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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

David,

I know this is the Red board, but do you have any experience or comments about the 5D Mark II? I'm doing a feature on it very soon.
 
No hands-on practical experience with the 5D. I've shot some HD on my T2i 550D however. There is a 5D User Forum out there you can try:
http://www.cinema5d.com/index.php

As well as forums on DVInfo, DVXUser, etc.

My general comment is test, test, test... and that your main practical challenge is focus-pulling and knowing whether the shot is in focus on the set.
 
David, maybe you could help me with a lighting gag I'm trying to do.

I'm filming in location on a 2nd story apartment and thus it's difficult to light through the windows, which really annoys me because I'd love to utilize some beautiful blue light coming through them. Don't ask me why, but I have a color envisioned for the scene--a very dramatic, emotional argument between a couple--that involves a lot of blue light coming in.

As I don't have access to the kind of equipment I would need to rig up large lights outside the windows, do you have any suggestions of how to fake this? I'm bought some translucent curtains I'd love to backlight somehow--maybe ringlight LEDS or something? I have access to a few 2ks, I was thinking maybe I could hang bounce board outside the window at a slant and bounce the 2ks from the floor, but I am not sure. I'd love to have the curtains in the shot as well...right now it's seeming quite improbable.
 
Perhaps you can get some small HMI's at window level from outside by using hi-rollers or some other tall stand (I think they go 18'). Or use parallels. Or perhaps you can arm some small lights from the floor above. Or perhaps you can find a 1st floor room. Or perhaps you can put a window flat in the room that is far enough from the wall to allow you to get lights behind it.

Otherwise, I suppose if the window sheers are not too close to the actors, you could use a Source-4 inside the room to put a blue square of light on the sheers that may look like the curtains are backlit instead of frontlit. And then above the window, you can rig a Kinoflo or bounce another Source-4 off of a white card to get the soft blue backlight on the actors that you want.
 
My short gaffer experience tells me that when you want light coming from outside the window it's REALLY simple if you can put the light outside the window, and very difficult and a big compromise quality wise to put it inside.
I'd suggest to get a big-ass tripod to reach the second floor with your 2k's and CTB them badly, but an even better option would be to try and magic-arm/superclamp/grip extend them straight out of the window. giving you a lot more control.

Just 2 weeks ago I was the gaffer on a short student film where we needed "early morning" sun through a window right next to a bed. We were shooting on the 3'rd floor so it'd been impossible without a crane to put lights outside. I tried everything, but in the end the simplest and easiest version worked brilliantly - I magic armed a 650 arri outside the window and filled the room with a single kinoflo. Since the light went through the window and hit the curtains it worked really well. If you have some grip extenders, superclamps and other gaffer/grip equipment at your disposal everybody but the sound man will be happy(in my case we had to leave the window just a bit open yo route the power line through. But if you have several rooms next to each other you always have the option to enter the power cable from another room making everybody happy.
 
David and Juhan,

Thanks a lot! I'd thought of the Source4 idea. I guess I'll see if I can find a way to get the lights all the way up there and put 'em through the window. I really want the effect of lights pounding through the blinds and the curtains. I'll let you know what I've come up with!
 
He's just being cranky about the Red, partly fueled I think by a resentment of the hype that has surrounded Red. But he's also correct in that earlier Red movies have had a certain look to their color reproduction, though I wouldn't describe it as being bad-looking, just that it had a look, the way that a movie shot on Agfa film in the 1980's had a look that was different than Kodak's.

But he's ignoring the continuous improvement in Red's color science, plus he's also ignoring that most of the Red movies that he doesn't like the look of were graded for that look. But looking beyond that (the clippy look of "District 9", the crushy look of "Book of Eli") you could say that there was a certain "Red look" to the normal everyday scenes in, like, "Knowing", a bit of desaturation in fleshtones and in blue colors that tended to give people the impression that Red was prone towards a sepia-ish cast.

Of course, again, some of this was deliberately done in the grade, but I think the problems of noise in the blue channel also tended to drive people to time images on the warm and pastel side to minimize the problem. I know some DP's who let tungsten-lit scenes in Red projects go very warm rather than push the blue channel. They sort of justified it as an artistic effect, but they might have made a different choice if the blue channel had been cleaner.

But it's a bit silly for someone to take the look of early Red movies and try to make judgments about the current state of Red since things have improved in every area.

So I guess what I'm saying is that his complaints are not coming out of thin air, he is clearly responding to something that he's seen and is bothered by... but he's also not acknowledging all the work that has happened by Red over the past three years to solve those image characteristics that bother him. And his argument is undercut by failing to recognize the image limitations of the Canon 5D video image. It's like the old saying in the Bible about pointing out the dust speck in someone's eye but ignoring the log in one's own eye -- you can't talk about how horrible some bit of color reproduction weakness is in the Red while ignoring the major chroma aliasing problems of the Canon, for example. Or ignore the fact that the Canon recording is 8-bit 4:2:0 at something like 40 Mbits/sec.

I guess he's just resorting to hyperbole for a bit of effect, but honestly he can't be serious to think he'd be happier grading Canon h.264 material for a feature film than he would Red 4K material.
 
He seems to have a venom towards Red I don't get.

His comparisons and claims make it hard to take his real-world experience at face value.

Sharp dude though... he's got some great posts at AVS.

-sc
 
David,

I was hoping you could help me with achieving something for my feature film. I am filming as I said before in a small apartment, and I'd love to add some dynamic lighting to a scene that develops into a very emotional argument between the two leads. When I look at scenes like the candle light scene in Blade Runner in Tyrone's office, or shimmering water sort of effects like that, I would love to have something like that going.

My first thought was to put 2 2ks through each window and have a fan on the drapes to get them moving, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to achieve this or not. I'd just love to have some visual kineticism (is that a word?) to the scene through lighting either through flicker or something like that, and maybe you had some experience that you could share that would help.

Thank you in advance.
 
Dynamic lighting usually has to be motivated, for example, rippling light from a pool of water, etc. In a bedroom, blowing drapes/sheers are a good idea but I'd probably add the extra element of blowing leafy branches in front of the light as well. A 2K is pushing it in terms of being a bright-enough light outside the window if this light-dark modulation is going to be the key light of the scene, but it may be enough for a night scene, as if from a warm streetlamp for example.

I find that skinny pepper tree or bamboo leaves to be better for dancing shadow patterns rather than a broad leaf plant.
 
Yeah the idea came from the trees outside my window, right around 6 ocklock the sun hits them and puts a great pattern on the wall, only I'm not sure my lamps are big enough to pound through that foliage and still reach into my room.

What do you think, if that setup fails, about some sort of practical in the room, like a lamp behind a fan--both practicals--that might do something interesting on the walls. I'll give it a test or something. There are so many scenes in here at night that I really want to change the lighting so the whole time we're in the apartment it doesn't feel like the same setups every time.
 
Álex Montoya said:
Hi there, David. What do you think they used here? It looks very naturalistic, almost only with available light but I guess there's quite some more to it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVeV5P5ppLY
Click to expand...

First of all, you don't know if this is a set on a soundstage, so there may be no natural daylight at all. But odds are, either way, there is a big softened light outside of the window to create the soft back-edge on the wide shot, combined with the fluorescent over the bed as a key. In the close-ups, there is some sort of softlight just off camera, side-lighting them -- could be anything, a Kinoflo, a bounce off of white, etc. but it is lower than the overhead fluorescent over the bed in Matthew Fox's close-ups. But the fluorescent over the bed is also doing a lot of the work in these set-ups.

All the lighting may be daylight-balanced (which suggests a location, not a set) because the flashlight is much warmer in color.

Of course, it's possible that the soft edge light from the window in the wide shot is actually available daylight, which means that the wide shot is basically lit with available and on-camera practical lighting and only in the close-ups did they add a soft light from the side to augment the light.
 
Shaft of light in low budget

Shaft of light in low budget

hi,
i have to realize a shaft of light in a theater for lighting 3 people in a localized position.
for now i can only use 6 theatrical lights 1kw PC light,.
do you think that this kind of light (used in group can help me to obtain a shaft of light?)
another alternative(we are in very low budget) could be changing PC light with VNSP PAR light and use in group.
another alternative is a single or two 2kw fresnel.
whic solution could be near the effect of light shaft?
thanks
 
The more the light is coming from the back, the more you will see the shaft in the smoked air. The brighter, the better, so VSNP PARCAN would work. But what works best tend to be projected beams like from a 2K Super Trooper sort of "big" Leko design. I've used clusters of Source-4's with narrow lenses (like 18 degrees) for that effect too. But a bright PARCAN would work too.
 
I meant Source-4 Lekos, whether tungsten or HMI, but yes, a Joker 800 in a Source-4 is like a mini-Xenon. Here are some shots I took on the set of "Manure", with shafts of light:

Two Joker 800 Source-4's off camera right:
900manure185.jpg


1K Xenon outside the window:
900manure186.jpg
 
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