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A diffusion filter has some element that causes light rays to be diffracted, throwing them out of focus, but has to have some clear areas to allow a sharp image to pass through — it’s the overlay of a sharp and soft image that creates diffusion.
There is another category of filters that have particles that spread and halate light: low-cons, fogs, and mist filters… but by virtual of having particles, they also cause some diffusion. Some are designed to soften less but lower contrast more, some are designed to soften more but halate less. Tiffen Smoque filters are a type of low-con filter that gives the impression of haze in the air if any bright areas are in the frame like a daytime window.
There is seemingly opposite advice regarding filter strength, one is that the tighter you go on the subject, the heavier the filter needs to be; the other is that the longer your focal length lens gets, the lighter the filter needs to be. But these are two separate issues, the first addresses the viewer’s need to see fine detail in wider shots versus close-ups of faces, the second is a technical issue that often the elements that blur focus on a filter get enlarged on longer focal lengths so you might have to reduce the strength. Ultimately this is why you have to make a judgement by eye.
If you want the look of diffusion filters, then use them! Just remember that it is safer to go lighter because you can easily make it heavier in post.
You were asking about the look of movies on home video pre-D.I. when color-timed interpositives printed from cut negative were used in telecines, not post-D.I. when uncut negative camera rolls were scanned for the D.I.
But the 90s were also the era of EXR Kodak stocks before Vision became the norm.
The recent “Dune” movies did this as well, scanned an interpositive or dupe negative laser recorded from the digital file, then scanned the film element. It’s a rather expensive technique, a feature-length 35mm intermediate costs about $10,000 for the stock alone, then there’s the laser recording and the scanning costs. Most people would opt for film grain simulation software (as “The Holdovers” did, using Live Grain and adding some subtle gate weave).
Telecine transfers of movies were primarily from a color-timed low-contrast interpositive struck as also a protection master after answer-printing. Projection prints are a bit too high in contrast to make a good element for transfer though they will be used if nothing better exists. Sometimes a cheaper option than an interpositive was to make a low-con print, a stock that Kodak discontinued eventually. I believe that interpositives were made on a step contact printer which was more stable than the high speed continuous contact printer used for release prints.
Sometimes, at some risk, the original negative was transferred for the final video master… but since it is not a color-corrected element, and sometimes has A and B rolls, plus has splices at every cut, it was not the first option though the quality was the highest.
It’s just my opinion, but the early daylight-balanced Kodak EXR stocks (50D and 250D) were definitely higher in contrast than the tungsten-balanced ones, but by the time of Vision-3, Kodak made them all pretty similar (almost too similar). The main change between Vision-2 and Vision-3 was the introduction of “micro grains” (very slow in speed) which increased detail by 1-stop in the extreme overexposure areas.
I use daylight stocks sometimes but whether I do a show that is, let’s say, 250D and 500T versus 200T and 500T, depends on a number of factors. As Roger says, you can pull the 85 filter on tungsten stocks for cooler shadows or a blue dusk effect, or let the scene itself be timed on the cool side (i.e. only partially correct for the missing 85 filter.)
So I tend to base the decision on whether it’s a movie that will lean cool or lean warm — if I’m doing a wintery movie in the woods, I’m more likely to stick to just tungsten stocks, if I’m doing a summer movie in the desert, I’m more likely to get the daylight stocks partly to avoid the 85 filter.
I worked 2nd Unit on Season 1 of “Westworld” matching footage from the first half of the shoot before they shutdown, and one DP used 50D whenever he could and the other DP shot everything on 500T — I’m not sure viewers saw a big difference…
Roger has switched to slower stocks in day exteriors in the past, like the use of 100T 5248 outside in “No Country for Old Men”.
There are DPs who use 500T for everything — John Seale for example, or Emmanuel Lubezki in “Tree of Life”.
There are arguments both ways. Yes, using 500T for everything in theory is more consistent… but often grain is easier to see in scenes with large areas of midtones (a blue sky for example) and day scenes can have more midtones than night scenes. You can also argue that our eyes perceive daytime exteriors as sharper and more clear, with more depth of field, than we do in interiors and night scenes.
On the other hand, 250D is so similar to 500T in look (and is just slightly finer-grained) that it’s a toss-up whether you need to switch. But I think 50D does tend to stand out when mixed with 500T — it’s SO clean. 200T is somewhere in between as you can imagine.
Just from a stock management angle, I’d try and limit yourself to two stocks though. Unless you really want that 50D look for select scenes.
Why? What difference does it make? If you want to learn good handheld staging and operating, why does it matter if only 50% of the movie was handheld versus 80% or 90% or 100%?
“Jarhead”!
The boat sequence in “Jaws”, the running around the submarine shots in “Das Boot”… Most of “Man of Steel” for some reason is handheld.
“Chinatown” has some good use of handheld (John Alonzo was good at that technique.)
If your wide shots clearly show the cold flashlight beams bouncing off of warm surfaces and picking up that color, then normally you would try and match that in tighter coverage — it’s not disorienting nor unrealistic if it is clear what causes the colors.
I don’t think it has to be exact when going in tighter, just depends on whether you think the viewer’s eye will catch a shift. You might, for example, use unbleached muslin for a slightly warmed-up bounce when the wood walls are off-camera if you less of a difference.
Of course, a room is made up of more than one color surface so once the actor moves closer and deeper into the room into a tighter shot in a different area where there are more off-camera surfaces, you might be more free to let the bounce just be the same color as the source light.
Tends to be a practical issue involving the space restrictions. Sometimes you don’t have the room to back up a light to fill a bounce surface so you’re better off with multiple smaller lights closer. But that’s the nice thing about a big diffused light, you can always add another light into the mix to increase the output if you’ve fallen short.
The cutters shouldn’t be reducing light intensity on the subject, just the background, but if they are, then you might need to increase the light intensity to compensate (add an additional light to the bounce or use a stronger light). You can also use negative fill opposite the bounce to add some contrast.
Generally no, I shoot on the Alexa and stick to a ISO 500 to 1000 range, mostly to control depth of field more than anything. Otherwise I’m mostly at ISO 800. I control my highlights or shadows by exposure and lighting. I control contrast through lighting and by adjusting the LUT using ASC-CDL, mainly for dailies (an adjustment might be to match two cameras or lenses for example, or to deal with a hazy set, etc.)
Either way you are designing a shot that requires the creation of a traveling matte — a chroma key / color difference key (using a green or blue screen usually) is the simplest post method compared to rotoscoping. Now if the actor became a near silhouette against the new background, you can sometimes get away with a white screen and pulling a luminance key rather than a chroma key, but even that may take some clean-up work.
Generally it’s better to take the time in shooting to get something that works well for post than to hand footage to post that needs a lot of work, especially if you don’t know how good your vfx people are or what sort of budget/time constraints they will be under.
Or put the actor in front of a big LED screen where the screen image itself rotates from the old to the new and spin the actor on a platform…
