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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

It would be worth testing against simply cropping to 2.40, to see which was better for sharpness, noise, etc.

Looks promising, though I'm not sure I'd put up with one on a pro feature. It may be too limiting in terms of focusing & zooming and what stop was acceptable, etc. But definitely worth testing.
 
Ryan E. Walters said:
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.
Click to expand...

Ryan,

What were the MX camera settings for your skew test.
180 degree shutter? 24 fps? etc.?
Your test seems to have too much skew for a
1 ms timing difference.
 
Douglas Underdahl said:
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 . . .
Click to expand...

Thank you.

Do you know the wipe direction for Panavision Cameras?
 
Martin Stevens said:
Ryan,

What were the MX camera settings for your skew test.
180 degree shutter? 24 fps? etc.?
Your test seems to have too much skew for a
1 ms timing difference.
Click to expand...

I provided a very detailed, downloadable PDF in the test that has all of that info- for both the cameras, and for the post. (It is towards the start of the article.) I also noted in that same post, that I was shooting at 4.5k in Redcode 42- which is the highest data, and resolution possible, so the processor is really working overtime at that point. Unfortunately, I did not have the M camera available for that one, as I'm sure that the results would have been even more extreme. The short answer to your question is 180 degrees, 24p.
 
Ryan E. Walters said:
I provided a very detailed, downloadable PDF in the test that has all of that info- for both the cameras, and for the post. (It is towards the start of the article.) I also noted in that same post, that I was shooting at 4.5k in Redcode 42- which is the highest data, and resolution possible, so the processor is really working overtime at that point. Unfortunately, I did not have the M camera available for that one, as I'm sure that the results would have been even more extreme. The short answer to your question is 180 degrees, 24p.
Click to expand...

Thank you Ryan.
 
This info was just posted by Jim in the EPIC posts section.
So the confusion is now solved.

Jannard said:
We have temporarily rolled back the clock speed (read-reset time) for the M-X upgrade cameras to work on several issues... calibration being one. As soon as we fix all the "stuff" we'll roll up the clock speed again. As of today's build, you will get skew "slightly better than the M sensor". Soon, that will go back to where it was when we showed M-X at RED Day. EPIC will be released with 5ms out of the box.

I would have posted this before... but I forgot. Sorry about that.

Jim
Click to expand...
 
David,

I've noticed a lot of national commercials seem to have a lot of "snap." And by that I think I mean a wide dynamic range in the negative. In looking at some of the stills on your site, I notice that sometimes your films snap and sometimes they are softer. For example, I would call "Manure" and "Solstice" snappy and "Norfolk" and "Twin Falls Idaho" soft. Is that a visual style you make a conscientious choice of on a scene by scene basis, or as an overall look, or something else altogether? Is it achieved through color manipulation, contrast, foreground lighting ratio to background ratio, lens choice, or a combination of all of the above and others? I've achieved that look a couple of times, but it was by chance and I'm not sure how it happened.

Thank you.
 
"Snap" tends to mean a contrasty image with strong blacks and some hot whites, which is sort of the opposite of a wide dynamic range image, whether or not they start out color-correcting one. "Snap" as in the image sort of "pops" out at you. It also tends to mean sharp images as well.

I like variety -- I'm sort of a cinematography history buff so I jump at the chance in projects to emulate other styles, whether a diffused 70's look or a crisp, contrasty Storaro-esque look. Saturated, desaturated, diffused, sharp, I've tried them all, but always justified by the story.

"Northfork" is definitely a bit dreamlike and soft, I used smoke, ProMist filters, flashing, to soften the image. It's meant to feel like the netherland between life & death.

Actually, "Twin Falls Idaho" was shot sharp, so the softness is all in the lighting, though I slightly flashed the negative on that one.

"Solstice" was mostly shot sharp except for the dreams and flashbacks -- I figured that for a naturalistic ghost story, it shouldn't be too filtered, it was fairly grounded in a real setting.

You try to do most of the visual look with art direction, lighting, lens choice -- tricks like diffusion are sort of the icing on the cake, not the cake itself, so you want to be careful.

The story also tells you how far you can go with stylization; some are more grounded in a recognizable reality and others have to be set in their own unique world.

I try to design an overall look to a movie, with variations to match the scenes. Some designs follow an A-to-B arc, where the visual start out one way and end up another by the end. Horror films tend to follow that convention, they move from the realistic to the expressionistic. Some designs are A-versus-B, where you are intercutting two worlds that contrast visually with each other. A common example would be a cold world versus a warm world -- like in "Little Buddha" where the Seattle scenes are very blue-ish but the flashbacks are very warm, as are the scenes in Nepal & India. Though that is also a bit of an A-to-B arc as well because there are more Seattle scenes in the beginning and more Nepal scenes by the end.

Beyond color, there is also the quality of the light (sunny, overcast, etc.) and its contrast (high or low), the sharpness, wide-angle vs. telephoto, etc.

Some movies have one overall tone while others have a lot of variation scene to scene. You can usually tell which approach to use when you read the script.

I don't have a specific personal style other than I gravitate towards certain visual effects that can sometimes be described as "painterly".

My earliest influences were visually opposite: Geoffrey Unsworth and Vittorio Storaro.

Unsworth belonged to the Impressionistic school of cinematographers that love visual abstraction, softness, romance ("2001" was atypical of Unsworth's work, mainly because of what the story required and what Kubrick wanted, but "Cabaret" is classic Unsworth, and John Alcott's photography of "Barry Lyndon" has certain qualities similar to Unsworth). I'd put Ozzie Morris, Robert Richardson, Janusz Kaminski, and Chris Doyle in that category. These DP's are most likely to use diffusion and smoke in their work.

Storaro is certainly painterly, but rarely diffused -- generally there is a crisp Caravaggio-esque contrast and dimensionality to the image. To me, he belongs in a category you could almost call Operatic, that Italian passion and theatricality, graphic, dramatic, bold. I would place Gregg Toland in that category too. Instead of being Impressionists, they are more Expressionists. And just as Caravaggio had followers, Storaro has too -- I see his influence on some many people, like Khondji, Anchia, Tivoli, Wolski.

The other school that has inspired me is what I would called the Naturalists or the Realists, people like Deakins, Willis, Savides, Watkins. Now obviously they have done painterly work as well, and even highly stylized movies, they are not strictly realistic all the time. All of these DP's have crossed categories, changed styles to suit the material, but they also have certain tendencies and tastes. When they are inspired by painters, it tends to be more realistic ones like Hopper or Sargent.

And there are a lot of DP's who cross categories all the time, making it harder for me to describe their general tendency -- someone like Conrad Hall, for example, or Allen Daviau, John Toll. Often naturalistic, but also very romantic.
 
David: Thanks for contributing and sharing your wisdom with the RED community. I have a question about two day for night filters offered by Tiffen. One is the classic Day For Night that fuses an ND with a lavender/blue filter. The other is called Monochrome D4N. For the monochrome filter, Tiffen makes some vague reference to adjusting the color timing in order to achieve the effect. That seems to apply to film-based acquisition. Moreover, it also doesn't give you any instruction as to what you need to adjust.

How would I use the monochrome filter for digital acquisition? Would the adjustments be in-camera or in post and what adjustments are required? Also, have you used either of these? If so, what applications best suit each filter? Thanks
 
The monochrome day-for-night sort of sucks a lot of the color out by giving the image a heavy greenish bias I think (I haven't used it myself), which when timed out, leaves a somewhat desaturated image.

My gut instinct tells me that this was designed for traditional film-based shooting and post where saturation cannot be adjusted in color timing a print.

Whereas with digital color-correction, saturation levels are easily adjusted so I don't see the need for this filter.

The Blue Day-for-Night has a blue-ish tint, though that's unnecessary in film when you can just use tungsten-balanced stocks uncorrected in daylight, so I think this filter must be assuming a 5600K base more or less (which is probably good for the Red One). I think some of the strengths have a built-in UltraCon or LowCon effect as well.

Worth trying out.
 
David, I asked this somewhere else, then realized I should try you... i will summarize:

What book or dvd do you recomend to get the basics of FILM CAMERA and RED CAMERA operation understood?

I have a lot of experience in everything from DV to F900s, but now i might have a chance to grow into a red / film shoot, and would like a resource to read before doing some tests.

THANKS A TON for your time.

Jeff
 
I answered your other post, but I can recommend my own work -- try "Cinematography" (Third Edition) by Malkiewicz & Mullen. It's written for the person just starting out shooting 16mm film, so it covers the basics and most of the concepts are applicable to 35mm.

As for Red, I can recommend Noah Kadner's book.
 
Thanks David, sorry for the double post.

I will be ordering your book momentarily i that makes up for it ;-)

Jeff
 
On a similar note, do you know of any books that teach blocking or coverage techniques? I recently watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and was just stunned at how I absolutely could not have shot or directed anything in that movie (at times I prefer Slocombe even to Kaminski...) Likewise, the dinner table scene in Drag me to Hell (and its clear antecedent in Wise's Haunting) blew my mind in terms of just maintaining screen direction and coherence while vacillating rapidly between subjective and objective presentation.

I'm a DP foremost, but it's so much easier to work with directors if you understand blocking and shot choice as well as (or better than) they do. I was just rejected from every grad school I applied to so I have to teach myself now. Are there any books that cover this stuff? Did you learn about it at Cal Arts? (I may apply there next year.) It doesn't seem so complicated, really, once you have the basics--but I don't know where to start.

I'm sorry for all my questions; my career is falling apart so I really need some guidance.
 
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David,

I know you don't like to hear this, but your reply was so awesome I wanted to thank you. You rock.
 
Matt W. said:
On a similar note, do you know of any books that teach blocking or coverage techniques? I recently watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and was just stunned at how I absolutely could not have shot or directed anything in that movie (at times I prefer Slocombe even to Kaminski...) Likewise, the dinner table scene in Drag me to Hell (and its clear antecedent in Wise's Haunting) blew my mind in terms of just maintaining screen direction and coherence while vacillating rapidly between subjective and objective presentation.
Click to expand...

I learned a lot about staging & directing by reading the Truffaut/Hitchcock book and then watching all of those Hitchcock movies. In fact, most of what I've learned has been by watching the actual movies -- Spielberg is a great teacher in staging for camera. Yes, he's a bit daunting, but then, he's Spielberg!

There are some directing books out there, I don't have them on my shelves to check, but I've flipped through a lot of these listed on this Amazon page under "customers also bought" and they all have some good bits in them:

http://www.amazon.com/Film-Directin...=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268869899&sr=1-1

I learned directing mostly by watching Hitchcock, Spielberg, Welles, Lean, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and John Ford movies more than anything else. Probably puts me at odds a bit with modern trends though, which I think of as the Cuisinart School of Directing -- cover everything with a dozen cameras and then chop it up the death. I guess you could say that Kurosawa started that multi-cam style, taken up by Ridley & Tony Scott... but I think they actually do it well.
 
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I can vouch for the quality of "Cinematography" (Third Edition) by Malkiewicz & Mullen.. Actually I studied under Malkiewicz at CalArts. :)

Great thread!
 
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