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Grim Fandango

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Everything posted by Grim Fandango

  1. You both have mega cool portraits! That's my only excuse and I'm sticking to it!
  2. Nah, I got the pair of you confused as one person! I combined your disagreement with me with zaks blog post etc... don't worry about it, the post above I feel is good information for people or easy enough to ignore
  3. My apologies then, you were correct! In truth, my first contact with you was in the piracy thread, where you were needlessly rude and caustic and I really only skim through your posts giving them minimal attention because, quite frankly, I don't like you.
  4. It's like if I told you I was shooting my lens wide open and you all jumped on me telling me that if I used screwdrivers on my lenses then my warrenty would be void. It's obvious that despite the words I used, I just used shorthand to refer to how I had set my iris. And likewise, to me the idea that you would buy a lens without understanding the picture it will give you on your cameras compared to your other lenses, well, lets just say, my jaw has hit the floor and it won't be being picked up for quite a long time. I literally didn't think that this needed to be explicitly stated.
  5. Yes, well I'm new here and I honestly thought this stuff was basics 101 and you would all understand what I meant. Clearly, I misjudged! Of course nothing stops you from speedboosting the sigma onto a m4/3, but the conversation was talking about emount sonys.
  6. No, if you stick that sigma on a crop frame camera and open it up to 1.8, you will get the precise same image at f2.88 on the canon with the speed booster on that camera for any given focal length. That gives you a 0.8 twist on the aperture dial of extra speed that is not avaliable to the sigma. Not a life changing amount I grant you, but mathmatically there.
  7. Bokeh - a term used to subjectively describe the way a lens renders an out of focus area. Is not measured by aperture size or focal distance, but in rather more fanciful ways, such as "jittery", "creamy", "lively" Circle of Confusion - The flattened spherical area rendered acceptably sharp by a lens to be described as in focus. Determined by a complicated function unique to each lens, commonly able to be moved and resized/shaped by a user using the aperture and focus controls on a camera Background Blur - Any part of the image that is in the background of an image and outside of the circle of confusion Depth of field - a laymans description of a linear line through the circle of confusion Fixed that for you
  8. We are not talking about leaving a lens in place and putting a crop sensor behind it, we are talking about putting a different lens that throws a smaller circle. But regardless, lets talk through your scenario, step by step. You put a lens on a tripod. It creates an image in a circle, lets say 44mm behind the lens. You place a sensor behind that lens. It is a 1m by 1m sensor. Luckily, it's a really large format lens. You measure the number of photons striking the sensor and ignoring the quantum problem of changing the energy by measuring it, you find that exactly 1,000,000 photons strike the sensor every second. Each photon carries 1 unit of energy, you you have 1,000,000 energies of light striking your sensor, energy that activates it. Interestingly, if you isolate a 1cm square area, you would find that as there are 10,000 square cm in 1m square, there are 10,000 times less photons striking that small isolated area, no matter where you measure that cm squared. Great! Now you remove that sensor, and put one there that is only 1cm by 1cm. You could place 10,000 of them on the big sensor to cover it exactly. So naturally, it is being hit by 10,000 less photons every second, that is 100 every second. So the energy being recieved by the smaller sensor is, drum roll, 100 energy units, 10,000 less. Thats a lot less light striking your sensor. Fortunately, you are a good engineer, so you don't lug that gigantic lens around to cover that tiny sensor, you designed a much smaller, lighter lens for that camera, that still lets 100 photons strike it every second. But because it's only got to cover a 1cm area, it is so tiny, it only lets 100 photons in every second, being a great designer, they are all passed through straight to the sensor. But the big lens is letting 1,000,000 photons in every second. To provide the same level of illumination on the sensor. The big lens is letting in a lot more light. It's so simple. The big sensor has a lot more light to work with. Why is this even worth worrying about. You're making a film, you're halfway through a piece of dialogue. You're filming at 100mm on a full frame sensor, open at 2.8. Your camera just stops working. You've got actors, crew etc all standing around, not doing anything. You reach for your spare, and guess what, it's a m4/3 camera. You know you need this to match as closely as possible or it's going to be really jarring, and difficult to edit. You get your 50mm lens because like a trooper, you are aware that the crop sensor needs a wider lens. Then comes the sticky question, what f stop do you set this new lens to? .... .... If you said f2.8 of course, (BUZZZZZZZ) Wrong, you notice that the background which was a beautiful creamy blur, is now clearly showing cars in your victorian costume drama. So what gives! It let's the same amount of light through, you incorrectly bemoan to all and sundry around you. Suddenly, I pop up, I'm your ruggedly handsome lead. In my deep, inspiring voice, I declare my truth. "Good Director of Photography, please, allow me. I know a thing or two about these matters. You chose this lens very wisely, for it has an apeture which opens much wider than your setting here of f2.8. It's a m4/3, a 2 times crop. If you apply that factor to the aperture and open it all the way up to f1.4, you will make a picture the equal of your ruined kit" "Nonsense" you hiss "This cannot be so! Get back to your place, sullen curr, and approach me not again!" Eventually, after much wailing and decrying of the gods, men and sheep, you, in a temper grasp the lens and make to hurl it from your visage. But, whats this, your fingers knock the aperture dial to 1.4, and in front of you, the beauty of my face, creamy, carless bokeh behind. It is the picture you longed so desperately for all along. It's overexposed now, but no matter, you have an ISO control in your picturebox. "To your places!" you shout rumbuctiously "Put down those nachos and clean the cheese from your chin. We resume shooting!" . . . Again, if you really think I am wrong on this, then do post two identical pictures, from different sized sensors demonstrating that the relationship between the differing f stops you used was not directly related to the differences in the sensor sizes.
  9. Then you will have literally no problem proving that! Get two cameras with different size sensors, stick two lenses on the front of them set to the same f-stop number, and try to take identical photographs with them. When you give up because the bokeh in one is far more out of focus than the other for the same frame, apply my formula and then take those same photos. Or just watch the video I posted above where they perform that precise test.
  10. The F-Stop number is a ratio, between the focal length and the aperture, so if you have a 100mm lens with an aperture opening of 50mm, it is set to f2.0. But a 100mm lens that covers a full frame sensor and a 100mm lens that covers a m4/3 sensor are very, very different to each other, despite sharing those two common measurements. The difference in designs manifest in the size of the image projected by the lens. The aperture blocking certain angles of light reaching the sensor is the same, thus the out of focus areas will be the same amount out of focus, but your 100mm lens on a m4/3 lens will show a much narrower DOF - as you so correctly point out. So to achieve the same frame as the full frame, you actually need to mount a 200mm lens on the full frame. What happens, the DOF changes because to maintain f2, your aperture is now 100mm wide, blocking far less of that light coming in. Therefore, you cannot achieve the same picture. In order to do that, you will need your 100mm to open up more, in this case, also to 100mm diameter - f1. So you see, for any particular picture, you cannot recreate it by matching the lens numbers and plopping it on any old sensor (we all understand this) not can you only multiply the focal length crop factor (becuase the out of focus character is different) but if you want to achieve the same look, you have to also apply your crop factor to the f number, your lens needs to be faster for the crop sensor to achieve the same shot. Thus when comparing two lenses for the same sensor, one a lens designed for that crop frame sensor, and one a full frame lens with a speed booster, not only is that speed booster concentrating the light, increasing it's brightness on the smaller lens (F2.8 becomes an F2), but you are bringing the full frame characteristics of the lens to that crop sensor efectively making that sensor a full frame. Therefore to achieve the same look that the full frame lens brings, you need to use that crop factor on the aperture too for the crop lens (which remember is not going through a speed booster).
  11. This explains things better than I can:
  12. My apologies, in my rush, I had confused you with DPStewart
  13. And don't forget that while it has the DOF of a 1.8, in light terms, it is illuminating like a 2.8 on a crop frame sensor - making the speed boosted 70-200 faster
  14. And here is my evidence: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/online-copyright-enforcement-consumer-behavior-and-market-structure Taken at face value, our ndings indicate that digital music piracy does not displace legal musicpurchases in digital format. This means that although there is trespassing of private propertyrights (copyrights), there is unlikely to be much harm done on digital music revenues. http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/documents/MPP/LSE-MPP-Policy-Brief-9-Copyright-and-Creation.pdf The creative industries are innovating to adapt to a changing digital culture and evidence does not support claims about overall patterns of revenue reduction due to individual copyright infringement. http://www.ew.com/article/2013/03/31/hbo-thrones-piracy And it certainly didn’t negatively impact the DVD sales. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c12454.pdf In spite of this, the supply of recorded music appears not to have fallen off much since Napster, and there is at least suggestive evidence that independent music labels, which operate with lower break-even thresholds, are play-ing an increased role in bringing new works to market. http://crem.univ-rennes1.fr/Documents/Docs_workshops_2013/2013-10-24_Digital_Piracy/2013-10-24_3_PeukertClaussenKretschmer.pdf Our main finding is that smaller and larger movies were differentially aected by Megaupload's shutdown: while only very large movies benefitted from the shutdown, revenue formost smaller and medium-sized movies decreased with the shutdown. https://www.vg247.com/2012/05/19/cd-projekt-pirated-games-are-not-lost-sales-drm-is-a-lot-for-legitimate-users-to-put-up-with/ “It really puzzles me how serious software companies can consider each pirated copy to be a lost sale,” said Iwinski. “Maybe it looks nice in an official report to say how threatening pirates are, but it is extremely far from the truth. https://stephenfollows.com/has-piracy-harmed-the-uk-film-industry/ I can see why the community pirated as they did – our core audience were teenage boys, who are also the keenest pirates. They were faced with a choice of either paying money (via credit card, which they may not have) to wait a week for a physical copy to arrive which could be scratched or lost; or they could instantly get a copy for free, which could also be backed-up and shared with friends. This stuff backs up and supports everything that I have been saying - 1) Piracy happens and you can't stop it. 2) Piracy can't be quantified in economic terms as you cannot "minority report" a downloaders intentions. 3) Piracy is a service problem, not an unwillingness to pay problem. Do with that as you will, there is tonnes more evidence out there, but I only have a half an hour to compile this for you. I'm not here on the side of the pirates, I genuinely want you to suffer less for it - but I don't have the answers, only a good sense for codswallop, and when I see inflammitory, clickbait posts like the OP, when I see pie in the sky numbers being hurled around with free abandon, I call it out because belief in something that isn't true does not help you in the short or the long term. I've already seen two people talking about "locking your work down". For gods sake, please, before you do anything that could actually ruin your career, please research what happened to large companies like gametrailers - http://www.thejimquisition.com/2016/02/gametrailers-was-a-victim-of-itself/ - the takeaway is what audiences do when they have to deal with a "locked down" media player. They go somewhere else. This is hardly evidence, but it's an interesting read nontheless http://www.cato.org/blog/how-copyright-industries-con-congress
  15. OK, Here: BTW, before I start, I'm a new user and posting a list of links probably isn't going to go well for me. So I'll do it in the next post, so you at least will know why I've gone silent Incidently, while I'm at it, why don't you post your evidence to support the claimed 10% you wrote about in that blog post. To save you an hour or two googling, the best figure you will find is the widely derided 6-7%, rightly ignored because it was based on "industry predictive models", i.e. someone thought that sounded about right. You'll also find a student paper which talks about the shutdown of megaupload and the 18 week increase globally in sales. If you use this figure, please look at the graph showing the period not affected by normal increase in sales and rentals as a result of the christmas period - it shows a change of between +4% and -4%, i.e. a statistically insignificant amount. Of course if you also include the weeks affected by christmas increase in sales, then we get to 6%-10%, and if you do want to use that figure, and I'm sure you do, then please apply the differential results to your own specific scenario, the one that shows only the biggest movies benefited from megauploads shutdown in increased sales, while medium and small productions suffered a loss of sales in the same period. In case my link doesn't come up for this, crucially important study, google "Piracy and Movie Revinues: Evidence from Megaupload A tale of the long tail by Peukert, Claussen and Kretschmer of LMU Munich, Copenhagen Business School and Institute of Economic Research, Munich respectively"
  16. Well, now, that's just not true. Never borrowed a dvd from a friend, do you think VHS to VHS recording didn't happen, do you think everyone who worked in a cinema was honest and absolutely never recorded the movie for private distribution. Kids didn't sneak into movies, please, piracy is an old problem that updated due to the technology avaliable. "It absolutely is a huge deal. It's absolutely real. And each passing year piracy is taking a significantly greater percentage of fair earnings away." Ok, let's pretend this is true. You're obviously not going to pay attention to actual evidence, prefering to rely on your own imagination and conjecture. What are you going to do? All capping on the internet doesn't work. You admit yourself that you can't stop the problem. So evolve or die. But I promise you, if you evolve the way of being a pain for your paying customers, they will go to one of the many other forms of entertainment they could do with their spare time where they don't have to deal with navigating your budget excuse for a restricted web video player (which doesn't prevent piracy, doesn't prevent someone downloading your movie for free and getting a vastly improved experience over your paying customers). So why not give your paying customers added value, the sort that piracy cannot deliver. Give them a smooth web experience, to be able to simply browse a list of movies, easily organised, relevant suggestions etc so they don't have to deal with malicious websites. Give them cheap playback - it's all very well producing a budget movie, but the price of admission isn't budget. I refer again to the "cheapest imaginable" price in the OP's article of $3. Know what it costs to go to the cinema in Namibia? Less than a penny. If you're not prepared to drop your price in that market, then they will pirate it, live with that, don't let it affect your mental health. Other ways to add value - how about giving access to the soundtrack in spotify, what about connecting with your audience via podcasts and videos documenting the production - get the audience invested early, connect in a likable, human way, get them excited early and they will be throwing money at the screens to support you before your movie is out. The amount of effort you put into getting great results from your gear for very little money - put equal effort in getting great results from very cheap marketing. When was the last time you were a guest on a popular youtube channel to talk about your film? If the answer is never, then why not, that's a colossal audience of people who sit at their computers watching videos for entertainment. Which is what you're selling. Or sit there, all caps us all about how unfair those nasty pirates are, how movies are dying and ignore the huge number of commercial sucesses being made every day across the globe on shoestring budgets. More movies are being made every week in Nigeria and India this year than were made globally each year through the "golden age" of cinema.
  17. Re: Streaming on your own website - if it can be displayed on a screen, it can be ripped, by using a software that masquerades as a screen, then records what it is "displaying". You will still have your movie pirated. Sorry. It may be a nightmare, but just keep on top of the distribution, shut it down, dedicate a quarter of an hour as regularly as you can to searching and composing your boiler plate "remove this content from your service please" email and you will limit it as much as you ever can. Don't risk your sanity over it, you've got bigger problems, including: Piracy is an easy scapegoat as to why your movie wasn't profitable. No-one has yet been able to prove a shred of economic damage as a result of piracy, and these consultation firms have been investigating the issue for decades. There IS solid data which supports the theory that people who view your content for free today pay more for the content you produce tomorrow. There is also solid evidence that the vast majority - over 99% of "download incidences" are non conversions i.e. this download is not a lost sale. They are other pirate bay type operations who want it on their service, they are the bots which trawl the internet logging god knows what, they are people who cannot afford your movie anyway and they are people who download it and never open the file. I think people who are blaming piracy for their lack of profitability are, on the whole, looking to blame anything that was "done to them" to explain their lack of profitability, it's a lot more seductive than having to change how one approaches the commercial side of the business. People seem to have this over-romanticised idea of "the movie business" that never existed. It has always been cold and difficult for new talent, low budget productions and independants. People have always taken advantage of your hard work, taken it for free and put their name on it. Nothing has changed, except that it's gotten easier and cheaper to make content, distribute it and earn from it. Sure, it's not all roses, but it's a hell of a lot easier than it was 30 years ago. So are they all paranoid conspiracy theories, no, there is always that guy, sat at his computer smug that he watched a movie for free, they exist. But honestly, was he ever going to pay for your film? There are always those in different economic circumstances who cannot afford the lowest price you could distribute your film to them for. Will half the world ever start paying the "low" $3, when they earn $2 a day, and need to pay rent, feed themselves, keep themselves healthy and bring up their kids first - will they ever pay you? But some people who download your movie do find themselves in better economic circumstances. And the evidence shows that they do then start paying for their entertainment that they used to get for free. So the theories are correct, but the economic damage is pie in the sky - numbers they pulled out of their backsides, they don't know that if piracy didn't exist, they would have taken an extra $250k. They just ran some stupid algorithm that they think sounds reasonable - 10% of all downloads would have paid me because, despite non of the evidence pointing to that, I believe it is so. And quite frankly, the people who have made themselves mentally ill, and driven themselves to the point of suicide have much bigger problems than bankrupsy - which people, especially self employed people in the lowest end of their industry go through every day and continue to lead rich and fulfilling lives. They deserve our sympathy, our help and support and all the good will of the community. I travelled to Japan to meet with a guy I only knew through the internet because when youtube deleted his account after three bogus copyright strikes, he said some really worrying things. He lost his livelyhood overnight, because someone content claimed Kevin McClouds music, and Google don't care. Guess what, he was really really sick - this was just the trigger. He got the help he needed and is doing OK now, people don't commit suicide, attempt it or even contemplate it unless they are seriously ill anyway and needed the help regardless, or are making a cry for help and attention. And they absolutely deserve our help, our attention and our good will. False platitudes don't help - playing along with their narrative that "the pirates did it to me" is just as damaging as playing along with a person with dementia's false beliefs, or agreeing that you can see something that a person with schizophrenia thinks is real. It may be the easy way to "help" them in the short term, but long term, their condition gets worse below the platitude. And finally, if you punish your paying customers by dracconian measures to "lock it down", your paying customers get fed up with seeing the people who download it for free get a better product than they do. Reread every comment in this thread with this in mind: Piracy is a service issue. Look at Cinegain "People seem to prefer the convienience of pai services" - service issue, Silvertones "I subscribe to XBox music because" - service issue, sanveer - "people want quality" - service issue, the whole pornography debate, what drives the porn industry - free easily accessible porn. I don't have the answers, but I don't want to see only the profitable movies be made. That's why I support content creators I admire through patreon, kickstarter et al. Not practical for indie movies, but it's evidence that other forms of entertianment have adapted and survived. Of the industries I am interested in, Boardgames - the biggest game in the world right now was a print and play (read as download for free) game. People pay to get nice cards. Computer games - the biggest games in the world right now are free to play. Youtube content - advert supported content, free to the user. What do you notice - the industries have pushed their content to the user and made it as accessible as possible. Take a look at the recent sim city vs a direct rival Cities Skylines. Simcity had dracconian anti piracy measures. Cities Skylines did not. Simcity was a disaster, directly as a result of it's DRM and a commercial flop for EA. Cities Skylines is one of the industries top sellers right now, continuing to take more money on a recent expansion. They are almost exactly the same game. As I said, I don't have the answers, but I sure know that "locking it down" is guarenteed to cost you income.
  18. Also avaliability of speed boosters and adapters, flange distance etc.
  19. Sorry, I'm about 4 times the diagnosis criteria on the autism spectrum, one of the things I tend to miss is when people are using words with a different meaning than I would - and the 101 wasn't just for you, but all! Again, don't take offense, just the way my brain works!
  20. Er... no. CA is caused by a lenses inability to bring the differing wavelengths to the same point. The more light has to bend, the greater the difference in the angle of red to blue light. If this angle is large enough that the blue is hitting a part of the sensor that will map to a different part of the final image from the red - tctu: it's hitting different pixels - then you will see the blue light as a "fringe". The only way a particular sensor could "amplify" this effect, is to be further back from the lens - the distance from the lens gives the rays of light greater space to diverge, which gives them greater distance between the rays and thus, amplified CA. Fortunately we know that sony mounts it's sensors very precisely, because people are able to achieve correct focus with sony gear, another thing affected by the sensor distance. The other factor is the density of the "pixels", closer pixels will reveal CA that other sensors do not, but that's not amplifying the CA, it's resolving detail other sensors do not, and that detail is the CA due to the lens. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if more than 75% of "sony problems" were down to people using the £10 adapters for their non native glass. That's not denying the results people like Klaus from photozone.de get with sony, but, I'm with Rich here, that it is more to do with the lens designs people are using - it's no coincidence that the problems are by and large reported with rangefinder lenses and hardly ever with SLR lenses.
  21. Sam is correct, I remember from the NEX7 days there was a strange drop in quality in the corners with many non-native lenses, and there were many theories as to what causes it, but, as a proud owner of both an NEX7 with plenty of vintage glass, and an 85 L that I use with my 40D, I don't believe this is any sensor issue, this is that lenses distinctive axial CA, in my opinion. It's not "severe" in this case, and in any event, it's so easy to correct (and most times it is done automatically in stills) it's not even a problem if it does bother you.
  22. Correct me if i'm wrong, but that's a lens issue, not a camera issue. The 85 1.2 is notorious for axial CA.
  23. Pewdipie doesn't make his money from ad revinue, nor do many, if any successful youtubers - I define success as full time and paying the bills for someone not living with their parents. We make our money from promotional deals and brand associations. (And Jim Sterling from Patreon)I personally have stopped monitising my content because the money I earn from running ads is an absolute pitance in comparison. My non paid content is there specifically for audience retention, which gives me guarenteed eyes on my paid content, which directly relates to how much I can ask for.
  24. That's plagarism, the key here being "claim it as my own", and is an entirely different section of law to fair use of copyright. Now if you had your characters in your movie watching the TV and the thing on the TV was a second or so of a non-descript part of his feature, and you credited his work, the thing you were making was an educational program for children, and the clip of his wasn't from a film aimed at the same demographic with the same educational aim, then you would be well within the bounds of fair use, you wouldn't need permission and I doubt Jonesy would be annoyed in the slightest. Even if he was, well, there's no harm done, in the eyes of the law, if your legal action pisses someone off - people generally are in control enough of the way they think to make a conscious choice to be pissed off. And seriously, what gives talking about actresses like that - if she was being a "prima donna", and nice how you relapsed to the lazy stereotype, it was probably because she was being treated poorly. You know with not being a 1 dimensional entity who just drifts through life being a pain to all she comes in contact with and being a 3 dimensional person, with thoughts just as complex and valid as yours, feelings and everthing.
  25. The information you need to give to get a sensible answer is the following: What is the thing you want to quote - is it a non-descript paragraph from a lengthy tome or is it the first verse from a short poem - the amount of the work you want to use and it's promenance is very important. Even a single line from a long book can land you in trouble, especially if that line were something like: "The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed" - one of the most iconic lines in Stephen King's "The Gunslinger" series would be absolutely off limits, whereas "The man in black travels with your soul in his pocket" from the same book would almost certainly be fine. As for the amount, the publisher almost certainly gives it's own authors guidance on the amount of work they can use in their books, they would be fighting a losing battle if you get a hold of that information and stick to it yourself. Is the thing you want to quote an unadorned fact - if yes, then go ahead, it's fine - "Humans live on the Planet Earth" for example, however "Humanity existed on the surface of the planet earth like termintes in their mound" is adorned with descriptive language and this is copyrightable - I made that up fyi, and yes, you have my permission to use it however you wish The purpose and character of use, is this a for profit venture, is it educational or entertainment - if it's both then for this purpose, it counts as entertainment unless it's aimed at children, when entertainment is beneficial to the education. The other thing to consider is how your work relates to the work you want to quote - if your work makes any part of that obselete, i.e. something of value given in that work is replaced in yours, you would not be able to do this - e.g. if I were to make a documentary on whales and I quoted a book by Richard Attenborough about sea life, if even a paragraph of that book contained information about whales, then my work would make that paragraph obselete, and I would be in trouble. If you are very confident that you are on the "fair use" side of all these terms, and very far on the fair use side, then you should be fine - at least in the US
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