Clark Nikolai

I've seen it though. I was working on a TV show and was about to delete my copy of the footage as I was finished with that episode and got a call from the producer. Both his copies of the footage went poof! The main copy and the backup copy drives both got corrupted somehow. He freaked out but fortunately I and the editor had copies of the footage.

Remember when people said things like "Oh, it'll be safe in the cloud", and "The Internet never forgets"? All it takes is for a company to go under or be bought out and folded for your files to be gone. We all need to have our own copies of our things on our own drives. Have another copy (for when the drive fails) and ideally in another building (in case of fire). I remember in the 1990s dreaming of having access to a film scanner so I could scan all my negatives to digital files, now I dream of having access to a film recorder so I can put my digital pictures on to real film.

They're still there but hidden behind the "Watch" menu item. No longer obvious by, for example, someone who doesn't know the site. It looks like the main page of a company and you have to sign up to do anything. For someone just wanting to watch some videos it looks from the main page like it's not a site for that.

Yep. So many good things are now just useless. It's almost like it was planned all along. Or it might have started with good intentions but then shareholders or agent provocateurs from competitors get on the board and make it less useful. I remember this video art piece that was aired on broadcast TV. They bought air time to show it. We (the viewers) are the product and sold to the advertisers. The content is just a way to bring in the products.

It might be possible. There are many industrial cameras meant for quality control on assembly lines, in airplanes, etc. These usually have global shutters too. They tend to have Camera Link as the output standard so there would have to be a way to record the signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Link It's probably all possible though. Maybe the guys at the YouTube Channel Alt Cine should look at repackaging an industrial camera with a recorder and monitor and make a cinema camera. It may or may not be worth it though compared to just getting a used Blackmagic Production Cinema camera off Craigslist. (They going for less than CAN$1000 now.)

I read about him meditating and how that helped him organize his thoughts better as well as get him in touch with his inner self and inner ideas. He also would trust his dreams and intuition. There's a story told (on YouTube) by the musician who did the theme for Twin Peaks, Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch described the mood and Badalamenti did some initial improv. Lynch said, great, record that. Badalementi wanted to work on it more, that this was just a start but Lynch said it's perfect. He was into the first thing. Much like beat poetry, stream of consciousness ideas I guess. I'm impressed by him being able to do that because some times when I'd worked intuitively it turned out to be a social faux pas so I tried to avoid that after that. I remember seeing Eraserhead at a repertory theatre. Someone who had seen in Vancouver told us that all the vampire punks (later called goths) go to it so we had to dress like vampires to watch it. So we did. Later we went for doughnuts so there was a table of vampires having doughnuts. A young woman came to ask us if there was some event going on or something. We played dumb and said that, "no, nothing was going on." The movie just created a mood that was depressing, stressful and entertaining at the same time. The line "Strangest darn things, but they're new!" I repeated for years. (The old guy says that about the mini chicken.)

Just the other day a friend posted his painting of one of these on his blog. https://geraldsaul.blogspot.com/2025/01/running-out-of-cameras-again.html Interesting how the camera is held horizontally but the film still goes up and down normally. It's almost like when DSLRs first started to be used for video. People assumed that you were shooting stills because of the camera shape. Back in the day, one of these would've looked like a bulky still camera.

I'd love to see this too. One could probably just put in an order for them to make some. There would of course be a minimum order quantity. For a small lens company it might only be 100 or 500. Some existing lenses might only need some modifying of the back elements and mount to work. (I'm just speculating here, I really don't know how it works.) I speculate also that maybe one of those companies that rehouse vintage lenses into modern housing could also rehouse new lenses into c-mount and for a Super 16 size sensor.

They're different?

Some years ago I took at course called Career Exploration (or something like that.) One thing I remember is that they said that you could do any job for awhile but eventually you won't be happy if it doesn't suit you personality type. They said to learn what your personality was (we did Myers-Briggs personality tests), and your tastes and interests and then from that you could go two different ways. One was to choose a career that fit your personality then you would make money and be satisfied at the same time, the other was that you could work at a job/career that didn't fit your personality but you could work at that and make money but then have your hobby on the side which would fulfill your personality desires. For me, currently, I'm doing both. My job that I make money at is closely related to my interests (but not exactly), then with that I make money and with that money I pay for my life and I pay for my hobby/art form. It seems to be working okay so far.

Yep, I remember working at a production house that produced made for TV movies, it was at the time of transitioning from film to using HD for shooting (Mostly HD-Cam and DVCProHD videotape). They figured they could streamline all sorts of things and save time and money. They decided to not use a slate anymore. What happens was that, yes, you could now sync the audio with software (PluralEyes) and you could figure out which take it was by what order it was shot in, it took so much longer for the assistant editors to do all that work that it was much faster to just take 30 seconds before each take and use a slate. So, basically, the new technology helped a lot in lowering the cost of production but they had to scale back a bit for practical reasons. (They also tried to shorten the shooting schedule to 12 days for a feature. That proved to be too little time even with two cameras running and they went to 18 days.)

Very nice. I remember being on that very train in Tokyo and seeing the train on the line just over and wishing I had been filming it. His other one in New York is really nice too and of course has the colours and tonality that can really only come from real film (Although some digital cameras can be similar). I totally agree. It's cumbersome compared to other workflows but if image quality matters then it's totally worth it. (It's still way less work than shooting film though.) Takes up a lot of space and time to convert it and ingest into your system. The rewards are an amazing image and the ability to go back to the raw files later if you decide you need to re-ingest differently. I had a shot that was underexposed in the darks. Since it was a scenic shot I decided to go back and reshoot it. I was waiting for the right day cloud-wise, then decided to re-ingest from the original raw files and suddenly all this detail was in the darks and I didn't need to reshoot. A year had gone by since I first brought that shot in and since then I was using different software to convert from raw. I love how I'm able to do that.

I agree totally. There is so much good gear out there that is considered to be old models but still work very well. I have two sets of Sennheiser EW100 G3 transmitters and receivers. I got them over ten years ago on Craigslist for about CAN$800. They were considered old then but I've not had any problems with them. I've had to scrape corrosion of the terminals once (I always take the batteries out now) and put heat shrink over the antennas (where the original plastic had cracked) but otherwise they are still going strong and work very well. I've had thoughts of getting some newer ones, such as the Sennheiser AVX EKP receivers as they'd be smaller and phantom powered but really, I don't need to. This also fits in with my philosophy I'm doing this year, is to get creative with what I already own. (It's going great so far by the way.)

From a Canadian perspective as well. The US Democratic Party would be considered centre-right in Canada. Having said that even Canadian politics is more right than it used to be, much like the world. This was predicted by historians. When resources run out, people start fighting over their differences (which previously would have been ignored) then political opportunists see this and use it to gain power.

I'm playing around with it now. Impressive! The Magnetic Masking is pretty amazing. The timeline vertical resize shortcut is something I know I'll use a lot. The "Transcribe to Captions" function only works on an Apple Silicon machine (mine is Intel) so I can't test that out. It seems like their approach is to add just a few features with every update but those features are very well designed and thought out. And I still have only bought it once over ten years ago and getting new updates for free. (Of course they'll make money off me in the future when I buy a new Mac. )