fuzzynormal

Who really needs cameras during and after the fall of civilization? Immaright?

I want to know more about the dark secrets of Ken and Bambi.

I'm a manual lenses guy. I despise auto focus for my filming. Even when it works I find it more of a curse than a blessing. Weirdly, I like it when subjects move out of focus and someone on the other side of the lens makes an organic correction to maintain it. And I love a slightly sloppy but creative rack focus. It's a neat trick of the craft. I'd rather have imperfections created by humans than perfection created by programming. Am I simply justifying my anachronistic (read: old fart) attitudes or do I really have a legitimate point? Am I alone? Is anyone else attracted to this?

Yes, it is the complete freken bool sheit. I agree.

I used to have over a Terabyte on Dropbox and found it rather easy and reliable. Have GoogleDrive as well, but not a fan as much of how they've implemented their sharing. Either way though, they both work.

If we're going back in time 10 years, maybe pick up one of those 35mm adapters and mount it on any CCD camera...would that be allowed?

So, my brother has a channel of his kid playing the ABC's game. The little guy is obsessed with the alphabet and he's a charming good natured kid. So, bro started making videos with his son everytime the little guy wanted to play with his letters. At the end of a year they had made about 150 vids. Somehow the YT algorithm, or an influencer, smiled on their little channel and overnight their subscription rate went from 25 people to 75K; still growing. He turned on the monetize option and just received a check this month for $2K. My bro is a blue collar dude and scrapes by. This is like hitting the lottery a little bit. He puts in the work, sure, but he and his son both love it and they're getting paid for it now. He's making more videos than I do. And, if I'm being honest, they're more engaging than the dry corporate shit I usually do for pay. And, with the extra income he can actually pay a few bills on time for a change. OTOH, I'm an old creative and working under the traditional distribution model of filmmaking. My wife and I have tanked about 35K of our own cash into our latest documentary and we've made, maybe, 5K of that back. So, brave new world, y'all.

It's a tool. If you use it with consideration it can be effective. If you use it just because "it looks cinematic" then you're making a sort of lazy assumption. I tend to rely on it for a lot my shooting as I'm trying to make uncontrolled settings tamer by limiting what my viewer can see; focusing on what I want them to focus on. I've found it effective for some of my documentary work. I've also found deep focus great for a lot of my shots as well. Here's a simple example from a doc my wife and I shot 5 years ago on a GM1 and GX7: Nothing fancy there, but imagine if it was deep focus. You'r eye would go so many different directions and not be drawn to the smile. As someone that watches A LOT of film festival submissions, you know straight away when someone is behind the camera and making informed decisions. And, yes, a lot of crappy movies are shot by people that shoot deep focus because they're not even thinking about it. It shows. That doesn't mean deep focus is bad. After all, some of my favorite movies are from Sergio Leone. The skill to use the gear is far and away so much more important than any "X vs. Y" technical scenario. Wisdom will adapt to any situation. Ignorance won't.

Like Gregg Toland? That guy was such a hack.

Do they implement proxies like Premiere? I don't mind encoding low res proxies for my documentary editing work as long as I can output using the source files.

One of the guys I do a film festival with used to be a park ranger here in town. He still assists film crews on local shoots like this: He assures me that working with the state parks is pretty straightforward. They'll indulge just about any request, even the Indie ones. Cheers

Film scanners are affordable. It's not too hard to DIY negative development either. If you're doing B&W it's even easier.

Ha! I get to wear my old man badge now! "Back in my day we spent over 100K for shitty 640x480 non-linear editing and we LIKED it!" Hey, things are pretty sweet when you're on the other side of the gate.

There's no "one trick" to making this efficient right out of the gate. It's esentially the same thing as learning a language or learning the guitar. You practice and you learn techniques that allow you to succeed. Those techniques and that style depends heavily on what kind of person you are. If you're good, you hone a sense for grabbing your "selects" and it gets you to the end-game faster, but you have to develop that muscle. FWIW, your project is big, but still modest compared to what typically gets shot for a doc. I hate to think what my footage-to-final ratio usually is...100:1'ish? I'd rather that offered as a Leone reference. Man, loved the way that guy did things.

A better question to ask, in my mind, is "do any of these examples make a big enough difference to truly matter to you?" For some, the answer is "sure," but for the stuff I do, at the budget I do it, I say "nope." That said, I like "E."

Y'all are probably well aware of this suggestion, but FWIW, I always lift my darker levels a bit with Fuji files in Premiere using "fast color corrector." I'll push "output" blacks up 8 and bring down the highlights to 235. From there I'll tweak some mids too, depending on what I'm trying to match. FUJI colors are nice, but the levels from my X-Pro2 are quite different compared to what comes out of other cameras. None of this is probably germane to your problem, but if you can recover your details in h.265 to your preference and the issue is at least consistent, you'll have a rough work-around. These sorts of hardware/maths issues are why, even though it's painfully slow, I typically like to render my important work using "software only." That might be worth a test. I know my PC does all sorts of frustrating things when I'm trying to export using hardware acceleration. So much so I just can't trust it.

FFS

How it looks is almost immaterial to the lousiness of the writing. Man, I really wanted to like this show a few years ago; seemed like it was actually building to an immersive compelling narrative. I would forgive them their trope-y foibles thinking they had a handle on the overarching storytelling. Hoo boy, in hindsight all the red flags are there. Another example of production craft elevating script mediocrity. NOPE. American Soap Operas are better at writing stuff than these guys.

If you can't see that, you ain't ready to be a filmmaker. That's really it. You feel like you have something so you do.

Ha! I have a skit from 25 years ago that ends abruptly because the Horton security guys chased us off the premises. Some things never change I suppose.

My opinion of making documentaries follows similar principles. My first goal is to interact with my subjects as naturally and chill as possible. Gear selection is a part of that. It's a process that has led to a certain style and result that's hard to quantify, but definitely makes a difference. When I walk away with my shots and the subject telling me, "That was easier than I thought." I feel like I'm on the right track. Now, for a lot of what I do, that means I don't necessarily get the most dramatic shots --as I constantly have to improvise by giving the subject more freedom, but that freedom creates a certain feeling that might go uncaptured otherwise. I'm an unnatural interloper in moments that demand naturalness, so minimize that unnaturalness, you know? Anyway, if you follow stuff I type here on EOSHD, you'll see I'm a fan of Olympus and smaller LUMIX cameras. The single most important decision I ever made, for me, was to decide to minimize my gear footprint with a camera like the EM5II, do things handheld that would otherwise require insane amounts of gear, and just learn how to "ghost" while still directing what needs directed. On the other hand, I have an old-school colleague that can't seem to enter a room without bringing three tons of crap into it, making sure it gets all unpacked, and then spending 2 hours to capture what I'd, more or less, grab on the fly in two minutes. What he creates is often legit and prettier than what I get, it's just rarely reads as authentic to me. So, what's the end game? That's where you gotta decide what you want to be as a filmmaker. I'm making a deliberate effort to shore up my storytelling skills rather than chasing technical achievement. I didn't always use to be this way. As for IQ? Man, I've just not cared a lot about that recently as the gear gets me to the threshold I'm happy with, and has done so for awhile now. Just speaking for myself and how I'm approaching things, I'm more excited of where my career in motion pictures is going than where it used to be. (so much for saying I would shut up)

In Russia you don't watch TV, TV watch you. Here, TV is wall. What a country!

Yeah, not sure why people are amazed when these cruel ridiculous people "Fail Up." There's not a time or culture in history where that doesn't consistently happen. Something about how humans are wired, man. We just can't look away from a car crash, you know what I mean?

To add to that, numerous people are attracted to dick-head personalities. Just a fact of humanity. Adults should know better (yet don't), but kids are particularly susceptible to aggressive earnestness, regardless if it's healthy earnestness. Any type of self-assuredness is viewed as a positive. Thus, many personalities that reach broad levels of success are not uplifting and positive, but degrading. This is not a YT specific issue. This is an issue with what it means to struggle to be a good person in general. To point out this theory in practice, I'll not post, but mention this: That YT Paul asshole kid had the asshole crackpot adult from InfoWars on his channel recently. A perfect storm of brash stupidity that makes life on this planet slightly worse for happening. Now, a few special people can transcend this "be a dick for attention" scenario and have charisma that's compelling yet compassionate. It's much harder to do. The sad reality is evil is alluring.

Honestly, I look at that and think, "It looks very nice and well crafted... and he would shoot something incredibly similar on just about any camera these days." Even more honestly, an old 5DII has more visual character in what it produces than what this does. But I like like soft and imperfect images, especially for something romantic and purposefully dreamy like a wedding. Then again, that's me. I suppose I have my own style. Who really knows with this stuff? The couple may have seen his reel and love the clinical and high-res look of his previous videos. Still, what are directors of these sorts of productions exactly reaching for? Shooting a compelling film or using expensive and cool gear? I'd like to shoot on medium format too just for the fun factor of playing with neat-o technical stuff, but the more important question comes down to, what actually works and looks best? If I'm being really nit-picky, I'd say that many of the shots are stagey and the couple don't look wholly relaxed. Now, is that a factor of their personalities? --or are they a little awkward because this guy was doing a bunch of gear rigging for his Hasselblad shots? Is he demanding precision for his scene direction? Is he missing a chance to put his couple at ease by prioritizing his gear selection and his image creation? What's happening on the other side of that lens? You know, having a good relaxed relationship with your subjects is so exponentially more important than equipment. Anyway, I'm off on my typical "gear-not-so-important" rant again. At the end of the day, the new IQ era we're in is great. I'll shut up now.