Clark Nikolai

Hollywood has always been and continues to be formulaic. Occasionally some new things are introduced, like influences from New Wave or graphic novels, but then those aspects just become part of the palette of options.

This is a tough question. There isn't any single camera that I'm aware of that has it all or is "right" for every situation. But if I had to pick then I would settle for something like a 4K Sony or Panasonic camcorder with the fancy balanced optical stabilization and 5.1 microphone. But a fantasy camera for me would have palmcorder ergonomics (or a VX1000 shape but smaller), the image quality of an Arri Alexa/Digital Bolex, global shutter, raw recording (ideally in camera,) 4K, high frame rate (for slo-mo mostly) all at a price that I can afford. We can dream..

I wouldn't call it a dud. It does what they designed it for. The only bad things about it are the viewfinder and the weight. (Okay, so the cranks are kinda stupid. Could've just been regular knobs.) It was never intended to be a fully automatic easy to use camcorder replacement. It's not a replacement for a video camera, it's a replacement for a film camera. I disagree that it's horrible to use. It's just a fully manual camera which takes knowledge, training and patience. (and an external EVF.) It's not the ideal camera for some types of shooting but for the types of shooting that it's designed for it does it very well.

Super 8 is very niche but still alive. Not many people want to buy an expensive camera just to have a "look" for a dream sequence or flash back scene. I can totally see a camera like this getting some rentals in shows where they can't afford to mess around with old equipment that might fail on the day.

It's only considered cinematic because we (viewers) associate it with drama and we do that because of how things were in the past. Drama was always 24fps and live video was always 30 (in NTSC countries). We got used to that. Nowadays dramas are in 30fps and 60fps. I remember when drama was starting to be shot with video cameras and it seemed wrong at first for drama to have a "video" frame rate but now it doesn't anymore. People are used to anything. So all that's left is choosing a frame rate for a "look".

It's way too pricey for someone but then again maybe some rental houses would be interested. Instead of keeping some old cameras alive they can get one of these with its warranty and availability of repair parts. Might be good for those that want to shoot film and will rent it. I'm intrigued by the extended gate frame size they have. That along with small grained film stock might approach Super16 in look.

I once worked at a production house that produced TV movies for American TV. There was a guy there whose job was to go through the scripts and change things to make it cheaper. Replace expensive aspects of the story with cheaper things that had the same story progression, change the locations of two or more scenes to be the same location, etc. Pretty effective in lowering the budgets.

I've heard this called "Availableism". Using what's available to you to determine what's in the story. It's something that has been done since the beginning of cinema really. The advantages over writing whatever then spending money to obtain those things is that it's cheaper. You use what you have around you. The other advantage is that it can be about a certain subculture and made by the people in that subculture giving it an "authenticity" I suppose. This is a good approach I've used a lot producing short art videos. In the mid '90s I applied for an arts grant for a feature length video (FLV) to be shot in S-VHS, using this exact method. I had the themes figured out and the cast, who were playing characters based on themselves, a skeleton of a story but no details figured out. This would be done with the workshopping as we went. No script but notes about what would happen in the scene and how it would end. The actors improvising. Anyway, the arts grant jury were all traditional film people and they thought this approach was sloppy and likely to fail. They were so used to the cost of shooting film determining the level of planning needed (in those days there was a big divide between video art and film art,). I didn't get the grant (But I'm not bitter... Anymore.) I ended up making it as a short video out of my own pocket a year later having wasted all that time and effort in the application that could have gone into just making the thing a year earlier.

Thanks for turning me on to Cinema P3. I had been using ProCam as an Apple Camera alternative app but I never found it intuitive enough that I could really get to know it. The icon symbols were too non-obvious. (Like the icons for Self Timer and Interval are way too similar. ). Cinema P3 is much better for me, it's pretty simple to use. I don't use the iPhone as a camera often enough to get familiar with a camera app so having something simple is best. I have an older iPhone so the Apple camera app doesn't do raw.

I have some exciting plans for next year. During the pandemic, like many, I developed a bleak outlook for the future and wondered if I should even bother making art. Now things are still not nice in the world but at least where I am things are stable enough that I feel I can work on making art again. This year I finished a short experimental narrative. That was fun to do, messing around with the two genres of both narrative and experimental. (It does mean though that festivals are confused by it and don't know how to program it.) This year and next I'm working on a lengthy atmospheric film about shapes, colours and patterns in the Vancouver area. It's an extension of the photography I've been doing for several years. Finding the patterns in architecture but also including nature in it. If you want a taste of it, I took some of my footage and put together a music video for the musician I'm using. I'm pretty happy with it. Test Card - Monochrome Dreaming Softened The Broadcast https://youtu.be/Tk72eAvOoow?si=8Fron9g6IgVd2RE0 Last year I spent a fair amount of money on purchasing gear. New camera, tripod, lights, monitor, etc. Now I think I have enough gear and am just working with it. I'm fairly happy with what the purchasing decisions I made. I now have to refocus away from lusting after new gear and move towards being creative with what I have. A couple of years ago I was very much into getting more lenses and researching aspects of the different types, now I see ads for lenses and I really don't care. This is good.

Another thing that might help is to upload to YouTube as a ProResLT file. That way YouTube isn't re-encoding from an MP4 but from a ProRes file. It'll take longer to upload but if quality is important then it's worth the time. And type of ProRes will work but I suggest using the LT flavour as it's the smallest file size that's visually lossless.

I developed a technique that works well for this. Basically it's to upres it to HD and do a smart deinterlace. This way you control the deinterlace and uprezzing instead of them. (I use Final Cut for this but probably any NLE would work.) There are probably several ways to do this but here is my method. -Duplicate footage outside of Final Cut. Bring both in. -Put one copy in an HD progressive timeline. (Same frame rate.) - Lay the other copy above it. - Turn down the audio of one of them. - On the lower one, in FCP inspector, check Deinterlace and choose the Field Dominance Override to Lower. - On the upper one, do the same but set the Field Dominance Override to Upper. - On the upper one, set Opacity to 50%. - Output to ProRes and make your H.264 from that. Some notes: This method blends the two fields together. Most footage should look good but if the shutter speed was set very high at the time of shooting there'll be a double image. This will of course be pillar boxed in a 16:9 frame.

This is something I find as well. When I first got an editing computer at home (MacPro in the miniDV days) I had dial-up so would only check emails on a separate computer. Later when I got ADSL and could connect more than one computer I decided that it was too distracting and kept the edit computer offline and used the other one as the general computer, email, web browsing, etc. That was good for a few years. Then the laptop got too old to run some new things and I ended up making the MacPro the single computer for everything so it had to be online. Big mistake, way more distractions. Say I'm in the middle of concentrating on a scene, there's all the subtle things you have to notice in the footage to make creative decisions that you have to muster up, then you get interrupted by an email coming in. Another thing is when things get tough it's natural to avoid it but you have to force yourself to stick to it and figure it out. When distraction is easy you can avoid it easily. You can tell yourself that you're just taking a break but a real break would be not involving a computer (going for a walk, etc.) I read about how David Lynch meditates every day and has for decades. This might be why he's so prolific. (I also have a theory about the increased diagnoses of ADD in young people. Maybe they're just normal but living in a time when their environment is more distracting than previous generations and to manage.)

I'm impressed too after having watched some of those same films on standard definition TV years ago. The new scans of the old films are amazing. I was working on a project recently where I was wanting a 1960s and '70s film look applied in post. At first I was looking at adding grain, scratches and instability(gate weave) but then realized, the look of old films now is of high quality scans of film so scratches and instability are no longer what people associate with old films.

I agree. Since Red's patent doesn't apply to uncompressed raw, and storage is so cheap now, new cameras could be including internally saved uncompressed CinemaDNG and be totally legal.

About a year ago I found an old Olympus Pen EE in a box of junk. It's very cool as it does half frame and has the photocell (that powers it without any battery) surrounding the lens which makes it look pretty interesting. I've been shooting with Rollei Superpan 200 film. It's fine grained so makes up for the half frame. (Not that I'm avoiding grain or anything.) It's fun to use. I find the lens is really good for half body portraits. Landscapes are fine (but a less interesting topic for me). It's partly shooting on film and the cost of that which makes shooting with it somehow special. Also the look of it is a conversation piece when asking someone to pose. The aperture and shutter speed are automatic, only the focus is manual (which I sometimes forget to set.) When I first started using it I was intentionally shooting retro subject matters to go with the look but now I just shoot anything even if there is modern elements in the frame. It's part of the "look of today" I suppose. I always take a digital picture of the same thing when shooting with it. I suppose to have some instant gratification but also as a backup in case the film image didn't turn out or something. Also as a good comparison of the two mediums.