Sean Cunningham

  Actually no, HFR narrative drama is almost as old as television itself.  You could spend years watching it continuously and without breaks.  (See: soap opera)   That's drama at 60fps in NTSC regions and 50fps in PAL countries.

Maybe HGL schlock.  Modern special effects make-up doesn't look good with normal HD cameras.  HFR will mean things will have to progress to a level it'll truly need to look like snuff just so it doesn't make people laugh.

I can't speak for Andrew but, to me, it obviously doesn't represent a real world use for high ISO in the context of the DSLR filmmaker.  Shuttering for exposure is also quite inappropriate.  For a stills photographer, fine.  Not for DPs.

    How ironic.  This guy would show the door to someone with a Panaflex.

  I used to.  Fantastic handling car, unlike its contemporaries that get more respect from the hard park Porsche snobs.   I'll own another one again one of these days but it won't be an "S" model.  Fatal design flaws in the engine, from a maintenance standpoint, and mechanics qualified and experienced in the water-cooled engines are near extinction.

  Horse shit.

I wonder if some of the variation in user experience with these anamorphic adapters has anything to do with the way folks are rigging up their mounts to overcome the bayonet mount (at least on the Century).  I'm using a step-up ring sandwiched between the rear element and the back of the lens.  It fits perfectly around the back element and essentially gives it threads to fit up perfectly into a 52mm Nikkor.  You wouldn't know it had been modified at all if you didn't know these things didn't come normally with threads in back.   I saw one example online where a fellow was doing something like this but with a slightly larger step-up ring being held in place by four washers wedged underneath the edges of the rear of the lens.  He then used a step-down ring to mount his modified anamorphic to his taking lens but now I'd expect there to be slightly more distance between where the rear of his anamorphic sits and where the taking lens is designed to expect something to be mounted, or does this tiny difference matter at all?   For that matter, does it matter if the diopter/achromat in front of the anamorphic has an adapter ring or more of space between it and where it would normally be seated if some form of home brew mounting method didn't have to be engineered?

During my second, and last, stint at Sony Pictures Imageworks my desk was at the end of a floor within earshot of an executive's assistant's desk and could hear into his office if the door was open.  I'd wear my headphones even without listening to music just so I wouldn't have to listen to some of the delusional conversations or 1/2 of a phone call that would leak out of there all day long.   First time around my suite-mates were both working on Polar Express and for my second term I got to watch them  (by them I mean Zemekis and Sony) force-feed the mocap method to the director of Monster House.  He wanted to do it as CG characters but animated in stop-motion style.  Would have been so much better.  He was just, of course, happy to be directing a feature having been given the opportunity based on his short film.  Sad.

In the case of Zemekis, he produced all those movies at a studio with teams of very competent animators getting paid better than any other non-union facility in Los Angeles.  They saved no money doing it this way, not really.  The animators were forced to do these films that way, despite loathing the process.  And Zemekis is completely enamored with the technology of how they were made and convinced that he creates animated films every bit as wonderfully as Pixar.   That is no exaggeration.  The people in charge of this stuff are that delusional.  

  Where I disagree with your article is your letting Jackson off the hook.  The Hobbit, like King Kong, like the LOTR trilogy are not the product of corporate film making, whether they foot the bill or not.  There is no influence, no choice, no direction that isn't pure Jackson.  His supervisors, producers, etc. are figure heads even.   He's making the films he wanted to make the way he wanted to make them.  Like Lucas.  Like Cameron.    With this in mind the problems with the action sequences and animated hordes are not the result of any deficiency in the armies of people it took to create them.  Or have we all forgotten all the boring, repetitive chase sequences in King Kong.  110% of this is Peter Jackson.  Just like the self-mutilation of the Star Wars saga by Lucas, this is an "auteur" with total control, no limits and no one telling them "no."     The artists that worked night and day, more often than not seven days a week, for months (or years, in the case of Cameron and Avatar) on end, are execution.  They're doing their job, often at the expense of their own health, their families and any regard for anything other than the film.  In the case of filmmakers like Peter Jackson and James Cameron or George Lucas there's also the masochistic reality of these people pushing themselves even further, allowing themselves to be exploited even more than usual, due to their futile idol worship.     I used to be one of them.   These filmmakers learned from the mistake of Francis Ford Copolla who was only compelled to return from the Philipines and eventually complete Apocalypse Now with the threat of the destruction of the negative he'd already shot.  With these guys,  there is no outside influence, no tampering, no limits and like Kurtz going off into Cambodia, no method, only madness.     edit: re-reading several posts I've made on this subject I'm gonna try to make this one my last.  I just hate the negativity it brings out of me.  You'd think I was talking about the GOP or whalers, lol.  I'm gonna try to concentrate on positive stuff and enjoy the anamorphic discussions which was what brought me to this forum in the first place.

  Don't forget beer!

  I've seen 48fps and 60fps in a theatre.  It's just bigger.  If you sit in the "sweet spot" with your peripheral vision completely filled you'll get vertigo with certain kinds of moving footage, which is neat for arial and action photography, and certain documentary subjects.  No way I'm gonna subject myself to that for hours and hours, like I'm some nosy tag-a-long in Middle Earth that everyone is ignoring.

  And some continue to make the error in thinking everyone they interact with on forums is JAFO.  They make guesses.

Nice!

Wow, that's not anything I'd even remotely entertained but it would explain why I couldn't reproduce the severity in that clip with my 1.33X lens.  But then I'm also stuck with fairly spherical looking bokeh too :(

LOL, no, gamers who think like this don't even know what they don't know.   What you just said was a bunch of nonsense.

That looks like either a setting or rendering problem, if it's not a camera-is-borked problem.  I don't get anything like that, beyond what I'd expect with any 24-frame system doing pans.  Maybe a youtube problem?   edit: are you maybe dropping your clips into a 24fps timeline and not 23.98fps?  Could be a weird interpretation issue maybe?

Actually, no, it's not that different.  In fact the threshold where it stops making much of a difference is in the 48fps-60fps range, at that point the human brain is processing the incoming visual information as if it were watching something that's actually happening, live.  This isn't the case with 24fps cinema at a 1/48th-1/50th shutter speed.   This isn't merely an issue of culture or what we're used to or economics.  This involves fundamental ways the human brain and our vision works together, influencing how we interpret what we're seeing.  It's science and the science has already been done (see: Douglas Trumbull).     There are no surprises to be had here.  None.  Not one *.       *-except maybe why Peter Jackson doesn't know more than your average person about his job, the film industry and stuff involving movie cameras that was figured out in the early 1980s.

    [img]http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvx9kwcREW1qfl94zo1_500.jpg[/img]

    The "TV" reaction is a simplified reaction to a complex sum of visual cues and years of experience, for some, with virtually no aesthetic commonality between television and motion picture production.  If a journalist in an even mildly technical publication were to describe the issue as sensitivity to temporal sampling they'd lose 99% of their readers, assuming they had any idea what that meant.  Most journalists, even those working for technical publications, know absolutely nothing about the subjects they routinely write about.  Not even enough to be "dangerous".   Whether Peter Jackson has an eye at all or ever did is something debatable.  His first three films in this series were drab and clinical looking.  He's not magic though.  48FPS and higher, for narrative, was proven a failure decades ago by Douglas Trumbull (ShowScan).  He's not the only one, just the most prominent, most disappointing and most well known example to reference.  And he was shooting on film, where you could still count on some magic in the emulsion and glass and printing.     High frame rates were proven a long time ago to be best applied to novelty, not narrative.  Theme parks, not the motion picture theatre.  Current generations of viewers raised on NVIDIA and ATI will provide a more willing audience than before, however.

Wow.     My initial response is, "duh," since this is exactly what I expected the end result to be at first reading Jackson's foolish techno-weenie goals for the picture.  It's not like he's really breaking new ground here, just re-discovering, for a fortune more money spent, what other people have known for decades.     Shoot 35mm film at 48fps and you instantly make it look like a teleplay and not cinema.  It looks like well shot TV, not like a movie.  Now combine this effect with the often unforgiving, discrete and clinical look of digital and he figured out how to cheapen the work of every craftsman employed on the film.     News anchors, of all people, were able to recognize this and complained about this after seeing the first demonstrations of HD technology BACK IN THE 1980s!  Just watch an episode of Face-Off on SciFi channel, Pete, prosthetic and set craft have not kept pace with directors that have more money than taste.     My only guess is these guys are just hoping one of these days people just won't be able to tell the difference between something that looks good and something that doesn't (or just not care).  Just like them.     edit: it's worth noting, you can achieve similar "video-y" looking imagery by shooting 24fps film with a higher than normal shutter speed.  Shoot 48+fps and then decimate (remove frames, no blending, not slo-mo) to play back at 24fps with consistent timing and the "video" look is retained, even at 24fps.  This happens all the time in movies and TV series shot with otherwise cinematic looking 24fps digital cameras when they shutter for practicals.

Weird.  Re-upped the file this afternoon to fix a gamma issue that made the online stream look a little too dark.  I thought I didn't have to worry about that since this was the first time doing the whole thing, besides the opening motion-graphic, on my Windoze laptop.  It's my first time using the Avid uncompressed format instead of ProRes too though so maybe there's some black magic in that I'm not versed in yet.     edit: it's worth noting that I'm never using my Tokina in here.  I never open up beyond f2.8 but there are still times I'm able to get acceptable focus at well under a meter from the lens...I wasn't always fast enough though, lol, as I'm twisting the barrel here and didn't have my follow-focus attached.  There at the end I'm pretty sure I was sitting on the armrest near my nephew and I was able to just get focus on the Raisinettes and blow-pop he holds up to the lens pretty close.  I'm operating the camera same as the picture in my avatar, using my P&C pistol grip attached to the GH2 and my Carry Speed viewfinder.

  Challenge accepted.  I find I don't need the diopter at F2.8 unless I need really sharp focus at well under a meter, ECU distance from the camera, at least not with my 24mm Nikkor.

  That's what the Tokina is for, in addition to CU shots.  It sharpens up apertures in the F2 and bigger range.  In my tests so far it looks like I can get usable sharpness opened fully to F2 on my Nikkor 24mm, F2.5 on my Nikkor 105mm and F1.4 on my Nikkor 35mm, with the Tokina, with my Century Optics.  I've seen videos online that look great with the 20mm Lumix pancake lens fully open too, with the Tokina.

More reference for y'all on the wider end of the spectrum.  No such thing as too wide.  This is from one of the most talented working DPs and an awesome looking motion picture: [url="http://www.theasc.com/ac_magazine/October2011/Drive/page1.php"]the cinematography of DRIVE.[/url]