Category: Techinque Page 8 of 18

Covid19 – 2 – Catalog the equipment

On 29 March 2020

The image is a tribute to the finale of the Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the artist Michael Pancrazio painted the mattepaint where later the scene of the character that brings the ark chest to the secret warehouse was composed.

Why is equipment cataloguing important?

Over time the filmakers, but not only them, accumulate a certain amount of tools and objects to work, and often not only out of necessity, but also for personal passion, myself included.

Having a list of the tools in the Excel/Openoffice/LibreOffice table to be able to reorder products in various ways is important for many reasons:

Be aware of all the tools we have and what we can use
List of all the items we can have on a set
List of products to offer to the customer to raise the price of our services
Sort the instruments by weight in case of rapid air travel and you can’t use the hold
List accepted items in carry-on baggage or not.Reme
mber that in the lists it is preferable to put the name and the acronym and not the category, otherwise I want to see you when at the airport control you say you have two shotguns, a boom, a couple of white guns for your “I’m not going to go
List of names and serials of all equipment for any travel and checks and declarations
List of names and serials of all equipment in case of unfortunate events such as theft or loss of some component
Last time you used the items, some of these like batteries would be useful to have a label on top where you mark each charge and discharge performed, it may seem manic but… there is a good reason, every type of battery id has a longer life if every tot time is used if for laziness or because you do not have at hand other batteries used always the same you will end up with x batteries that last less because you have used them too , and the others that you may not be able to load them because you left them two years in a drawer… given the cost of batteries, better to be careful
list of all the media you have : sd, cf, ssd, hdd and their real speeds (do testing), so you know how much are the giga or tera available when you will be called to manage a project, and at the same time you know if you need to use multiple rooms at the same time if you are covered as media. I know too many people who compulsively or for emergencies have bought more media than they remember, and not being ordered, scattering everywhere such media, not immediately making ordered backups, find themselves with media tera, but not knowing if and what they have they keep buying it.
Format and test the media so you can verify that they are in place and have no defects.

If all these reasons are not enough for you… well it’s a way like any other to pass the time 😀

The real Crop problem

By carlomacchiavello

On 28 March 2020

In Techinque

It's in people's heads…

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand calculations, I thought direct reference images were the best answer.

The images you find below are the comparison of the framing of two pocket4k and pocket6k then the 4/3 sensor of the pocket4k (not micro 4/3 as you often read, because that is the attack) against the Super35 sensor of the pocket6k.

Placing the easel 3 meters from the photo window these images show that the difference of crop is not extreme, it is not a real problem as so many go to demonstrate with so many absurd calculations.

As you can see in these comparison shots with several fixed focals 24-28-35-50 in an interior is not so dramatic.

Also since there are so many features in the narrow places (and 3 meters are not many) I thought it was useful to create a simple scheme between the two rooms so you see how the crop system is less important when we are up close, because the angle difference is less compared to being further away from the subject, but if you are further apart, you can move to compensate for the shots, so it's a false problem.

Real Crop Problem

By carlomacchiavello

On 28 March 2020

In Techinque

It's in people's heads.

As they say, the picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand calculations, I thought directly reference images were the best answer.

The image below compares the framing of two pocket4k and pocket6k for the Pocket6k Super35 sensor and the pocket4k 4/3 sensor (not micro 4/3 to read well).

Placing the easel 3 meters from the photo window, these images show that the crop difference is not extreme and it is not a real problem as it goes to demonstrate in so many absurd calculations.

As you can see in these comparison shots with some fixed focus 24-28-35-50 interior, not so dramatic.

Also because there are so many features in the narrow area (and three meters is not much), I thought it would be useful to create a simple scheme between the two rooms to see how important the crop system is when we are nearby because the difference in angle is smaller than being far from the subject.is a wrong problem because you can move to correct the shot.

Covid19 – 1 – Shopping in 2020

By carlomacchiavello

On 26 March 2020

In Techinque

Today I’m prolific, no, it’s not true, it’s that some things stay on standby for a long time, sometimes for too long…

Since we are forced home we could take advantage of all the onLine services to shop and buy the necessary without going out, and if we go out, do it as smartly as possible. Theoretically mine should be a foregone post, but since I know many people for whom my advice has been wonderful discoveries, I make them public.

Spending onLine supermarkets

Many supermarkets, large and small allow online shopping and home delivery, allowing a small number of people around to spread the contagion, both as unwitting carriers, and as infected by touching where others have left the virus. Google your nearest supermarket to optimize your expenses

Physical expense

For some people, shopping is an excuse to go out, often too many times, as friends from supermarkets are embarrassed to find the same person three to four times a day in front of the checkout with bags, when the same supermarket offers the home delivery and online shopping.

By putting the need for spending we can optimize the spending by doing it every 4-5 days by taking some care:

Create the shopping list on your phone, as you notice the shortcomings, so we have less risk of finding out back home what was missing.
create a “menu” of the week, so as to have a pleasant turnover of the products to buy and at the same time a healthy and varied diet, avoiding compulsive purchases, and above all we have the certainty that we do not have to go out again due to the lack of some Type.
put the products in order of route, that is, the list of the shopping list in order of the path you do in the supermarket (which every super small or large has to entice you to buy more. The purpose of the order is to do the shopping as quickly as possible, to reduce the time of contagion of yours and at the same time allow other people to do the shopping, because we are not the only ones to need.
create a plan B, that is, for at least 50% of the products a second option so that if they are not available we do not turn to research, but we already know what to take.
buy fresh (fruit, vegetables, milk) with the longest possible storage dates
stock up on long-lasting products (milk, canned goods, pasta)
buy meat/fish and possibly freeze or freeze it for longer storage
optimize the purchase of carbohydrates (bread, breadsticks et) to avoid falling too much into temptation (i’m the first).

Online newspapers

So many newspapers, newspapers, magazines have the online version, subscribe, even temporarily to the online version allows us to stay up to date and keep alive small and large newsrooms that right now are also feeling a great work difficulties

Amazon Spend

Amazon.it is the world reference for online shopping, and don’t overlook that there are so many mundane everyday products, from light bulbs to slippers that can get us home without wasting time.

The Prime service that offers you music, movies, television series included in the subscription.

Amazon Pantry

Many people don’t know the Pantry program, which offers supermarket purchases inside amazon, so all kinds of food, soaps, pet food and much more.

Shooting with Cinema Cameras

By carlomacchiavello

On 29 November 2019

In Techinque

From many years there has been the “fashion” of shooting with photo cameras, even at the cost of working worse than the video cameras (lack of continuous video autofocus, bad audio, management issues on long shots, lack of stabilization, ergonomics for video etc etc) and we almost forgot about the photographic part. In the past I made a provocative post on one of the most used cameras for video, analyzing the photographic part, today I will make an even more shocking article… take pictures with a cinema camera… Blackmagic Design pocket4k.
In fact this “claim” has been happening for centuries, since the 90s customers have been asking for grabs of video in interlaced SD format to pass them on to the graphics for the creation of the covers of the VHS, and with embarrassment I tried to explain and make it clear that the definition, the quality of the color, and many other elements would have caused low-level results…

Around 2009 (so only recently) Red was the first to propose frame extractions from their 4k shoots as an alternative to photographs, and it seemed that that blasphemy was going to ruin the world of photography, when in fact anyone has any Technical cognition of video and photography shooting knows that or shoot for video (correct shutter for the perception of movement) or shoot for photography (high shutter for sharp images without microblur).

With the Red’s high costs, this project was shelved by marketing that sought to sell the Reds as photo cameras, but had no appearance, ergonomics and complete advantages over traditional Reflex.

Recently (August 2019) due to a last-minute technical snag, the unusable camera, I had to “invent” an efficient way to use what I had to photograph, namely the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4k.
The camera is a 4k sensor camera developed by Sony (the same tech as the gh5s and Sony ALpha7), with the ability to shoot via the photo button of uncompressed DNG frames or shoot… that is to make bursts of 60 frames per second of 10 mpx for … a lot of time.

The photo shoot button was implemented to be able to capture raw uncompressed frames for VFX use or to make images with the same colormetry as the movie (my request to BMD from the first cinema camera, where I emulated this operation with the function of the timelapse, and later also with the 4K Production Camera), but it has a defect it’s SLOOOOW!!!

The responsiveness of the button makes this function unusable for a more serious photo shoot, but using the video shot instead and then extracting the raw frames, is a more flexible and efficient solution for the final result.

During the morning, overcome the fears of shooting, managed the problems of focusing in the sun, eventually exploiting false colors and peaking I managed to bring home a fair number of shots.

Once I chose the filling time I used the wheel to change the diaphragm, quiet that in raw I could handle iso without problem in the post (the pocket has a raw iso invariant), a proper time to handle the light, which being constant I did not have to touch more than so much, with manual focus (to which I am also used in the photo shoot) I found myself quite quiet in the shots.

I voluntarily chose to use a Lexar 128gb that supports recording in Q0 for a few seconds, so instead of worrying about the fact that the board would only allow me to shoot for a few seconds, I worked as if I had that card for the gusts of 3-4 seconds at a time. I could have used the connected ssd, but I would have had to click more on the camera button, instead it was like shooting with a camera, but more frames per second, for longer 😀

Once I got home I checked the images, the Dng that I tried to shoot in parallel to have alternatives to the sequence in Braw Q0 and in the end I was surprised how the differences between dng and braw in Q0 were almost null in sharpness , DR and general quality.

Not many people have noticed that BMDs with the new Os have the ability to shoot using Shutter angle or in more familiar shutter time like in photography.
To avoid the microblur I chose to work at 1/520, adapting diaphragm and iso to manage the exposure.

The workflow I developed to then manage the material is simple:

Import braw into Resolve.
Creating the timeline with clips.
Navigating and choosing the frames that interest us.
From the Camera panel, use the Export Frame feature to save a braw frame (without recompression we save a raw frame for storage).
Create a new project that will load the individual raw and Dng frames and then export a sequence of TIFF 16bits with the correct raw file colormetry.
import into a normal photo management program (Photoshop, Lightroom, CaptureOne) for normal photographic features.

Alternatively, those who use Adobe Premiere can do the same thing by purchasing the Braw Studio of Autokroma, developer Antoine introduced at my request the function of exporting a 16bit frame directly from the raw source from version 1.61.

Pro

Rich colormetry with large workspace
Photographic sequences of almost infinite duration, great for sport and fashion
In case of difficult focus it is possible to seal during the shooting to have the sequential fire certainties
You already have the room with you while you make the videos

Against

Longer-than-usual workflow
Difficult shooting without aids (a simple Shade box solves the problem).
Need for larger supports.
Shutter that can’t go below 1/24 or go above 1/720

Below you can see an example where it becomes unlikely to find out which is sourceD Dng and what is a BrawQ0 frame, only by downloading the originals from which the models are excluded, by copyright issue.

From here I can think that the purchase of the sister 6k (21mpx resolution) becomes an interesting solution in those situations where fires are more controllable and the need to grasp with gusts shades and details that in the gusts of a camera traditional show their limits.

Of course this is an alternative solution, but not primary where a camera with a thousand and more elements is LA solution for taking photography, rest of the idea that each tool expresses the best in the work for which it was created.