Clark Nikolai

I just checked eBay. Yes, you can get an original Arri Alexa for less than CAN$5000 including the viewfinder. We live in the golden age of cameras, Kids. Go make your movie!

So true. I assistant edited on a feature shot with a 2K Alexa and they (for some reason) recorded to ProResHQ. I found the files to be some of the nicest, easiest footage to prepare for the editor. The show had a colour grader at the end but before that point, one of my tasks was to colour grade test reels and rough edits and it was so easy and fast to do as the image that it had, even in ProRes was amazing. The image is really nice and easy and quick to make it look good in post. This has budget advantages. Another thing the DOP told me he liked about the Alexa is that the viewfinder shows you beyond the recorded image. This way you could anticipate, say, an actor about to enter the frame. This was something he had missed from the film days. Film cameras' viewfinders would show more of the image than you're getting and would have a frame guide to show you what you would get but you could see more on the sides than that. He also said the menu on the side panel was fast and easy to navigate. Another time saving on set.

What I'd like to see is something the size (or smaller) of the Minolta DiMAGE X. I had one in 2003 or so and it was great! It would fit in your pocket, had internal zoom too. It was 84 x 72 x 20mm. https://www.dpreview.com/articles/8470280799/throwback-thursday-minolta-dimage-x So, if a company made something that small in that form factor but updated the specs; more zoom range, higher megapixel sensor, maybe stabilization, microSD card slot, etc. I'd be into it.

It's rare for an entire movie to be shot at a high frame rate, most of a movie would be at 24fps with the occasional slo-mo shot so this would work out fine then.

Yep. While I'm glad I have a phone on me when a picture is needed to be taken but it's not a good experience. The advantages of a phone camera are: -You usually have it on you. (Best camera is the one you have with you. That old saying.) -You can email them to someone right from the camera (or post to social media or whatever.) without having to copy to your computer first. -The screen is big compared to a compact camera. -Stablization can be very good. That's about it though. There are many problems with taking photos with a phone. (Except for some recent high end models) zooms aren't good. It's hard to see the controls in bright sun. The iOS camera app's text size for the settings (like time and flash) are super tiny (and hidden away) so hard to see when out in the sun. A real camera would have a larger button or dial for this that you can feel and see easily. Part of the reason the stability appears to be so good is that the phone takes a bunch of images then combines them, helped by the gyroscopic data, to create a picture. It looks pretty good for an easy snap shot and is good enough for most things but it's not "real" in the sense that the shutter opened on a sensor/piece of film for a moment of time and captured that. The desire for authenticity isn't new but tends to come from demographics that are surrounded by fakeness.

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. )

I think the main reason to scan film at a super high resolution is to see the individual grain particles. It once was a thing to try to avoid but now it's a cool thing to have (and there's all this interest in fake film grain plug ins). When shooting digital for narrative cinema, 2K is plenty (if the camera is good in other ways.) Shooting at a higher resolution in order to punch in of course is useful.

Also, the experience of making something is better when it's something tangible. I used to work at a post production house so all day I would be looking at a screen, it was a nice break to go load the dishwasher in the coffee room sometimes just because the dishes were real and I could touch them. I think that's a bit why there's interest in shooting film now (stills and motion) is that it's tangible. Even if it'll just get digitized and viewed the same way as digitally sourced images, the making of it is a different more satisfying process to some. The Wallace and Gromit films are real claymation even though it could be entirely done in CG. It's just a better result and probably more fun making it.

I lived through that age when only film was considered good and video was considered something for the lesser ones to play with until they can get good enough to shoot on film. It's funny that video won in the end. For me, I watch YouTube videos of enthusiasts, (mostly young people), excited to shoot on film. It's funny to me because I never want to touch it again. It's so picky. You have to do so many steps or you won't get an image. You won't really know until it comes back from the lab which problem you'll have either. The process distracts from the creativity in some ways. (It might be all these things are a "challenge" and that's the appeal.) Having said that, I understand why the look it has is now some sort of standard to compare other types of looks to. I saw an interview with the director of Roma. He said something like that it was a modern 4K black and white digital grain-free look, not a film look. If you listen to some YouTubers talk about what is cinematic, it would not fit their definition but watching it you see that of course it's cinematic.

I agree with both of you but one thing I've noticed to add to it is that with young filmmakers/videomakers/creators/viewers I get the sense that well-made media is viewed with suspicion whereas something sloppy or of low quality is viewed as having authenticity to it.

Thank you. I do have an old 1080p Ninja and have looked at these kinds of things. From what I can tell they first one upscales and deinterlaces to 720 or 1080. What I want to do is have it output in the native format of the camera, so NTSC interlaced 720x480. Then I could record that with the Ninja and do my own upscaling and deinterlacing later in post. (Giving me more options and control over that.) The second one (Portta) says that it doesn't scale. That might mean that it'll output the NTSC interlaced signal out of the HDMI port. It doesn't seem to do composite or S-video input though.