G7 Internal Recording + HDMI out?

[andy lee]

Ive been doing alot of tests with the G7s on my custom made shoulder rigs and Im not having issues with the rolling shutter .

with regard to Pandora movie I did alot of tests to show the Director Arri Alexa v Red Epic v Panasonic G7 internal recording v Panasonic G7 and Atomos recorded .

and he liked the look of the internal recording on the G7 with Metabones XL speedboosters and Nikon lenses , its very very sharp clean image and he decided to do the whole movie with it , the image is superb and grades very well ,  using 6 x G7s was the best option for us time wise as I wanted to shoot multicam.

[JazzBox]

Andy, did you record the dialogues on set with shotgun etc or will you go with ADR?
If you recorded sounds on set which setup did you use?

[andy lee]

Director is being bold ! and decided to ADR the entire movie - partly as the sets where built in a building under Manchester Airport flight path so Jumbo jets very five minuites made on set sound unusable !! that decission made it alot faster and easier for me as DOP !!

[mercer]

5 hours ago, andy lee said:

Director is being bold ! and decided to ADR the entire movie - partly as the sets where built in a building under Manchester Airport flight path so Jumbo jets very five minuites made on set sound unusable !! that decission made it alot faster and easier for me as DOP !!

I like ADR. I have done a little acting and it is pretty easy to listen to the scratch track and mimick the cadence and tone of your lines... Especially when broken down into smaller bits. 

[andy lee]

most big Hollywood films are ADR , Fincher has been doing it for years now , as it lets the actors craft a performance for the dialogue , I do prefer it as you get a much better contralled dialogue sound in the studio , also outside in a big city its impossable to get useable production sound as you have car traffic noise , airplanes, policesirens etc etc all messing up your sound , so I prefer crafing at all in ADR and post.

[JazzBox]

9 hours ago, andy lee said:

Director is being bold ! and decided to ADR the entire movie - partly as the sets where built in a building under Manchester Airport flight path so Jumbo jets very five minuites made on set sound unusable !! that decission made it alot faster and easier for me as DOP !!

Thank you Andy!
It is something I'm considering for a web series: maybe it is far more easy to ADR six episodes of 5 minutes each then having perfect audio on the set

[mercer]

25 minutes ago, JazzBox said:

Thank you Andy!
It is something I'm considering for a web series: maybe it is far more easy to ADR six episodes of 5 minutes each then having perfect audio on the set

The guy who made the short Lights Out that catapulted him to a Hollywood directing career, always ADR'd his shorts. I don't think he even plugged in a mic for a scratch track. 

[IronFilm]

 A nice looking short film shot with a G7:

https://vimeo.com/173374319

 

[François Albaranes]

10 hours ago, IronFilm said:

 A nice looking short film shot with a G7:

https://vimeo.com/173374319

 

Thanks for sharing my film IronGuy !

It was shot with the G7 and 12-35mm f2.8 & 42.5mm f1.7 lenses. Graded with Magic Bullet Looks in Premiere Pro CC.

[IronFilm]

It is very good! Glad you joined up to the forums now  This site is a great resource!

[François Albaranes]

44 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

It is very good! Glad you joined up to the forums now  This site is a great resource!

Thanks ! I've been coming there for months but hadn't registered yet.

[kaylee]

first of all, @andy lee, thank you so much for all of this great information. i love your use of COLOR!

now what is this adr stuff guys fill me in smore (mmmmm..... s'mores)

On 7/12/2016 at 0:54 PM, mercer said:

I like ADR. I have done a little acting and it is pretty easy to listen to the scratch track and mimick the cadence and tone of your lines... Especially when broken down into smaller bits. 

pretty easy... really??? thats great to hear ive always been terrified of adr cuz it just seems so hard and time consuming to me... from all these comments it must not be as tough as i think...???

On 7/12/2016 at 3:03 PM, andy lee said:

most big Hollywood films are ADR , Fincher has been doing it for years now , as it lets the actors craft a performance for the dialogue , I do prefer it as you get a much better contralled dialogue sound in the studio , also outside in a big city its impossable to get useable production sound as you have car traffic noise , airplanes, policesirens etc etc all messing up your sound , so I prefer crafing at all in ADR and post.

that makes sense. but is this practical for a lil baby indie film like mine (feature)? i mean i love the idea of having that control to get the best performance, and isolating the voice itself from the rest of what the actors are doing...

wow i really have to look into this *mind blown*

[mercer]

14 hours ago, kaylee said:

pretty easy... really??? thats great to hear ive always been terrified of adr cuz it just seems so hard and time consuming to me... from all these comments it must not be as tough as i think...???

that makes sense. but is this practical for a lil baby indie film like mine (feature)? i mean i love the idea of having that control to get the best performance, and isolating the voice itself from the rest of what the actors are doing...

wow i really have to look into this *mind blown*

Okay, this will be a long answer full of personal theories that will probably enrage someone...

From an acting standpoint, I find ADR to be extremely easy, but I'm not a real actor that has studied and honed my craft. To go line by line and listen to your line reading and then repeat it, is probably the easiest thing I've ever done as an actor.

With that being said, it is pretty soulless and devoid of any form of performance creativity. But I am totally fine with the most generic of styles, a friend of mine who is an indie filmmaker, will sometimes do a line reading and then ask me to repeat it the way he said it... Especially with specific lines that require a specific cadence. I do not get offended by this type of performance, but I am sure a lot of actors would because they want to bring something personal to their character. I don't care about such things. I am more like David Mamet who believes that everything an actor needs to know about a character is on the page.

As a no budget director, ADR sounds both liberating and terrifying. Now when I say no budget, I am not mincing words, I am not speaking micro budget or low budget... I mean NO BUDGET. I have a decent day job that affords me the time and a little cash to pursue this, but I am in zero position to invest too heavily into any one project.

I am a one man band filmmaker that will occasionally have a little help, but I have learned very quickly that you can never count on any help when it comes to making movies on the cheap. You can only count on yourself. I do pay my actors on a small per diem basis which is usually enough to cover their expenses and put a little coin in their pocket. So I try to schedule everything I need from them for as few days as possible... So much so I will rewrite characters and combine characters if it gets the short made. 

I believe in getting the best quality I can get based on the level I am at. I am not a professional audio guy. I cannot afford a professional audio guy... or gal. If I can plug a Rode VideoMic Pro into my camera and get usable audio, I will do that every time. If I will get better audio doing double sound with a lav and a small pocket recorder... I will do that. If I have to do ADR, I will do that, but never before I attempt to get good on set dialogue. 

Where my opinion differs from most, is that a lot of low to no budget filmmakers believe that if they use a sennheiser Mic plugged into a zoom recorder and have a friend hold a boom pole over the actor's head, they are getting professional sound because Hollywood does double system, and Hollywood sound techs use boom poles. Sure that's true, but Hollywood has professional equipment way better than a zoom recorder and a mixing board with a mixer adjusting the levels of the tracks as the tape is being rolled.

And you know what, even after all of that, in a lot of instances, Hollywood films are ADRd in post. There really is no right answer but there are a lot of options and every shot, scene and sequence has a mountain that needs to be climbed to get it in the can. So, do what's best for the time and resources you have. If you can get the dialogue on set, awesome... One less thing to worry about. If not, fix it in post. 

To add one more thing, my theories and practices are based on 2 short films I have done and a half dozen or so, that I started and then abandoned because they either didn't have the legs they needed to be a compelling short on either a personal or artistic level, or they turned out to be something I couldn't do well enough at my level... Some projects require more than I can give.

[mercer]

And also from learning and watching based on the work I performed as crew/producer on two of my good friends' half a dozen, or so, no budget indie films...

After the ES scandal I don't want to sell myself as anything more than I am... An aspiring, amateur writer/director with more opinions than credits. 

[kaylee]

@mercer thank you thats very helpful

tbh im the actor with the most dialogue, and the idea of just trying to match my voice cadence without using anything visual seems way easier to me.... but idk ive never really tried to do it lol

what i hate is watching something and having particular lines of dialogue stand out as adr – like in the middle of a conversation – where they dont fit in. i dont think audiences notice that but i do

[IronFilm]

7 hours ago, mercer said:

Where my opinion differs from most, is that a lot of low to no budget filmmakers believe that if they use a sennheiser Mic plugged into a zoom recorder and have a friend hold a boom pole over the actor's head, they are getting professional sound because Hollywood does double system, and Hollywood sound techs use boom poles. Sure that's true, but Hollywood has professional equipment way better than a zoom recorder and a mixing board with a mixer adjusting the levels of the tracks as the tape is being rolled.

 

Plus there is a fair amount of technical skill in operating a boom pole well, which nearly all "friends holding a boom pole into a Zoom" don't have.

7 hours ago, mercer said:

As a no budget director, ADR sounds both liberating and terrifying. Now when I say no budget, I am not mincing words, I am not speaking micro budget or low budget... I mean NO BUDGET. I have a decent day job that affords me the time and a little cash to pursue this, but I am in zero position to invest too heavily into any one project.

 

"Time" is still a crucial part of a low/no budget film. 
If anything... even more precious than on big budget films!
As you can't just pay people to get more of their time. There is only so much of people's time you can ask them to give up for free (or even for very low pay). Thus one of the pitfalls I see of ADR on low/no budget productions is that you run out of "time" with actors to get them back to do ADR. As the logistics of herding cats is not easy.

[kaylee]

53 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Thus one of the pitfalls I see of ADR on low/no budget productions is that you run out of "time" with actors to get them back to do ADR

that too

[tupp]

On 8/1/2016 at 9:58 PM, kaylee said:

pretty easy... really??? thats great to hear ive always been terrified of adr cuz it just seems so hard and time consuming to me... from all these comments it must not be as tdonough as i think...???

Your terror is justified.  Avoid looping like the plague.  It's not something you would ever want to do.  If you do not record your audio live, you are in for a long slog through the mud in post.

 

ADR was discussed in a similar thread last week.

 

In this post, I embedded a video example of the proper way to setup each take in an ADR session to save time.  If after watching that video you still think ADR is a cake walk, do a test -- try shooting one page of dialog with camera audio and then loop it.  See how you  feel about looping your entire project after doing that small test.

[kaylee]

2 hours ago, tupp said:

Your terror is justified.  Avoid looping like the plague.  It's not something you would ever want to do.  If you do not record your audio live, you are in for a long slog through the mud in post.

 

ADR was discussed in a similar thread last week.

 

In this post, I embedded a video example of the proper way to setup each take in an ADR session to save time.  If after watching that video you still think ADR is a cake walk, do a test -- try shooting one page of dialog with camera audio and then loop it.  See how you  feel about looping your entire project after doing that small test.

thanks @tupp... thats what I thought~!

tbh long ago i did a 30 sec spec commercial for school where i figured id adr the dialogue because there was ~so little dialogue~ and it was a nightmare and turned out terrible. mind you, this was at the very beginning of my filmmaking journey so i know a little bit more now... i would change a lot of things if i were to do it again lol. but that was when i learned that a film is audio

my vision for my indie feature is to do as little adr as possible – only when unavoidable. and of course im going to hire audio people who actually know what theyre doing, unlike myself lmao

[JazzBox]

3 hours ago, tupp said:

Your terror is justified.  Avoid looping like the plague.  It's not something you would ever want to do.  If you do not record your audio live, you are in for a long slog through the mud in post.

 

ADR was discussed in a similar thread last week.

 

In this post, I embedded a video example of the proper way to setup each take in an ADR session to save time.  If after watching that video you still think ADR is a cake walk, do a test -- try shooting one page of dialog with camera audio and then loop it.  See how you  feel about looping your entire project after doing that small test.

I slowly started thinking to record the audio on set: I have no problems for medium/close up indoor (I own some pics from my recording studio and the Rode micro boom). 

But how to achieve a decent sound when you record the establishing shot, the wide one? When the mic is far away from the actors the sound dramatically changes and it is... far and thin.

And also outdoor, with a shotgun everyone will notice we are filming and we want to be as fast and as invisible as we can.

I started to think to Lavalier: I own a Rode SmartLav+, it's ok for interview, but I don't know if it's good for narrative works. 

Also: my Zoom H5 will be unusable since it is too big to hide near a Lavalier. 

My other problem is that one of the characters it is not human, so we have to ADR it anyway and I don't want the sound is too different from its voice (made in studio like a voice over) and the sound of other actors in the room.

I have no budget, I can spend no more then 300 €: what do you suggest? A Rode NTG4 (or 4+) shotgun, 2 lavaliers? ADR everything? 

Thank you!