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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 :)

Ron Perelman's company is going to be done in a few years.

David,

I just can't understand you bias against bulgarian waffles…
They are quite delicious, if memory serves.:clown2:

Emmanuel
 
David. Yes, it is true Red hasn't proven itself as a reliable company yet, mostly because of the fact that it's so brand new, so little time has gone by to really prove much of anything. Panavision on the other hand has had a long history and reputation behind it.

Just an interesting note I thought I'd mention, I was reading an article in a cinematography magazine talking about Jim Muro, the DP from Crash. In it, he discussed the various steps he took to save money (I can't remember exactly what he did) that ended up saving them a considerable amount of money. This was a budget that was modest for Hollywood standards of about 6-7 million. I'd assume he'd have saved even more if the Red was available then.

Yes, at the moment, the well-funded films, the Pirates, Spider-mans, and Transformers of the world will stick with film until the Reds, Dalsas, and Thomsons prove themselves more reliable.
 
Yes, movies in the under 15-mil budget range often look for ways to save money, but every producer & director cuts corners in different ways. Unfortunately they all start with crew salaries before anything else...

But beyond that, some will spend their money differently than others. Up til now, shooting on 35mm was generally a given though, but now with the Genesis, the RED, etc. that is less of a given. Recently some of the mid-level production companies doing movies in that range have been pushing their directors to consider using digital to save money (partly out of a need to brand their company as "hip" and "cutting edge"... and partly to save money.)

This is a recent change in attitude from just two years ago. Now you have TV companies like Showtime generally mandating digital origination, a trend I would have guessed would have happened sooner.
 
I would assume that if Red's cameras advance even more, like the Red Epic, to the point where they're considerably "better" in image quality, such as color rendition, resolution, ergonomics, and keep that beautiful DoF and motion rendition, then I can imagine the shift towards digital accelerating. Once enough studios and producers/directors/cinematographers believe that the Red can match and surpass the performance of high-end 35mm cameras, the Red might become a well-known staple of professional "film"-making. I don't want to have the "it's all subjective as to what is better, it's all a matter of taste" again, but I will say that if Red's cameras surpass them, they'll probably take over as the new standard. I mean...would anyone still want to drive a Honda if Mercedes-Benz cars were better in both quality and price?
 
Also take in consideration that many times, image quality and the coolness factor and what the director want to do don't matter worth a hill of beans if the feature can't be bonded.

A good personal friend of mine is a Senior VP at one of the big feature bonding companies (there aren't many.)

We were talking about this, and he said, "Forget about RED. The problem is how to bond data." We had a long discussion after that, but with bonding companies, they could give a crap about origination. They care about safety, reliability, and protection. If they are not convinced about these things, no bond. No bond, no money. No money, no feature.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
luki said:
They care about safety, reliability, and protection. If they are not convinced about these things, no bond. No bond, no money. No money, no feature.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA
Click to expand...

That is not exactly how it really works.

Well ... next time we have drinks Luki I can share LOTS of colorful opinions I have about bond companies.
 
Offhollywood said:
how tradition insurance packages for production are based on motion picture film statistics - instead of IT statistics, etc.
Click to expand...

A little off topic, but I wanted to emphasize that how important is the proper interpretation of statistics. However, unfortunately, even simple statistics are sometimes not properly understood or applied with disastrous consequences.

Firstly, a hypothetical scenario, and then, a real case that happened in Britain.

Suppose an HIV testing procedure is 95% accurate on the test subjects, and suppose that 5% population of the whole world is HIV +ve (I have exaggerated this number of 5%, but not really gigantically, to achieve an interesting result). Then what is probability that one is really HIV +ve, if one is tested for HIV and the test comes out to be +ve?

And the answer is 50%!!!! Yes, i.e., under the assumptions I have put in, one can just flip a coin and decide if they had HIV or not.

Okay don't panic. The probability that one is HIV -ve if the test comes out to be -ve is 99.7%. Pretty high.

Now on to the real case. Sally Clark in Britain was accused and convicted of the murder of her sons according to what is known as "sudden infant death syndrome." Only when the Royal Statistical Society intervened the error in interpreting probabilities was recognized.

Please see the following article:
Neven Sesardic, "Sudden Infant Death or Murder? A Royal Confusion About Probabilities", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2007 58(2):299-329.

Wikipedia link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Clark
 
toolizcool said:
I would assume that if Red's cameras advance even more, like the Red Epic, to the point where they're considerably "better" in image quality, such as color rendition, resolution, ergonomics, and keep that beautiful DoF and motion rendition, then I can imagine the shift towards digital accelerating. Once enough studios and producers/directors/cinematographers believe that the Red can match and surpass the performance of high-end 35mm cameras, the Red might become a well-known staple of professional "film"-making. I don't want to have the "it's all subjective as to what is better, it's all a matter of taste" again, but I will say that if Red's cameras surpass them, they'll probably take over as the new standard. I mean...would anyone still want to drive a Honda if Mercedes-Benz cars were better in both quality and price?
Click to expand...

As David has mentioned, already, within the last two years, mainly because of Genesis and Viper, but more recently thanks to Red joining the fray, things have already begun to change quite rapidly.

Once Epic is released (along with or followed by the next generation from Arri, Panavision and Sony, etc), these cameras will trigger the "knee" of an exponential curve, which will rapidly see the replacement of chemical film with digital cinema cameras.

exponentialdi9.gif


This is exactly what happened with single-lens-reflex still cameras. What people do not realize is how quickly an exponential trend moves compared to linear change. Once things start happening, it's very much like a snowball effect.
 
I also think that, whenever we witness an exponential development in some field, the progress in that field has been artificially obstacled for a long time.

Film ruled for too long and now...

...The Force balances itself out, with the outburst of Digital technology.

***

The Roman orgies and the following rigorous morale of the Middle Ages...

Dialectics....

But now, once again we have the zillion XXX sites on the Net. :)

Get ready for the new Dark Ages. :biggrin:
 
I think Tom is on the mark

I posted a year ago on a thread about DSLRs and the StopMotion industry and their inroads to commercials and features

My RED cameras are currently on loan for tests to an animation studio that produces features, commercials, series and shorts. Up until last year features and commercials were shot on 35mm movie cameras and series for HD or SD broadcast were shot on XDCAM systems with a handful of DSLRs deployed in commercials and shorts.

When I went in last week I saw Canon and Nikon DSLRs everywhere and an established high end 2K RAW workflow for film out and HD mastering - they are never shooting film again
 
Another thing I wanted to mention and ask was, I was watching Apocalypto, which was shot on the Panavision Genesis HD. I noticed much of the movie looked distinctly digital. It was really apparent in the chase scenes, where you can tell the motion rendition looked like a home video shot with a camcorder, or like a live broadcast of a sports event. It clearly did not look film-like (because it isn't). I compared it to the Red, and particularly the Peter Jackson short, Crossing the Line. Now here, you would have difficulty telling whether it's film or digital, because the colors are very well done, just like film, and very important, the motion was very film-like and cinematic. I know both pieces, Apocalyto and Crossing the Line were shot on 24fps and projected the same. Can someone give me a detailed or technical/scientific explanation for why this is? Why one looks so different from the other when they're both digital and 24fps? Particularly, I'm talking about motion rendition.

You know, to be honest, if someone had only looked at Apocalypto as what digital cinema cameras can do, some might not be impressed.
 
A creative decision was made on "Apocalypto" to shoot with the shutter at 360 degrees for action scenes and low-light scenes, hence the smeary motion. You can get a similar motion look on the RED if you worked at it... Since a movie camera can't really go much beyond 200 degrees, most are limited to 180 degrees, a longer shutter time like from a 360 degree shutter (i.e. no shutter at all) produces very un-film-like motion.
 
I thought those "chase scenes" in Apocalypto were done mainly with tiny 16mm cameras... thus explaining the video-like DOF.
 
Tom said:
I thought those "chase scenes" in Apocalypto were done mainly with tiny 16mm cameras... thus explaining the video-like DOF.
Click to expand...

No, only a few fast-moving shots were done that way, and probably in the middle of a fast action scene, you aren't really noticing the extra depth of field. Besides, people are used to seeing daytime scenes at deeper stops in 35mm, so shooting 16mm at f/2.8 is like shooting 35mm at f/5.6, which is hardly unusual in the daytime. So the only thing that would have differentiated the 16mm footage from 35mm (or Genesis in this case) was the graininess and the softness.

The video-like motion smearing was definitely from the use of a long shutter speed in the Genesis.
 
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