silvertonesx24

Interchangeable lenses will really help with the "that's a Phantom" look that shows up everywhere now

8 hours ago, tupp said:

I don't think OP was objecting to phones because he/she is worried about busted takes -- he/she seems to expect crew to "look busy."

This is a big part of it. Clients aren't on set often but I've gotten comments about it in the past about it because ultimately they are the one paying for it.

I understand that there is set work to be done on smartphones. What I am talking about is the delay where the grip could help get hands on something but we have to call him up because he is finishing up typing some email or whatever. If he was paying attention he would have seen that a gaffer needs help and there wouldn't be that dysfunction. That is the part that irritates me. I don't want to be a stickler but I'm paying very fair rates for talented crew and it seems at 80% of the time I look over it's tap tap tapping on the fucking smartphone. Again I get that filmmaking is hurry up and wait but I'm paying you to be there.

Thanks for the comments

I personally don't spend a lot of time on commercial sets but when I do it seems like most of the crew spends half the time tapping away on their smartphones.

I have spent enough time to know that filming is the ultimate hurry-up-and-wait setting.

Would it be considered acceptable policy to blanket ban phones on my set except for emergencies? I feel like if my company is paying fair day rates for (non-union) crew, that they are focused on the work and even in down time working on consolidating gear, prepping for next shot, etc. Most of my crew are freelancers so I understand that they essentially running their own businesses, but the time I pay them is my time not theirs and time is the most valuable commodity on any set

Or is it just considered acceptable like surfing social media and playing fantasy football at your office job

I have one 12 core Mac Pro. Multicore performance looks really great on the benchmarks but rarely does it get used to it's potential by software, at least within the Adobe ecosystem. Especially with After Effects renders these days

So many of our clients are brand productions, only seen internally or for special presentations. I find the MusicBeds and Position Musics very useful and affordable for music licensing. Can't beat $200-400 and a temp track to use for client approvals.

Recently I had a client contact us about taking what we produced and putting it on air. No big deal, right? Well I go to check into the music license (the same piece we already licensed) and the company wants 40x what we paid to license the music for online in the first place! They want as much for the music license as the client was planning to pay in media for the local TV spot.

Does anyone have any alternatives or suggestions for music license portals that aren't so insultingly expensive just because the client is putting a little bit of money behind it to promote it?

Not everyone advertising these days is Unilever for crying out loud

I'm in a similar situation, in the next few months I will be on the road much more and would like something that can handle 4k video editing and Element 3D after effects. 

I'm interesting in exploring Ryzen 7 solutions, but I'm unsure if leaving the nvidia/CUDA world will be OK as far as video and AE goes. Any opinions on a good Ryzen and GPU laptop?

4 minutes ago, anonim said:

inclusion of prores or even raw.

This will never happen for DSLR.

1 hour ago, wolf33d said:

 

This looks like PR from one of a million cheap Chinese companies. "in the History of Lumix is achieved" really? No way this could be real.

14 hours ago, Damphousse said:

So are community standards designed to mitigate those bad effects.  Or are we to believe you wish to go back to a world where Big Tobacco marketed cigarettes to kids?

India fumes as Big Tobacco targets young people in bid to recruit new smokers

From The American College of Pediatricians...

"Consumption of pornography is associated with many negative emotional, psychological, and physical health outcomes.  These include increased rates of depression, anxiety, acting out and violent behavior, younger age of sexual debut, sexual promiscuity, increased risk of teen pregnancy, and a distorted view of relationships between men and women."

Not really something a seven year old should be randomly exposed to while watching cartoons.  Never imagined that would be a controversial statement.

Here's an idea- teach your children to identify and resist manipulation in advertising (ironically the opposite of what I do for a living). Don't depend on the fucking iPad, television, Hollywood, Madison Ave, or the government to raise your kids unless you want them to become a case study for the american college of pediatricians.

As a fan of the obnoxious nostalgic nonsense that is 80s hair metal, it's funny watching the parallels between Twisted Sister, Poison, PMRC, and today with YouTubers. Same crap just different generation.

Algorithms are neither good nor bad they just are. Just don't watch the videos and they won't show up in your feed. "Modern culture is corrupting our children" is an argument as old as time.

Also, I find it hard to believe that 2/3 of people browse the web without adblocking. Block ads and they don't make money. It's as simple as that and far better than traditional interrupt advertisement. If you like them then whitelist them. uBlock is just common sense. You can't control other people but it isn't really that hard to control what you or your children watch.

Why do people do bitrate comparisons on YouTube? It's so pointless.

I owned a Kinemini and now own a few KineMax.

The KineMax is a significant upgrade over the Kinemini in every way. Obviously resolution, color science, and usability. The Terra 6K uses the same sensor in a smaller format. Dynamic range in the "golden" mode is insane. My DP (owner of alexa mini) was blown away by our ability to shoot subjects directly against a bright sky.

Cineform Raw >>>>>> every other codec out there. Lossless raw at smaller file sizes than Prores and I can cut 6K raw even on a first gen i7.

The cameras are rock solid. Never an issue. Never a crash. I had one big problem on set once not getting it to recognize the SSD, but that was because I was using 7mm instead of the 9mm SSDs that the slot is built for. Yes you have to deal with crappy Chinese support and sending it back to Bejing to fix anything so if that's not for you, don't even consider them.

Now, cinema cameras will be a pain in the butt if you're 'upgrading' from DSLR, so the GH5 and the 5D come out to shoots way more than the Kinefinity stuff. But that's a different argument.

1 hour ago, Don Kotlos said:

HEVC doesn't play

But yes I agree it will be nice to see whether the new Kaby Lake CPUs with supposedly hardware decoding of 10bit HEVC actually work. 

Pascal GPUs will decode HEVC like butter, provided you use the right program for playback. The default Windows 10 video app will decode 10 bit 8k 360 video without even breaking a sweat.

But Premiere Pro does not take advantage of that.

6 hours ago, Brian Caldwell said:

The "why" seems pretty obvious.  16x9 is enormously important, and to get there from 4:3 without wasting sensor space you need (16/9)x(3/4)=1.33x.  Whether or not 1.33x is "crap" or not depends entirely on the lens design.

I was referring to the anamorphic desqueeze monitoring option. I don't see a logical reason to only include one ratio, especially when all of the good lenses are different ratios.

On 8/30/2017 at 10:52 AM, Andrew Reid said:

Answer from Panasonic about the anamorphic desqueeze...

It's for 1.33x lenses when used in the normal 16:9 video mode.

Why would they do that. 1.5x and 2x is where it is at for anamorphic. 1.33x lenses are almost all crap.

Great thread idea

A few years back we had a shoot where the drone got stuck in a tree. After a few seconds of thrashing it, the drone slipped out and fell hard 20 feet to the pavement, slicing someone trying to catch it. He was bandaged and luckily we had parts on hand to repair and get it back up in the air.

This all happened right in front of the paying client as he had happened to be on the shoot that day to see the drone. Pretty awkward.

On 8/23/2017 at 8:50 AM, Tim Sewell said:

This is great and everything, but really only in an emergency. Most smartphones don't have removable batteries, so you're left with a choice of some kind of USB powerbank (adding weight/bulk) or running your phone down in the field - where you're most likely to need a cellphone.

USB power is readily available anywhere really. Quality smartphones are dirt cheap, you can buy a locked phone for this purpose and keep your cell phone free. I bought an S6 for no other purpose than using it with Gear VR and this looks like it'd be perfect for my rigs. Get into the settings to disable apps and put airplane mode on and you're going to have much better battery life than field monitors that eat batteries for breakfast.

2 hours ago, Nikkor said:

After all that's what liberals want, power. Social Justice is just an excuse, White Privilege is the new Original Sin. The Ed Davids are the new Priests, they want power and Privilege in exchange of nothing. Social justice is never going to come through people like Ed.

That's really well said. It's the new evangelical. People who proselytize, lead with vague statements presented as absolute truths, pass sweeping judgements on others, make doomsday predictions, use words like 'denier', 'justice', 'retribution', 'reparations', any opposition is doubleplusungood and must be shut down.

They hijacked the right in America fifty years ago and they are only recently starting to lose influence there. Now the left is picking them up as a different crowd.

You people give Trump far too much credit.

He has zero ideology. He has zero history of any ideology. He's a massive buffoon who loves nothing more than to stir the pot. He'll flip positions in a second. He's a Democrat one year, Independent the next, then an evangelical Republican in time for the Iowa caucus. He's that guy who will contradict himself in the very next sentence and deny to your face that he ever did it. Not because he doesn't know that he did, but because he loves watching it piss you off. His 140 character ideology is about as deep as the ideology of Kim Kardashian.

The idea that he is some bleeding heart white nationalist fascist a la Richard Spencer misses the entire bit. And when you have antifa scum hysterically looting and rioting over him, it really makes you wonder who the real fascists are.

4 hours ago, Neumann Films said:

I really couldn't say, it just seems like what happened with Facebook a few years ago where your videos don't quite reach the audience you know is there.  It wasn't gradual, it happened within a week or so.

Yeah, maybe that's it.  They want to push longer videos now or something?  Who knows.

That sounds about right. I haven't been on either platform (as a creator) long enough to notice these things from that perspective. 

From what I've heard, YouTube SEO today is all about the recommendation engine. Best practice is to find the channels and videos that do well and copy them close enough so that you'll show up in recommended videos. As Andrew mentioned if everyone in your market is into clickbait style junk then you have no choice but to play follow the leader and do the same. Then since these are public companies highly valued based on a potential monetization of mass audiences they're all going to force you to pay to play in the end.

All of this feels like in 20 years everything will conglomerate into only a few giant channels with the budgets and resources to pay to play and we will be were we were before the internet democratized everything.

22 minutes ago, Ed_David said:

But I guess what is your definition of a white nationalist?

Mine is a person who is racist

That's...a circular definition. Also, racist is a relative term, and has been corroded to near-meaninglessness.

A white nationalist is someone who's defining ideology is that the white race (more accurately, Aryan; WN hate plenty of 'white' people) inherently owns their nation and manifests destiny over other races and nations.

This is a clear, objective, and absolutist definition.

1 hour ago, Ed_David said:

About argueing with me is like arguing with a black hole...isnt that the point of debating? You dont change a persons mind but you become stronger in your own beliefs and reasoning skills?

Why? So we can become even more polarized and you can safely live in the echo chamber of your own head? The benefit of debating is to convince others on the fence to heed your reasoning vs the other debater.

There is no reasoning with someone who tosses out "Trump is a white nationalist" as an absolutism. It's such an illogical foundation for debate that why should anyone who isn't a sycophant even bother. What a waste of time.

Had you started with "Trump doesn't seem care that actual bleeding white nationalists are using his persona to embolden themselves. Here's why I believe that's dangerous" then maybe we could have a productive discussion. Or you could create inspiring art around that. But you didn't, so we won't.

4 hours ago, Neumann Films said:

YouTube has taken a turn for the insane over the last...4 months or so.  They changed something under the hood and it's all very different now.

In what way? Recommendations? search placements?

From my perspective clickbait has infested YouTube over the last year or more. Make an obnoxious reaction face thumbnail and pad your video with lots of blab so there's more space for ad placements. It's not about creating "content" (hate that word) it's more about creating the appearance of shock and substance when there really is very little there

I hate this kind of thing as much as anyone right of center, but I find Google's tracking/advertising/manipulation practices to be more concerning especially considering their political clout and market share. The online advertising market is a straight up duopoly right now between them and Facebook.

But unfortunately, they're king when it comes to many things on the internet.

Tried shooting it in VR timelapse. It would have worked out nicely, had the clouds cooperated.

9 hours ago, AaronChicago said:

I'm planning on bringing out my 2x anamorphic with the GH5. I just dont want to fry my sensor. Any idea on how long it's safe to aim at the sun?

It wouldn't be any different than shooting at the sun normally. Which granted probably isn't the best idea for your sensor.