“Camcorders”

Back in high school, I decided to get my own video camera. It was my final year of Media, and the Media cameras.. I just didn’t like them. They looked too small. (I had no logical reason at the time, as I had very little camera knowledge). So I shopped around online, looked at all sorts of fancy “camcorders” from Sony, Panasonic, Canon, JVC… There were miniDV cameras, HDD cameras, direct to DVD cameras.. sorting out what I wanted was a great learning experience. I ended up getting a Panasonic NV-GS500 for cheap on eBay.

It was shiny, relatively large, and I’d read it had a big sensor for shooting in low light conditions. Great reasons for buying a camera, I know. But anyway. While shopping around for my camera, I became curious to know.. what was the most expensive video camera out there? You could browse the cameras in certain price brackets, so I went and looked at the $14000+ section, and thought “shit, what an intense camera, and for $14K that must be what professionals use, wow”. I think there was only one camera in the 14,000+ section — a Canon XL-H1, or something like that.

I was incredibly impressed by the number of dedicated buttons, the lens hood that made the lens look huge and intimidating, and the matte black finish.
But now when I think about it, I hate these sorts of cameras. They’re not “point and shoot” cameras by any means, but there’s this horrible emphasis on automated, computerised functions to make things easier.. and the marketing of these cameras can be extremely deceptive. They look like theyr’e on the bleeding edge of camera technology.. space-age submachine gun things.. yet most of this advanced technology simply helps the camera cut corners and interpolate data. If this sounds too general.. I guess I’ll name names. You’ve got the Canon XL-whatevers, and the Sony HVR-Z-whatevers, Panasonic HMC-whatevers… I don’t like them. They occupy this awkward space between consumer camcorders and fully professional cameras, and everyone seems to think that they’ll have “superior resolution” because they look so futuristic and confusing.
What’s not to like? I’ll tell you a few of the things I hate about said cameras.

Sensor size.
They’re all pretty much 1/3″ CCD or CMOS cameras, meaning that the crop factor is huge. You need wide, wide lenses to squeeze a picture onto such a tiny set of sensors. Hence it’s difficult to get a shallow depth of field, hence your video looks even more like ‘video’. What’s worse is that these cameras are usually HD. Squeezing so many pixels onto a small sensor increases noise

Lenses that stop down as you zoom.
Apparently, this has something to do with making zoom lenses more compact. I’m not sure about Canon’s or Panasonic’s lenses, but Sony’s HVR-Z1/Z5 lenses stop down rapidly. The Z5 goes from F1.6 at wide angle to F3.4 at full telephoto… God help you if you’re doing a night shoot with it (I was last week). I guess if you’re going to use the camera with auto-shutter and auto-gain, the massive light loss won’t be as much of an issue, if you’re prepared for your tight shots to be grainy as hell. But for regular, sane people who aren’t going to resort to auto-gain, getting a tight shot could mean completely changing your lighting setup.. massive pain.

Interframe compression
HDV. It’s.. sort’ve HD.. but not. It uses MPEG-2 long-GOP compression, with sprinklings of keyframes and strings of interpolated pictures in between. Now.. I’m currently editing a project in HDV, and it actually looks quite good, but it takes a lot of processor power to work with HDV footage, and your colour correction options are quite limited because you start seeing compression artefacts everywhere. It looks good, providing you don’t mess with it in post, or confuse it by shooting lots of movement or complex detail. HDV chroma subsampling is also terrible.. 4:2:0.. don’t shoot anything red. Red shirts, people under red lights, etc.. it all blows out, looks flat, blocky and extremely saturated.

Auto-anything.
Alright. So it’s not necessarily bad for a camera to have automated exposure software. But they make it so freaking hard to turn off. You switch the camera to “manual”, but that’s not good enough in many cases.. that only toggles autofocus, that sort of thing. To make shutter speed, aperture, and gain fully manual, there’s some other trick you’ve got to pull off.. it’s quite deceptive.

Fake zoom/focus rings.
By “fake”, I mean digital. You can turn the focus ring round and around and around forever, I guess because the ring isn’t mechanically attached to the lens elements.. it controls them indirectly through digital circuits instead. something like that. The point is that these focus rings aren’t designed for focus pulling.. at least, not the Z5. Maybe I was completely tripping, but on the Z5, the sensitivity of the focus ring seemed to change as you moved from wide to telephoto. This meant that accurately marking focus points on the lens never worked.. you crash zoom, focus, mark the focus point, then zoom out and your focus point will be somewhere completely different. wtf.

that’s probably enough complaining for now. my point is.. don’t be fooled by the shininess or the buttons or the price tag.. they’re usable cameras, but there are many many corners cut.

Dangerous ideas

I’ve been reading again.

Paul Wheeler’s book on High Definition Cinematography is a very interesting read because it goes against so much of what I hear about film vs digital. Obviously it’s biased, as it’s a book specifically about digital cinematography, and because Paul Wheeler admittedly prefers the look of digital cinema. But he raises some very interesting points. I’m going to summarise a couple of things that have.. slightly affected my views.

The resolution of the human eye
One minute. 1/60th of 1 degree out of 360. That’s the limit to our perception of visual resolution. Any detail that occupies less than one minute (1/60th of a degree of our field of view) will not be properly resolved by the human eye. Hence there is a point at which individual pixels onscreen cannot be resolved by viewers sitting a certain distance away. Beyond this distance, pixel-based and film-grain-based images will both look seamless because our eye cannot identify individual pixels at that size, density or distance. 1920×1080 images have just enough pixels to pass under this threshold of 1/60th of a 360th when stretched across a large cinema screen, assuming you’re sitting towards the back of the cinema.

Generational loss in replicating film
Film negative captures an incredible amount of detail. Estimates range from 3K to 4K to 6K equivalents and beyond. But what seems extremely scary to me is that in order to distribute your film on a large scale, the conversion from interpositive to internegative to whatever else significantly degrades the resolution of whatever you originally shot. The resolution of 35mm you see in cinemas is apparently estimated at around 1.2K.. 1.4K by more optimistic people. Obviously films shot digitally are still subject to this same degradation when release prints are made for screenings, but there aren’t as many generations, as footage remains free from degradation until after post-production is complete. And, considering the push towards digital projection in cinemas, you could theoretically make a digital film with almost zero degradation throughout the entire process of mass distribution and screening.

Now the question is.. do we *want* to maximise detail in our films? Without thinking, most people are going to say yes. That’s what we’ve spent ages trying to do. Sharper lenses, cleaner film stocks, more pixels, greater resolution… that’s all “progress”. But now.. clean images don’t look “filmic”. They’re harsh, there’s no magic in them, no life, no grain… Maybe we just need some time to acclimatise to the look of digital cinema. Or.. perhaps we decide that we don’t want any more resolution. Maybe 1.4K projections look the best anyway — they’re slightly soft and hence filmic, and you can see grains of cellulose dancing around.. etc. If so, we may as well stop developing new imaging technology, as any ‘improvements’ in resolution or grain reduction are only going to make things worse.

What a backwards idea…

Film, man. It’s beautiful

I’ve come to hate the Kodak website. All useful information is buried in convoluted layers of film-propaganda.. about why I should use film, why “Industry professionals” choose to use film, why I should buy Kodak film, yet it’s so hard to find anything about the fucking film itself. And I don’t want to hear the word “latitude” ever again.. jesus.

Anyway. I’ve finally found Kodak’s catalogue of stock. It’s available at http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Product_Information/index.htm.
And Kodak’s brief descriptions of each stock, as well as in-depth specification lists and curves etc, are online at http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Production/Vision2_Color_Negative_Films/index.htm

Now that I’ve got both of those elusive urls to refer back to, I can move on to more important matters. I realise that everyone is sick to death of film vs digital arguments.. it comes up everywhere, and I guess it’s a bit cliche.
But after visiting the Kodak site, I was surprised by how blatant.. and desperate.. the film propaganda is becoming. You know Kodak’s having a hard time when you see how much effort they’re putting into advertising. It’s everywhere.



Dont’ get me wrong, I’m not against shooting on film, not at all. But it irritates me when supporters of film completely dismiss digital alternatives on a seemingly irrational basis. So many testimonials supporting film are just like

“Yea man, shooting 35mm Kodak film allowed us to really see the detail because there’s so much latitude, you know? You can see like, highlights and shadows at the same time like ’cause there’s lots of latitude, so we didn’t have to have lots of lights because of the latitude. It’s awesome dude. And there’s.. these grains.. y’know man, these grains.. and it’s just beautiful man. You don’t have to have all these computer things, or these cables or digital things, it just works and it never breaks and it’s so simple.”

Why does Kodak target their products to complete idiots when complete idiots probably can’t afford to shoot on film in the first place?

No one seems to be able to articulate exactly why shooting on film is so wonderful. They always resort to “latitude”, or some magical quality of the “grain structure” that allows for the capture of practically infinite detail. Or they just give a list of successful movies shot on film and suggest that because they knew what they were doing, you should probably follow suit and shoot on kodak stock as well, because that’s obviously what made those movies so fantastic.

Negative film does have a lot of latitude.. you don’t have to worry about the about harsh clipping of highlights. The grain does look good in many contexts.. digitally-shot films can look strangely sterile because of the lack of film grain. But.. it’s not magic.. it’s a light-sensitive emulsion.. and in recent times, film often gets scanned digitally for post-production, so whatever “magic” there is to film is quickly reduced to pixels.
It’s not romantic, but it’s true. Digital intermediates are becoming increasingly popular, and although film is scanned at extremely high bit-depth (16-bit would be 65,136 different degrees between a black pixel and a white pixel), it’s still a collection of pixels.

What puzzles me is that when I watched the VCA FTV graduate films at ACMI, projects shot on 35mm looked far superior to those shot digitally on RED or HD, even though all projects were ultimately exported as Standard definition 10-bit ProRes files. They’re all digital. All 720 x 576. All have 1024 different degrees between a black pixel and a white pixel. Yet the HD/RED films showed significant aliasing.. jagged edges in wide shots.. lots of stair-stepping. This sort of thing is common when projecting SD images on a large screen. There’s often lots of deterioration because you’ve only got 720×576 pixels to work with.
So.. it didn’t surprise me that the films shot on RED had stair-stepping in the wideshots.. it seemed like a natural result of down-converting to such low resolution output. What did surprise me was that I never saw any of the same artifacts in the 35mm films, despite the fact that they were digitally scanned and down-converted to standard-def.
“It shouldn’t surprise you Josh, digital cinema is still in its infant stages.. how can you expect it to compete with 35mm film, which has over a hundred years of history? It just can’t handle fine detail or highlights in the same way as proper film emulsion, it’s obvious.”
But it’s not film any more. The 35mm projects were scanned at 2K or whatever, then down-rezzed for playback at ACMI. Why no stairstepping when it’s converted to measly standard def? I don’t know. People say “that’s just what film does, it’s different.” But to me this makes no sense. Film cannot defy all logic and reason just because it’s expensive and traditional and inherently “beautiful”. It’s not inherently beautiful. It’s light rays and chemicals.. and when it’s scanned, it should behave like anything else that’s scanned.

Whatever. I still don’t know the answer. “It’s film” is not an answer.

What I’m ultimately getting at is that I like the fact that no one romanticises shooting digital. We know there’s no magic. We know that pixels are ugly, we know compression is ugly.. shooting digital can be pretty damn ugly. But we know how to minimise this ugliness.
It’s simple. It’s down to earth. For many purposes, it’s not as nice as film. But at least it’s not full of itself.

Digital: “Hi I’m a digital imaging sensor”
Film: “And I’m a strip of 35mm Kodak film, baby”
Digital: “So what have you been up to, 35mm Kodak film?”
Film: “Well for over a hundred years I’ve been working with Industry Professionals to make some of the finest motion picture images imaginable, using my Advanced grain structures and emulsions to bring superior image quality to every production I’m a part of. I’ve been the most robust and reliable format in the known world and the guys at Kodak just keep making me better and better by changing my grain structures. I’m fairly overwhelmed by how great I am, really.”
Digital: “Aren’t you going to ask what I’ve been up to, 35mm film?”
Film: “Fuck off man”

By all means, shoot film. I want to shoot film. I’ll probably like shooting on film.
But I don’t like film-dogma.

Don’t ask

An 85B filter is used when shooting on tungsten stock in daylight. CTO gel serves a similar purpose when shooting on tungsten stock with HMIs or 5600K lighting of some kind. That’s all fine.
What gets me is that in all situations, an 85B filter is meant to cut down light by 2/3rds of a stop.
I should leave it here. I know that to compensate for an 85B filter, you boost levels by 2/3rds of a stop.. and that’s all I really need to know.
But.. how is this possible? How can an 85 filter reduce the intensity of all lights by the exact same amount?
I’m sure it does.. It’s a rule for a reason. But to my mind, it doesn’t add up. An optical filter absorbs certain frequencies of light (preventing them from passing through the filter) more than others, which pass through it more easily. So.. the 85B filter absorbs light in the blue spectrum (high frequency, short wavelength), while allowing orange light to pass (lower frequency, longer wavelength), thus achieving an orange colour bias for shooting on tungsten stock.
Now.. consider the fact that different light sources have different colour biases. Tungsten lights throw out a great deal of orange/red/infrared light. HMIs and fluorescents have a colder bias, and do not have a continuous output across the visible spectrum (I’m fairly sure). This means that there are many peaks and troughs across their output from warm to cold.. (possibly meaning that these lights are prone to having low CRI?***) and that certain frequencies of light aren’t present at all (this possibly only applies to fluorescent sources..).
Anyway.
It seems that filters absorb (eliminate) certain frequencies of light while letting other frequencies through. It also seems that different light sources have different spectral distributions and colour biases. So.. if an 85B filter absorbs blue and violet, allowing more orange/red light to pass, surely it would have more of an effect on an HMI (with high levels of blue, violet and ultraviolet) than on a tungsten fixture (with a bias towards red/orange output).

I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right, now that I’ve written it.

I’m not saying that placing an 85B filter on a tungsten light would do nothing, obviously you’re going to lose light output because of the filter density, resulting in light loss no matter what fixture you’re using. But.. are you really going to lose exactly the exact same amount of light regardless of the colour bias of your fixture? If so, it’s a strange world…

****** ED: According to David Mullen’s book on Cinematography, and another book by Blain Brown, this used to be the case, but no more. HMIs and fluorescents are now made ‘quasi-continuous’ with the addition of rare earth metals to fill the gaps in light output, achieving a high colour rendering index (CRI)

Post-sync

If all goes to plan, next year we shoot on 16mm. I need to go down to the RMIT techs and figure out exactly what we’ve got to work with in terms of lenses, number of mags, and whatever else. I know we’ve got an Arriflex 16SR2 (as previously mentioned, ad nauseam) — but what I don’t know is whether the gate’s been modified to shoot super-16 or not. Of course, I’d like to shoot S16 ideally. whatever we make, it’ll be in 16:9, so shooting in 1.66:1 would mean using a much larger portion of film than cropping from 1.33:1.
And this brings me to a more important question: do we record our audio optically on the edge of the film? Can we? Should we?
This would automatically mean shooting in standard 16mm format, and heavily cropping into the frame to make our film 16:9. Sucks.. but RMIT’s camera may not be modified to shoot super-16 anyway.. I need to check. But is the quality of audio recorded to film sufficient? Does it cost more to process film when it also contains your audio? I’d say it would.. most likely..

As you can see, I’m not liking the sound of optically recording audio.. because of the potential cost, because it would limit us to shooting in 4:3 and cropping, and because I’m not sure about the quality. So.. is there another option? At RMIT, we use Sound Devices 301 Compact Production Mixers, which are incapable of recording sound.. only mixing sound and sending it somewhere else.. usually the DSR-450 or other digital camera with 2 channels of recording onto dv tape. Obviously, that’s not possible in this situation.
I’ve come up with a ghetto workaround.. quite convoluted, but it might be worth it. In my hypothetical new scenario, we’d run our mics into the 301 mixer, as usual. The audio mixer would normalise the levels and send them out to *two* Marantz solid state sound recorders, one for left channel, one for right. One Marantz recorder would be set at a higher level than the other, so that if the audio clips, we can take it from the backup recorder.
Is this viable? Yes, I’d say so. But there are several complications/limitations. Obviously we’d need to slate absolutely everything, and mark everything quickly and efficiently, as we’re burning through precious film stock. And we’d need a larger audio crew.. One or two boom operators, an audio mixer, and a sound recordist running two Marantz recorders at once.
“Why do you need the audio mixer, why not cut out the middle man and record straight from the boom mics into Marantz solid states?”
There are two reasons. One: The Marantz recorders cannot accurately display audio levels. There’s a crude meter on the front, displaying your level as a series of large blocks.. it’s difficult to read and regulate. Two: The Marantz recorders are digital.. you have no head room above 0dB. There’s less risk of the sound clipping if it’s been normalised to 0VU at the audio mixer, which displays the levels much more accurately and has a better gain control.
The other consideration is mobility. Having your boom operator(s) attached to a sound mixer attached to a recordist operating two solid states at once may mean that the boom operators are tethered.. it would be difficult for the recordist to follow the action while also monitoring levels, etc. It may also be difficult to have so many audio personnel in cramped locations.. that sort of thing. But they’re limitations we can work with, I think.
We just need a tight crew.. and we need to establish shooting protocols in concrete, and know them back to front.
Something like:
The 1stAD announces that we’re going for a take — roll sound.
Sound recordist starts up both solid states and calls “Sound rolling.” or “Speed”
Clapper needs to be in position with the slate correctly labelled, he/she can call the shot number and take number (shot number should correspond with the recording number of the sound recordist’s files).
Camera should be focusing on the slate at this point, ready to roll.
Camera rolls, clapper claps, camera quickly reframes/refocuses.. Operator calls “Frame”..
then we’re ready for “action”.

The Inverse Square

I’m not a maths person. My brain doesn’t like thinking about which parameters are inversely proportional to what, or which variables change exponentially in relation to others… but I will. There’s a lot of maths to understand in cinematography, from MIRED shifts to logarithmic changes in light levels to adjustable gamma curves when shooting digital. And today I’ve found a new mathematical law that I don’t fully understand.. the Inverse Square Law. Despite not being able to grasp exactly what is going on with this rule, the implications of this rule are fairly great.

The rule applies to lighting, and involves the relationship between light intensity, the spread of light, and how rapidly light falls away. I’m not going to give you all the gory details about the mathematical formula, but from what I can gather: When you double the distance between your light and your subject, the spread of light increases exponentially, and the intensity of light decreases exponentially. When the distance is doubled, you’ve squared the amount of spread (so if your light covered 5 metres from 10ft away, it will cover 25 metres from 20ft away). When the distance is tripled, you’ve cubed the amount of spread, and the intensity is now a ninth of what it was before you tripled the distance. etc etc.

What does this mean in practical terms? It means that to get an acceptable exposure, there’s a tradeoff.. a decision to be made. A 200W KinoFlo 2ft away from the subject will give you the same light intensity as a 2k placed 15ft from the subject, or a massive 20k at 45ft, etc. All of these options will provide enough light to work with… the difference lies in the amount of falloff. Using a 20k from 45ft will illuminate a massive space around your subject evenly. The actors will be able to run and skip and dance all over the place, and the lighting will remain consistent throughout. This is great for continuity purposes. But for mood.. everything’s going to be flat.. there’d be much more contrast if you went with the KinoFlo, 2ft away from your subject. The light will fall away rapidly using this small fixture, creating darkness in the background.. tone, texture.. etc. Only problem is that your subject can hardly move. Move slightly forward and the light levels increase exponentially.. move slightly backwards and the light falls away in a similar fashion. To the eye, the difference may not seem too drastic, but on film, the difference may be 5 stops for example.. a huge difference (5 stops under would be just 3.125% of your original light level, and 5 stops over would be 3200% of your original level.. logarithms.. pretty messed).

So.. a larger fixture at a distance can be used to provide the same amount of light as a smaller fixture, but over a greater area. When considering what lights will be needed for a particular scene, the mood/look must be considered as well as the size of the area that must be lit, the degree to which actors must move, whether prac lights will be drowned out or interior scenes flattened by the use of large fixtures.. etc. It’s all a tradeoff. Small fixtures provide shadow and mood, but are terrible for continuity, and for anything involving lots of movement across large physical spaces. Large fixtures provide more even light, allowing great freedom to actors and ensuring visual continuity, but can potentially flatten a shot..

lots to think about, so many parameters. and they all interact with each other logarithmically according to exponential curves.. shit.

Visual Interest

It’s about time I posted something up here.
Ideally, you are currently thinking something along the lines of:
‘So Josh, how did that 48 hour film competition go? That one that you posted about once but then never mentioned again?’

Well.

Andy McPhee (Wolf Creek, December Boys, briefly on Rush, Underbelly, Neighbours), won best actor for his work in our film.
And also I won best cinematography — that’s $3freaking000 dollars of equipment hire from Panavision. Brilliant. Awesome. Great. So now.. what do we (Emma, Stevie, and myself) do with $3000 from panavision? Whatever we end up doing, it had better be damned good to warrant the spending of actual money. (well.. prize money.)

I’ll get to writing up a Panavision shopping list soon enough, I assure you. But for now, I want to discuss the 48Hour Film Project, and why we won, cinematography-wise.

You’ve got 48 hours. 36 teams enter the competition and compete against you. 28 teams succeed in entering their films within 48 hours. Of these 28 films, one wins best cinematography, and it’s ours (‘Mistaken’). Is it because I’m a decent aspiring DoP? In part, I’d like to think so. But ultimately, it came down to the imaginativeness of Stevie’s script, and the great locations that Emma found for us… I’ve never appreciated the importance of location as much as I do now.

After watching 27 other films created in 48 hours, you start to see patterns.. common pitfalls.. and yea. Let’s face it. The 48 Hour Film Project is going to attract a lot of people who do not like planning. They want to be ‘spontaneous’, and ‘versatile’… ‘edgy’.. so what do they do? They shoot outdoors, with a small crew, in the bush. Or.. they shoot outdoors, with a small crew, down the street outside their house. They’re all using small/edgy/versatile Z1p-style cameras and haven’t figured out how to switch off the auto-gain, so the exposure is going all over the place. Lighting continuity varies hugely from shot to shot, and the sound’s wrecked by wind and traffic and whatever else. This whole ‘natural light, raw edgy realism in the bush’ thing killed a large number of films. There were a few nice shots, but none of it gelled together and some sequences were so horribly overexposed I’m not sure how they let it happen.
So yea. Natural light.. I’m not a fan.
Also, far too much wide coverage. That was irritating in several films. Granted, you’re shooting handheld and don’t want to exacerbate the shakiness.. but you’re shooting DV, and DV doesn’t like wide shots, especially not wide shots of the bush with huge variations in contrast and dynamic range. You distance the audience, correctly exposing becomes more difficult, your boom operator wants to kill you and you really don’t have enough pixels to properly capture so much detail in a bush environment. I know, it’s not impossible to do, but it wrecked many films. Seeing them blown up at ACMI cinemas really demonstrated the limits of shooting DV PAL.
And finally, so many stories just weren’t.. visually interesting. I know, visuals aren’t everything, and you’ve only got 48 hours so you should be concentrating on clever screenplays and general wittiness. But where’s the visual flare? If I had one of these other scripts to work with, I think it would’ve been hard to find aesthetically strong ways of telling the story, because some of these scripts just weren’t that kind of story. That’s why I’m thankful that Stevie’s script involved poledancing, bikers, satanic voodoo pimps and a massive revolver. There was so much to work with, especially given our locations. The strip club was lurid, every wall was a mirror and there were colourful lights everywhere.. blend all that together with a shallow focus and you’ve got lots of visual interest. And then there was the church with a massive fluorescent cross and the huge brick walls to paint shadows over. You just can’t make these sorts of shots work in a small cluttered loungeroom with white walls and a dying couch. You’ve got to get out of the house and go somewhere different.

So.. it all makes sense. We had an ‘unreal’ script that took place in visually interesting environments, also allowing us a great degree of control with our lighting setups. By contrast other groups wouldn’t have had lighting gear at all. Hence shooting out in the bush under the harsh november sun makes sense.

What I’m saying I guess is that it feels cheap, in some ways, to say “I won best cinematography!”, when so much of it comes down to these other factors. I knew how to work the DSR, I knew how I wanted to light the scene, I knew how to get a shallow focus.. but really, I got the award because of what we had to work with. Visually interesting places and characters, proper film lighting equipment and a shiny metal revolver.

Think back to ‘Silver Lining’, the film I shot with Elliot. Same camera, same lights, same DoP. Why does it look so bland? Because we shot it underground in RMIT, in front of a white wall with a makeshift ‘desk’, and it was meant to be a plumbing supply store. There was something.. NQR about the look of that film, and I think it’s simply the fact that we shot it in such an unconvincing, plain location. So for next year, in all future projects, it’s burnt into my brain.. the technical operation of lights and camera mean nothing if you’re not shooting in a good space with a good script and a damned good art department.

Bedtime Reading

>

I’m waiting for these to come in the mail. Each of these books is 500+ pages, half a kilo.. for between $50 and $80 AUD, minus shipping.. Well worth it I’m thinking. Of course, I’ll find out when I read them. But these are the sorts of resources I’ve been trying to find over the past few months.. and they’re difficult to find in your regular bookshop. Previously, I went to the RMIT bookshop, and the most technical book I could find was

which covers all aspects of production.. but there’s not enough detail, and it’s a bit dated.. lots of debate about whether or not to edit on computers.. and many chapters devoted to linear video editing systems.. (if you flick through this book you’ll also see that it’s where many of our tech-related RMIT dossier readings came from in TV1, etc).
But yes. I’ve gone through quite a bit of Mollison’s book, which was helpful because it starts from the absolute basics.. you learn everything from the ground up without missing anything. Still, it’s one of those ‘all-rounder’ books for people who feel they can/should make films single-handedly.. generic “filmmakers”.. which is frustrating, when looking for specifically cinematography-related information.

So.. what happens while my lighting and camera assisting books are in transit from the UK? What do I read? Well, luckily, one of the camera operators at Studio A revealed to me that if you go into Borders, you can generally find copies of American Cinematographer magazine, shipped in by Air Freight.

It’s about 50% advertising (I don’t mind, it makes you familiar with the sorts of cameras/gear that professionals want to hire), 50% articles discussing cinematography in upcoming feature films (ie Where the Wild Things Are and Antichrist).. great resource because it’s effectively a collection of real-world case studies.. and you can go to the cinemas and know “that was the scene they shot on Phantom HD”, or “there’s the bit where they lit with 5k fresnels and a xenon”.. etc.

In fact.. I’m going to go read the thing now. Don’t tell anyone about Borders.. like all things on the internet, that’s a secret. (ie don’t steal my copy of american cinematography or you will die)

Blowup

“Several other factors, such as subject matter, movement, and the distance of the subject from the camera, also influence when a given defocus becomes noticeable.
The area within the depth of field appears sharp, whilst the areas in front of and beyond the depth of field appear blurry.
For a 35 mm motion picture, the image area on the negative is roughly 22 mm by 16 mm (0.87 in by 0.63 in). The limit of tolerable error is usually set at 0.05 mm (0.002 in) diameter. For 16 mm film, where the image area is smaller, the tolerance is stricter, 0.025 mm (0.001 in). Standard depth-of-field tables are constructed on this basis, although generally 35 mm productions set it at 0.025 mm (0.001 in). Note that the acceptable circle of confusion values for these formats are different because of the relative amount of magnification each format will need in order to be projected on a full-sized movie screen.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

So.. if your final output is 35mm film projection in cinemas or whatever, and the apparent focus of 16mm footage becomes dubious when blown up to 35mm size.. does this then cancel out the effects of using wider 16mm lenses with deeper perceived focus? I mean.. you’re using longer equivalent lenses when shooting on 35mm, but if the tolerance, the margin of error is more forgiving because there’s no blowing up of the image, which format ends up being less forgiving in terms of perceived focus when outputting to 35mm film?

This is where I rush to my nearest film lab, beg for their 16mm short takes, and start testing in my backyard on an ancient, makeshift film camera.. I wish I was old-school.

SRII — time to go 16mm

According to the equipment booking forms at RMIT, this is what we’ve got to work with, film-wise.

The Arriflex 16SRII

Specs from http://www.iactionfilms.com/camera_arri.htm:

* 1-75fps
* Super 16 (16mm convertable)
* PL Mount
* Crystal Sync
* Shutter: 180
* Illuminated format markings
* Ground glass: converted to fiber optic
* Video assist: color, or black and white
* 400FT magazine

What scares me is that when you take away the lens and the film mag, your SRII becomes

wtf. where did my camera go..
It’s a strange concept.. also demonstrates that I’m far too into shooting digital. With film, your lighting and choice of stock seems more important than the choice of camera itself. As long as the film camera’s reliable and quiet enough for sound work, I’m not sure there’d be much of (or any of) a difference between cameras, in terms of your final product.

Also, it looks like there’s no way of adjusting shutter angle on this camera.. though I’m not sure. If it’s fixed at 180 degrees.. it’ll be time to break out the ND filters. I’ve used the in-built ND on the DSR cameras, but often I’d just increase the shutter speed instead because toggling the filter changed your white balance preset.. such a stupid system.. about the only thing I don’t like about the DSR. But anyway. With the SRII, it seems that ND filters will be crucial to getting a shallow depth of field.. I don’t want to close down the iris where I don’t have to. (yes, i know that much of today’s amateur cinematography consists of mindless shallow-DOF-porn.. but I don’t care. It looks good. And it doesn’t have to be mindless)

Anyway. Given my half-baked theory that the actual 16mm camera body doesn’t matter much compared to stock and lenses, I want to know what 16mm lenses we’ve got at RMIT.. I’m guessing we’ve got a zoom of some kind.. I don’t think RMIT’s the prime lens kind of university… but yea. It scares me that from Lemac, the longest lens in a 16mm prime lens kit is 50mm. The longest? 50mm? I know that it’s 16mm and the crop factor makes the framing equivalent to around 89mm on a 35mm camera… but on a DSR, with a significantly smaller sensor area than on Super16, the kit lens goes from 9mm to 155… and you can open up to F1.7, even with the lens at its longest. Brilliant lens…

So.. assuming I get to shoot on S16 next year, what happens lens-wise? The lens supplied by RMIT will be a zoom, and it will hopefully be longer than 50mm. But I’m worried about the lens speed.. will it be able to open up to F1.7 or equivalent? Looking at lemac, some 16mm zooms don’t open up past F3.. F3.7 even. That would scare me slightly. In comparison, the Zeiss superspeed mkII series of 16mm prime lenses from Lemac are all rated at T1.3.. which generally also indicates a max aperture of F1.3… that would be some impressive shallowness.. even if the longest lens is 50mm.

The catch?
The cheapest kit of Zeiss superspeeds that includes a 50mm lens is $340 per day, excluding GST. Fuck.
I just hope RMIT’s got a damned good 16mm zoom.. that’s all I can say.