Clark Nikolai

I'm surprised that I'm just finding out now that he had a career after All in the Family. I know I've never really followed Hollywood that much but how did I never find out he was directing? Anyway, yeah, that Trump guy. Oh wait, should I be careful what I write here? Is this social media and I might need to show it at the border someday? Nah! He'll be gone soon likely, things won't be better with Vance but at least they won't be so unpredictable. I'm still not setting foot in that country until they make some changes. Am I too hopeful or is this really just "the good times" before it really gets bad?

I have one and it really is a good camera when it comes to the image quality. I love the image it makes. It's brought my own filmmaking to another level. It's not a run and gun camera though. More of like using a 16mm film camera. Nothing automatic. Manual everything. The dream of an all-in-one isn't quite true with it though. You need to rig it out with an EVF. (Although I don't have and have never used the shark fin shaped viewer with the mirror so maybe that's okay.) I used to see them come up on eBay a few times a year but now they rarely do. And people are asking US$11000 with accessories. (I also notice that nobody is bidding on them at that price and the listing ends without any bids, then gets relisted.) I occasionally see them listed for about US$5000 but they don't last long at that price. They're a good camera, worth $5000 but not worth $10000. I think that it's no longer such a unique camera image-wise and you can get a close enough image with a used Alexa or Blackmagic Production camera 4K and be making your movies. (Still if one came up and you could afford it, get it.) If you're handy you could make your own using the same sensor. Check out this project: https://github.com/lafauxbolex https://www.youtube.com/@LaFauxBolexDigitalCinemaCamera/videos

Schhwwweeeaaatt!! Just checked out the specs. Nice. If I was looking for a camera I'd totally check it out. https://media.onecall.com/Image_Products/Canon/XHA1_info6.pdf It doesn't have HDMI but it does have HD-SDI through a BNC terminal, meaning it could connect to an external recorder to record in ProRes if you can't find any miniDV tapes anymore.

Yikes! You know, I've been too busy to get around to upgrading my iPhone to iOS 26 and now maybe I won't (until they sort this out.)

It once was that the pros had 16mm an 35mm film and the "amateurs" had Super 8 and videotape. Now that's all changed. Yesterday I was capturing some old videotapes from a friend's project that we did in 2011 on a Canon HV20. It looked amazing. I was expecting it to look worse than cameras of today but it doesn't. Just shows that even a camera from then, with a CMOS chip from that era, MPEG 2 encoding, 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, 1440 x 1080 frame size recorded of the wide screen image, and 8 bit colour, it still can look amazing. It just shows that cameras have been very good for a long time now. The differences are mostly ergonomics and physical size. When deciding on a camera, you have to consider what you want to spend months living with.

Wow! This is surprising to me. Maybe the market is saturated for that type of camera.

I really like this shape in the bokeh. It reminds me of 1950s graphic designs.

I was looking at the Chinese characters and wondering what rice would have to do with lenses. I looked it up and 小米 is pronounced xiao mi. Hah!

This is interesting. Now, what I want to see is software that converts CinemaDNG in to ProResRaw.

It's more work but can be done. This guy cycled from China back to England and shot video along the way. Quite an adventure. https://www.instagram.com/joshreids/ Now, he would be someone to ask for advice from.

Both types of credits on imdb won't be a problem. In fact it could show that you have experience on set so you possibly could have a greater understanding of a film project than just your one area. It won't matter if there were some big names in the film.

I got in touch with the person who's doing this project and we've been emailing back and forth about it. There's now a YouTube channel and a sample video (with more to come).

I had a better look and they're not going directly from the sensor, they're going from an already made machine vision camera. https://machinevisionstore.com/Catalog/Details/992 https://machinevisionstore.com/content/downloads/basler/AviatorDatasheet.pdf These are used on assembly lines and such. It connects with Camera Link (which is an industrial standard for these kinds of cameras.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_Link Maybe this thing isn't "faux" after all.

I stumbled on this GitHub project. Not sure what to think about it (and suspect it might not be real). They're using the same sensor as the Digital Bolex and 3D printing a similar shaped body. No mention of an A to D board, just the chip going in to a Raspberry Pi. I remember the original Digital Bolex team took a few years to get the sensor's quadrants aligned and to get the colour science sorted out and these guys' sample images look great after only a short time. Maybe all this stuff is just faster to figure out nowadays. https://github.com/lafauxbolex What do others think? If real this would be great! They're changing some things from the original: A M4/3 mount, a big monitor and compressed DNG files.

Recently I showed something I did some years ago, shot on HDV with a Canon HV20. Some people were impressed that way back then I had such good equipment then shocked when I told them it was on a consumer HDV camera. (I did have a wide angle attachment and shot it in a log type mode then colour corrected it.) Cameras have been more than good enough for a long time.