[Todd Terry]

Probably about half of our work is for ad agencies, about half directly for clients.

Here, unlike media outlets, we do not have an agency rate.

I think as a general rule agencies mark up our work about 15% (in fact I know that is the case for some of them). Others probably mark it up a lot more. I suspect one agency marks it up a great deal… as there have been some commercial clients that still use an agency for ad placement but now come to us directly for both creative and production as they were making such huge middle-man payments. Conversely, I know that in some (fairly rare) cases where we had low production costs on a simple project but it was one with a huge media buy, an agency has either not marked the production up at all or even subsidized it, as it was a tiny portion of a big media budget.

Others may do it differently, but here our rates are what they are no matter who the client is.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

For what it’s worth, this just now happened to me again. I could not access the COW, trying different browsers, two different ISPs, and just for the heck of it trying with my phone…

But when I tried now again about 10 minutes later, seemed to connect fine…

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

We shoot tons and tons of bottles, as one of our commercial clients is a bottled water company.

Biggest help is knowing exactly how to light, position instruments, and being aware of not only reflections but backgrounds behind see-thru items… but above that, I use dulling spray on virtually every bottle we shoot. Since it can be permanent, I don’t use “real” wipe-off dulling spray, but rather just Krylon matte-finish clear spray from the hardware store. A very light spritz will take off almost all of the hard reflections and dry within five seconds. A heavier spray will give the bottle a more frosted look if you want it to appear cold, which we often do.

Another issue we have is with the labels that are on the bottles… the real labels are printed on some kind of very slick polymer which is very shiny, so we often use fake ones. Since our art director also did their product packaging and logo design, we have ready access to the elements so we just print our own labels on matte paper and stick them to the bottles. In some instances, we have had her design very slightly simplified versions of the labels to use for photography, eliminating some minor elements (i.e. product size and things like that) that do not read well on camera.

If you really want a bottle to look cold (which is also good at killing reflections), we use Ice Powder from Trengove Studios. It’s a powder that you mix with a bit of water which becomes this gelatinous slush, and will adhere to bottles and glasses and look like icy frost… and it will last for hours even under hot lights. It especially sticks well if you frost the bottles with the Krylon spray first which gives it a better surface to grab. We actually use a number of their ice and frost products, and all of them (with the exception of steam chips) work very very well and look completely realistic…. https://www.trengovestudios.com/photoeffects.htm

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Oh no, the Kinor hasn’t been made in many many years. Both the Kinor and the Konvas were cold-war era cameras… and were basically Russian clones of other cameras (for example, one of the Kinor 35mm models is an almost-identical copy of the MovieCam SuperAmerica… you can even swap parts and mags).

That being said, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to buy a “new” one. I owned a Konvas 7M 35mm camera (and used it tons) that was already 20+ years old when I bought it. But, it was brand new and I was the first owner. All of the components were still wrapped in that weird brown wax paper that was common to the way they shipped new Russian cameras. A clean and lube, and it was a brand-new old camera.

One of the best things about that era of Russian cameras is the glass… both the Kinors (16mm and 35mm) and the Konvas (35mm) often come with LOMO lenses (if you are lucky and find a complete kit…body, motor, mags, and sometimes glass). People go crazy for the Russian lenses (both LOMO and Foton)… they are really beautiful (the look of the LOMOs in particular is very Cooke-like). In years past you could get them dirt cheap… but so many people are using them on big-sensor video cameras now that the market glut has really dried up and prices gone way up. I still shoot with a Foton 37-140mm in the rare instances that I use a zoom lens.

You can learn more about the Kinor and Konvas cameras at the CommieCam users group at konvas.org. Fun people there. Many of us in that group have bought equipment and cameras from the same guy, Rafael Pankratau from Belarus. He’s one of the really trustworthy dealers of vintage Russian cine gear. I don’t know what he has in stock these days but he’s at rafcamera.com. Great guy, and super helpful. He’s even custom-machined parts for me and got them to me from half a world away within a week or so… and dirt cheap.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Thanks, Tim… yeah the preference does seem to be sticking now across different computers/browsers/ISPs, which it didn’t before. I’ll consider myself happy about it.

My only complaint now would be that I often visit the COW before actually logging in (I’ll only usually bother to log in if I’m going to post), so I’m stuck with the default view until I sign in.

I can live with that, especially if everyone else in the world prefers it that way. Well, except Zelin, who I saw was bitching about it in another forum… but then again, I noticed the sun did rise today. 🙂

Thanks Tim!…

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Nevermind… might have figured it out (without knowing what I did).

I could never get the preference-change to “stick” when changing it in my profile before, but right now it seems to be sticking.

Now back to yelling at kids for straying into my yard….

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’ve been waiting to hear from someone who has used the Digital Bolex first hand… it seems very cool. I’ve been watching that since it was just an idea and a Kickstarter campaign quite a long while ago now. Not that anyone should care but it’s not a “real” Bolex, of course… the couple that cooked it up just licensed the Bolex name… but it seems to do some pretty cool stuff.

And yeah, I loved the Bolex Pro… and yes, it was a TANK. I never weighed it because I was always afraid to find out for sure. I really loved that camera. It was designed for TV newsgathering, but in unfortunate timing that was right when video first came into play for TV news, so the camera died and only 300 were ever built. It was awesome though. I did hate to sell it, but a documentary filmmaker actually offered a fair bit more than I paid for it myself 10 years earlier (it would be a great doc camera)… and considering I hadn’t used it at all in a couple of years I let it go. It was flawless and whisper quiet… even though it wasn’t really technically a blimped camera you had to be in a totally dead quiet interior to hear it running at all, and even then just barely a little hum from the mag. Beautiful images, too… made a lot of really pretty commercials with it for sure. Now you have me missing it.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I’d be reluctant to recommend a specific camera, since I don’t know what your needs are, what you are capable of, how much you want to spend, or features you need, etc.

Just do some research, and see what’s available on the used market. Quick ones that come to mind are the Arri S and the Russian Kinor 16. They are both plentiful, inexpensive now, and built like tanks.

When I shot 16mm I primarily used the Bolex Pro 16. If you can find one they are worth looking at. Not many people know this camera at all as it was very rare, they only made 300 of them but they are GREAT cameras… and pretty wild as they looked like an Aaton but were designed by Arri yet made by Bolex. They look like a giant version of the Aaton A-minima. GREAT features, coax magazine that you unbelievably can remove in mid-roll… total auto-threading that actually works… built-in motor so you don’t have to add one… super quiet and crystal sync at 24fps and 25fps… and a bunch of other features. The only downsides are it is big and heavy (although does look impressive!), and it came with a proprietary lens mount so you had to use one of the two lenses it came with (a 12-120 Angenieux, or the more desirable Schneider-Kreuznach zoom, which is the one that I had). Both lenses are fully servo controlled, zoom/focus/iris. It was just a great camera. I do see that Visual Products has one for sale now for $3200…

https://visualproducts.com/storeProductDetail02.asp?productID=665&Cat=17&Cat2=31

I often had even veteran cinematographers ask me “What the heck is that?” It was a great camera though.

The one linked above has the Angenieux, but is still a good lens. That package is a fraction of the price that I paid for mine (and a lot less than I sold mine for, too). But that was almost 10 years ago that I sold it, when film was still a little bit in use.

As as for using Resolve, your choice of film camera makes absolutely no difference in what editing platform you are using. I will note though that even though it can kinda do it, I’ve never really heard of anyone using Resolve to edit. Resolve is super powerful, but I’ve never known anyone to use it for anything other than color grading… which is what it is made for. I guess stranger things have happened.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

I really can’t recommend any particular company.

We’ve only had it done once, it worked but it was also widly expensive. But then again, we were having an entire RAID recovered… maybe a card won’t be so bad.

We got a recommendation from the local people who do our computer service… you might try that route.

T2

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

[Todd Terry]

Well my first (and the obvious) question is, why would you ever use the C100 to initialize a card for the 5D? Don’t do that. Initialize the card in the camera it is intended for. Honestly I’m surprised that it recorded at all… I can’t think of any reason not to use the camera that will be shooting on the card.

Ok, now that that is out of the way…

Two questions… firstly, can you see the footage on the card when it is in the camera? Or do you get error messages there, too?

And secondly, do you get this error message when you first put the card into a card reader? Or do you get this within the Canon XF Utility? If you are not using the XF Utility, try that. I’m not super hopeful that will work, but at least it is worth a try.

Barring that, you will have to go the data-recovery route. Some Googling may lead you to some recovery systems that you can buy and try yourself, but a more likely-successful route will be to send it out to a professional data recovery company to get that data back.

T2

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