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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 whether 24 fps motion is more annoying in 3D projection; it may just be annoying because "Avatar" has so much fast motion in it in general.

As for 48 fps shooting, sure, the motion would be smoother without a doubt, but it may also make the digital photography feel more digital, less like film, for better or worse. Maybe as more and more people get used to the digital look they will care less and less about the 24 fps look.

There is an argument to be made that a fast-moving action movie would be better if shot at 48 fps for 48 fps projection.

Trouble with converting it to 24 fps is that you don't really gain anything having shot it at 48 fps. You either have to drop every other frame and thus end up with a defacto 24 fps with a 90 degree shutter look, or you have to blend every two frames and thus get the blur of 24 fps with a 180 degree shutter.
 
Thanks for the heads up David- and for the additional stories. :) Looks like I have some back issues of AC to order.
 
Good question -- I would assume that a standard low wattage laser flashing the lens & sensor is probably not going to do any more sensor damage than the sun glinting off of a car windshield would, for example... but of course, how do you test this, in case you are wrong?
 
Hey David,

I've been digging into some of your recommended reading.

In his discussion with Truffaut, Hitch was pretty critical of method acting. Do you know what Welles' thoughts were on the subject?
 
David Mullen ASC said:
I don't know whether 24 fps motion is more annoying in 3D projection; it may just be annoying because "Avatar" has so much fast motion in it in general.

As for 48 fps shooting, sure, the motion would be smoother without a doubt, but it may also make the digital photography feel more digital, less like film, for better or worse. Maybe as more and more people get used to the digital look they will care less and less about the 24 fps look.

There is an argument to be made that a fast-moving action movie would be better if shot at 48 fps for 48 fps projection.

Trouble with converting it to 24 fps is that you don't really gain anything having shot it at 48 fps. You either have to drop every other frame and thus end up with a defacto 24 fps with a 90 degree shutter look, or you have to blend every two frames and thus get the blur of 24 fps with a 180 degree shutter.
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I'm wondering if anyone ever tried using different framerates for different scenes in the theatre. Have everything at 24 fps but the actions scenes that have e.g. 48...
 
This is an interesting article:

http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue9/wellesperformance.html

So, what can usefully be said of Welles' acting style? Much of the little scholarly and analytical work which has actually been done on this subject (largely all by Naremore and Michael Anderegg) affords a great deal of attention to the presentational character of Wellesian performance, often tying it, at least in part, to Brechtian theory and left wing politics. So Anderegg, for example, claims that "in certain roles and at certain moments in all of his roles, Welles approaches the Brechtian ideal of performance. … [he] interprets his roles for us, projects both the emotion required by and the explanation of each dramatic moment." Certainly, Welles' work as actor can frequently be understood in such determinedly anti-illusionist, presentational terms. In fact, he himself frequently advocated a non-naturalistic, 'hot' performance style that echoed certain key elements of Brechtian performance theory.

According to Naremore, for instance, in a lecture on "The New Actor," Welles, like Brecht, proclaimed the necessity of formulating an expressly performative acting style that acknowledged the audience and thus aimed to deconstruct the fourth wall realism of both the Stanislavskian stage and Classical Hollywood film. "Even before the movies," Welles said in this lecture, "actors stopped considering their audiences," It was the constant effort of people like Stanislavsky in a very serious way and John Drew in a frivolous way to pretend there is a fourth wall. This is death to acting style. It is practically impossible to create a new acting style which excludes the direct address to the audience." Here, in his insistent focus on acknowledging the spectator and thus preventing her passive submersion in the drama's ostensibly real fictional universe, Welles certainly sounds somewhat Brechtian in his thought.

That said, however, this focus on the Brechtian elements of Welles' performance is somewhat too restrictive and totalizing. For one thing, there are several respects in which Welles' conceptions of acting differed greatly from Brechtian ideals. As Naremore describes, for example, "unlike Brecht, [Welles] did not encourage his audience to talk back to the spectacle, and his idea of the theatre remained expressionist and 'magical' … All of his work was dependent on structures of fascination and illusion, and on his own role as manipulator."

This notion of concealing the magical means by which theatrical effects are generated would have been anathema to Brecht, standing, as it does, in complete contradiction to his determinedly anti-illusionist theatrical/political project. In addition though, beyond the relative Brechtian or anti-Brechtian elements of Welles' acting, a variety of further influences, ranging from the practices of 19th Century melodrama and Shakespearean performance, to Stanislavskian-based Method acting, can also at times be discerned in his style. Indeed, even while Welles himself stated that he was "an actor of the old school," he also admitted, "I'm always making fun of the Method, but I use a lot of things that are taken from it." At various moments, Welles' film performances suggest the influences of Delsartian gestural acting, of traditions of oratory and storytelling, of his early work in radio drama, and of the practices of the Realist, Expressionist, Absurdist, and Epic theatre movements, amongst other things. Not surprisingly then, given the tendency to heteroglossia and complexity in his work as a whole, Welles seems to have been a very dialogic actor. As such, it seems that any attempts to draw general, totalizing conclusions about his performance style are necessarily doomed to failure.
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Felix K. said:
I'm wondering if anyone ever tried using different framerates for different scenes in the theatre. Have everything at 24 fps but the actions scenes that have e.g. 48...
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Once sound movies came along, starting in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer", projection speeds had to be standardized, but it wasn't uncommon for early silent projectionists to play around with projection speeds, though mainly to squeeze more showings into the day.

But shooting rate and projection rate was a lot more fluid back then. Certainly shooting speeds varied quite a bit according to mood, making some motions more dreamlike and others more energetic.

Trumbull originally wanted the 65mm scenes in "Brainstorm" to switch frame rates from 24 to 60 but he couldn't get the studio behind that because of the special Showscan projectors that would be needed. But he did shoot the 35mm scenes in 1.66 with mono sound so that it was more dramatic when the movie cut to the 65mm shots in 2.20 with 6-track sound.

The first 5-perf 65mm movies (the Todd-AO process) were shot at 30 fps instead of 24 fps, but after the first two movies ("Oklahoma!" and "Around the World in 80 Days") the frame rate was changed to 24 fps. 3-panel Cinerama was a 26 fps process until MGM used it to make "How the West Was Won", which was shot at 24 fps.
 
I don't think Welles' ideas re: acting have the first thing to do with Brecht's, except incidentally. Brecht was all about making the audience aware of the actor as a distinct entity from the character in order to preclude maudlin sentiment or purely emotional response--thereby facilitating easier reading of a political/discursive subtext. Welles simply acted (and directed) in an over-the-top, self-conciously formalist way that derived from theater.

I think Welles' early films (Kane, Ambersons) are primarily tragic, in the most traditional and theatrical sense. And, to that extent, Welles is trying to engender tragic rather than Brechtian distance. Welles' films don't deal with dramatic, empathetic everymen, but with larger-than-life tragic heroes. Generally, the tragic hero is one with whom you sympathize but do not align (or share in vicarious experience) and to that extent the director of tragedy must push some rift (distance) between protagonist and audience and yet retain the protagonist's autonomy as a character (and not the actor). Welles, foremost a student of the theater, did this using theatrical means: through traditional theatrical acting and larger-than-life performance. Citizen Kane's bold cinematographic distortions and virtuoso camerawork are highly analogous to its performances: over-the-top while not precluding emotional response, and only distanciating in order to engender a tragic response, and not a Brechtian (critical, too-distanced) one or a dramatic (purely emotional, too-empathetic) one. Welles and Brecht both relied on some level of distance between character and audience, but achieved it through different means and toward distinct goals.

Even modern filmed tragedies (Eastwood's highly overrated Mystic River comes to mind) rely on operatic rather than naturalistic acting in order to provide tragic distance, but Mystic River is in no way a Brechtian film. Dogville, by contrast, is.
 
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Hi David,

thanks for all the time you spend on answering the reduser.net community.

I have a question regarding the RED. I almost always shot with DV/HDV cam, more recently with some DSLR, but I'm finally about to get my hands on a RED (well I did before as a director, but it will be my first as DP)

I'm very exited, but also a little bit concerned.

I would like to shot exteriors night for night, in a city where there is not so much practical light. But I want to use the practical light as much as I can, especially for the background.

Lets say I'm lighting an actor with a kino flo and an HMI for his backlight. But I want to use the practical light of the city as a background.

If I push the ISO of the RED to hight numbers to make my BG lighter, how can I protect the light on the actor to clipped? I mean I can use flags, ND gels,… I already have some ideas, but I'm very interested by listening what you have to say about these kind of situation.

My question is about the balance between powerful cinema lights again city street lights (once again, only as a BG, so the frame doesn't looks empty).

Also, what is for you the maximum ISO we can set on a RED (original Monstro sensor, not M-X). Since the camera were "rate at 320 ISO", everyone that I know that use the RED always shoot 320… I would push it more (may be 800? or is it foolish?), and I'm find with some grain, as I will crush the blacks in post anyway (the director is looking for a comic book style)… But still, what set up, according to you, for an acceptable noise floor?

I know for a guy like you it should sound like stupid questions… I usually like to learn by myself and make my own mistakes to not do it again a second time (or in do it in purpose). The fact is I always owned the camera I used, and had time to do my homeworks. But I do not own a RED, and I'm afraid to have not enough time to practice before the real shooting.

Thank you for taking time to answer me, as well as all other questions you already answered in this forum.

Please excuse my approximative english, hope everything that I wrote makes sense…

Julien
 
Matt W. said:
I don't think Welles' ideas re: acting have the first thing to do with Brecht's, except incidentally. Brecht was all about making the audience aware of the actor as a distinct entity from the character in order to preclude maudlin sentiment or purely emotional response--thereby facilitating easier reading of a political/discursive subtext. Welles simply acted (and directed) in an over-the-top, self-conciously formalist way that derived from theater.
Click to expand...

"Brechtian" is probably the wrong word, but there was a certain anti-naturalistic streak in Welles, especially in a later film such as "The Trial" despite the use of real locations, which, like Terry Gilliam, Welles manages to make look like theatrical sets. I don't think Welles thought that "artifice" was a dirty word. His acting reminds me of Kubrick's comments to Jack Nicholson that James Cagney was a better actor than Henry Fonda, because Kubrick felt a performance should be judged by how interesting it was rather than how real it was.
 
Julien Deka said:
Lets say I'm lighting an actor with a kino flo and an HMI for his backlight. But I want to use the practical light of the city as a background.

If I push the ISO of the RED to hight numbers to make my BG lighter, how can I protect the light on the actor to clipped? I mean I can use flags, ND gels,… I already have some ideas, but I'm very interested by listening what you have to say about these kind of situation.

My question is about the balance between powerful cinema lights again city street lights (once again, only as a BG, so the frame doesn't looks empty).

Also, what is for you the maximum ISO we can set on a RED (original Monstro sensor, not M-X). Since the camera were "rate at 320 ISO", everyone that I know that use the RED always shoot 320… I would push it more (may be 800? or is it foolish?), and I'm find with some grain, as I will crush the blacks in post anyway (the director is looking for a comic book style)… But still, what set up, according to you, for an acceptable noise floor?
Click to expand...

Generally you balance the levels of your lights so that they match the background to the degree you want -- so if the background is very dim, you either use dimmer lights, or you use bigger lights backed farther away, or you knock down the lights with scrims, dimmers, etc.

And you pick an ASA rating that suits that level and the f-stop you want to shoot at, or can shoot at.

As to how fast you can rate the original sensor... well, how much noise you can live with is a matter of taste, so you should test it and look at the results on the largest screen that the final project will be shown on. But the visibility of the noise is dependent on how lifted or crushed your shadows are, so if you are crushing the blacks a bit, that will help. It's also affected by the base color temp, the closer to daylight, the better. So if you can live with tungsten lighting going a bit orange, you'll get less noise in the blue channel.

800 ASA on the old sensor is certainly usable, but borderline -- if you can get faster lenses and live with 500 ASA, you'll be happier.
 
Whoa... Deep water! With that, I can approach Touch of Evil and Kane with different eyes. I've had mixed feelings about pre-Method techniques. I've managed to remain somewhat ambivilent about Heston, not understanding what it was he was doing. I wouldn't call it self conscious, but there was that artifice about him that I found distracting. It seems pretty clear that Welles didn't have a problem with it. I always felt that it prevented me from giving in and suspending disbelief, regardless of how much I desired to. Maybe with understanding I can embrace it more.

Thanks guys.
 
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Hello David,

Do contemporary motion picture film cameras have a Rolling Shutter issue?

The reason I ask is that there is a test for Rolling Shutter on Ryan Walters website.

Click on this link.....
http://www.ryanewalters.com/Blog/files/The_Clash_of_the_Titans.html

It appears that the new Red MX sensor still has a slight Rolling Shutter issue.
But I am confused, because if the MX has a film like refresh rate, then does this mean that film cameras have a Rolling Shutter issue as well?

Also, do you know if the MX sensors refresh rate changes when a different Redcode rate is used?
 
Jim posted the refresh rates for the new sensor and what a film camera shutter's equivalent rate is. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head.

A film shutter is mechanical but since it slides/rotates in front of the frame to cover it, a certain (small) percentage of the frame exposure happens during that movement, creating artifacts -- but it's pretty mild.

The current M-X refresh rate comes closer to film's rate.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
Jim posted the refresh rates for the new sensor and what a film camera shutter's equivalent rate is. I don't recall the numbers off the top of my head.

A film shutter is mechanical but since it slides/rotates in front of the frame to cover it, a certain (small) percentage of the frame exposure happens during that movement, creating artifacts -- but it's pretty mild.

The current M-X refresh rate comes closer to film's rate.
Click to expand...

Sorry to persist about this "Dave" (2001: a Space Odyssey voice), But perhaps I can ask in a different way.

If you were to pan an Arri movie camera back and forth
horizontally very quickly, would there be skew like the skew
depicted in the MX test footage from the link I provided?
Would there be any skew?

According to what I’ve read online, the M sensor has a
9 ms refresh rate, the MX a 5 ms rate, and film has a 4 ms rate.

I'm not looking to fault MX, I'm just trying to understand if traditional
film camera also have low Skew.

(I have also asked this in a new EPIC section post)
 
Martin -

It depends on the Arri camera - some, like the IIC and III have shutters that wipe from top to bottom, much as the rolling shutter of the RED. Others, like the 535 and 35 BL, have shutters that wipe from side to side . . .
 
I have also heard, that when the shutter in a film camera wipes across the frame, due to its relation between the lens and the film plane that the shutter creates a soft wipe across the frame where as a digital sensor's "shutter" is electronic and more "exact" which also contributes to the difference in motion rendering.
 
Hi David,

Hope all is well. If you get curious, maybe take a peek at this anamorphic adapter (panasonic ag-7200) on a 5dm2:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?p=1902384

Would this lens setup be of professional quality in your view, or just short?

The shaky-cam / bad exposure of the test wasn't great, but the anamorphic lens characteristics looked very promising -- to me anyway.

Would you avoid such a setup, or maybe give it a test drive?
 
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