Todd Terry
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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Oh gosh Abraham… I couldn’t say when. I don’t think it’s happened in, oh, probably at least a couple of weeks. Maybe a month. But it has been happening for a long time with regularity.
It’s not a big deal for me, rarely do I have a “posting emergency” haa… and the problem always resolves itself after a while.
OH!… I did just think of something that I completely forgot… I do remember one time when I couldn’t connect that I whipped out my phone and checked the site, and couldn’t connect that way either. I just assumed the COW was down for a minute for some reason or other. That was quite a while back, though, hence my not remembering that.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I’m very late to the party here but I’ll note that it happens to me fairly frequently, too. I’ll be on the COW, either reading, or just surfing, or posting, and notice I will lose contact. A little while later (an hour or less) and the COW is back.
I’ll usually notice it when I get an email about a COW thread, and then when clicking on the link to enter the forum it will be dead. OR, when writing a response to someone, sometime between reading their submission and when I click “Post” it has lost its way.
Switching between multiple computers does not help (I still have contact with the rest of the WWW, just not the COW). We also have two separate ISPs here (our regular ISP is cable, and we have DSL through AT&T as our emergency backup). If I push the button in the server room to switch to the backup ISP, it doesn’t change the situation. I’ve also had the same issue when accessing the COW at home.
I don’t know what the issue is, but I don’t think it’s anywhere in our building. On the upside, t least the trouble is usually short-lived.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah I was crazy with them for a while. When I was shooting a lot of 35mm I used to have the colorist telecine the footage all straight… then do another pass with all the footage canted a bit right, then another canted left. Voilà!… instant full-resolution Dutch angles, which you really couldn’t do in post back in the standard-def days without losing too much res. Easier now in HD or 4K.
There’s another cinematographer in our area of the country (who used to be a COW regular, though I haven’t seen him in a while) who was even more extreme about it than me. I swear he shot almost nothing but dutch angles… and extreme ones, I bet some were almost 45°. I really learned that when a client give me some footage he had shot for them to use on another project. It was impossible to intercut with my new boring-straight-and-level stuff.
Right now I’m in my “arcing dolly” phase, which I use a lot for talking heads, etc. We had a slider company make us a curved one to our specs with exactly the same radius as Matthews curved track, so I can do short dolly arcs infinitely easier/faster than laying real track. I probably use it too much.
We’ll see what I get obsessed with next…..
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah I definitely don’t see the Steadicam and the Movi as interchangeable or replacements for each other. Both good tools, but one’s a wrench and one’s a screwdriver.
All that being said, I really don’t do many stabilized shots anymore. I used to do a lot, but just kinda got out of the habit. I can’t even remember the last time the Steadicam case was cracked open. Wait… yes I do, and I was shooting film with it, so that’s been at least 4 years. Sad.
I do sort of go through these phases of what I like, whether it be framing, camera moves, lighting, whatever. I was looking up some very old footage recently and realized “Ahhh… that was during my ‘Dutch Angle Phase’ that lasted a while.”
What goes around, comes around.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Yeah assumed it was some kind of obvious trolling… the real Dennis Rodman is far too busy hunting and fishing with Kim Jong Un to bother with this. Plus it was one of those “posts without any reason to be posting.”
Nonetheless I did want to mention the CAME-TV stabilizer, I wonder if anyone has actually used it.
I find this whole stabilizer revolution pretty wild. It’s a bit funny that Steadicam had the market so monopolized for so long and it took about 20 years for the first one-tenth-the-price clones of Garrett’s original invention to appear. With the MōVI, it took about 20 minutes.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Haven’t seen it with my own eyes, but there are also the gimbals from CAME-TV, which (as far as I know) seem to be by far the most budget-conscious offerings of all the MōVI-style rigs.
Their smallest DSLR sized rig is less than a grand… up to about $1900 for the biggest.
Honestly I haven’t used any of these really, yet (if you don’t count just running around the studio with one just for fun)… but have a friend with a Ronin and he has found it quite problematic.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Jaeson Jrakman] “I too always thought that shutter speed referred to the 29.97 fps that I normally shoot in.”
Noooo noo…. shutter speed and frame rate are two entirely different things, although some people seem to confuse them.
FRAME RATE is how many frames per second you are shooting. I.e., at your 29.97 rate you are shooting about 30 frames each second.
SHUTTER SPEED is, well, the speed of the shutter… how long the exposure is for each of those frames. The shutter speed could be a lightning-fast 1/1000th of a second, but still shooting at a frame rate of 30fps.
Here’s where it comes from…. in a real film camera (which all this theory is based on) the film is advanced a frame at a time and then stops for the exposure… 24 times every second. The shutter is a spinning half-disc, rotating 24 times a second. Because it is half a circle, half of the revolution it allow the film to be exposed, and half the time it blocks the light so that the film can be advanced to the next frame. Thus, if it is exactly a 180° shutter (which some but not all are), then at a frame rate of 24fps you have a shutter speed of 1/48th of a second, because it exposes the film one half of the time of each revolution. That’s where the calculations come from… and that gives about the right amount of motion blur for our brains to interpret those 24 individual pictures as smooth motion.
Now you can shoot with a faster shutter speed than that, by using a variable shutter in a film camera, or merely cranking up the shutter speed in a digital camera. Crank it up much more than normal and you lose motion blur in each frame, thus giving you what is called the “narrow shutter” look… that choppy strobby effect (see the movie “Gladiator”) that is sometimes used to make action movies look more “actiony.” People also call this the “Private Ryan” effect, as it was used in Saving Private Ryan extensively.
The instructions on page 43 of your manual are all about that shutter speed and have nothing to do with frame rate. Now, 1″ would usually mean a shutter speed of one second (a very long shutter speed if you were taking a still image). I’m guessing that since it is technically impossible to shoot a shutter speed that is longer than the frame rate, that your camera is actually just shooting as slow a shutter speed as it can, and then stopping (which would actually be 1/30th of a second, rather than the real 1-second speed it is set on). At any rate, most people would consider 1/30th much too slow for any footage that contains any action, as the footage would be quite blurry. In that case 1/60th of a second would be the “normal” speed and what would likely look best.
But as I said, all of this should have no effect on your brightening/darkening images and your changing color temps. Without seeing any footage I really can’t hazard any more of a guess as to what is going on there.
By the way, even though you now apparently have your iris set to manual, if you still have any auto-exposure voodoo going on then while the iris is locked the camera might be floating the ISO up and down to compensate for exposure changes. The ISO should be at a fixed setting, too… not on “auto.”
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Can you post a sample? Might clear things up.
What framerate are you shooting? And not sure exactly what you mean by a 1″ shutter speed?
Most of us shoot most “normal” projects at either 24fps (actually usually 23.976fps unless there is a reason to do true 24fps) or 30fps (usually 29.97fps). A “normal” shutter speed is “one over twice the frame rate”… meaning usually when using 24p a normal shutter speed is 1/48th of a second, and for 30p it’s 1/60th. That shouldn’t have any bearing on the effect you are seeing, though… I only mention it because you stated your shutter speed and I wasn’t sure how to interpret what you wrote.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Jaeson Jrakman] ” Under auto, is it adjusting for light conditions as the person moves into frame?”
Absolutely…
Old schoolers like me will tell you to never use auto anything. No matter the camera, I always shoot with everything full manual… color temp, exposure, focus, everything. I don’t really have a choice as I primarily shoot with the C300 and PL-mount cine lenses, so there aren’t any auto features, as is customary for cine-style cameras… but still, that’s my choice and what’s considered the “right” way to do it.
What is happening is when someone walks into frame they are changing the total amount of lightness and darkness in your frame, so the auto-exposure is compensating for it. Same with your color temperature, the new element in your frame is changing the overall color temp of the scene and adjusting the white balance for you.
If you switch both of these features to “manual” it will eliminate your problem.
I’m not knocking auto features, they help a lot of people, but they can also cause problems. For the vast majority of the history of motion picture cameras there were zero auto features… and if you can learn to shoot fully manual, you can shoot anything, and always know exactly what you are going to get.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I’m not adding much new, just to echo Mark’s sentiments that you really need to differentiate the sides of your business…. brides-to-be definitely don’t want a corporate video guy… and a lot of people in the corp would wouldn’t even consider a wedding guy for work. That’s not your fault, of course, it’s somewhat the fault of a lot of people who call themselves video professionals and churn out horrid wedding videos. It has really tainted that market, although one of the best video people I know does mostly weddings (and his videos are great).
If weddings are making you money, I certainly wouldn’t kill that cash cow. Especially since you have a regular “real” job, which I’m assuming is M-F 9-5, or thereabouts. If that’s the case, on the upside that has you working exactly when weddings aren’t happening, thus freeing you up for those. Unfortunately though, those days/times are exactly when corporate video work does happen, so growing that part will be harder.
We’ve found corp work tends to fall in one of two realms… the first is a company that needs some production for something, it’s usually fair-sized budget-wise, we produce something nice and high-end for them, they’re happy, and we never (or rarely) hear from them again. It’s not our fault, or theirs, it’s just that we filled a need they have, and now they don’t have the need anymore.
The other side is companies that we do much lower-budget and lower-end work for, but we do a lot of it, over and over again… because they have continual needs.
We had one Fortune 500 company that we worked for for a few years. Painfully simple and low-end work… little $3K jobs but they kept happening over and over again, every week or two (with almost no heavy lifting, practically trained-monkey work). Unfortunately for us eventually the company was sold to a bigger company, and all their video work was then handled by the “home office” elsewhere. Event though there was nothing creative or artistic about the work, it was definitely a cash cow that we missed.
Those kind are hard to find.
One suggestion would be to ingratiate yourself to and align yourself with advertising agencies. We do mostly TV commercials and the majority of those are through ad agencies…. but even if you don’t want to do commercial work, most agencies also have corporate clients. While we have worked for many corporations directly, just as often (maybe even more so) the corp work we’ve done has been through a company’s ad agency… everything from training videos, to safety videos, marketing reports, PR vids, annual report videos, etc. Ad agencies aren’t just for ads. And if you are really good and make them happy, you can work your way into a really good position with agencies. In our market there are some agencies that mix it up… using different production companies for different jobs. But more often than not people stick with the folks they know and like… with the majority of our agency clients, we do all of their video/film work, whether it be corporate, commercial, web, whatever.
To that end, if you aren’t already a member of your local AdFed, join it… go to their monthly lunches/meetings, network, meet people. On the public relations side you might also get involved with your local public relations council (here in Alabama it’s the PRCA)… the internal marketing people in corporations tend to be more involved with the PRC than with the AdFed, although many are involved in both.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
