Axel

One rig for all tasks? It's rather various rigs, and in different variations too: Pistol grip. Monopod (can serve as a prolonged grip) Gorillapod (can serve as a simple shoulder rig) Tripod. In many variations. Lightweight stabilyzer. Stabilyzer with vest. Basic shoulder rig. Terminator style shoulder rig (with follow focus, monitor, mattebox). Picodolly. Slider. Jib(s). To be continued.

The original files on your card are AVCHD? Fine, because FCP X only imports AVCHD as a copy, even if you chose 'original media', because then the video will be put in a Quicktime wrapper. Look for the 'movs' in your event folder, there are no 'mts'. So, as I told you before, whether you created a 'camera archive' (a backup of your SD card on your harddrive, with untouched mts-originals) or 'optimized media' (a ProRes copy, best for older or slower Macs), it is safe to format your SD card in-camera. The FCP X way to move events and projects to another harddrive (or another Mac), gives you the option to consolidate the clips further. You can choose to copy only clips you actually used in your project, i.e. only 100 of 400. To make this clear: You reduce copies already. I really don't understand what you worry about all the time.

Simple story, but with a lot of possibilities. Write a good dialogue (not too many words), make the order a little love story. He instantly falls in love with her, which makes his frustration even more funny and gives him a better motivation to learn intensively. Keep the learning sequence short, you could superimpose floating english words that fade in and out. His ambition could be funny again. When the day comes, he is surprised (as she is and we are) that he asks her to have coffee with him (or something more witty, english is not my native language). Happy end, a classic.   For a beginner, it's perhaps best not to move the camera too much. Find a classic, conservative framing, capture clean dialogue (use at least a good directional mike, mono), you better mix atmo and music in post.   Biggest challenge is direction. Wise directors said, there is no bad acting, only bad directing. Meaning: Don't teach your talents how to act. Take your time. Change the script, change the story on set. Don't rehearse, just start over with the changes. Tailor dialogue and action so that your character fits to the actor, never conversely. Don't cut a dialogue scene into one-sentence-takes during the shoot. Repeat the scene in complete length from other POVs. Let them repeat often. Don't praise or criticize too much. Stay serious and NEVER lose your nerve. Cater (softdrinks, coffee and sandwiches, don't start with beer and pizza, both demoralize).   Overacting is not funny. It's the situation that must be funny.    Please post your finished work in our 'screening room'.

Once my older brother told me to look out for old lenses, because modern coating enhanced contrasts and made the bokeh unattractive. I found this to be as wrong as the common belief that an older wine must be a better wine (the french word bouquet sounds as esoteric as the japan word bokeh). In any way, IF a lens is overly sharp, you will have no smooth gradient into the blurred background, and the brighter objects will look sharper or have an outline. Another rule of thumb is that a tele will have nicer bokeh than a wideangle wide open. Because the DoF of the latter is a sphere, which looks unnatural. That's why I don't buy the 17,5 mm f.95, though it would otherwise be the perfect reporter lens.

So there. Many came to that conclusion. There still can be something special to the old analog way, but one has to be aware of the costs and the considerable ecological damage caused by all the stinking chemicals.   As far as photography is concerned, we seem to be through with analog. How long will it take for 'film'?

I second this, and I have another point for you. Decide, whether you want your photos - be enlarged by a laboratory. - be analog originals enlarged by yourself in a darkroom. - as analog sources for digital post. For the last option, you will need a high quality film scanner.

I am not a professional but an amateur obsessed with workflow solutions and I know as well FCP classic and Premiere since ten years. In FCS, I learned Soundtrack by the manual and by Larry Jordans tutorials. To facilitate the audio workflow, both recommend to organize the audio *tracks* in FCP by 'checkerboarding'. FCP X knows no tracks, and it allows only a very simple audio mix. Rumours say that Apple is working on Logic Pro X, which would solve this shortcoming. Allegedly you can also checkerboard your audio clips by assigning roles which will be understood by ProTools. I can't comment on this, having no experience with this. The answer, whether FCP X meets the needs for professionals, obviously depends on a few more criteria than just price of the software and tracks or not.

  A follow focus is the one item you don't need. I know a few people who own one, and I own one myself. It's only useful if your rig gets veeery long, and you can't reach the lenses' focus ring easily with your left hand anymore. Without focus ring and without matte box, there is no need for rails also, the rig by your 'personal handy man' can be less complicated. You can use aluminum bars (as rack blends they are even available in black, just make sure they are the 4mm quality) and bend the shoulder support in a vice. The most critical part is the exact height, so allow for height adjustment. You could buy two quick release units, one for the rig and one for the tripod. 

Excuse us, all you serious tech buffs, for entering this thread, which was started as a discussion of anamorphic film in modern cinema. Though it is exhausting and time consuming, I enjoy this kind of debate, because that's what moral is about: Evaluating what's right and wrong under certain circumstances, finding out (if only for oneself) what is the greater evil, limiting freedom or tolerating dangerous or even destructive ideas.     If someone gets killed for the sole reason to sell a film that thrills the sick customers, it is clear that the killer will be sentenced for murder in the first degree. Which is defined as a killing/manslaughter/homicide with the most low and condemnable motif. I think nobody disagrees, that his deed is wrong, if the word is to mean anything.   Now that the victim is dead anyway, why not allow the film to be published? Easy to answer, even with basic civil law: The victim didn't approve it, she/he presumably and with ample certainty would not have wanted it to be published. To hurt personal rights, even of the deceased, is prohibited by law.   That the film cannot be published has nothing to do with censorship.   I just learned, that probably a genuine snuff movie was never made, because they are easy to fake. So if there is no murder, no victim, can the film be published? This question is academic, because it won't be published anyway, but sold secretly to a customer who needs to be quiet about it. The whole point of the fake is, that the customer must believe it's real, therefore the seller must be a murderer or his accomplice. The public would most probably never learn about the existence of the film. Therefore no innocent outsider gets harmed, it's just a sick deception between sick people, who can't sink any lower anyway.   Not a candidate for censorship.   One famous film shows the intricacies of the problem: A Clockwork Orange. It's director Stanley Kubrick often stated, that he didn't believe art to be able to trigger crimes. Clearly A Clockwork Orange does not glorify violence in a strict sense. But the moral compass seems to have lost it's magnetic pole. The film raises quite a few moral questions but is so brutally honest not to give easy answers. Kubrick himself became so frightened by his own film, that he ultimately banned it for the UK, where he lived.    Thoughts (and fiction) can be dangerous, there is no arguing about that. But who decides where the limits are? Who has moral unfallibility?

Don't be silly. A snuff movie is made to capture a real murder. How can this be legal? Or justifiable? Do you remember my credo from some hundred pages back? My freedom ends where yours begins. And it is your freedom to express your views on violence and a missing moral compass in many films. I have to accept that.

  Come on. On a primitive level, all borders possible have been crossed long ago. Snuff movies. Illegal for good reasons, not interesting for most. We know already that humans are capable of creating hell, this is no news.    There are more subtle taboos. Our societies age. There are ever more old ones suffering from dementia. How are we going to treat them in the future? How do we treat them NOW? I am not talking about statistics, you don't lose your emotions when you get Alzheimer. Root for a demented old human being? Globalization makes the european (or, for that matter, the western) way of life obsolete. What are we to do? Build walls around our borders to protect ourselves from the biggest migration period in history? Become third world without resistance? It's like the downfall of the roman empire, it was not the destruction of the city of Rome, it was an inevitable process of losing influence. All our projects and hopes for the future go down the drain. Computers and automatization take away our work. The futurists in the beginning of the 20th century said the roboters would some day free us from stupid drudgery and let us work for noble missions. Can we be transformed?    Problems as these, with more questions than answers, could be treated in films. For the sake of such controversial themes, I fight censorship. 

  I wasn't adressed, but I answer anyway. There really are some sick and despicable characters in the Tarantino universe. They are more sick and cruel than one can tolerate, that's for sure. But characters. They fit into the cinematic wax works chamber of horrors and heighten the impact of the film. The easiest way to start filmmaking used to be making gory horror movies, because the rules of the genre were so well-defined and you got away (even economically, if only in the video shops, where Tarantino worked as a boy, if I remember correctly) with a bunch of cliches and really bad filmmaking. You can watch 200 Troma-movies for free on youtube, they give you an idea.   A movie character doesn't have to believable. He is more like the crocodile in a punch & judy show. That's what Tarantino films are: Good shows. Everything is completely artificial.    Crocodiles for adults of course need to look a bit more 'convincing' than for five-year-olds. Perhaps they look like boss Matsumoto:   who is paedophile and is instantly killed by the girl. O-ren however is not just a victim who revenges the murder of her family, she turns into another crocodile, one that's more interesting than the usual movie villain.   All these plot constructions are easy to look through, they are all deliberate arrangements. Tarantino is a talented writer, perhaps he can be called a master. But I don't see him as a genius. A genius has more depth. Hitchcock for example had a real abyss in him. Psycho is no genre movie at all (though it influenced a lot of genre movies), it practically makes a Ted Bundy type of character the hero. Not only for the eerie effect, it's clear that the world in Psycho is itself evil. Watch the end: When all down-to-earth characters are hushed by the psychiatrists' plain explanation, mothers grinning skull is superimposed over Bates' face.    Someone made a Ted Bundy movie, and it was nowhere politically correct or 'balanced'. But it didn't cause people to identify with a psychopathic killer.    A film can't spoil our moral. Nor can it make us better men. Some may be more attracted by the crocodile, but whose fault would this be?

Yeah, Leang, that was something! The first minute reminded me of a scene in a Tarantino film, where they talk about 'Like a virgin' and what Madonna might have been referring to ...

  In this particular instance, there is a small group of jewish resistance fighters, who answer the evil that befell their world with a kind of desperate cruelty. The scale of this evil is hard to understand for a civilized human being (perhaps Basterds should be viewed after Schindlers List), but yet it was banal reality. In real WW2, the real anti-nazi-rebels weren't kind either. They 'behaved' like terrorists (and were followed as such by the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo), and they made 'prisoners' only if they could get informations from them, no matter the means.   I want to point out by this, that there is indeed a kind of 'balance' in this treatment of the circumstances. It goes without saying that Tarantino likes to depict exaggerated violence for it's own sake. I am not a real fan of his films. But as I see it he doesn't deserve to be called irresponsible for what he does. Political correctness and moral lectures belong elsewhere, not in art and definitely not in cinema.   Did you see the excellent documentary 'The Gatekeepers'? It is about the Schin Bet, the israeli secret service for internal affairs.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uc8U89IcSo   The real Schin Bet directors talk very openly about bending morals. Innocents were killed, captives were brutally slain (tortured before), because the agents couldn't stand the prospect of hearing them defended in court.   What is so fantastic about this doc: They are very respectable, civilized human beings, well educated and able to reflect on their roles. What is right, what is wrong? Spielberg made his perhaps most 'grown up' film with Munich, dealing with similar topics. Good and bad never come in the expected package, you can't derive a moral for everybody out of real events.   BTW: In Gatekeepers is something to admire for the more technically interested forum members. There are three-dimensional Ken-Burns-effects that really take your breath away. The famous photos of photographer Alex Levac of the arrest of the hijackers of "bus 300" turned into bullet-time scenes. What these sequences (there are a lot of them) say: These were real events once. We can flesh out the faded B&W photos and reconstruct the scene. Very impressing.

  What he did instead:   He put a not-so-young black woman in the role of the heiress (Jackie Brown), quite a statement. He shows violence against women, but he regularly gives them very interesting characters, he is almost kind of a feminist. He reactivates actors, who get a chance to begin their careers anew (Travolta, Jackson in Pulp Fiction), showing that the coolness of their former image was a fake. He is cynical in that sense of the word: He doesn't take bullshit. He writes long dialogues in which our common bullshit is remorselessly analyzed. Very often bullshitty films (on the 'right' and safe side) are the targets of his bullets. He makes a black slave a western hero. Unheard of. When Amistad ran, my fellow projectionist, who is good at imitating voices, dubbed Anthony Hopkins' heroic speech (through the projection window, you can't hear the film). It was very funny. Later we saw the film with sound. We laughed even more (the audience was not amused!), because he had seen far too many films to be in the wrong about the content. Well meant bullshit.

  The last line was witty.   You remember the witches' lines of Shakespeares Macbeth? Fair is foul, and foul is fair ...   We are a violent species, there is no doubt about that. Culture taught us to sublimate our aggressive impulses so that we don't kill each other permanently and society becomes civilzed. Violence is no invention of art. It's hereditary, it's our nature.    What if Spielberg directed all films that contained violence? Surely every fascination for this dark side within us would be perfectly neutralized (in the films, not in our souls). And the amok running maniacs, the psychopathic rapists, the murderous thieves for drug money or the mafia killers, bereft of the wrong role models, would stop their wrongdoing?   No more terrorism, no more war against people, no more holocausts, no more 'racial' oppression ('race' actually always belongs between quotation marks, because scientifically human races don't exist)?   But vampire movies need to be stopped as well. Why? Because they feed this fascination for the 'evil' in us. Unnecessarily. Wrong.    And a lot of other genres would need serious script supervision. To an extent, I believe, that would make cinema completely unattractive. Cinema is about light and shadow. It's about the lights that go down, sitting in the darkness, deliver yourself to a kind of giant dream. Now, as we all learned, dreams are not free of censorship, but their mark is the power of subversion. They tell a truth that is beyond our civilized self. And if they don't, they lie.

About the VFX strike: Visual effects are considered cheaper special effects. When Avatar came out, there was an open letter signed by many of the vfx-slaves to James Cameron, begging him to speak out for their rights. But justice in a world that's built on competition is like unobtainium. And it's not just about being paid badly. It's about suffering from a bunch of collateral illnesses. Sitting all day and most of the night in front of a computer kills you. The rider of the last shadow ...

  Tax-financed TV stations - as they still exist in my country - are required by law to fulfill an educational mission. To control their independence (which sounds self-contradictory in a way) the content is supervised by a commitee of agents from political parties, the churches, the labor unions, whatever. The term for what they guarantee is 'balance'.    Now, I am all for balance, but not so within i.e. one documentary feature. Why? Because bringing every statement to the level of common sense is against plurality of thoughts, of opinions, of weltanschauung. That's exactly what happens in the EU, a big leveling of ideas, egalitarianism instead of freedom.   Nonetheless I do find the public TV better than private TV, much better.   But cinema doesn't work that way.      I am not against The Color Purple or Amistad. But I wouldn't like to see all controversial material, sensitive as it always is, turned into mainstream Hollywood movies.    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n26iGdm354I

  You are right. Colorista is a much easier way to get things done. Color is useable only in that one-way direction:           Yes, it all depends.

MFT system lenses communicate with the camera through contacts. A member of the german Slashcam forum proved, that they correct wide angle distortion, but not alone: They override settings for contrast and sharpness. He put a strip of tape on the contacts and compared the images with and without digital correction. This could explain in part the moire problems the GH3 showed in the first published test shots, which were all done with system lenses.   I recommend you buy manual lenses (or also manual lenses, since of course without communication you can't have autofocus). Start with SLR magic 12mm and, perhaps, SLR magic 25mm (comparison between my beloved Voigtländer 25mm and the latter here). Why? Almost always the manual lenses look, well, better.   As for the audio, it's up to you if you want the sound to be in the file to facilitate the workflow or not. Four things to consider: 1. It's nice to own an audio recorder anyway. You can sample sounds, it's fun and teaches you to direct your attention to good audio. 2. You could be diverted by the double task, so an extra person who captures the audio would be best. 3. The problems of synching video and external audio without plural eyes (plugin for host-NLEs) or the automated synching of FCP X are not unsurmountable. And with them, it's not a problem at all. 4. It doesn't have to be either this or that. You can have a mic plugged in the camera for certain occasions and for others you use the external recorder.   Of course you should have a tripod. The difference between heaven and hell lies in the pan head. That is, if you love pans. Pans are in the language of film as problematic as zooms. A minority uses either of them for good reasons, the majority doesn't. If you don't need very good pans, you can buy a tripod for under 100 bucks, the GH3 is light.   You should buy a shoulder rig. Imho the best solution is a rig that works like a shoulder-camcorder, an ENG-camcorder. But that implies that you have a good viewfinder, and the viewfinder of the GH3 is not good. Two options: Either you buy a magnifying eyepiece you can attach to the GH3s OLCD (which is good). That costs around 100 bucks. Con: It prolonges the whole construction. Or you buy an external EVF, connected via HDMI. These used to be at least 700 bucks. Now there are chinese copies available, like the Seetec (~300 bucks). Reviews so far confirm that the functions and image quality are not worse than those of Zacuto, smallHD and the like. However, the built quality seems to leave a lot to be desired. This is typical for chinese products.   Without any doubt, Zacuto has not only quite expensive solutions, they are elegant and minimalistic. You can compare the difference in handling a setup with a 'loupe' (Z-Finder) and an EVF here: http://vimeo.com/49470691   My advice is, you take this video and look for cheaper alternatives. But keep it as simple!

But he doesn't need 5D2RGB to fix it, right?

Right. 'The right moral' for me starts for me with the freedom of speech, the freedom of thoughts. Brad Pitt scalps nazis. He should just shoot them instead, according to you. Allright, it has some sadistic violence in it. If it was meant to be a program for kids, this was way over the top.   Django shoots murderous racists. You see their wounds explode with a lot of blood spreading around (very exaggerated, nobody can believe it, it's like Itchy & Scratchy). They should have died like in the old MPAA approved westerns before the 60ies.    I consider myself a person who tries to live on the basis of a good moral concept, derived from Kants categorical imperative, which can be paraphrased, my freedom ends where yours begins.   Homosexual marriage clearly hurts no other human being, so any attempt to prohibit it to sooth the sentiments of religious fundamentalists in order to get elected is no moral at all. Neither is the shy proposal to censor popular works of art (or what else are you up to?). Common sense?    Someone above wrote that no one can be blamed for the nature of mankind. I think this is true. Each one of us can only try to do better. 

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUcgI9jwhlA   Watch from 0'54"

Again:  1. Tarantino with his roguish attitude is not exactly Sam The Eagle when it comes to law&order righteousness. But Basterds and Django define very well what is right and what is wrong. And to imply that he took the wrong sides would make you look, well, ill-informed, to put it mildly.     The whole party is ultra-right-wing. Perhaps ill-informed is quite a mild term.     2. Tarantino doesn't show violence 'as realistic as he can'. Both films are completely unrealistic fantasies. Vengeance fantasies. They cite other films, and they don't hide that. The holocaust happened without the german people having to be seduced by frivolous films that mixed up right and wrong (Stolz der Nation is crude, primitive propaganda, the real nazi films were romantic comedies full of likeable characters, where everybody knew to 'behave', knew right from wrong etc.). This reality left no room for utopia, only in cinema. The Revenge Of The Giant Face ...   Ah, and all the evil schemes! The government, the EU! The international conspiracies! How far about do you have to travel back in history to find authorities acting against the interests of people? One is responsible for his own actions, end of story. 

Right is right and wrong is wrong. Tautology. And no guide if there was to determine if violence could be not so wrong or possibly right under given circumstances and how you would narrow down these circumstances. For example if suppression and murder on the ground of racism may justify counter-violence. And if the ones committing this counter-violence are entitled to feel pride, elation, joy by doing so. Not shame for not being polite, misbehaving and being poor role models for the White Man's kids. It's simply not the task of cinema to educate the society. A mirror never shows an idealized self.