expensive, it’s been a long time since I bought any but if I recall they are less than a hundred bucks. Now, these are NOT true photographic lights but I was pleased to find that the CRIs on them are more than high enough to be adequate. Of course I did have to rig up my own socket/mount and all that jazz because the Pier One lantern is literally a paper ball on a wire frame and not much else… but it was no big deal.

Gives a very pleasing light.

T2

—–ADDENDUM——

I forgot I had a behind-the-scenes video from this same shoot here on the COW… you can see the China ball in action, it was on a long strut on the dolly that floated it along with the talent….

Of course there were bunches of other lighting instruments in this scene, but the China ball was the key. If you’re curious enough to see that finished spot, this is it….from a few years ago…

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

[Todd Terry]

[Terry Leahy] “The backlights should take care of themselves…”

Perhaps… but don’t underestimate that. I’ll often tell people to watch for the full-length head-to-toe shot when someone is standing on stage on a well-lit show like The Tonight Show or The Late Show. Look at the floor, invariably the strongest (sometimes only) shadow you’ll see is in front of the talent… meaning the brightest and/or hardest light is the backlight. The “little light wall” might not be enough to give you a true decent backlight with a good hair rim, shoulder spillage, etc., that will give you good separation from the background. If possible I’d dedicate at least a small fresnel instrument to each talent for backlighting, that’d do the job nicely.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’ve got to make this super fast (late for being on location) or I would write more… but….

For something super fast/easy/cheap in a semicircle (or full circle) roundtable situation like this, I’ve often started with a large China Ball hanging directly over the table and just barely up out of frame as my key. It gives nice soft flattering lighting on everyone, since it is both soft and equidistant from all your talent. Then I usually did individual backlights for each talent, and sometimes that was enough and good to go.

It’s not the most interesting lighting, but it’s fast and easy and everyone looks pretty. When you have a bunch of people in frame and restrictions of space/time/budget and all that jazz, sometimes you don’t have the luxury of making the plot interesting for everyone, so this is a pretty fast-n-easy way to go.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

That should fix you up, if that’s what your problem is you’ll find it easy to solve and be kicking yourself as you said you have been struggling with this for years.

Note that clearscan mode is good for all kinds of things, not just lights. It’s actually probably most commonly used when you need to shoot monitors, television screens, and things like that. But with the prevalence of LED lighting now it’s being used a lot more for flicker issues (note that is the case with AC-powered LED lights… with DC-powered ones like the ones we use, there is no flicker).

Also note that clearscan may not solve all of your problems, but only some of them. It is conceivable that you are in a situation where all of the lighting sources themselves are not in sync. You will see this a lot in rooms that have multiple monitors in them…the monitors might not all have the same refresh rate so that when you have your camera set to eliminate the flicker in one of them, it doesn’t fix the others (or even makes them worse), and vice versa. With lighting that is usually not an issue if you are all self-contained in a single building or room where the power is all the same… but it does happen. I was shooting at an event last December with hundreds of Christmas trees in a park downtown, and almost all of them had LED lighting. However, generators were used throughout the park so there were multiple power sources all operating independently. I had several shots where I could adjust some of the trees to be flicker-free, yet others remained. And if I adjusted for those flickering ones, then the original ones went back to flickering. It forced me to adjust my framing and to find the best balance for some of the setups.

Happy shooting….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

If your flicking is due to shutter speed issues caused by non-continuous lighting (such as flo, LED, HMI, neon, basically anything except tungsten lighting), then yes… tweaking the shutter speed is what you need.

Instead of shooting in seconds’ increments (i.e. 1/48th) or shutter degrees (i.e., 180°) you need to be shooting in “clear scan” mode. I don’t know about the 5D, but the C100 will almost most definitely have a clearscan mode (I shoot with the C300 and it does, so I’m just assuming the C100 does). You’ll find that in the menu under “shutter.” When you are in clearscan mode, you don’t dial in the shutter speed represented in fractions of a second, you dial in in tiny minuscule increments expressed in hertz (such as 60.146) or 59.244) so that you can set it at the very exact same rate at which the lights are phasing. Run the dial up and down and you can very easily and quickly see at what point the flickering starts and stops. Easy breezy.

The only problem I ever have with clearscan mode is simply forgetting that I’m in it, and forgetting to change back to the normal fractional mode when I am finished with it. That’s not really a problem, of course, but it does give me a shutter speed that is just a tiny bit higher than I would normally like, which slightly affects both motion blur and exposure levels. So… remember to switch it back off when you are no longer in those lighting conditions.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Yeah this is obviously a sleazeball…

As Mark said she does own the physical pictures themselves, but she certainly doesn’t own the right to use them without permission since your people appear in them.

Not surprising that she is trying to use them… if she is brazen and fraudulent enough to try to con people out of money, then I’m sure illegally using a photo or video doesn’t bother her in the least.

At the very minimum this deserves an immediate Cease and Desist notice to them… if that doesn’t work within 24 hours, then bring out bigger legal guns.

There’s not even the remotest gray area about this. They clearly and patently cannot do what they are doing.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

This is not exactly applicable to your camera, as I use the C300PL, not the C100… but it might give you some ideas as to what’s out there…

I usually try to use a real external HD monitor when I’m shooting something critical, but when I can’t and have to rely on the LCD screen I’ll often use a viewfinder loupe, made by Hoodman…

If I use that combined with focusing aids (usually monochrome + peaking + edge detection) then I can usually ensure razor focus even without a monitor… fortunately the C300’s LCD has (I think) 900 lines of resolution, so it’s one of the rare on-camera TTF screens that is good enough to focus by.

I often like shallow DoFs so I often shoot wide wide open (and for most of my primes that’s f/1.3) so sometimes my depth of field is really miniscule and I too have really had to work at good focus… and the loupe helps a lot.

The Hoodman loupes aren’t perfect, and I had to rig up that mounting band (two elastic hair bands sewn together). The really good ones are the Diety Mira and the one from Zactuo (especially the Mira), but they are a tiny bit pricey (about $700 and almost $500). I’m not usually one to skimp on gear but since I only use a loupe relatively rarely I’m making do with the one that’s a third the price.

I’m not sure if any of that is applicable/transferrable to your situation with the C100… but maybe it is, or will at least spark some ideas.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I have to say I’m a little surprised at the answer….

I had a minute to kill so I ripped that video and threw it on a timeline. After playing with a couple of speeds I found that the most of the slow-mo footage looked to be perfectly “normal” speed if played back at 150%.

So… that tells us it was shot at 36fps… or thereabouts.

I’m pretty surprised, to my eyeball I would have guessed the frame rate to be much higher than that… so I have to reluctantly recant my original guess that it was much slower slow-mo than I first thought.

Oh well, live and learn…..

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I hate to argue with a sage like Rick (because I almost never can successfully), but in this case I will…

If you overcrank yet still shoot with a “normal” frame rate (say, 1/48th) you will get blurry smeary slow-mo. The brain needs just a certain amount of motion blur to interpret images as smooth, any more or any less causes problems.

You will not get the staccato effect by shooting at a higher (appropriate) shutter speed for slow mo. Think of it this way, if you were shooting in real time a subject that was actually moving slowly, you would get much less motion blur in an individual frame than if your subject was moving quickly. That’s what shooting at a higher shutter speed for overcranking basically simulates.

Or think about it this way… us old timers like me and Rick used to shoot film. If you were shooting 24fps in a camera with a non-variable 180° shutter, your shutter speed would be 1/48th. BUT, if you overcranked to 60fps, your shutter speed would automatically be 1/120th… there’s no changing that even if you wanted to (with a fixed-shutter camera… and even with a variable-shutter film camera you can only change that a little). And yet the footage looks “right.”

Rick’s argument makes a bit of sense in theory, but in practicality you need the “right” shutter speed for the corresponding frame rate.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well firstly, I wouldn’t call that “slight” slo-mo by a long stretch. I’d say it’s pretty significant slo-mo. To me “slight” is shooting at maybe 30fps or 36fps… which gives you just that barely-slow-motion look that is prevalent today.

The obvious (and slightly snarky, I realize) answer is to just run some tests. Shoot footage at various frame rates and see what results you like. Also, it’s easy enough to rip that Vimeo video, throw it on a timeline, and adjust the speed until the action looks “normal.” If that video is the look you are going for, then that will tell you at approximately what fps the original footage was shot. Some of it didn’t look all that slow, but then again some flying birds looked pretty darn slow so that leads me to believe the fps was fairly high.

So, just test it. Oh, and remember that when shooting at higher-than-normal fps you should shoot with an appropriate shutter speed for your new frame rate (the formula that you’d likely want to use is “one over twice the frame rate”… ergo, if you shoot at 48fps you’d want a shutter speed of about 1/96th… at 60fps you want 1/120th, etc.).

T2

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