Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[David Mullen ASC]

David,
I am in Nepal and will be hanging out of a helicopter tomorrow trying to get some decent arial footage with a canon 7D. I wanted to bring my Red cam but it ended up just being to heavy to trek around the himalayas with.

I guess I just wanted some pointers on how I should mount/hand hold the camera what lens and frame rate I should use.
we have 18mm Ziess and a 24-70mm L series glass. A couple of bungie cords and some pillows so needless to say it will be a super gorilla style shoot.

I have thirty minuits in this helicopter with a window open to get these pick up shots for my film Light In The Himalayas so I got to make it count. to get an idea of the look of the film up to this point check out www.lightinthehimalayas.com . Everything up to this point has been shot on the HVX 200 using natural light with as much golden hour as possible.

Thanks so much for your thoughts, wish me luck tomorrow.

yaque

I don't feel qualified to give advice on aerial shooting from helicopters -- I haven't done it myself and feel it's dangerous enough that it should be left to experts. Good luck!

 

[kyle hartman]

Shooting interior/exterior car scenes at night

Shooting interior/exterior car scenes at night

David,

How would you light the interior of a moving car at night ?
Unfortunately we cannot afford a camera car and process trailer.
Would you use a Kino car kit inside? I thought about possibly getting
an extra mount for a 1'x1' panel to mount on the exterior of the car
as a key light, but seeing as they will be driving would their be a consistent key light ?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Jeffrey T. Morgan]

David,

How would you light the interior of a moving car at night ?
Unfortunately we cannot afford a camera car and process trailer.
Would you use a Kino car kit inside? I thought about possibly getting
an extra mount for a 1'x1' panel to mount on the exterior of the car
as a key light, but seeing as they will be driving would their be a consistent key light ?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I am not David, but what jumped to mind for me were two things.

1 - they used small LED panels / strips for Collateral.

2 - a low budget idea would be to pick up the inexpensive Cool Lights 2 light portable bank, or even better (read cheaper) would be an in car inverter, plug in 2 standard type lamp connectors, and have 2 CFL bulbs, I have one that is a 250w replacement (though it uses far less watts, which is why it would work well in a car). Mine is daylight balanced. they are LARGE bulbs, maybe 8 inches long, and 4 inches across. They have a nice silent ballast built in. I would then safely mount it / lay it in the dash behind the wheel.

just some naturalistic thoughts.

Jeff

 

[Stephen Williams]

I don't feel qualified to give advice on aerial shooting from helicopters -- I haven't done it myself and feel it's dangerous enough that it should be left to experts. Good luck!

For a start the rolling shutter of a still's camera will be a disaster.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

David, working with Red (more specifically your recent M-X experience), and in general, how to you manage detail/textures in the set?

DPs do a lot with lighting to show textures, paint boring walls by creating gradients with light fall-off or throwing patterns on them... I am not a DP, but once you ran out of "light help", do you then factor a different level, one of sharpening to increase the perceived detail in a wood grain, etc?

And do you just gauge how much detail will be captured by eye together with a good mental idea of how much will be resolved at the intended distribution resolution? Or do you also go to the DIT and take a closer look?

And how do you keep track of, and balance, the amount of sharpening you might introduce to the RAW file in terms of continuity?

What about and not wanting to sharpen a CU too much vs. helping texture-bland sets in deep DoF which may benefit from a little more perceived detail? Of course there is always matting skin tones or rotoscoping faces, and bringing the grade close enough for comfort in the cut... but how do you handle this aspect on set?

Not sure if I am composing a good question here, lol... I am running on little sleep and lots of coffee. Plus I am a bit deep here for my "DP swimming skills", but I hope I conveyed the general subject I am concerned with, and hope you don't mind elucidating us about that whole capturing and handling detail with M-X, mostly for 2k/1080p I suppose. I'd love to hear anything you would like to share on this.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

David,

How would you light the interior of a moving car at night ?
Unfortunately we cannot afford a camera car and process trailer.
Would you use a Kino car kit inside? I thought about possibly getting
an extra mount for a 1'x1' panel to mount on the exterior of the car
as a key light, but seeing as they will be driving would their be a consistent key light ?
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

First, it depends on where they are driving -- through a well-lit commercial street, a deserted suburban street, in the middle of the countryside, etc.?

Yes, you can start with a dim glow from inside the car using small soft sources (Rosco LitePads, Litepanels Micro, Kino car kit, rope lights, etc.) You can also add an even weaker frontal fill through the windshield so that there is a constant shadow detail level.

The key is to keep all of this dimmer than the surrounding ambient streetlighting so as to not overpower that, or the background. It helps to use a sensitive camera or fast film stocks and fast lenses, and it helps to find fairly well-lit streets so that they do most of the lighting for you.

But there comes a point, like in the countryside, where there is no real ambient light, at which point you may wonder if you might as well shoot poor man's process (parked car with moving lights) at better light levels for exposure. If you actually drive the car, you can sometimes get away with a side angle where the car drives past close bushes, trees, or a hillside so you can throw a little weak light on that passing stuff out the window, to get a sense of movement.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

DPs do a lot with lighting to show textures, paint boring walls by creating gradients with light fall-off or throwing patterns on them... I am not a DP, but once you ran out of "light help", do you then factor a different level, one of sharpening to increase the perceived detail in a wood grain, etc?

And do you just gauge how much detail will be captured by eye together with a good mental idea of how much will be resolved at the intended distribution resolution? Or do you also go to the DIT and take a closer look?

And how do you keep track of, and balance, the amount of sharpening you might introduce to the RAW file in terms of continuity?

What about and not wanting to sharpen a CU too much vs. helping texture-bland sets in deep DoF which may benefit from a little more perceived detail? Of course there is always matting skin tones or rotoscoping faces, and bringing the grade close enough for comfort in the cut... but how do you handle this aspect on set?

Not sure if I am composing a good question here, lol... I am running on little sleep and lots of coffee. Plus I am a bit deep here for my "DP swimming skills", but I hope I conveyed the general subject I am concerned with, and hope you don't mind elucidating us about that whole capturing and handling detail with M-X, mostly for 2k/1080p I suppose. I'd love to hear anything you would like to share on this.

There is an old rule that textures need to be exaggerated a bit for filming, which is why art departments spend so much time aging walls and whatnot, so that it reads. You can accentuate rough textures with raking hard light, or reflecting a soft source in the surface of the object so that the dark grooves stand out.

Sure you can add edge enhancement to those areas of the frame using Power Windows-style controls in the color-corrector, keeping the sharpening off of the faces, but you really want to be subtle about that and look at your sharpening on a large D.I. screen if the final result is intended for projection. You can't make decisions about edge enhancement on a small TV screen. Just keep in mind that the sharpening will also make the noise more pronounced. So I wouldn't lean on that trick too heavily.

Even though the sharpening had a video-ish effect, I thought the movie "Session 9" looked quite good, shot on the F900 in an abandoned hospital / mental asylum. The peeling paint on the wall was lit from a raking light through the windows and the edge enhancement made the texture really pop.

But your better off playing it safe when it comes to sharpening.

 

[kyle hartman]

First, it depends on where they are driving -- through a well-lit commercial street, a deserted suburban street, in the middle of the countryside, etc.?

Yes, you can start with a dim glow from inside the car using small soft sources (Rosco LitePads, Litepanels Micro, Kino car kit, rope lights, etc.) You can also add an even weaker frontal fill through the windshield so that there is a constant shadow detail level.

The key is to keep all of this dimmer than the surrounding ambient streetlighting so as to not overpower that, or the background. It helps to use a sensitive camera or fast film stocks and fast lenses, and it helps to find fairly well-lit streets so that they do most of the lighting for you.

But there comes a point, like in the countryside, where there is no real ambient light, at which point you may wonder if you might as well shoot poor man's process (parked car with moving lights) at better light levels for exposure. If you actually drive the car, you can sometimes get away with a side angle where the car drives past close bushes, trees, or a hillside so you can throw a little weak light on that passing stuff out the window, to get a sense of movement.

Great, thanks !

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

Thank you. So do you sometimes find yourself grading on set, not literally, but in your head?

And on the flip side, have you worked closely with a Director and DIT since the inception of RED Rocket?
If so, please tell us a bit about your take on that process, and how you are evolving with it if you are in fact getting into creating specific looks on set (and importing them to the camera perhaps) and really taking advantage of it. I can imagine you work so much in your head, but with this unprecedented level of WYSIWYG on something like a 25.5" 1080p Panasonic on the cart, and a 56" 12-series Panasonic for dailies, I'd assume you can work a little more upfront to protect your vision down the pipe by collaborating with the director on set and really getting close to nailing look in the meta-data, especially now with REDgamma, etc.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I fundamentally, philosophically, do not believe in creating looks on the set. Shooting is hard enough, I don't need to spend time on the set doing post-production work as well. And a movie set is not a proper environment to judge things critically, unless you've built a screening room that meets DCI standards.

I may create a few looks in prep, to be applied to dailies, or to create a LUT, but once we start shooting, I don't make changes. As long as I know what I'm recording, I know what I can do with the image in post based on pre-production testing and from experience. Sure, I'll double-check now & then during the shoot -- if I can, I'll take the first day's footage into a post house and look at it in an environment similar to the final distribution format, but otherwise, I have to accept that not only is it not possible to be in absolute control over the process of filmmaking, it may not even be desirable. Filmmaking should be a human process, and nothing human can be perfect. So I'm not interested in completely removing all the variables and risks from the process, within reason of course. Otherwise, I should become an animator and create everything myself.

People waste a lot of time on a movie set fiddling with things. That's natural and part of the process, attention to detail... but it has to be matched with the ability to prioritize, to fight the battles worth fighting for, and to spend the time where it is best served. Perfect is the enemy of good, as they say. You spend too much time on one element, and other aspects may turn out worse -- and the thing you spent so much time on turns out to not be in the final cut.

There is practical obsessiveness and impractical obsessiveness, and you have to recognize when you are crossing the line from one to the other.

I mean, I'd be more than happy to spend time on the set doing post-production work on the image IF they doubled the schedule to compensate. But they rarely do.

So I think you create processed looks in prep (with the DIT) and in post (with the colorist), and during the shoot, you mainly want to use traditional tools (lighting, exposure, filters, etc.) to get the image as good as you can get it, and what you need -- and what you mainly rely on the DIT for -- is to make sure you understand what's getting recorded, and that the viewing methods are as accurate as possible in an uncontrolled environment. And that the system is staying consistent with how it was set-up in prep, and that things are following through into dailies. But playing around with the look on the set? I don't take it too seriously if I can't view the results in a proper environment.

In fact, on my last two digital shows, I eliminated the separate DIT tent and combined his set-up into the mobile director's video station, so we can all sit together near the actors. So the viewing conditions are less ideal and more inaccurate, but we move around faster and I'm not cut-off from the director and the set as I was when I sat in a DIT tent (which I only did on my first show with a DIT and won't do ever again.) Of course, outdoors in daylight we'll set-up a pop-up tent or flag the monitors.

Yes, when I shoot, I am always thinking of what I might do in post to the image to adjust something that I can't fix easily or quickly on the set. Or I am telling the director what we should save to post to fix.

RedRocket implies I'm going to transcode and look at 4K footage on the set. When do I have time to do that, look back over what I've shot? We're constantly moving forward, we rarely stop to review, not if we want to make our day. I'd only do it in extreme cases when I thought something was going wrong and I needed to double-check the R3D files.

 

[cooper roberts]

David, thanks for taking all the time to join in on these forums! This summer I'll be shooting my first feature and since the Scarlet won't be out in time, looks like I'm going to use the Canon 5D. I'm trying to wrap my head around aspect ratios and their justifications. Is there something silly about cropping a digital 16:9 image down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1? I see that being done a lot for online DSLR clips and I'm curious what a professional DP's take is.

Is my personal aesthetic preference the only thing to consider when deciding between aspect ratios for my 5D project? Are there any downsides to leaving it in 16:9? In general, what is the point of wider ratios like 2.35:1; simply to engage the peripheral?

Thanks,
Coop

www.zAration.com

 

[Jamie Havill]

David, thanks for taking all the time to join in on these forums! This summer I'll be shooting my first feature and since the Scarlet won't be out in time, looks like I'm going to use the Canon 5D. I'm trying to wrap my head around aspect ratios and their justifications. Is there something silly about cropping a digital 16:9 image down to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1? I see that being done a lot for online DSLR clips and I'm curious what a professional DP's take is. Is my personal aesthetic preference the only thing to consider when deciding between aspect ratios for my 5D project?

Thanks,
Coop

Obviously David is going to chime in here, but just to reassure you, cropping to a desired aspect ratio is common practice. It is purely personal choice on what you think will fit the project best.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

16x9 is the same thing as 1.78 : 1 and is not that far off from 1.85 : 1.

So the safest thing is to shoot for 16x9 and just figure that if it get shown in a theater it will be trimmed slightly to 1.85. If you want to take that into account, you can just add a bit more headroom into your shots.

Whether you want to compose for a letterboxed 2.35 image is just a creative choice, though I don't think the Canon's recorded image has enough resolution to handle that much cropping for theatrical projection, but for letterboxed TV display, it would be fine. Just hope no one ever asks you for a 16x9 full-frame version unless you protected the whole frame well.

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

Thank you so much for the detail you put into that post David. It is so great to hear you talk about the big picture, and your past experiences.

Also, after reading your post I'd say it is hard to argue for wasting time on playing with looks, at all. Perhaps the only time where it would be logically justifiable would be if there is something wrong and you are considering a re-shoot.

On the other hand, at least a few hours in the weekend at a local digital theater with the editor going over the cut is still a must. Hopefully with a large HDTV and an SDTV as well as the large projection, to look at how performance nuances play. All in the hopes of spotting areas where an easy pick up may help, fix, or complete a scene. But that is a different story. I can't help wonder however how you would approach dailies from a directors POV.

In fact, on my last two digital shows, I eliminated the separate DIT tent and combined his set-up into the mobile director's video station, so we can all sit together near the actors. So the viewing conditions are less ideal and more inaccurate, but we move around faster and I'm not cut-off from the director and the set

Of course, outdoors in daylight we'll set-up a pop-up tent or flag the monitors.

On a side note, it makes me very happy to hear you say this. It is very much what I have had in mind for my independent feature. We won't be doubling up the schedule, though I'd love 60 days! : )

 

[Steven Caesare]

I'll take advantage in the lull in this thread to say that I just saw Northfork, and David, the cinematography was excellent.

I did find the story a tad odd, however.

-sc

 

[Ralph B.]

I must confess I haven't looked through all 292 pages of Q&A, but I had a question regarding DSMC shooting. I know everyone has pulled a still from a motion before but with the idea that there will be a good deal of people that will be shooting "hybrid" (my word, meaning shooting motion with the idea of using stills from it. Think Esquire cover).

This opens up a whole new way group of tradeoffs. My question to you is what is that sweetspot that you see much of this hybrid work happening at? If you only have 1 chance to get the shot(s) where do you see the best tradeoffs happening for this type of shooting? I recognize that it will be different for a football game than an interview or fashion shoot, but to me this is an interesting topic. Do you go for perfectly sharp no blur stills, adding back in motion blur in post, or is the better choice to set up the shot for motion and let stills fall where they may. Or maybe just overcrank... Any ideas on how DSMC shooter will approach that situation where there is only one shot.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, if the motion video has to look good, it's probably best to stick to film-style frame rates and shutter speeds and just hope that the person pulling the frames picks one without too much motion in it blurring it too much.

Otherwise, like you said, you want to overcrank and/or use a shorter shutter angle but I don't know if that will give you the motion image you want.

I think of this trend of pulling stills from Red motion like pulling stills from a movie, that it has a certain look... like actual frames from a narrative movie rather than still photography.

 

[scott mei]

shoting 25p with 1/60 in NTSC land with over/under crank possibilities

shoting 25p with 1/60 in NTSC land with over/under crank possibilities

Hi David,

I am shooting a commercial which will output to 25p PAL in NTSC land,because the lack of the budget to do a final conversion from NTSC to PAL I was asked to shoot the project in 25P.

I know you shot a project in this circumstance with a Sony F-900 and you solved the problem with the ECU. any suggestions I could do with the red?

I know i can just shoot 25p with a shutter setting at 144/150(1/60) degree to avoid the flicking as the electricity here is 60HZ. I wonder if I will run into any kinda flicking problems or any possible problems when I do over/under crank of the camera speed.

I assume I should shoot 50p, 75p, 100p for slow motion based on the 25p base, and go 75 degree or 37.5 shutter angle for strobing motion effect as i would normally do in 90 and 45.

am I hitting the right way with those settings? or would I have any kinda of issue with those settings? I am a bit frustrated and I look forward to any suggestions and helps. thanks a lot!!

 

[David Mullen ASC]

You'd shoot 25P with a 150 degree shutter to get a 1/60th exposure time when you wanted to avoid flicker from 60Hz AC lights. Or just set the exposure on the Red using shutter speed instead of shutter angle and use 1/60th.

Otherwise, you don't need to overcomplicate things for slow-motion and short shutter angle efx, just use whatever slow-mo speeds you want and 45 and 90 degrees if you want, as long as you don't have flicker issues with those pulsing 60Hz lights. If you do, then you need to find shutter speeds that work. It would be easier then to pick speeds that are good for 60 Hz, like 60P, etc. It doesn't have to be in multiples of 25. In other words, once you aren't shooting 25P with a 150 shutter, shoot how you'd normally shoot for slow-motion in a 24 fps movie, using HMI "safe" speeds when necessary for a 180 degree shutter, or the right shutter speeds.
http://media.panavision.com/ReferenceLibrary/pdfs/tech_reference/60Hz.pdf

As for conversion to 60i, the simplest thing is to just treat 25P as if it were 23.98P and add a 3:2 pulldown. It makes the movie slightly slowed-down (because 25 fps footage is being played at 24 fps) a hair and you may want to do a pitch correction to the audio to adjust.

 

[Eirik Tyrihjel]

I fundamentally, philosophically, do not believe in creating looks on the set. Shooting is hard enough, I don't need to spend time on the set doing post-production work as well.

This just makes so much sense to me, I really appreciate the time and energy David puts into this thread, I love reading every bit of it as it evolves. Thank you!