fuzzynormal

My buddy has a prime lens set for lend. Would this be possible:

I've been told it's a decent camera for indy films.

Let's keep the debate goin' ...Can't wait for the next great prompt artist to really bring their vision to the screen. No one prompts as well as that Vogel dude. That guy prompts. Why try to create a golden hour scene when you can just ask for it? Nothing says artistic cinema like a computer deriving and stealing other's hard work. :-| Should we go to an art museum to look at some lesser talent's paint-by-numbers? The creation matters. Now let's do motion pictures. Cinema has always been craft as well as the art. Minimize the craft, minimize the art.

Gotta find a retired old dude that's now an aspiring guitarist -- that used to work in production in the 90's and happens to be sitting on a closet full of short ends. Shouldn't be too hard, right?

This video is really cool. The density and scope of info is perfect for a neophyte.

35mm is daunting, but it's not my first time shooting film. It's been decades, but I've rolled 16mm before. I just think it's funny that I'm so frugal about modern digital gear, yet here I am seriously thinking about spending 200x more money to accomplish ... well, let's be totally honest, nothing of substantial IQ advantage! I mean, I bought a EM10III for $300 a few years ago, and that camera will shoot impressive 4K. I can't even get 1 minute of 35mm film shot and scanned for less than that. I'm very amused at how ridiculous this all is.

As a poor independent documentarian, we might need to have a talk about the word "affordable." This 35mm film stuff is the deep side of the motion picture pool and I really shouldn't be swimming in it!

Borisfx you say? Well, since this is a thread about editing, good spot to mention the old Media100. Anyone here know what I'm talking 'bout? That Boris guy was busy in the 1990's. Actually, if you want an old school editor, you can take a journey into the wayback machine and download his media100.com/ Along with the early and buggy versions of Premiere (you can't fault Adobe for staying true to their legacy), the M100 was the system on which a lot of early NLE adopters did corporate work. NTSC, baby! 1/3rd of a megapixel! And all of that plugged into a 68040 motorola Macintosh. BTW, similar chips are in my Amiga/Video Toaster, which I still have and still use it to play "Worms" on it as well as "Pinball Fantasies." My Amiga is right next to my Vectrex Video Game System that I got for Christmas as a 13 year old. Anyone here play Minestorm? Anyway, back to computers: the Video Toaster's NLE, "The Video Flyer," was the biggest POS to ever even try to call itself non-linear-editing. Their horrible attempt at it basically took a nail gun to the coffin of the company's, NewTek, earlier successes -- successes that started in the late 80's. Geeze-Louise, really going into the past now. [insert obligatory "Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk" joke here and also maybe the "Onion on my belt" Simpson's gag]

I guess I just need to figure out a worthwhile story to tell with 1.5 minutes of film.

Recently came into possession of this nice and functional 35mm 2C-BV ARRIFLEX. Before I eventually sell it I'm considering shooting a 200' roll to notch that experience; just to say "I done done that" 2 whole minutes of footage! What the hell. Ain't cheap, kind of financially stupid to do this sort of undertaking, but maybe ultimately worth the effort, I think? Anyone out there willing and able to offer advice regarding the lens situation with these old things?

There it is. Great point. One of the best features of modern NLE's

Well that was awesome.

Honestly, if you just re-made a version of FCP circa 1999, but it had good color control, I think that sort of NLE would have a chance at success. For me, and the way I work, I've found that all editing should be holistic and contextual to have a project emerge in a satisfying way. For instance, new-finagled tools like text-based editing with transcribed audio ends up being more of a time-suck than an effective technique. That might seem counter-intuitive, but for me the quick decisions that tool allows often leads to narrative dead-ends; I get cuts that "read well," but don't feel elegant -- so I ultimately end up not using those sorts of choices and going back to re-do stuff. I guess I'm saying there doesn't seem to be short cuts, pardon the pun, to a quality edit, so maybe just keep the NLE tool as elegant and simple as can be?

Personally, I like simple. These days I fret that features get in the way of artistry. Too often I focus on craft and don't invest enough in the art of it all. So maybe a basic tool is best? I don't know. I can tell you the best film I ever made was with FCP 7.

Has it been a good investment? You making money with it?

Well, there's one hell of a metaphor in the "context" of this.

While AI can be employed for positive or negative things, there's a bigger outlook at play for me. Robert Persig's famous musings are where I want to stand philosophically. His theories, and my limited understanding of them, are pretty much the reason why I ultimately view AI unfavorably.

We should hold theft in disdain. Not doing the stealing thing, after all, is one of the commandments in the Bible. I have a friend/colleague that has gone into the AI rabbit hole. He wants to only deliver videos with 100% generative AI. His argument is the hackneyed "It's just a tool". Well, a tool delivering mimicry from unauthorized sources is theft. "But humans copy each other all the time" he's said. Sorry, bud, you're just rationalizing stealing. Putting aside that human plagiarism is also theft, the process of being creatively influenced as a human is not the same thing. Humans filter all creative context through their own impressions, wisdom, experiences, empathy, and feelings. That particular matrix is infinite, random, and organic. The talented know how to tap into this mystic calculus, to develop their expertise, bend their skill set as a means to an end, and to use all of it to create something profound. Hacks (of which I am one, mind. Maybe a self-aware one, but still one nevertheless) can only regurgitate superficially. This lazy superficiality has now been globally scaled and monetized for the 1%. It sucks. Specifically, it sucks for me because those mediocre jobs of regurgitation used to be $$ in my pocket, not theirs. I had a skill of the craft that was worth a certain value. That value is diminished significantly. Yes, I'm bitter about it. Should I be? I may lack art, but at least I had craft. Be that as it may, my colleague's use of AI is especially galling as he's eager to brag at how hard it is to get the various AI systems he uses to comply with his prompts. Here's the thing: he's putting out animation style videos. Do you know how difficult it is to be a crafts-person creating animation? Good god. And he says he's "working hard" doing prompts? The "it's a tool argument," to me, is like going into a museum to admire and marvel at the paintings and sculptures ... but then standing in front of a 10th grader's paint-by-numbers knock-off of "The Harvest" and insisting it also deserves as much admiration as the original Van Gogh -- Or looking at some technical feat, like a 3D print of Michelangelo's David and being, like, "Wow, the person that ran the 3D printer equipment to make a copy of that sculpture is so great!" Bull. Shit. Admiring the craft needs to also be part of admiring the art. If my colleague is so addled that he doesn't even see repercussions of that craft-art-divorce, he's probably hopeless. Worse, he keeps trotting out his latest video examples in a gee-whiz-isn't-this-great-way to everyone around him -- as if we're supposed to be impressed? He's literally said, "I can finally make everything that's been in my head exactly how I see it!" "Make?" No, that ain't what's happening, not really. And the fact that he can't even recognize that he's not a "maker" is the real problem. People that are too shallow to cop to any of that, to appreciate what's being lost ... again, it's the deeper major problem with [waves arms around] all of this. I'm tired hoss. Tired of shaking my fist at the clouds.

Regarding voice AI. Hoo boy. As a documentarian, this one can affect me a lot. A lot of ills can be smoothed over with AI audio. But ... at the end of the day it's an ethical choice how it's employed. I've decided to ONLY use it to salvage VERBATIM lines from interviews and field audio that is distorted beyond comfort. Like, wind noise, clothes rustling. And then it's a last ditch option after audio EQ/Rx tweaking. Best thing to do is just not 'f up the field production to begin with. Beyond that, if AI is used as a production short cut to solve a storytelling/crafting failure as a filmmaker -- I now consider AI use untenable for me. It's simply on the wrong side of things morally when it comes to making honest doc films. Sadly, I fear that's now a contrarian opinion; an "old-fart" opinion. No one probably really gives a shit anymore about these sorts of "cheats" 'cept me.

We might be surprised at how many people out there are in the hobby for, more or less, that reason. On the other hand, being truly creative at cinema and storytelling is rather elusive. That's my experience anyway. Good stories are hard to do. But, playing with tech is a gateway into this creative realm. Honing craft is part of the larger process, right? With craft, you don't need to be creative, so much as tenacious. One can be good and clean at the craft without being all that remarkable with the other stuff. Anyway, run around with Birders if you want to see the extremes between creativity and tech hoarding. Capturing "Birds In Flight" is a big goal, and for many of them (affluent retirees) they'll buy kits that are valued at 10's of thousands of dollars -- yet they struggle to understand how to make it deliver images that tell a compelling story. They latch onto tech to mitigate their creative shortcomings... this kind of thing is not really a harsh criticism, as it's definitely something I'm guilty of.

You'd think. But y'all might have a hard time appreciating how normal all of this is for the majority of American history. We mythologize our "E Plurabus Unum" system, especially after WWII, but analyze our past without a filter and it's not exactly encouraging. Egalitarianism doesn't have place in what has, more often than not, been an oligarchy.

Anyone here shoot a Panasonic Pro AG-HVX200A recently or even back in the day? I'm thinking I want to go into the past for the final camcorder purchase of my life. I figure I should have a true CCD camcorder just "because" and this one might be it. Looking for any advice, thanks.

I want to be wrong...but my own family...man. It's not good.

I wish video documentation would stop it. But if you're here you'd kind of know it's not gonna stem the tide in my nation. Shame and reality are irrelevant now; doesn't move the needle. As an American it's pretty easy to see that the collapse of our ideals post WWII society is inevitable. The capitalists want it and they have the power, they control the narratives. And the narratives don't offer rationality--they just offer ideological excuses. Not exactly sure why the powerful want this. Maybe they're just cruel people? Maybe they know climate change is coming and will cause crisis so they need to lock things down with fascism to have societal control while covering their asses(ts)? I don't know. I do know I'm sad. I would've rather not lived through this.

I think Clara Bow was the first to teach the camera things with her gaze. Especially desire. Free desire. Or was it defiant desire? I forget. 😉 Also, the camera has a bad memory because it keeps getting re-taught all those things by different people. But I suppose being enamored by others is normal. Celebrities exist for good reason. Cultural context mixed with a harmonizing charisma. Maybe it's not even the camera. The story and image of Mona Lisa is still around in our collective consciousness. The girl with the pearl earring. How about Adele Bloch? Or maybe if you'd rather consider the male rendered in a painting to think about ... well, again, the Mona Lisa ... ? Regardless, legend has it that Anna Whistler was a right old twat. Kicked a cat once and liked to slaughter chickens.