Sean Cunningham

  I didn't say a thing about practicality.  I said compromised.  Any solution that enforces an 85mm+ scenario I consider an expensive toy.  If you insist though, there certainly isn't anything "practical" about spending thousands to shoot VIMEO uploads that make the bokeh-boys go "oooh" and "ahhh".

I'd also suggest, for folks with full-frame sensors, they might consider just embracing the aesthetic of full frame, which is, ideally, nearly as different from standard 35mm motion pictures as anamorphic photography is.  It's already got an impact advantage and one that's easier for less sensitive viewers to still appreciate when shooting daylight photography.   Anamorphic on full frame, with almost all of the available adapters, is the most compromised setup you can build, largely because there isn't a lot of precedent for anamorphic at this size.  65mm options were crazy big and the least anamorphic of all of the standards.

Really, eight pages of this shite?         Eight pages and you still haven't learned the difference between "hero" and "antihero".     Sad.

Yeah, I'm waiting on a project to justify Element 3D.  Normally motion graphics are something I just play around with but I may be doing a lot more commercials that could benefit from using something like this.  Doing the same things in Houdini for a quick and dirty spot involves a lot more work that has nothing to do with pixels hitting the viewport so a more integrated solution within AE is awesome.     Here's the second spot in the series:   http://vimeo.com/61033585

There's alternatives to Boujou now that employ its style of feature tracking.  CS6-After Effects has this ability, though I'd never expect it to be on par with Boujou.  Tracking has always been one of the single weakest features in After Effects.  Thankfully they bundle Mocha with AE now and it's tracking is excellent.  I've successfully converted Mocha tracks into something I could use with my 3D camera in Houdini but most folks will want something less "fiddly".   There's a pretty cool looking tracker for sale over at Video Copilot that's far more affordable.

  You are a friggin' idiot.  I wasn't getting conservative, something I'm not. That's just an ignorant assumption based on where I live (or I should say, the State, because I live in a liberal, media conscious city that actually plays an important role in world music and film, unlike yourself).  My reaction was based on common sense.  Time and place.  I'd expect even a child to understand that, propagandist.

  What's crazy is this aspect ratio goes back to somewhere in the early 1960s at NHK and the first demonstrated HD systems.  Only back then they were originally working with 1125 scan lines.  I think there was a Euro standard in the 1980s that also had 1100 lines or more but it was analog, if I remember right, and lost out to the slightly lower spec digital format in 1080.

Tarantino and musicians have been the targets of neo-puritans on the right and thought nazis on the left and new leanings towards cultural censorship in the USA, coming on since the 1980s.   He left the Sundance program back before making Reservoir Dogs because those proto-hipsters didn't like his stuff.  Then there's the MPAA, which is both not the friend of the independent (either leaning or financed) filmmaker and a fairly right-wing organization governing a left-wing (supposedly) industry and its filmmakers.     Tarantino basing his style on '60s and '70s films is no different than new blues-based hard rock duos and trios forming and creating new music.  Just because new styles have been created in the meantime it doesn't mean that contemporary artists must pick from whatever is the latest thing to use as a basis for their work.  Blues-based hard rock wasn't "used up" by the late 1970s it was the artists working in that style who were used up and out of ideas and not creating music to the same level as when they began.   Thank the Maker, for films in particular, we have plenty of neo-classical and neo-romantic composers like J. Williams, J. Horner and Basil P.  to create amazing, orchestrated scores.  The music wasn't, somehow, all used up.   Same goes for filmmakers.  

  Why?  Some crackpot claiming it promotes violence against women and rape?   Those people need to visit Japan.  Pornography is produced on an absolutely EPIC scale there, in all forms of media, to extremes that would literally render some critics of pornography into a catatonic state or convince them that "the Rapture" had to be just around the corner.  Yet they have, compared to us and several Western countries, a sub-fraction of the rapes committed.  Also, unlike in the USA, they have an 80%+ conviction rate for those that are reported.    They have only a few bizarre, MacArthur given (the General) rules about content, some of which have been repealed, some of which are still observed for, I don't know what reason.  The content creators and consumers find ways to circumvent these rules, though, ultimately, they just have to visit US and European sites to see what's "illegal" there...which is a crazy notion because they have sub-genres filled with demons who rape and all kinds of tentacled monsters that rape (lots of rape) and just...crazy stuff...I guess they have to be that crazy with it because they can't seem to pull off Zalman King-level soft core and their straight, meat-and-potato hardcore makes me feel like I'm watching special ed kids exploited.   Virtually any kind of bent is portrayed for their highly cultured, highly educated, highly civic, highly formal, heavily repressed society to consume and somehow the world keeps turning and women aren't (contrary to some of the stories they make) viewed as prey animals.     Groping on subways and buses...well...yeah, there is that.

Killer Joe is an excellent film.  It's far more reminiscent of his earlier works, like Cruising.  It's very subversive.  Amazingly so for a filmmaker of his vintage.  That he can still produce work that outrages so many people, I can only hope I'm half the filmmaker he is someday.   I saw this film at a fairly packed, late night screening at the Alamo Drafthouse.  It's very funny.  That was the aspect of the film that Mathew M. missed the first time he read the script and thought it was the most deplorable thing he'd ever read.  It took him a few days of stewing over the story before he took a look again.  There are practically no characters you can really like here, aside from Juno Temple's Dotty (she played Selina Kyle's roomie in The Dark Knight Rises), but she only gets a pass because...well...she's not all there.  Though she's obviously, from the trailer, a party to the crime being planned she's still an innocent who lacks judgment.    What's truly subversive about this film isn't that it's a story of sociopathic, moronic red necks, it's that, in the final reel, the audience is made to pay and feel guilt for the hoots and laughs and cheers that they let out during the film that came before those final moments.  They're lured in and then, at the end of the fun house, they're shown a mirror.  Not everyone can take it and so, at "that moment" there will almost invariably be a few people who get up and leave the theater.     Those people though, they're not of higher moral stuff.  They'll outrage and they'll cry for the film to be done away with or say it should have never been made.  But the truth is, if they made it that far they're no better than anyone who stayed.  No better than anyone who participated in its creation.  They're just self-righteous boobs.

Y'all English better not watch Killer Joe...your coppers are already making sure you can't watch A Serbian Film.

  No, hence the anti-hero.  Pure heros are generally boring and don't represent real, complex people.  The classic hero is often two dimensional.  This is why a Batman movie, even the bad ones, will usually be better than watching a Superman movie.   The anti-hero in Western, personified by Clint Eastwood in the 1960s, was a moral man (he had a code) but he was a brutal and cruel man to those who did evil.  The boring hero Western of John Wayne went out of style with sequined shirts.  It went out of style because audiences got around to realizing it was fake.  It neither represented a believable depiction of humanity or a believable depiction of the West.   Sam Peckinpah, influenced by European cinema, was one of, if not the, first American directors to bring these sensibilities to domestic, US productions, his magnum opus being The Wild Bunch in 1969.  Django is no more violent, and its anti-heroes far more heroic, than anything seen here.   The anti-hero can't be random.  He can't be one who practices anarchy.  What matters is he has a moral code (even mobsters have to have this to be appealing) that he practices.  When he fails to follow his own code, then he must fall.     Anti-heroes follow a moral code as well.  Morality is not B&W good and evil.  Otherwise we'd have burned down all the churches in the land for the centuries of evil they have done, do and continue to preach to people.   What must be is that the protagonist be consistent with his moral code, whatever it may be.  In Django our anti-heroes only deliver cruelty and violence to those who deserve to die that way.  They are, ironically, immoral in the context of their times because they are exacting justice on caucasians for crimes committed against individuals regarded as property and lesser humans.  Abe Lincoln himself did not view the black man as an equal human being, to put that in perspective.     All I'll say here is they need to be as extreme as they need to be for the story being told.   That's a parenting issue, not a filmmaker or even a broadcaster issue.  But there is no evidence that violence creates violence in individuals not pre-disposed to do what they're going to do anyway.   The first Rated-R movie I ever got to see in its entirety: Excalibur  (age 8) The first Rated-R movie I ever saw in the theater with a parent: Outland (age 9) The first Rated-R movie I ever saw in the theater with only friends: Friday the 13th Part III in 3D (age 11)   ...my story is more common than those who shoot up schools (who also weren't raised on a steady diet of un-edited Looney Toons and war-time propaganda animations, the Three Stooges, etc., like the generations before me that also didn't create mass violence to be pinned on media exposure).       I don't agree at all.  What's lacking is parents giving their kids a moral compass to interpret what they see in an intelligent way.   Not trying to pick on you Mark, but I don't agree with anything you're saying here.  I have to take into account, however, you live in a country with an aggressive history of government censorship that continues to this very day so you're likely more sensitive than even other Europeans, which is where graphic cinema, both in violence and sex, actually comes from.  You can't even legally see a lot of contemporary or even classic examples of where this comes from, going back to the 1960s.   Pretty much everything you see in American cinema that's not in the boring, early, Vaudville teleplay style, flat like you're watching a stage production with overly broad, melodramatic "acting", originated in Europe (and to a lesser extent now, Asia).     And violence in these countries is generally much lower than either England or America.

Criticisms of Tarrantino's films for violence and "shock" value are so myopic.  His direct influences for this film are thirty or more years old and as violent.  His films are influenced by European cinema, which is what influenced American filmmakers to be more graphically violent than was the standard here.  Even today, American horror movies are timid compared to European and Asian films.    If this kind of film violence was a bad influence on kids then the 1980s would have been a very different looking decade.  Somehow it wasn't.  Pointing fingers at movies is pure ignorance on many levels.

  The spherical parts of Magnolia would likely be related to its visual effects.  The general, narrative parts of the film were most definitely anamorphic.     Back then ILM was still in the mode of shooting all plates flat that would feature FX and there are a load of FX near the end. 

  This is sorta what I did, but using a 52mm->67mm step-up ring.  The 52mm portion fits perfectly around the rear element and the 67mm edge fits just up under the rear bayonets.  Un screw the back plate, pop on the step-up ring, tighten the back plate back down.  It's a purely mechanical solution that will hold beyond the capability of any glue.  Instant rear threads for the Century Optics adapter at a very popular size requiring no additional adaptation for several Nikkor and even some Lumix lenses.   Once screwed in, the anamorphic adapter would sooner rip through the threads on the taking lens or rip the taking lens off the camera body before that step-up ring will ever come undone from that anamorphic.  It's a purely mechanical, clean and robust solution.  

  Most documentaries that I see, produced with much more expensive cameras, have to roll with their limitations in uncontrollable circumstances.  I fail to see the point at being so obtuse about this or what cameras would even be viable as test candidates to somehow account for the unpredictable with somehow magical properties that overcome the inherent limitations of 422 encoding to a bitstream that can only be so big, through a shitty, consumer grade digital interface.        Line up the cameras that record floating point color, sent out through HDMI (the BMCC has a leg up here), to be recorded by...something.  Let's see'm.  I'm really curious now.     edit: of course this is all academic though, given the BMCC the obvious choice is "shoot raw".

  Then, again, same solution as with film, you use more light to remove the contrast.   "Black Magic" is the name of the camera and the company, they're not actually claiming the camera has magical properties, FYI.  And there's definitely no magic in the Nikon.

Use a graduated ND, like the film guys with even more latitude use.

  You'd almost think they had some kind of back room deal going so that none of them released any serious, deciding threat to each other or their own over-bloated pro lines.  Then along comes some little company (by comparison) with a camera called the BMCC who didn't get that memo and they're left looking rather lazy and stupid to all but serious stills photographers.

  LOL, yeah, every "epic" test video must contain a cat.  I think there's some law about that, lol.       Yeah, it's an easy one to get really excited about the first time you use it and roll back the footage.  The only other patch I've used is Flowmotion, which was a noticeably improved recording over stock.  This felt like an even bigger jump, from Flowmotion, than Flowmotion felt from stock.  That's from a limited sampling of imagery types, I'll be the first to admit.  I've played around with the kinds of scenarios I'm more likely to be shooting in and have enjoyed seeing other user's "broad daylight" examples being posted on the net.   I've seen really outstanding imagery from just about all of the popular patches, and plan to do some comparison shooting with one or two of Driftwood's other patches based on his suggestions for the content being shot.  I foresee a situation where I carry a small stack of cheap SD cards with patches representing content-specific "stocks".  I'd like to be able to isolate it down to three...a general, high quality setting, a CU/ECU talent setting and a fast action setting.  Hopefully one of these also takes care of shooting the highest quality 60P possible with the camera.   "Moon" though, that seems to be the one to beat for 24P.  I did, however, really like whatever that patch was that the Spanish (I think that's right) GH2 feature was shot on in the daylight.

  ROFL, wow, you're so baller.  

  Don't be pedantic.  Use in a film or art to serve a point is different.  At the very least, in jest, it's only appropriate between well acquainted friends who can communicate with each other without the need of pretense or editing.  Do you enjoy such a relationship with Andrew?   You were just being disrespectful and baiting so that you could play the part of the victim and create or turn this into a political issue with Islamist propaganda overtones.       Dude, you choose to live and work in a country that criminally indicts individuals residing in other countries for TWEETS they see as anti-Islamic.  GTFO with your very ironic hypocrisy.  

I must admit, I was pretty shocked to find out they had adapted the GG-type adapter to something this modern.   Letus had nice hardware but, at least when I had my Redrock gear, the Letus was smaller but it featured a greater parasitic light loss.   Solutions like the Metabones Speed Booster are way more appealing.   Still, I agree with what you're getting at, and admit that I've certainly contributed my own bias on the subject, but at the end of the day results are what I value most.  I can't deny that great looking, cinematic imagery has been made with smaller sensors.  I mean, an SI2K film won the cinematography Oscar one year.  I didn't go to look up what cameras were used because I thought there was something wrong with the imagery in Slumdog Millionaire.  Quite the opposite.  There are loads of great looking episodic shows shot on S16 as well, often more cinematic than other dramas shot on S35.

With a little luck, Goat Man's Hill will be going into pre-production on our next feature in the next couple months.  In all likelihood I'm going to shoot most of it with "Moon Trial 3" and anamorphic.  A good deal of it will be available light and night in urban spaces.  The basis for my finishing pipeline will be After Effects, Film Convert and ColorGHear.     I've started roughing out various recipes for how the footage will flow through the pipeline, mainly dealing with NR and then the right balance of grain to put back in.  At some point I may investigate ColorGHear Pro's grain layers instead of this portion of Film Convert.   http://vimeo.com/60359953     This is a boring test video. If you don't like boring videos testing very specific settings, software combinations or techniques, keep moving.   That said, it does have a cat!   Seriously, there's a lot of excitement re: Driftwood's "Moon Trial 3", especially where 24P is concerned. After doing a snoop on ISO noise between 12500 - 160 I was blown away by how clean ISO640 is with this patch. I wanted to shoot a high contrast, available light scenario to not only play with NR but also different techniques and levels of simulated film grain (via Film Convert). The irony in this is not lost on me, hah-hah.   I output three versions of a pan + dolly. In all three scenarios I'm using Film Convert for my basic "emulsion pass" but with grain turned down to 0% (I knew I'd be applying it later). Each version also uses ColorGHear to give it a slight grade (switching off any cinegamma nodes because this function is provided by Film Convert).   All three versions use the "GHrain Killer" GHear to smooth out the chroma noise. Because this also filters out detail and sharpness in the luminance portion of the image I use the NR on a layer I just intend to use for its color. All three versions also use the technique I standardized on for SICK BOY to enhance small contrast and detail without the false edging you get very quickly with typical sharpening kernels and still rather quickly with the Unsharp Mask tool.   Lens Used: 35mm f/1.4 Nikkor + Century Precision Optics 1.33X Anamorphic   *1st Pass* ...I combine the "grainkilla" smoothed chroma with an original, unfiltered luma and 42% grain over the entire image.   *2nd Pass* ...I leave out the original luma, passing through the filtered luma and then depending on my LCE (local contrast enhancement) pass to re-establish an acceptable level of detail (still enhanced versus the original). The result is sharp edges and the ability to make out tiny textures like on the wall, the material on the chairs, etc. but also exceptionally smooth looking blacks even when I blow out the exposure to see "what's down in there". This version also has a uniform 42% grain applied to the whole frame.   *3rd Pass* ...in this one I do everything I did in the second pass but this time I create a luminance key with a "bell" shaped response that gives me all the mid tones while rolling off both shadow and highlight region and grain is applied through this key (this is based on an article I read interviewing the DP and colorist re: an episode of HOUSE that was shot all on the 5D where they discuss applying grain in this way). This allowed me to bump up the grain to 77% yet the net result doesn't feel as overall noisy as the previous two examples.   Oh, and 4' of dolly track just isn't enough.    

So do you set the taking lens at infinity and then just focus with the Schneider?  Or do you have to focus both like most re-purposed projection lens setups?