Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[Jon Chema]

Not exactly the same brand (the photo may be of a Panatape, not a Cinetape) but look here:
http://www.cinemaelec.com/products/cinetapemeasure.php

Ultrasonic distance measuring device.

Super cool! Probably makes your 1AC's life much easier! Are there any other similar solutions that aren't so expensive? Say for a smaller budget shoot? I've heard of laser measuring tape?

 

[Jon Chema]

You have to dim a higher wattage bulb more to match the output of a lower wattage bulb, and more dimming means a lower color temp.

There is no right or wrong answer, sometimes you deliberately put a very bright bulb in so you can dim it way down to an orangey color. But otherwise, you try and get something close to the level you like so that the amount of dimming is minimal, hence why you carry a wide range of bulbs. Yes, some sockets are not really designed for the heat of high wattage bulbs up full, though if they are only turned on for the shot, you will probably be OK. Whether I start out with a 60w bulb in the fixture versus a 150w bulb mainly depends on how bright I need the lamp to be. Often as a starting point, let's say with a crew that comes into the room early, I will have a whole room of lamps globed the same way... let's say all with 100w bulbs... and then start to either dim some or change the bulbs to get the look I want. Thing is that not every lamp is there to provide light for the room or the actors, sometimes it's just an accent in the background of a shot, just to create a highlight back there, and being fairly dim is OK.

Kino just came out with some practicals that are pretty cheap. I think $14 a bulb and they have them in daylight and tungsten balances. 100w equivalent CFLs

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Super cool! Probably makes your 1AC's life much easier! Are there any other similar solutions that aren't so expensive? Say for a smaller budget shoot? I've heard of laser measuring tape?

The cheapest thing is an ordinary tape measure.

 

[Jon Chema]

The cheapest thing is an ordinary tape measure.

This is true. I was referring to something OTHER than a tape measure though!

 

[Harry Clark]

I'll chime in, if it's OK with David.
The sub-$100 Fat Max laser is a nice replacement for the tape measure in certain circumstances. A little hard to see in the sunlight compared to more expensive Hilti and Leica products. Excellent for crane work (if you affix a small show card at the camera's film plane and "walk" the actor's action while the crane goes through its move) and better than a steel tape at intermediate distances, and quicker than rolling up the cloth tape.
Be VERY careful (beyond normal caution!) pointing it at an actor's face. Even if you have a steady hand they can turn their head unexpectedly and get the laser in the eye. It's best to have your 2nd go out with a small showcard and hold it at the distance of the actor's eye, off to one side. Good 2nd ACs always have "eyes on" the 1st and can discreetly dash out for a last minute focus check (they are usually out there with the slate anyway)
Some actors (and even some stand-ins) are understandably nervous about the use of lasers, and will sometimes request that you not use one. Respect their wishes. An easy way for an AC or any other technician to get fired is to be a distraction on set or making on-screen talent feel unsafe. Using a laser tape creates the opportunity to fulfill both of those criteria.
Sorry to hijack the response, David. I feel strongly that lasers are overused at times and often in an unsafe manner.
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Awi Suryadi]

Need advice urgently... I'm shooting a feature in 3 weeks, just had a testcam with RED... Colorist is pretty new with Red also, so we need advices on how to get the best out of that camera... We will be using Lustre to color-grade it... We shot both with 2k and 4k during testcam, couldn't really tell the difference in the grading room... So the colorist suggested 2k instead for easier/faster transfer... So my questions will include (but not limited to): should I shoot in 2k or 4k? 24fps or 25fps? Any other settings that you can recommend? Thank you so much...

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Need advice urgently... I'm shooting a feature in 3 weeks, just had a testcam with RED... Colorist is pretty new with Red also, so we need advices on how to get the best out of that camera... We will be using Lustre to color-grade it... We shot both with 2k and 4k during testcam, couldn't really tell the difference in the grading room... So the colorist suggested 2k instead for easier/faster transfer... So my questions will include (but not limited to): should I shoot in 2k or 4k? 24fps or 25fps? Any other settings that you can recommend? Thank you so much...

DON'T shoot in 2K unless you absolutely have to for slow-motion shots!!!

That's my main suggestion. If you want to end up in 1080P HD, shoot 4K HD, if you want to end up at 2K, shoot regular 4K.

2K shooting mode only uses 1/4 of the pixels on the sensor and the final resolution is not 2K, it's probably around 1.7K at best. Plus noise and moire will be worse.

24 fps or 25 fps? If this is for European broadcast, shoot 25 fps. If this is for theatrical but will be posted in Europe, it's a toss-up, 25 fps may be easier to deal with. It will get shown at 24 fps on a film print, a slight slowdown.

 

[Stephen Smith]

David,
Do you have any suggestion on how to properly balance two cameras to each other... I am on the current stable build and I find though I create looks in the camera and transfer to another I am still having issues...

 

[Rob Ruffo]

DON'T shoot in 2K unless you absolutely have to for slow-motion shots!!!

That's my main suggestion. If you want to end up in 1080P HD, shoot 4K HD, if you want to end up at 2K, shoot regular 4K.

2K shooting mode only uses 1/4 of the pixels on the sensor and the final resolution is not 2K, it's probably around 1.7K at best. Plus noise and moire will be worse.

24 fps or 25 fps? If this is for European broadcast, shoot 25 fps. If this is for theatrical but will be posted in Europe, it's a toss-up, 25 fps may be easier to deal with. It will get shown at 24 fps on a film print, a slight slowdown.

Interesting... Do you find the results actually better in 4K HD vs. 4K 16x9 for 1080p?

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Interesting... Do you find the results actually better in 4K HD vs. 4K 16x9 for 1080p?

In theory, it's a simpler downscaling so would introduce fewer artifacts, but I haven't tested it.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

David,
Do you have any suggestion on how to properly balance two cameras to each other... I am on the current stable build and I find though I create looks in the camera and transfer to another I am still having issues...

I had some issues with that as well, not sure there is a solution other than to do the final matching in the final color-correction. Since you are recording RAW, you don't have any in-camera signal processing going on to match two sensors' outputs perfectly, so I think there may be some variation happening between bodies, though nothing major (and if it is a major difference, you should get Red to look at the cameras.)

But there is another issue entirely, which is metadata matching between cameras so that conversions match -- I had a few bugs with that, sometimes dailies coming back where the metadata was read properly from one camera but not the other, though that may be a mistake on the post end, not the camera end of things.

As far as loading looks on set into the camera's metadata, I don't really work that way other than minor alterations, but then, I have yet to shoot a Red project that had to have a very stylized color-correction effect throughout, like a skip-bleach look.

 

[Joey G]

Mr Mullen
How would you go about lighting a daytime car interior against green screen? I assume with lots of space lights and supplementary soft lights for modeling inside the car? Is there any lighting effect that would give the impression that the car is moving? I know that for a night scene you would tend to pan different colored lights in and out but daytime seems trickier to recreate.

 

[Daniel Browning]

In theory, it's a simpler downscaling so would introduce fewer artifacts, but I haven't tested it.

QuadHD (3840x2160) can be downscaled to 1080p very fast and with good quality using the "half-high" demosaic/downscaler. If the same same method was used to go from 4K (4096x2304) to 1080p, it would not be pretty. I don't think the RED SDK even allows it.

As good as the "half high" is, the slower, high quality downscaling methods are superior, and for those, QuadHD and 4K are essentially equal (with a slight nod to 4K). RedRocket really comes in handy for that.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Mr Mullen
How would you go about lighting a daytime car interior against green screen? I assume with lots of space lights and supplementary soft lights for modeling inside the car? Is there any lighting effect that would give the impression that the car is moving? I know that for a night scene you would tend to pan different colored lights in and out but daytime seems trickier to recreate.

Depends on a number of things, one is how elaborate you want to get with moving lights, and that depends on the background plate and where the car is driving... and the length of the shot. Most of the time, for day driving, you can get away with a fixed lighting pattern unless there is an obvious shift, like the car taking a hard right turn.

But as I said, it also depends on the location of the scene -- a car driving through an open field / open highway in hard sun wouldn't have as much lighting change as a car driving under a forest canopy or through the canyons of a city.

So to discuss this more generically, it's like lighting a day interior for a room: you have soft skylight spilling into every window, and you have hard sunlight coming in from one direction. And usually the sun is a warmer color than the soft overhead skylight.

Yes, a ring of spacelights around the car may be a good starting point to get all the soft toplight that would spill downwards through the car windows. You would have to think about the front windshield because it probably shouldn't have any reflections in it, it should be clean so you can hard sky/cloud reflections in post later. So it may be necessary to hang a black solid on a frame above the front windshield to remove reflections and light around that to get the light to hit the actors and the hood of the car. If you are going to see much of the overall car body, you would need a giant silk between the space lights and the car in order to create on big soft reflection rather than a bunch of spots, and even then you may see the space lights coming through the silks.

You don't have to use spacelights either, any soft unit would work -- I used Kino blanket lights and Lumapanel fluourescents for the stage work on "Manure" faking skylight. You can see the units reflected in the cars on these shots:

Of course, one option for greenscreen car work is to dull spray all of the exterior paint to get rid of the reflections, which may be necessary anyway due to reflections of the greenscreen.

The hard sun can be any large unit, just depends on the stop you need. If it needs to move quickly on a jib arm or something, a big PAR may be easier than a heavier fresnel unit.

You have to decide whether any movement is due to the sun moving (because the car is turning) or due to things passing between the light and the car, like passing trees and lamp poles. Sometimes I'll have grips wave things between the soft and hard lights to create momentary flicker as if a telephone pole or something passed through.

Of course, then there is the lighting of the greenscreen itself - the larger and farther away it can be, the better (to reduce green spill bouncing back onto the subject) -- this also allows you to light the screen with Kino greenscreen tubes rather than white light. Otherwise, things like cyc lights and whatnot work, the main thing is to get the screen evenly lit.

What's nice about doing it on stage (day car work) rather than on a process trailer is that you have more room on each side of the car to get lights shining into the car, often when looking through the front windshield at two people in the car, it's hard on a process trailer to have a big soft light coming from each side of the car because of the space it takes up on the road. On the other hand, of course in real life, you have natural daylight doing a lot of the work for you.

 

[Gregory Lopez]

David...
Are paints like Rosco chroma key paints better at avoiding bounce back than regular matte paints. And what is the benefit of lighting with green screen tubes?

Thanks

 

[David Mullen ASC]

David...
Are paints like Rosco chroma key paints better at avoiding bounce back than regular matte paints. And what is the benefit of lighting with green screen tubes?

Thanks

Any paint used should be as matte as possible... the reason you use Rosco chroma or digital green paint is just for the purity of the hue, not the level of matte / flatness (which should be as matte as possible), you want a pure green without subtle colors mixed into it.

Green bounce or spill isn't so much an issue of the shininess of the paint, it's just that with all that light on a green surface, it acts like a light source, so how much it spills on the subject is dependent on its brightness / intensity and its distance to the subject (not to mention the reflectivity of the subject). This is why you generally want the screen as far away as possible, hence why it may have to be larger as well. As far as brightness, it depends on what the compositor wants, many want it at the same key as the subject. The evenness of the lighting matters more in some ways.

The reason for using greenscreen tubes is that they put out such a narrow wavelength that the color of the greenscreen becomes very pure, just green. Now some compositors sometimes feel that green or bluescreens lit with Kino green or bluescreen tubes get too saturated for their tastes, but to some extent, that is really a camera issue, how it responds to intense saturation.

The main downside to Kino green or bluescreen tubes, besides cost, is that their light can only hit the screen, not spill onto the subject. So if the subject has to stand on some green floor as well as have a green wall behind them, for example, you'd have to go with white light for the whole green set-up.

To reduce spill, you want to black out any parts of the screen not needed, and use a bit of backlight, it can be a soft backlight if the subject isn't supposed to look backlit (in general) the idea is that the lighting on the subject matches the lighting in the background, so if you can't justify a backlight on the subject, you shouldn't use it or it should be very soft and subtle.

 

[Clint Lealos]

Hey David, I asked you about how to achieve a 60's look with the Red One Camera, and you gave me some great advice. I ended up using a 1/4 white pro mist filter and a Cooke 18-100mm for the entire thing. We lit mostly with 2.5k and 4k Arri HMIs and a couple little tungsten lights with CTB. really tried hard to match the hard light of the period. It was a fun exercise for sure. Here is the final commercial spot. Shot entirely in Istanbul, Turkey. I thought it turned out pretty good. Thanks again for all your help David.

http://vimeo.com/15718953

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Hey David, I asked you about how to achieve a 60's look with the Red One Camera, and you gave me some great advice. I ended up using a 1/4 white pro mist filter and a Cooke 18-100mm for the entire thing. We lit mostly with 2.5k and 4k Arri HMIs and a couple little tungsten lights with CTB. really tried hard to match the hard light of the period. It was a fun exercise for sure. Here is the final commercial spot. Shot entirely in Istanbul, Turkey. I thought it turned out pretty good. Thanks again for all your help David.

http://vimeo.com/15718953

That was fun, it turned out well, has that period look you talked about.

 

[Ivan Kovax]

David,

Another greenscreen question.

What do you find is the best method to to light a person who needs to be keyed against a floor?

For example - a shot of a sprinter squatting and ready to burst out of his starting position. The spill around his hands and feet would be quite harsh, and additionally dealing with shadows would be quite problematic as well.

Many thanks,
Ivan

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I guess the first question is whether you really need a green floor or can use a dirt floor that matches the background enough. But if you really need a green floor, some people will use a mylar floor and reflect the background greenscreen, especially if you need the reflection (which you don't), otherwise you are talking about a green floor. You probably should first worry about matching the lighting of the background plate... if that shows a sunlit space, you may have no choice but create a hard sun key on the subject, creating a shadow on the floor, which may require a bit of roto for the compositor. The other thing is to use enough fill so that the dark undersides of the body aren't only filled-in with green bounce. But if your subject is kneeling on the green floor, your compositor is going to have to deal with a certain amount of green spill / ambient bounce. Some people prefer bluescreens in this situation because they bounce back less light than green, and a little blue in the shadows is better than a little green.