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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

I don't know the menu of the camera well enough, my camera assistants are in charge of that... but you probably have something selected that is maintaining the shutter TIME rather than the ANGLE. I haven't had the problem you are describing with the Red cameras.
 
sreenivasa reddy s said:
Hi Mr.David,
I am a little confused regarding the Shutter angle being changed automatically when changing the frame rates while shooting on RED. It does not happen on Film Cameras like ARRI 435 or even on Alexa.
Please enlighten me.
Thank you.
Click to expand...

You can change the shutter to absolute or relative
 
Hi David. Something that has been troubling me for a while that i can't seem to get clarification on...
In several films of late i have been noticing what i would describe as very slow zoom creeps. They usually take place when the camera is otherwise static and often during tense moments of dialogue. I think mostly the movement isn't consciously noticed at all but when i start to feel tension building in static shots i often start watching the edges of the frame and very frequently the shot is becoming tighter. I'm sure you know exactly what i mean but something strange that goes along with this came up in my research. Roger Deakins says he almost never even carries a zoom lens, he actually mentioned that he didn't have one on Prisoners, but many times such, as in No Country, i have noticed it.

example- at 3.21 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=co5aKOGcHaw and at 3.04 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLCL6OYbSTw

Could it be this is actually some kind of push in using a track/crane? It's very small but to me it looks like the whole frame is closing down on all sides(as it does during a zoom), or could it be that it was done in post? It looks very organic, and imperfect, like it must have been done in camera.


Thanks in advance :)
 
Those two examples are slow dolly moves. The second one is more obviously a camera move because it moves past the shoulder of the Javier Bardem. The first one is also a camera move but because there are no foreground elements, the perspective shift is harder to see.

If you were doing a dolly-in on a medium to long focal length of a person standing against a wall, it would be hard to tell the difference between that and a zoom-in because there are no depth cues.
 
Library Interior / Fluorescent lighting

Library Interior / Fluorescent lighting

Hello,

I am shooting a scene for a narrative piece in a Library.
The scene is a Day Interior, and the location is primarily lit inside via Fluorescent lighting.

I counted, to replace all the bulbs with Kinos would be 100+

So my question(s) is:

Do I embrace the Flurocents and use a Tiffen FL-D to balance the Fluorescent lighting to Daylight?
Do I augment the Fluroscents with Daylight Balance sources?

Has anyone had experiences with shooting with Fluorescent overhead practicals, any solutions, thoughts or tips?

LOCATION PICTURE:
1) http://meyer-allen.com/media/fairfax-branch-library/04i.l.jpg
2) http://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/VqYLgHiWDw2oGkH0ky9-OA/ls.jpg
 
Usually you take the path of least resistance, match to the dominant source. Unfortunately in your case, you've got an equal amount of daylight and fluorescent... You can't gel all of those windows and skylights with Plus Green to match the fluorescents (ignoring the warm/cool axis) and you can't afford to swap out all of the fluorescents. If you have scenes under the skylight, my suggestion would be to turn off the fluorescents which are just lighting the shelves in the background. Or turn off / unscrew tubes most of the fluorescents and then just re-globe selected ones with daylight tubes so there are a few left on, the rest are off.

For the angles looking away from the windows at the shelves in the background, again, replace just a few of them with daylight tubes, turn off the rest.

The other option would be to cover the skylights with black tarps on the roof and then you'd just have the vertical windows in the background to gel with some degree of Plus Green to match the fluorescents, then light the foreground with Kinos with the same tube type being used for the shelving area. Once everything is greenish, you can use some sort of CC-Magenta filter to reduce the green.

FLD and FLB would work OK, they were designed for daylight (D) and tungsten (Type-B) film stocks in the 1970's. FLB has some orange in it as well as magenta to correct 4300K to 3200K.

If I use a filter in those situations, I tend to use a CC-Magenta 20 or something. You could just correct it in post or with white-balancing. The only problem I've had with that are with blonde-haired actors -- their hair picks up more green than their skin, so you find yourself getting overly magenta skin if you try to get all the green out of the hair, unless you want to create and track windows on the face separate from the hair.

So my preference would be to just replace a few of the tubes with daylight ones, turn off the rest, and light with daylight sources.
 
David, Quick question for you. Im shooting a piece for a sports equipment company and we've requested a green screen for product shots. They only have a white cyc wall available so the producers want to do a luma key shoot for everything. Do you have any suggestions for shooting for a luma key vs chroma in terms of lighting, wardrobe selection, casting, motion, camera settings etc? Would love to hear feedback.

Thanks a milion
 
Have the producers done this before? Is the vfx supervisor OK with doing everything with luma keys? Because there still might be some roto work involved.

Think of it this way, the best time to use a luma key is if your subjects are black silhouette shapes. The worst time would be if your subjects were pale-faced blondes wearing all-white in overexposed lighting. Both luma and chroma keys mainly work around the principle of a difference in tone or color between the background screen and the subject. So first off, I'd say that doing bright backlights on the subject would not be a good idea against a white background. The subject should be in mid tones and darker, particularly around edges.

I'm just guessing here, I've only done luma keys when it made sense, something easy to pull a key off of against white, like a near silhouette, not when it should be done with chroma keys but they just don't want to pay for painting the cyc green.

Now, recently the bomber sequence in "Unbroken" was shot with white soft light through diffusion wrapping around the plane, which means that luma keys were (probably) the basis or starting point of the composite work, but I'm sure a lot of roto work was involved. Could be wrong on that.
 
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David Mullen ASC said:
Have the producers done this before? Is the vex supervisor OK with doing everything with luma keys? Because there still might be some roto work involved.

Think of it this way, the best time to use a luma key is if your subjects are black silhouette shapes. The worst time would be if your subjects were pale-faced blondes wearing all-white in overexposed lighting. Both luma and chroma keys mainly work around the principle of a difference in tone or color between the background screen and the subject. So first off, I'd say that doing bright backlights on the subject would not be a good idea against a white background. The subject should be in mid tones and darker, particularly around edges.

I'm just guessing here, I've only done luma keys when it made sense, something easy to pull a key off of against white, like a near silhouette, not when it should be done with chroma keys but they just don't want to pay for painting the cyc green.

Now, recently the bomber sequence in "Unbroken" was shot with white soft light through diffusion wrapping around the plane, which means that luma keys were (probably) the basis or starting point of the composite work, but I'm sure a lot of roto work was involved. Could be wrong on that.
Click to expand...

Thanks David. the producer is the editor as well as editor. I don't think he's done it before, all the gym gear is black which im comfortable with but the models using it is where im at a loss. I suggested wearing black running gear, casting not pasty actors and no blondes at all. I planned to do a grid of four red heads over top of them all going through a 6x6 frame with 216 or muslin. and then a 2k on either side of camera to fill from the front through frames as well. No backlights. then light the wall separate. Am I on to the right path? I've never had to do a whole shoot for luma key so I'm a bit nervous.
 
That first clip could be done by having the actor walk incredibly slowly during a time-lapse sequence. Otherwise, you'd have to shoot a slow-motion plate of the actor against green screen and shoot time-lapse background people on location and some time-lapse people rushing against green screen for the foreground so the slow-motion actor could be composited between the two layers of moving people. And probably you'd do all of the green screen on location in the same light.

The second commercial is an example of bullet time photography, an array of still cameras fired at the same time to freeze a motion but allow the camera to move during the frozen moment in time. Perhaps the inserts of the jewelry were shot normally though.
 
David, on your personal projects, would you shoot a color baked format or RAW? When RED cameras having a working Prores format, what other mitigating factors would producers consider in choosing cameras?
 
M.Halsell said:
David, on your personal projects, would you shoot a color baked format or RAW? When RED cameras having a working Prores format, what other mitigating factors would producers consider in choosing cameras?
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For a feature, I'd prefer to record on raw, which is more affordable/manageable with a Red over an Alexa just because of the data rates. My last feature was shot on an Alexa in 2K ProRes just because ARRiRAW was something like 5 times the data I think. I think with Red cameras, recording raw for features has been fine to date and I don't see a need to record ProRes instead. I see ProRes recording taking off more for TV work that has a fast turnaround and a high volume of footage.

In terms of my limited experience with using ProRes over ARRIRAW on the Alexa, my main reason to prefer raw is simply that I have the option when any cropping and reframing has to be done of working with a file that hasn't already been down-sampled to 2K/HD. Otherwise, I don't think there is a big difference in terms of color and dynamic range when color-correcting, it's just that probably with more problematic shots, you may have a little more flexibility in pushing around the uncompressed ARRIRAW image.

I'm curious what the data rate difference is between UHD ProRes on the Amira versus ARRIRAW on the Alexa, you'd think that it would start to get close.
 
John Wee said:
David,

For a typical drama indie film, what other filters would make good compliment with the Hollywood Blackmagic 1/8 & 1/4 ? thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

Do you mean other diffusion filters or filters in general?

I'd certainly carry a 1/8 Schneider Black Frost, since the 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic is already a 1/8 Black Frost + 1/8 HD Classic Soft, so by having a 1/8 Black Frost, you have one more step lighter than a 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic when necessary.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Do you mean other diffusion filters or filters in general?

I'd certainly carry a 1/8 Schneider Black Frost, since the 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic is already a 1/8 Black Frost + 1/8 HD Classic Soft, so by having a 1/8 Black Frost, you have one more step lighter than a 1/8 Hollywood Black Magic when necessary.
Click to expand...

David,

Thanks for the response, I am thinking about contrast control filters and maybe ambient filter? Also do you find the need of using 2 or 3 different types of diffusion filters in the same movie?
 
With film, we had little choice about the visual presence or ascetics of silver salts, but do you think with digital we are moving toward a perceptually grain less viewing experience? What is your preference about the presence of or lack of noise?
 
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