DV camera discussion

[mattias]

any feedback on that imx clip btw?

Hi Matt - it looks like a fun film. Technically the images looked pretty good to me - although I do think the colours and lattitude still look a bit limited

ha, got you fooled. this is a teaser for a tv series, and nothing except what you've seen has been either shot or written. :-) the teaser worked on the networks too and we now have a pilot deal.

in what parts did you find the colors and latitude lacking? i know a few places but i'm curious. the night scenes are actually gorgeous, so it's probably the compression and your viewing conditions. i lit them a lot and crushed in post, so there's a lot of depth in those shadows.

I really liked the depth of field - you got some nice shallow DOF on some closer wide shots - like the school hallway at aroud 1:00. Did you use a mini35 DOF adaptor

pro 35 actually, but yes. and zeiss ultra primes, which obviously aren't included in the price i mentioned. :-) in fact no lens is, since it's a professional camera, but it's still extremely affordable.

thanks for the comments.

/matt

[Scotness]

ha, got you fooled. this is a teaser for a tv series, and nothing except what you've seen has been either shot or written. the teaser worked on the networks too and we now have a pilot deal.

Hah - well done! Certainly got me -- I thought it was a bit long for a teaser or a trailer - but that would explain it.

I'll have to redownload the clip (I've just done a computer reformat/overhaul) -- so I'll give you the points where I thought the colours were a bit muted tomorrow.

For everyone that's interested too -here's an interesting article comparing the Canon HD camera to the other ones
http://broadcastengineering.com/hdtv/br ... canons_xl/

Scot

[MovieStuff]

here's something i shot on the xdcam imx btw. easily the best price performance you can get in sd, in my opinion.

http://www.mattias.nu/stuff/lalaland.mp4

Looks great!

My comments are:

A) Girls were never that good looking when I was in high school.

and

B) The premise (and the girl) reminds me of a series some years back called "My So Called Life". This is not meant as a rag on your promo because MSCL was a terrific show and very well done.

and

C) Girls were never that good looking when I was in high school.


Years ago I was involved helping a local guy get a feature off the ground based on a successful stage play that he had written. The people in the play had remounted the production for several years in row and it always played to packed houses. When he made the feature, he recast everyone which created some hard feelings, especially since the people he cast weren't really any better than the cast of the play (which were very, very good).

So if this gets picked up for a series, are they going to use the same actors as in your promo? If not, how do the actors in the promo feel about that? Just curious.

Anyway, looks just great. You should be very proud.

Roger

[wado1942]

Of course one could have a good CP-16R for $3,000. That'll blow all the systems in question out of the water.

it's kinda like buying a 5 gallon water tank to store bottles of coke.

I like to call it "running a bus with a lawnmower engine".
I'm not against HD cameras, I'm really not. But people buying cameras that say HD on them just because they SAY HD on them is another matter. Like I keep saying, more pixels isn't always better. The lens, the size of the CCD block, the compression scheme are all more important than 50% higher vertical resolution.[/quote]

[Nigel]

Christoph--

Thanks for the update.

As for the deck...you don't have to go to a deck. You could go to some sort of drive.

Good Luck

[steve hyde]

Of course one could have a good CP-16R for $3,000. That'll blow all the systems in question out of the water.

it's kinda like buying a 5 gallon water tank to store bottles of coke.

I like to call it "running a bus with a lawnmower engine".
I'm not against HD cameras, I'm really not. But people buying cameras that say HD on them just because they SAY HD on them is another matter. Like I keep saying, more pixels isn't always better. The lens, the size of the CCD block, the compression scheme are all more important than 50% higher vertical resolution.

[/quote]

...I am also looking at an *overhauled* CP-16R and a Zeiss 10-100, but this is an 8K camera package.

Steve

[flatwood]

...For everyone that's interested too -here's an interesting article comparing the Canon HD camera to the other ones....

This article was a little hard for me to read. It sounded like, reading between the lines, that the writer liked the the Panasonic better. What was your take on it?

[christoph]

[quote="Nigel"As for the deck...you don't have to go to a deck. You could go to some sort of drive.[/quote]

well, what kind of drive did you have in mind? i did quite a lot of research how to shoot HD affordably and the cheapest way to shoot 4:4:4 1080i is over dual HD-SDI (which, as said, the Canon doesnt have in the first place) to a blackmagic or aja card and a workstation with a big drive array. 1080p24 is near 200mb/sec, which means you need a raid0 of at least 6 drives.. that's 700GB/hour (times 2 since it's original footage you need a way to backup this too). in other words about 400EUR per hour in storage cost alone.
add to this that you''ll be tied up to a power hungry (and probably loud) computer all the time, the hassles with potential crashes etc and it's not too hard to imagine why hardly anybody does it. and certainly not with a 10k camcorder ;)

++ chris

[christoph]

Of course one could have a good CP-16R for $3,000. That'll blow all the systems in question out of the water.

oh sure, for our last project this would be..

buy CP-16R: 3k
15hours of 16mm film: 10k
processing and cleaning: 10k
telecine to HDCAM SR: 15k (including DV dub for editing :)
online on a 4:4:4 HD system, with colorcorrection: 2k (this is too cheap, but i want to end up with a round number)
----------
total: 40k


compare to:
renting a Z1U plus stuff for 2 weeks: 500
buying a mac pro: 2500
doing all the effects and color correction yourself: 0
----
total 3k

guess which route we took ;)
++ c.

[wado1942]

I think those figures are a bit inflated. You can still color correct 16mm yourself and besides, it'll look far better than heavily compressed HDV comming off of a cheap CCD block with a cheap lens in front of it. And you don't have to go to HDCam SR. Some houses will go straight to hard drive which will make post production much cheaper. Most of the film projects I've done, we rehearse a few times before shooting and this cut WAY down on the film needed. In the case of documentary stuff, I'd just shoot SD-8 or MiniDV. Anyways, even a feature length film I can hardly imagine taking 15 hours of film. If you have your stuff together and plan properly, a 2 hour movie can be done just fine with 6 hours of film.

[christoph]

If you have your stuff together and plan properly, a 2 hour movie can be done just fine with 6 hours of film.

thanks for telling me that i have no clue and for the advice how to shoot my movie ;)

in my case i needed all 15 hours because we were shooting with non actors, and i needed it all digitized because there were a lot of visual effects in it. as for inflated prices, i dunno, maybe in the states everything is much cheaper, but over here you'll find that my numbers are rather on the low side.
DS8 was not an option either, and miniDV just dosnt have enough pixels if you need to do a lot of vfx and the end result is a 35mm film print.
so in my case HDV was perfect.. but if it had been possible to shoot on 16mm or HDCAM i would have done it, trust me ;)

++ christoph

[steve hyde]

..If anything, Christoph's estimates are low-ball for a feature. Sure one can be made for half of that with a bit of luck, but I wouldn't pitch that idea to the investors. 40 - 50K is what I would budget for materials on a 16mm feature. Probably best to call it 60K so that you have a slush fund.

I agree that the hard drive work flows that every one is so excited about these days sound like an expensive pain in the ass. I want a mini-DV camera because I want to record to mini-DV, make cheap dubs, work out ideas, It is a great format and economies of scale have brought the costs of working in the format down down down...

Like I said earlier in this thread, color space is not my main concern. I just want smooth motion recording and high resolution - something that can be cut with 16mm for documentary applications and a camera that operates like a cine camera (not a palm corder ).

Steve

[steve hyde]

.....by the way, what are the pros and cons of operating the CP-16?

Steve

[wado1942]

in my case i needed all 15 hours because we were shooting with non actors, and i needed it all digitized because there were a lot of visual effects in it. as for inflated prices, i dunno, maybe in the states everything is much cheaper, but over here you'll find that my numbers are rather on the low side.

OK, I've worked on dozens of sets and even working with total amateur actors, I've never seen more than a 6:1 shooting ratio be used even on DV tape. Our film productions are more like 4:1 using amateur actors. I could go into a lot more detail but It'll be hard to do that without sounding like a bigger jerk than I probably already have. But on our sets, we rehearse the actors with the director while waiting for the lighting crew to get done. We also keep camera logs stating what takes we expect to be good so we only print/transfer that footage. It really cuts down on the wasted materials and time for everybody involved. We easily cut 33% off the budget and time it takes to do a movie because of this approach. I spent a lot of time working with a somewhat well known director on a 35mm piece and this is how I learned to do it myself before meeting him. He affirmed the workflow we adopted and praised my crew for being so efficient.

As for working with a CP-16R, it's pretty easy to do but you have to have a good light meter. The real trick with those cameras is loading them properly. If you're even 1-perf off the correct loop size, you'll get chattering. But it's a DEAD quiet camera, produces beautiful images and it's rock solid. Just don't do a lot of running shots with them particularly with a 400' load. You'll get tired quickly. But if I could only own 1 film camera, it'd be the CP-16R.

[christoph]

We also keep camera logs stating what takes we expect to be good so we only print/transfer that footage.

problem is that over here it usually it's cheaper to do a one light rush of everything than paying somebody in the lab to sort out the bad takes.. but i know what you mean, i personally like shooting long takes, so on some projects i unloaded the exposed material after every take, mark the can with "process" if it was good, and with "fridge" if it was bad.. this did cut down lab costs in half.

but in the mentioned case none of this was possible without totally altering the film, and i rather adapt the shooting medium to fit the film than to force my work methods on a director.

as a side note, it's strange how everybody bitches about the compressed colors of HDV while in reality it has a wider color gamut than PAL/NTSC. the color sampling is not worse than miniDV either and the mpeg2 compression works surprisingly well.. it sure looks like a bad idea on paper, but i'm always amazed about how it looks in real world.

++ christoph ++