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Since they are defects of the lens (even if vignetting could be a – questionable – artistic choice) my humble opinion Is that the important Is to get rid of them, with a Lens that reduces the effects, a camera able to correct them or in post production, whatever your budget allows . The real question Is why sometimes they feels the need to add defects to a flawless image (vignetting, flares, ecc) but that’s another story. 🙂
May i ask a about the aperture and equivalence? I’ve read many confusing position about that. For some It seems that aperture changes to consider the equivalent focal length, for others the sensor doesn’t influence the aperture because It’s a ratio based on actual lens size . Who’s right?
Only Roger knows what he was thinking about, of course, but for example the Alexa Mini LF (the one from 1917) is full frame (I’m not an expert, i’ve just looked for It and i may be wrong).
Anyway, I was watching the very same video the other day! 🙂 I suppose you listened to the podcast episode about lensens (the video Is taken from that i think) and what i learned is that it’s pointless (for me) to know what gear he uses, it’s the way of thinking that i can try (just try) to use. Wide lenses to put an important character in context, longer lenses for less important characters, prime lenses to be forced to take decisions and somehow to create “intimacy” with the actors and make the audience feeling to “be in the scene”, not “watching a movie”, etc. In this way is not that relevant, i think, the size of the sensor and the equivalence.
I’m the person with less experience here but I could suggest you something that Is helping me in understanding the behaviour of light and Its connection with exposure. If you have a smartphone you can download a free exposure meter app. They use the phone light sensor and the one i use Is completely free. I’m of course aware that these can’t sobstitute a true exposure meter (but they are expensive) and experience above all (and that comes by trials and errors and time), but I’m beginning to be aware of differences in lights strength and i’m beginning to be able to set the lights accordingly to the exposure i want. I check the result with the camera metering to see of It indicates the 0. Again, i am aware of the limited valute of my advice but it’s working for me and, well, It’s free after all… 🙂
Summing up, since I don’t have a 6k li camera I’ll try not to use the post production stabilization to avoid the cropping from 4k .
Just to be clear, you don’t need post stabilizer with a gimbal, it just makes things ultra smooth instead of smooth. The frugal tripod stabilizer hack will help reduce shake but especially micro jitter, which is the bigger evil anyways imo.
Thanks!
You all have helped me a lot with this issue.
I think I’m making some progresses, it seems I found my personal way to use the tripod (more like a shoulder rig than a gimbal) and I’m beginning to understand the Groucho walk that Roger suggested. Next step is going on location and do some test, I really want this scene to work and I’d like to solve all the problems in pre production…
Thanks to you all for taking the time to answer to my silly question and for your useful inputs!
The easy answer is to shoot wide using a 6K camera and use motion tracking in post and crop to roughly 4K. But you will still need to have the camera fairly steady and there are all sorts of ways to achieve this and YouTube is full of DIY hacks to getting a steady shot…
I will have to disagree a bit and say that today the least elaborate and yet best method for following actors outside of a steadicam is a gimbal. It yields great results especially when combined with post production image stabilization – shoot a little wider as intended as the post stabilizer will crop into the footage a few percentages. You will still have to “ninja walk”.
Summing up, since I don’t have a 6k camera I’ll try not to use the post production stabilization to avoid the cropping from 4k .
My wife thinks I walk like a gorilla with no knees, actually, but I’ll do my best to refine my ninja skills, ah ah!
When you steady a shot that has extreme sideways movement in post it can produce a very strange effect because it is not adjusting the foreground in relation to the background. You might just as well suggest the shot be made in AI rather than the real world. Walking backwards on a flat gravel road should not be a problem for someone who is proficient using a hand held camera. Counter to what might seem logical, a heavier camera may well help you as it tends to ground the shot. Yes, you can use a stabilizing system, of which there are many efficient variations.
Thanks Roger, you’re amazing!
I tried some tips I found around the web and a cheap and maybe unusual one that seems to work fine (at least for me) to reduce handheld shaking is using my tripod as a gimbal, with weights to make it heavier. I’m doing some tests, somehow I’ll find a solution. Or insert an earthquake in the story, ah ah!
The shot you mention was made using a stabilized camera rigged to the top of a pole that was being carried by two grips. The slight parallax movement of the characters to the background was a problem and was minimized by the way the grips walked, a kind of Groucho Marx step as is used by any hand-held camera operator. As far as I am aware, though some of the blends between shots were massaged in post none of the film was stabilized that way.
Thanks for the explanation! What you achieved with this movie is incredible…
In other words It’s a LUT for the initial color correction, not for the grading, Is It correct?
No, Roger said he would sit with the colorist and go through every shot to tweak exposure (besides color correction to match shots) but no additional grading. If you watch Roger’s films shot on Alexa, the differences between them come from lighting, set design, costume ect but ‘grading’ is the same for all of them. The only variables used are color temperature (and I suspect tint).
I know his goal is to obtain the desired effect directly in camera, which (together with his naturalistic and motivated approach) is a bit of a mind opening way to look at things, since we live in an era in which a lot of what we see and how we see it (not only in movies) it’s created by a pc. The best part is that, like all the masters, he makes it look quite easy!
He uses the same LUT on every movie. Roger on this forum:
The LUT we use was created at E-Film, now Company 3. It is not hard to do. Just shoot some tests and take them to the DI suite. I would be very surprised if the LUT I use is very different from any other. The only adjustment in it is to the contrast curve and the amount of color saturation. That is standard for any LUT that translates the RAW data.
Show LUTs in general aren’t too funky because they must work in all situations and are tested in all situations before actual shooting.
In other words It’s a LUT for the initial color correction, not for the grading, Is It correct?
Thanks!
I feel a bit like i had just discovered that you need fuel to make a car move, ah ah! But things are finally making sense for me!
My problem is the ISO, actually. I don’t have a very fast lens and i’d like to avoid to increase the ISO to keep the noise maneageable. So knowing the amount of light that (more or less) would gave me the same exposure is a big step for me. I realized that with a bit of creativity a small amount of additional light could help me solving the problem.
Thanks to you all for your replies, you all gave me interesting things to reflect upon! I see the risk of giving more importance to the math than to the image. Perhaps it seems an interesting aspect to me because i have no experience and i think that at the beginnings (no matter in which field) “magic formulas” seems a very useful tool to look for. And besides that i’m a science and maths teacher and so i really love formulas, ah ah.
From your comments it seems to me that (in my particular case) contrast ratio could be the starting point to set the scene and not the final step, since i think it could give me an approximate idea of how to begin to light the scene.About the second part (keeping the ratio or adapting to the scenes) i am trying to study movies i like to see what choices they made. What i hope to achieve is to avoid both a boring homogeneity of the images and a messy variety of them and find the right balance. Which at the moment looks like a very complicated achievement to obtain, ah ah!
I sometimes can’t even comment in a thread at all, mostly when I have already commented. I also sometimes have trouble logging in. It’s a “too many redirects” error, not caused by my cache/cookies as I have this issue with different devices, browsers and when trying with deleted cookies/cache or even over a VPN. That means it must be the website itself but is anyone else even having this issue?
I had some similar problem some time ago but It seems the issue i had with login, password recovery etc are not showing agaib. A strange thing it’s actually that, as soon as i post a thread i see the “edit” option, that disappear in a few time.
Just to clarify: i am not complaining or anything, the forum is great as It Is, It’s Just a little suggestion to add a simple feature that i think a forum template usually allows (in other words, i suppose It could be an Easy fix to do). 🙂
It’s very possible that Tom Stern and Clint Eastwood just “felt” that high contrast, hard lighting was just “right” for the film. Relying entirely on their artistic intuition without really deconstructing why they felt that way. In my opinion, I find lighting is usually more about the feeling than the logic.
Yes, i agree with you on that and that’s my point : the lighting feels “right” for this story but my impression is that they tried to give to the majority of the scenes the very same feeling (because it’s elegant? to underline the moral meaning of the movie? because it’s cool? i don’t know but that’s there) more than aiming to a realistic approach. Of course one could suggest that i feel the lighting so “right” because that’s why i experienced the movie, but as a mental exercise i tried to think how the movie would look with different lighting and if “feels” different.
This is the frame that somehow triggered my curiosity . There’s the composition of the image, the elegance of such a solution and many other things of course, but it made me realize that characters in this movie seem to costantly emerge and drown in the shadows and many scenes are made only by few details in a sea of black shadows.
In my opinion, I find lighting is usually more about the feeling than the logic. It’s less of a clearly defined microcosm of the films complete themes and typically more of an individual component that works in harmony with the rest of the film. But I like your theory a lot. Very clever.
It’s an interesting point of view, it shows that lighting a movie is not just recreating a light for a right scene, but also adding a touch of artistic and personal view to the entire movie.
But I like your theory a lot. Very clever.
Thanks a lot, i do appreciate that!
I apologize if i don’t use a correct terminology but my experience is with illustration, drawing and painting (that’s why the shapes created by lights and shadows and their edges grab my attention, it’s the core of painting reality) and i’m doing my very first steps in understanding cinematography and cinema in genera and i think Roger’s site is the best place i could find to begin the learning journey. 🙂
You could make hoops of 1″ plastic pipe to hold up a ‘tunnel’ of diffusion. There is a white industrial plastic that is equivalent to a 216 diffusion and comes in a wide roll. I used this on a film when I needed a lot of diffusion, instead of paying far more for something from a film supply company. You could rent seamless grid cloths or silks, which might be the cheapest option.
It’s comforting to know that even you resort to a bit of DIY for some scene. 🙂
Turtle Base, they are the bottom or ‘feet’ of a c-stand. Essentially the lowest position you can get on a stand without a babypin nailed to a piece of plywood.
Thanks! I didn’t know they had a specific name! I learned a new thing and it’s a good day when it happens!
