Sean Cunningham

I think he was referring to the Letus shoulder rig they're using.  They make more than just those adapters.  His emphasis on using those Super16mm zooms precludes the use of the Letus adapter.   *** edit: though yeah, it does appear he played with their lens adapter too, sorry **   It's one of the few (maybe not the only one anymore) that places a DSLR or equivalent rig more on the shoulder, like the ergonomics of shooting compact 35mm motion picture cameras, rather than the awkward and fatigue-inducing position out in front of the operator, throwing off their center of rotation.   This, of course, necessitates an EVF or small HD monitor positioned farther forward than most rigs.   With the Letus rig your recorded view pivots about a point closer to the imaging plane.  With most rigs you're actually sweeping the whole camera through the air, side to side, doing a simple pan.     To get an acceptably shallow DOF he opened up to T2 and used heavy ND in the daylight exteriors.  That's not unheard of.  The stop Cronenweth tried to maintain throughout *Fight Club* was like a T2.3 even for daytime exteriors, and that was Super-35.   edit2: because now I felt like I'd totally misread much of the article I went back and read through it again and it looks like he did shoot with the KOWA 35mm lenses but cropped in and without the "ground glass" adapter equipped (it's never pictured in any of the camera rigs, he just seems to mention it with a stock product photo in the article). 

Fantastic article, thanks for posting.

Going back and looking at my own results again, with Moon it appears that 320's only objectionable noise comes from its green channel while luminance is quite clean.  That's with the "tungsten" setting.  I've yet to go through and do a "daylight" test.  I've been rendering out, ironically enough, film grain tests the last couple days adding "noise" back into Moon 3 footage after removing what's there in-camera, lol.

Admittedly, I hadn't considered that.  Most of the information I found rather quickly on the subject deals with shooting RAW and from a stills photographer perspective but I'd assume these same factors play into shooting video.  They have much, much more latitude to de-noise without wrecking usable information than we do at HD resolution and only 8bits of compressed, sub-sampled chroma.   At that point you have to weigh whether the slight dip in DR going from 320 to 400 that may or may not actually affect your image in practical, observable effects is more important than the difference in noise that, depending on the patch, is clearly visible and clearly affects your image in practical, observable effects.     From a RAW, stills photographer standpoint, DR at ISO160 is 10.8 stops and at ISO400 it's 9.8 stops...that's based on one site.  Another claims almost a whole extra stop of DR starting at ISO160.  Yet others claim ISO400 is the base and then multiples of 160 are derived from these multiples of 400.  All I take away from it currently, given the very thorough explanation of exposure and DR with the GH2 for video by Shian Storm at his ColorGHear site, is that the useful  DR is much lower than these stills guys enjoy, I'm going to go for less noise (though shooting Moon versus Flowmotion renders the difference between 320/400 ISOs less of an issue).   Most of what I intend to shoot I have to try to contain under ISO1250 so it's all gravy, so long as I stay away from 250 and 500.

    While "Moon" brings ISO320 back from the dead, it's still the lowest quality, from a noise standpoint, between ISO1250 and ISO160.  ISO400 is noticeably cleaner.

  With their ever increasing improvements internally what's keeping these from the "next level" is the plastic lenses they shoot through.  I'm going to assume, though they don't say here, that they've completely removed the stock lens and they're focusing the C-Mount straight onto the chip.   The biggest advantage, for professionals using these (and there are a lot of them), is the size.  This only extends the lens.  The body is still basically disposable and weighs practically nothing.  Even the cheapest C-Mount is likely going to deliver an infinitely better picture than what it comes with stock for the BestBuy markets.   This is for shows like SOUTHLAND and movies using these for stunts that want footage that cuts even better with their normal gear that can't go where these can.  This can likely replace car rigs that some DPs are using 5Ds for, because they don't care for the cheap lens and auto-exposure of the GoPros as-is.  Even in this form it makes a 5D look bloated.     They do need to come, at the factory, with an exposure lock though. 

    Yeah, that's just nuts.  I re-did several of the tests as a "crazy check" to make sure the particular ISOs were coming through right.  I didn't, at first, believe that ISO250 could be so crap.  ISO640 was where I was really surprised though.  It's nice to see that ISO1250 is totally usable, if need be, planning for some NR.

I decided to check this out for the Driftwood "Moon 3" patch...ISO 640 is clearly very good with this one.     ...color...       ...RED channel...       ...GREEN channel...     ...BLUE channel...       ...LUMA only...

http://vimeo.com/59920628   ...I did all the "digital opticals", the glows and FX related to how slick their skater helps make your footage, lol.  My specialty usually swings more towards the photo-real, natural phenomenon stuff but I love these sorts of old school, optical printer style effects that I grew up loving as a kid.     They've always been a challenge to do, well at least, digitally but now that After Effects has both a 32bit workflow with, more importantly, linear-light colorspace, they're far, far easier to accomplish effectively.   Anyway, the spot is fun.  They should be posting the second spot Paul and I did any time now, for their Cine Squid this time.

Holy crap, it sold for $800!

Check out Shian Storm's sight for his new color grading tools, ColorGHear.  He has loads of helpful video tutorials on the site for everything from lighting to grading, some of them free without purchase of the CG toolkit.   http://www.colorghear.com/

FYI, most of Zero Dark Thirty was shot with six banks of Creamsource LED lights.  Based on the comments in AC Mag about the lighting of this film they were likely using the "doppio" or "bender" version since they compared it to a 1.2K.  These guys, however, aren't just using readily available, standard LEDs.  They're actually using different shaped sources, for either flood or spot usage.  These suckers look rather expensive.   http://vimeo.com/10558484

  Except this is clearly presented as an adaptive solution, not purpose-built for one lens or even one anamorphic adapter.     Of course a simpler solution, for a single focal length or specific lens could be achieved.  It's an irrelevant fact in the context of this man's creation and not a solution approaching equivalency, at best.  At worst it's a shitty attempt to downplay this guy's work.   Hopefully you're just being irrelevant.

Job done?  50mm is a great focal length but that's a myopic solution at best.

While in "the library" I was thumbing through an old issue of American Cinematographer and came to an issue talking about Soderberg shooting Full Frontal on a handful of Canon XL-1S...I think this was a 2001-2002 issue.  The price of that camera was somewhere on the order of $4800 with that soft kit zoom.  I forget what the VX2000 cost but it was somewhere close to $4K if I remember right.  The camera I wanted at the time, one of JVC's slick, professional DV jobbers, that cost about $7500 if I remember right, minus the lens.     Anyway, it made me appreciate just how amazing the Scarlet-X and, especially, the BMCC are for their respective prices, given what far, far lesser cameras have cost in the not-too-distant past.  Not to mention, 135Mbit 3:1:1 HDCAM cost you a cool $100K around this time.  We're shooting better than that on $800 cameras now, thanks to the GH2 hacks.

    On the WIKI listing all of their suits (there have surprisingly been a lot of them for such a young company) he's listed as a defendant.  When I clicked through the reference it did point to something said here or elsewhere, in a blog.  It was  (didn't say what though) listed as dismissed though so apparently they weren't aware that it's not actually  libel if someone can prove what they said is true.

It sold on ebay.

Yes, there are oodles of flavors of codecs writing h.264 but x264 is one of the highest quality variants around.  It's supposed to be part of the VLC install on Windows but doesn't appear to install well in Win7.  As these open source things go, finding something that just works can be hard, if you aren't the type to muck with compiling the source yourself.  These open source engineers can almost never design a decent interface that properly prioritizes information in a clear way for end users.  They just don't think like we do.   I run it on my OSX box using the much easier to install x264 Encoder for Quicktime.  Then it shows up in any application that lets you write Quicktime files.  I haven't gone through the trouble of getting the same encoding abilities on my Win7 box which, even though it's a quad-core where my Mac is only dual-core, performance isn't an issue, because (my guess) limitations in threading renders MPEG Streamclip not much faster, if at all, on my Win7 box.

I've no love for Sony, no vested interest in RED (yet) but this is what you get with the liberalization of patents that happened not too long ago, allowing corporations to snap up patents for stuff they never created just so that they could use the legal system as a weapon and as a means to subvert free enterprise and create monopolies with one hand while fighting them with the other.   It's just sorta funny that this time it's David wielding patent law at Goliath instead of the other way around.     edit: holy crap, RED sued Andrew (dismissed)

Nothin' but love for the Redstan

  Yes, that's MPEG Streamclip that I use, but the x264 settings dialog is the same for any app I use calling the encoder.  You can use it from the QTPro Player as well to save out your MP4 and, unless you're down scaling or doing some other kind of processing in addition to saving out the MP4 I don't know that doing it from MPSC buys you much, though it's still my go-to for making upload MP4 files.     edit: oh, and like I said, these files most likely won't play back on PS3 or "smart" BD players and TVs, but, once uploaded to VIMEO their smaller, re-processed HD version can be downloaded and these seem to play back just fine on simpler playback devices ;)

    I'm sure they are.  And, I'm sorry for giving you a hard time about it.  They are high quality lights.   I'm seriously sensitive to heat though, truth be told, that's where a lot of my bias comes from.  Location interiors you gotta turn off the AC and we tend to be making stuff in Texas, in the Summer.      Some DPs are traditionalists and likely think something like Kinos are the Devil's lightsource.     They're certainly still on the grip trucks that go out.  My producer was so frustrated with me because I wouldn't let the guys get any of them off the truck we were paying for to bring into the house.  "Couldn't you just use one?"  I think he said to me once, hah-hah.  Then, the one day of the shoot we did nighttime exteriors we didn't bring the truck to the house and only had the Kinos and the bat-strips I'd built so, there was my karma.

Hard light.  Looks like what it is.  Especially if you're running them without heavy diffusion in front so it doesn't look like you're shooting an early color talky or classic television show.  Unless you spend a great deal of time and effort and real estate to make it look like something other than what it is...nope, not interested.     Pretty ridiculous saying they don't get any hotter than other kinds of lights though.       edit: I'm reminded of an old rommate of mine.  The man should have been born in the 40s.  He ended up going out and buying a bunch of these lights which ended up taking up a fairly good chunk of his 1940s bachelor apartment later on.  He then, after scouring the Hollywood camera shops found a blimped Mitchell that was once used by one of David Lean's cinematographers and bought that big bitch too.  It's neat and all, these museum pieces but what he's not doing is actually going out and shooting something on a whim, or to learn, or experiment with because he needs an old Hollywood grip team to mess with it.   There's no way he could go out and shoot on the weekends because asking other for help, with that sort of equipment, it's like asking folks to help you move...every weekend.

Unfortunately the current Vimeo help files don't delve passed the front most settings for the codec.  I was getting really good results for a while but then all of a sudden I started seeing momentary brightness changes during the course of a clip that featured more than just a few scene cuts.  Simply increasing the constant rate limit didn't eliminate these.  I finally, after piecing together bits and pieces from about a half dozen sites have a preset now that I use that's working so far, it just produces larger than expected files (that I can no longer play on my PS3 or other Sony "smart" BD players) but I can live with that.   The documentation on x264 is rather incomplete and poorly written conveniently for the options that seem to have the most impact on what ultimately got me fixed up :(   I'll look for where the preset file is saved so that I can upload it perhaps, or just add to this post with the settings I changed from default that appear to be working...more to come...     Multipass + B-Frames (use the Vimeo suggestions for Kbps @ 100% Quality)     Under Options:   "Behavior" tab   [set FPS to that of your clip] Force qmin on ABR/CRF mode qmin: 10 use 3rd pass     "Values" tab   refs: 6 me_subq/me_range: 7 + 16 KeyInt Min/Max B: 24 + 4 sc_threshold: 40 qcompress: 0.60 noise reduction: 0 VBV bufsize: 0 VBV maxrate: 0 deblock alpha/beta: -1 + -1 AQ strength: 1.00 rc_lookahead: 60 psy-rd RDO/Trellis: 1.0 + 0.1 qdiff/chromaoffset: 4 + 0 ip-factor/pb-factor: 1.00 + 1.00     me_method: UMH coder_type: CABAC directpred: 3:Auto trellis: 1:Only final Worker threads: Automatic Faster FirstPass: Turbo 2 H.264 Level: Automatic AQ mode: Variance b_frame_strategy: Optimal (Slow) H.264 Profile limit: up to High Profile weightp pred: Weighted refs + Duplicates     ...now, not saying these are optimal, just saying the only downside is slightly larger files to upload.  Pretty happy with the quality though.  Good preservation of grain structure.  No brightness shifts near scene cuts.  

  Looks like with a bank of 4 Z96 you have ~3200LUX where the Switronix is ~2000LUX.  I do love the scaleability of these.  Seems like, with just a little engineering for some kind of support frame, there's no reason you couldn't keep clicking on additional units passed a 2x2 matrix.