CineAlta Magazine Issue 5

behind the scenes

issue 5

Prismatic World Tour

Katy Perry in 4K All access with Director Russell Thomas of Done + Dusted, Cinematographer Brett Turnbull, Lemac, NEP and United

The F55 makes The Wonder List

by Philip Bloom Cry Havoc Productions: How the F5 gets us there

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Letter from the Editors Welcome to our fifth issue of CineAlta™ Magazine. Even after reading dozens of end‑user stories and hearing hundreds more, we continue to be amazed by the ingenious ways that DPs, directors and producers put our cameras to work.

In this issue, you’ll learn about a Katy Perry live concert captured by F55s with cinematic shallow depth of field, global shutter, and on-board 4K recording with simultaneous HD signal output. Yet this same production used the camera shading tools familiar to any network sports broadcast crew: Sony camera control units (CCUs), master setup units (MSUs), remote control panels (RCPs) and the Sony 700 pin protocol.

This speaks volumes about the flexibility and adaptability of the F5 and F55. Instead of introducing special-purpose cameras that address one niche or another, we’ve created a versatile platform that serves owners and operators in an enormous range of production scenarios, from documentary and lifestyle shooting to drones, underwater and handheld Steadicam in addition to full-budget episodic TV, OTT programming and theatrical features.

the F55 and currently airing on CNN. Philip takes the camera into challenging and remote locations from the Galapagos Islands to the Everglades to the Piazza San Marco. Needless to say, he comes back with amazing images.

This issue also features the inspiring journey of Cry Havoc Productions and Powers, an original series that streams exclusively on PlayStation® consoles.

Finally, be sure to visit the new sony.com/35mm Here you’ll find refreshed information on the camera line, workflow charts and links to dozens of end-user stories. You can access the full catalog of firmware updates. And there are tons of great images, many of them supplied by the DPs we’ve featured in CineAlta Magazine.

CineAlta Magazine is all about you. Your adventures, your productions and your experiences make this publication possible. Our thanks go out to all of you who have contributed.

Please keep the stories coming to production@am.sony.com Thanks.

Check out our feature story on Philip Bloom’s The Wonder List, a series shot primarily with

Alec Shapiro and Peter Crithary

Alec Shapiro

Peter Crithary

President Professional Solutions Americas Sony Electronics Inc.

Marketing Manager (Twitter: @CineAltaNews) Professional Solutions Americas Sony Electronics Inc.

What’s new

By Peter Crithary Version 6.0: Sony has been keeping the faith with everyone who invested in the F5 and F55. And now we’re taking the next step, with the release of Version 5.1 and the up-coming Version 6.0 firmware.

F55 Version 5.1, available now enables the F55 equipped with the CBK-55PD codec board (for Apple ProRes 422 and Avid DNxHD® recording) to work with the CA-4000 camera adaptor and BPU-4000 baseband processor unit.

(This particular combination had not been possible with previous firmware.)

AXS-A256S24 V2.0, improves playback reliability specifically for this card.

F5/F55 Version 6.0, expected in June 2015 adds Apple ProRes 4444 recording, when the camera is equipped with the optional CBK-55PD codec board. Here's the superior color precision of 444 RGB as compared to 422 Y/Cb/Cr and the enhanced grayscale of 12-bit versus 10-bit capture. Resolution is 1920 x 1080, while available frame rates include 23.98p, 24.0p, 25.0p and 29.97p.

We received many requests to implement User 3D-LUTs for S-Log2/S-Gamut, as a result this is now being implemented. Other updates to version 6 will be announced, and we will not be stopping there.

HDR Grading. When you consider that today’s better cameras can capture more than 12 stops, while consumer displays deliver closer to 7 stops, you can appreciate the potential for brighter, more dynamic presentation. In fact, the industry is rapidly moving toward High Dynamic Range (HDR) content distribution and display. Of course, our CineAlta cameras are already there. That’s why we built HDR into our new BVM-X300 monitor. And that’s why we built our cameras with an ultra-wide color palette, called S-Gamut, and with 4K image sensors and 14+ stops of dynamic range. The bottom line: when you use these cameras and capture 16 bit Linear RAW, your productions are future proofed. You can distribute Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) versions now, then release HDR versions whenever the market is ready. For more information about HDR, click here for our special report.

XAVC™: Twice as nice: Thanks to decades of accomplishment, Sony engineers have a unique grasp of the realities of both cameras and codec design. As a result, the XAVC codec and Sony’s 16-bit RAW format return the best possible picture quality for the file size. The XAVC codec implements the highest level (5.2) of the H.264 standard, consuming only 90 Mbps in HD, and a mere 240 Mbps in 4K at 24p. It's more than twice as efficient as Apple ProRes 4K 422, meaning that your costs for storage and file transfers are cut in half. And your recording times on a given card are doubled. It’s an incredible advantage for anyone who needs high shooting ratios (reality), long loads (docs, nature), or the fastest possible transfer times (everyone).

And Sony's codec expertise makes it possible. The XAVC chipset in the F5 and F55 actually implements two-pass encoding in real time, analyzing frame by frame with variable bit rate encoding, as opposed to only analyzing the first frame as competitor AVC implementations are doing. Thus XAVC delivers lower data rates and smaller file sizes — while maintaining very high picture quality.

Sony 16 bit RAW: Less data than uncompressed HD: If you demand the most accurate rendition of what the sensor sees, Sony offers RAW recording. Sony RAW is visually lossless and elegantly compressed to only 960 Mbps at 24p. While competing systems are typically limited to 12-bit grayscale, Sony RAW is 16-bit linear.

By design, this captures more tonal gradations than the human eye can see. It’s a better starting point for color grading and it’s a far better fit with High Dynamic Range grading and the 16-bit linear pipeline of the ACES workflow.

Yet even at 16 bits, Sony 4K RAW consumes less storage than uncompressed HD — and far less than the closest competitor’s 12-bit RAW. You get the highest possible picture quality at a fraction of typical RAW file sizes. This translates to very cost-efficient media management, with reduced file transfer times. RAW workflow becomes far faster and more affordable.

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Prismatic World Tour Katy Perry in 4K All Access with Director Russell Thomas, Cinematographer Brett Turnbull, Lemac, NEP and United

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The Wonder List Philip Bloom shoots CNN's first in-house original documentary series

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The world of Cry Havoc Productions Shooting documentaries for tv networks

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Content The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel A conversation with Ben Smithard, BSC

1 Prismatic World Tour Katy Perry in 4K 33 The Wonder List by Philip Bloom 53 H ow we got here: The World of Cry Havoc Productions

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69 T he Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

99

A conversation with Ben Smithard, BSC

85 Ci-eeing through the Cloud 99 C reating a POWER-ful Graphic Look

for Sony Playstation Network Series

115 P owers: Going the speed of sound with Agamemnon Andrianos

123 Ci-eeing through the Cloud

Powers

Sony Cloud Production Services Ci allow productions to capture, color, and review — from anywhere in the world

Creating a POWER-ful Graphic Look for Sony PlaystationÂŽ Network Series

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A Bet's A Bet. DP Jendra Jarnagin Shooting a Raunchy Comedy in 15 days

145 T WC Sports supports its regional

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networks with high-quality imagery

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The speed of sound

A Bet's A Bet. DP Jendra Jarnagin

TWC Sports

An interview with Agamemnon Andrianos on the

Shooting a Raunchy Comedy in 15 days

How TWC Sports supports its regional networks with high-quality imagery

sound of Powers

Prismatic World Tour

Katy Perry in 4K All Access with Director Russell Thomas, Cinematographer Brett Turnbull, Lemac, NEP and United Interviews by Peter Crithary Written by David Heuring

4K Multi-camera Concert Shoot On December 12 in Sydney, Australia, a crack international crew of seasoned veterans rolled camera on an extraordinary live shoot. All eyes — as well as fifteen Sony 4K cameras — were trained on Katy Perry as she launched another knockout performance on her Prismatic World Tour. Behind the scenes, Director Russell Thomas was overseeing one of the first ever F55 4K multi-camera concert films to fully incorporate an OB infrastructure.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

U.K. production company Done + Dusted, Australian equipment suppliers Lemac Film and Digital, outside broadcast specialists NEP Australia (formerly Global Television), and European broadcast facilities company, United, collaborated on the complex shoot. Over two nights, twelve Sony F55 cameras were recording 4K internally and synced with time code from an OB truck. Four cameras, including a couple of the new PXW-FS7 models unconnected to the NEP truck, were handheld.

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Director of Photography Brett Turnbull piloted the production, designing the camera package, set-up files and the look management, working with the Katy Perry tour lighting crew to adapt the stage lighting. With Turnbull was Cinematographer Cameron Barnett, who was onboard from the early stages of the project, shooting extensive tests and pulling together and supervising the camera team as well as operating camera on both nights. Crucial to the success was the seamless interaction of a

Crew shot on wrap: Lemac team, NEP team, United team, DOP’s, focus pullers & assistants

wide range of technologies, often for the first time, under the tremendous pressure of the live stage environment.

inside the groundbreaking production, a snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in live performance capture and big-time concert, as narrated by key members of the team.

HD has been the common OB format, with facilitators like NEP providing end-to-end solutions with 2/3inch cameras feeding HD to a truck for HD linecuts and HD (or SD) broadcast. This shoot was the shakedown cruise for 4K acquisition grafted onto an HD/OB production model. What follows is a glimpse 4

Prismatic World Tour in 4K

Director Russell Thomas www.doneanddusted.com

Russell Thomas is a Grammy-nominated director known for his work with top-shelf musical talent. His trademark creativity can be seen in concert coverage, music videos and live performances by U2, Jay Z, Muse, Scissor Sisters, Robbie Williams, Will Smith, Pink, Coldplay, Kylie Minogue, George Michael, and Girls Aloud, to name only a few. He started out as an editor, and soon became an in-house director at MTV. 5

These days his imagination and experience are mostly put to use in capturing and conveying live performance events, often in conjunction with the production company Done + Dusted. Here he reveals the thought process behind the Katy Perry Prismatic World Tour shoot.

Thomas: For me, an assignment like this is essentially about telling the story of Katy onstage. That’s the simple side of it. That means beautiful shots of Katy. It means showing her relationship with her

audience, and capturing the atmosphere in the arena, and trying to create a sense of scale.

It means explaining in pictures to the viewers at home, in a relatively simple way, how the show works. Katy’s stage show is very busy, and it’s important to do all that in a way that is not intrusive, allowing Katy to do what she does best. Along the way you can’t help but add a little bit of your own style.

I knew we were going to film it over two nights, and I didn’t want to cover it in the same way both nights. By covering it slightly differently each night,

I could draw on both nights in choosing shots and different angles. When you watch it, it probably looks like I had more cameras than I did, because it was done over two nights with 15 cameras.

I wanted to film it partially from an audience’s perspective, so I actually put cameras inside the audience. When Katy sings to somebody in the audience, I knew roughly what part of the audience she’d be singing to, because I had seen the show

quite a few times. I’d put a camera in the audience at that point, so it would feel almost as if she’s singing to somebody right next to the camera.

That’s always a bit of a gamble because on any given night, she can completely change her mind about where she’s going to sing.

”I wanted to film

it partially from an audience’s perspective, so I actually put cameras inside the audience

”

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

“I was

shooting Katy close up, you could see the sparkle in her eyes , and it was mesmerizing.

�

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Katy’s a perfectionist, and she wants everything as beautiful as possible. And you can’t really do much better than 4K. I had co-directed Miley Cyrus’s Bangerz tour, and that was also in 4K. I think the format really depends on the artist. 4K is really an amazing format, and when the show is absolutely fantastic, which Katy’s is, I think it only enhances everything, because you’re presented with that much more information.

You get a chance to see everything.

I wanted to shoot wide open on cameras so I could get the shortest depth of field as possible, and I was a little nervous about the cameras and their focus pullers not being able to keep the focus.

Katy moves around stage quite a lot. But on both sides, they were amazing — technically as well as in terms of the skill of the operators. Sometimes the depth of field was really short and the guys did a very skilled job in bringing it in.

Costume detail is amazing. When I was shooting Katy close up, you could see the sparkle in her eyes, and it was mesmerizing. That intimate contact between you and the artist becomes so much stronger. It is like being much closer, but it also feels like they are really there next to you. It’s like having the best seats at the concert.

“I was a little nervous about the

cameras and their focus pullers not being able to keep the focus. Katy moves around stage quite a lot. But on both sides, they were amazing

“

But I think 4K also means that you have to put a lot more work into everything. For example, cameramen and such become much more conspicuous, so you need to spend a lot of time working out your camera angles so you’re not shooting cameramen, even on the side of the shot.

During the actual concert, I’m in a truck outside, watching the big bank of screens. I see the output of the F55s in HD while we’re recording in 4K on the cameras. So the first time I actually saw this project as a 4K thing is in the grade, because the offline is obviously a compressed format. But it was only when I got to the grade that I actually could see how stunning it was. And it was literally stunning — it really blew me away. It’s the sharpness of the detail.

It’s the colors. Everything comes into play.

Cameron Barnett operates F55 with Fuji 75-400mm Premier zoom while focus puller Matt Floyd keeps it sharp using Preston FIZ and 17" Sony OLED

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

We shot in a “best-light” way in order to maximize flexibility in the grade, so it looked quite washed out when we were filming it. But even then, you can tell there are going to be some special moments. I’m quite excited to see the finished grade, which is being done in London. Most of what I shoot and have shot in the past has been HD, so moving to 4K is a revelation for me.

I’m just finishing the grade, and there’s still quite a lot to do. There are a few little online-type things to do, and we haven’t decided on the opening of the show — whether we will film something separately or go with something simple. I’m waiting for Katy’s management to free up so we can talk about it.

Multi-camera 4K is still in its infancy.

4K has been around a while, but to actually shoot it as a multi-camera format takes quite a bit of technical prowess to make it work. I sought advice on which camera would be the best from technical people. I’ve filmed on RED cameras and on ARRI Alexas before. I talked to a lot of people, and I kept coming back to the F55, and that’s what I chose.

It’s probably the easiest format, the format that gives the greatest amount of flexibility. I can’t really think of anything I’d change, except that two hours of handholding without putting the camera down was pretty tough on the operators.

On the whole, I think that everything we wanted to achieve, we did. I would definitely use the F55 again.

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“I talked to a lot of

people, and I kept coming back to the F55, and that’s what I chose

“

Greg Harrington (fg) and Cameron Barnett (bg) operating F55 production set-ups: Greg with Optimo 17-80mm and Cameron with Fujinon Premier 75-400mm & RAW

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

Cinematographer Brett Turnbull www.brett-turnbull.com

Brett Turnbull’s early background as a musician and experimental filmmaker has served him well. His formative years were spent in London’s post-punk scene, where he began shooting and projecting hand-made 16mm film backdrops for live music. The results got him noticed by the prestigious National Film School in England, and a more conventional film training followed. Since then he’s become a prolific and versatile cinematographer with credits ranging from award-winning music videos, commercials and documentaries, to feature films and 3D. Recently, his specialty has been multiple-camera shoots, often with a live performance aspect. His understanding of and ability to blend a wide variety of formats has helped him on projects like the James Cameronproduced 3D movie Cirque Du Soleil: Worlds Away and performance documentaries like Coldplay: Ghost Stories, Roger Waters The Wall, Björk: Biophilia Live, Monty Python Live (Mostly), and dozens more. In the last year or so he has used the Sony F55 camera on a number of multi-camera shoots including OneDirection, Lenny Kravitz, Kylie Minogue, Michael Buble and Santana, as well as on commercial shoots for Burberry, Mobil, McDonalds, Toyota and the BBC classical film Ten Pieces.

Turnbull: The first major concert I shot on the Sony F55 was The Rolling Stones Sweet Summer Sun in Hyde Park, London. The band were celebrating 50 years together and doing a show at the site of their famous 1969 free concert, which was also filmed and is now a classic rock & roll documentary.

“I think the F55 has been a real

game changer for multi-camera shooting because it’s such a modular and flexible system

“

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At that point the Sony F55 had just come out. I’d been shooting a lot on Alexa, and we snapped up the Sony cameras straight away because they seemed to offer a lot of flexibility, but also at a lower cost. Getting as many cameras as possible is a big factor when filming a live show! Peter Gabriel’s Back to Front: Live in London followed soon after. That was my first experience of shooting 4K on the F55 live system.

I think the F55 has been a real game changer for multicamera shooting because it’s such a modular and flexible system. The interface with the world of outside broadcast is much more seamless. I don’t think ARRI and RED have ever had it high on their agenda to include that kind of functionality with their cameras.

When Arri released their “fiber remote” system, we filmed a Coldplay concert in 2012 with their demo cameras as the core of our equipment package, but no rental companies bought into the idea after

“With the Sony

camera, interfacing with outside broadcast trucks is already integral to the design

“

that. It was killing me that I would keep asking for this system, but nobody could rent it to us. Same goes for RED, they’ve recently started offering a 4K broadcast module, but it doesn’t seem to exist in the real-world rental market.

With the Sony camera, interfacing with outside broadcast trucks is already integral to the design.

You have the option to take remote control of the paint functions, which I’ve done a number of times for live broadcasts, or when there’s a very fast turnaround for editing. Or if you prefer, you can treat the F55 like a film camera and record in S-Log or RAW and grade the pictures later in post. It’s great to have the freedom to make these choices, even on the shoot day. It’s all built into the camera. Just by changing a few menu settings, you can take a totally different approach to filming. Also, the physical

construction is modular, so it’s very simple to add on the 4K RAW recorder or CA4000 live adaptor without turning the camera into a Frankenstein monster.

Back in early 2011, I started working on a film adaptation of Roger Waters’ show The Wall.

Originally, we tested 35mm film neg against RED and Alexa, and decided to go digital. At that time shooting in ARRIRAW was just not a practical option.

If you’re looking at filming a 2hr show on 15 cameras a day for six days, the quantities of data are just vast.

There’s no way anyone could cope. We ended up shooting the movie on RED EPIC. The footage was great, but adapting these cameras for live stadium shows and dealing with the 4K and 5K RAW data was a massive undertaking. This was before the Arri XT camera came out, or the Sony F55.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

On recent projects using the F55 — for example on Katy Perry — we’ve taken advantage of being able to shoot 4K XAVC™ on most of the cameras, while selecting key cameras to shoot 4K RAW, however most concert films still tend to be filmed in HD, as

Cameron Barnett (left) and Brett Turnbull (right) backstage

Bolke Lautier from United

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they’re aimed mainly at the Blu-ray™/DVD market, with TV and limited cinema release tacked on. In that case we’ll either record HD XAVC in camera, or else take the live video feed into the OB truck & record externally onto hard drives in Apple ProRes 422 HQ. I’ve shot side-by-side tests where we weren’t able to see obvious advantages in picture quality either way. But what’s immediately clear is the massive amount of difference in terms of storage. XAVC is a very efficient codec — it does compress the information greatly, but without a very obvious loss in picture quality.

Using an F55 camera package on Katy Perry made it simple to achieve a variety of configurations without having to rent a bunch of different camera types.

That’s a big advantage, as multi-camera plots evolve & change constantly, even on the shoot days. As a DOP it’s great to have the flexibility to respond to the director’s creative wishes without it becoming a logistical nightmare. We use a ton of gear on these shows and it makes sense to standardize the cameras as far as possible. That way the AC’s can borrow from other kits in case of tech issues, and we can also adapt and re-purpose the cameras easily.

Sony has had the vision to respond to an increasing demand for large-sensor cameras that can crossover into areas of filming which have traditionally been the preserve of television and outside broadcast technology. Other manufacturers just don’t seem to have taken up this challenge as effectively.

I was very happy that Bolke from United could join us in Sydney as technical manager, he’s been something of a partner in crime these last few years. Bolke has a wealth of experience shooting live music, but unlike most other people working in the outside broadcast world he’s been highly proactive and experimental when it comes to adopting and integrating so-called digital cinema cameras for this type of work. In particular he’s very aware of the need to find a way to make multicam shooting on largesensor cameras more palatable for TV and DVD productions. The problem is that directors fall in love with the pictures offered by Alexa, EPIC and F55, but budgets don’t go up accordingly.

Ultimately there’s a need for technical solutions that can streamline the equipment and crew package. Meanwhile Bolke and his team will always improvise and find a way to get the job done — like the “Black Boxes” they made in-house.

For Global/NEP, I’m sure that having Bolke and some of his team to guide them through this whole process was a valuable experience.

“Using an F55 camera package

on Katy Perry made it simple to achieve a variety of configurations without having to rent a bunch of different camera types

“

I was very impressed with the local camera rental house Lemac, who were excellent. It helped enormously that I had Cameron as our “man on the ground” well before the shoot, and as the shoot days drew closer I was able to hand over more of the responsibility for running the camera side of things so I could focus more on lighting. Meanwhile Lemac were bang-on, their attention to detail was superb and they always managed to offer good practical solutions to whatever issues we came up against.

I always prepare extremely detailed equipment lists, charts and scale drawings to avoid any possible confusion on these type of shows. Especially when I’m working in other countries, where I don’t have my regular team of technicians around me, who know how I like to put stuff together, and run things on the day. But with Lemac any concerns I might have had soon disappeared, they picked up everything very fast and made a big contribution to the success of the shoot.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

On the Katy Perry shoot, we chose S-Log2 gamma because of its flexibility for grading. I’ve had really positive feedback from colorists using S-log2 on other shows. S-Log3 is an interesting new option, I did some testing but couldn’t see any immediate advantage for this particular project. It’s important that the colorist is comfortable with the rushes they’re given, and being in familiar territory can be part of that.

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I was fortunate that we could do a good amount of prep work. Katy’s show was touring for some time in Australia before the shoot, and luckily a trusted colleague of mine is based out there, Cameron Barnett. He shot a range of tests for me on F55 some weeks before the shoot, so we could sign off on a recording format, and troubleshoot technical concerns like lighting flicker and lens resolution for 4K. So by the time I arrived, we were already ahead of the game. I joined the tour in Melbourne and shot

“I had an F55 set up by the lighting desk, with the live video output fed to an OLED/waveform monitor

“

my own lighting tests on F55, which I loaded into Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. This way I could analyze the stage lighting, and have an accurate reference to work from. I was able to do a couple of pre-light sessions with Katy’s lighting director before the show moved on to Sydney. I had an F55 set up by the lighting desk, with the live video output fed to an OLED/waveform monitor. Next to that was my test footage so I could compare “before and after”.

When we were done, the LD saved the “tweaked”

version of the stage lighting onto disc as a separate show file, so we could load this into the lighting console for the nights we were due to film in Sydney.

Having the F55 camera there during prep meant that we could see exactly what we were going to get on the shoot. The live audience would see a slightly different version of the show on those nights, but the deal as always in this situation is that my changes would only be significant on camera, and not affect their enjoyment of the live show.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

“...on live shows, I usually get

incredibly limited opportunities to adjust and finesse the lighting before the show begins

“

The F55’s monitor LUTs are a lifesaver for me. As a film crew coming in to a big rock and roll tour, you’re on borrowed time. It’s not like a movie or commercial, where you’re in control of the situation. Ideally you’d create a LUT on set that accurately represents how you want to grade the footage in post. Whereas on live shows, I usually get incredibly limited opportunities to adjust and finesse the lighting before the show begins. I have to dive in and be very quick and efficient about making changes. Much of the detailed lighting and exposure adjustments end up being made on the fly during the show. So I need to see a picture I can respond to instinctively. Even if we’re shooting Log gamma, I’d rather see a “worst-case-scenario” like REC709 on the screen, so I can react quickly and ride levels to make sure the scene is being captured safely. During the show I’m in communication with whoever is controlling the iris of each camera. That would be vision engineers in an OB truck, driving 17

Cabrio lenses by means of a Sony RCP panel. Or with film lenses, it’s generally the focus pullers, using a 3-channel Preston remote lens control system. So I’m instructing them about their exposure as far as possible, but in essence we’re all looking at the same picture on our monitors and busking it, using the LUT and waveform display as a guide. I always fight to have the most talented and experienced 1st AC’s on these shows, with a good eye for exposure as well as focus. It’s really tough for them, a combination of shallow focus, dynamic camera movement and extreme lighting changes. The crew in Sydney did a fine job, I was very grateful to our local facilities and production contacts for putting together such a great team.

The Katy Perry project had a relatively healthy budget, but no budget is unlimited. Russell and I would have loved to shoot everything RAW, but that wasn’t an option. So we prioritized and

shot three to four cameras per night in RAW, mainly close-ups, for two reasons. Obviously, you want to make sure the artist looks their best, and shooting uncompressed would give the most flexibility for grading later. The other big challenge is the limitation of lenses.

Unfortunately there’s no S35mm equivalent to the big telephoto zoom lenses used on HDTV cameras with 2/3-inch chips, which have evolved over decades to meet the needs of sports and live event coverage. So for us getting close-ups of Katy was bound to be a challenge. Having the ability to push in another 10% here and there, to reframe slightly, would really help. Even though in RAW there aren’t any more pixels available, Russell was confident that shooting this way would give him more flexibility in the edit.

We knew it also from past experience on the Peter Gabriel 4K concert. We also decided to shoot a couple of the wide master shots in RAW, to help capture the extreme dynamic range of the pyrotechnics and other lighting effects in more detail.

“...we prioritized

and shot three to four cameras per night in RAW, mainly close-ups

“

One of two handheld F55s with Canon 17-120mm ‘Cine-Servo’ zoom: as close as can be to the stage.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

In terms of lenses, one of the key factors when shooting a live show is being able to get a variety of shot sizes from any given angle. Changing lenses mid-show simply isn’t practical, and camera positions are never ideal. Directors need each operator to have the maximum zoom range we can squeeze out of every position. We used Optimo’s wherever size and weight wasn’t a problem. Then Cabrio lenses where these suited the style of operating. The 19-90mm is great for handheld work, with the ENG handgrip on the side and a good zoom range. It’s pretty much equivalent to having two lightweight Optimos in one, the 15-40mm and the 28-76mm. Plus the built-in servo unit can interface directly with TV-type lens controls, which is great for jimmy jibs and remote dollies. We also used a couple of 17-120mm and 30-300mm Canon® zooms.

Ideally I prefer not to mix and match optics, but with equipment packages of this size, there’s usually some practical decisions to be made because of availability. The long lenses are the toughest. On live arena shows the only way to get a camera at eye level is to put it miles away from the stage, otherwise you’re blocking the audience’s view. Finding suitable telephoto zooms to shoot Katy’s close-ups was a challenge, with regard to focal length, aperture and optical quality. We tested a Canon/Century 150-600mm alongside the Optimo 24-290mm with extenders, also a Canon 95x TV lens with a B4 to Pl adaptor — and finally brought in two Fujinon 75‑400mm Premier zooms from Europe.

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Early on we considered using CA-4000 4K live adapters, but it didn’t really make sense for this show as we’d already decided to take a more “film-like” approach. One of Russell’s earlier camera plots included an inverted tracking Towercam system rigged to a truss, and also a top shot on a remote head. For those cameras, Bolke and I were planning to use the CA-4000 4K live adapter because we had no physical access for reloads during the show. So that was a no-brainer, as the CA-4000 would have enabled remote 4K recording and given us control of all camera & lens functions in a very tidy package. But Russell decided in the end that he preferred to shoot the concert more traditionally and mainly front-on. He just felt it was a better representation of the show. So we threw away some of our toys. It was just a practical decision. Also because we were treating this more like a film shoot and recording S-Log in-camera, we weren’t painting the cameras live, so there seemed very little advantage to be gained from using the CA-4000 backs on this occasion.

I think if we’d been shooting in a more TV style, they would have been great. To be honest we also weren’t sure that we could reliably get enough of the rack units and 4K servers to record on. We had used some CA-4000 backs successfully on the Peter Gabriel 4K shoot in 2013 — but in Australia, November of last year, it just didn’t make sense.

“We used Optimo’s

wherever size and weight wasn’t a problem. Then Cabrio lenses where these suited the style of operating

“

We also tried out the new Sony FS7 on this shoot.

The director wanted a small, lightweight camera that could be put into the crowd without assistants and security guards all around the operator. He wanted them to be shooting almost like a member of the audience using a mobile phone. We went through a lot of ideas, including the obvious contenders like GoPro® Hero 4, Lumix DMC-GH4 and the Blackmagic 4K. I flagged the various practical limitations we would face — limited lens range, reliability and also the fact that by the time these cameras were

“pimped up” enough to actually be usable for the operator, they don’t end that small after all. At that point, it turned out that Lemac Australia had a couple of FS7s and were offering them to us. So it made sense to use a better camera. The pictures would match the F55s better, it was a little bit lighter, and cheaper — especially as we used stills lenses.

[Metabones lens adaptors were used to mount Canon EF mount L-Series 16-35mm or 24-105mm zoom lenses on the FS7s.]

An indication of the potential and perspective achieved with the FS7 at ground level in the crowd, seen here only a few rows from the action.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

“Theatrical lighting usually has a load of

heavily saturated colors in the palette — Congo blue, ultraviolet and primary reds.

TV cameras fall to pieces very quickly in those conditions, whereas the F55 handles deep colors really well

“

21

I like to be out at front of house by the mixer when we’re filming. On this show Katy’s lighting director was calling follow-spots, as well as running the desk.

This was a very complex show, with hundreds of moving lights, automation, video & lasers. For the filming we added another five follow spots, a few extra lamps & trusses over the stage, and a large additional lighting rig out in the auditorium to cover the audience. Bear in mind that the LD has been touring this same show for a year now, and has it all baked in. All of a sudden, he’s got a whole bunch of new stuff to cope with. If I’m sitting outside in a truck, the danger is that I’m going to try and talk to him on comms at the worst possible moment, and make him miss a cue, or mess up his spot call. So I’d rather be standing next to the lighting desk where I can choose a better moment, or just point at a video monitor and use some basic sign language.

“No rock and roll show is

complete without flashing lights and strobes. There’s also a lot of video projection and giant LED screens these days — there certainly was on Katy Perry

“

I generally rate the F55 at 640 rather than 1250 ISO when I’m shooting Log, just to avoid noise and to make sure that I’m also not expecting too much when the sensor hits burnout level. I’ve found the camera to be relatively quiet, and very impressive in low light. Theatrical lighting usually has a load of heavily saturated colors in the palette — Congo blue, ultraviolet and primary reds. TV cameras fall to pieces very quickly in those conditions, whereas the F55 handles deep colors really well. And you just know that you’re going to see a lot of that in any live show.

The F55’s global shutter is also a massive advantage for shooting live concerts. No rock and roll show is complete without flashing lights and strobes. There’s also a lot of video projection and giant LED screens these days — there certainly was on Katy Perry. Given the artifacts that you see with rolling shutter cameras, the F55 really wins hands-down on that side of things.

For example, I hate the ugly white banding effect that you get from shooting strobes on rolling-shutter cameras, compared to the way a strobe flash exposes on film — which is more like a total white-out across the whole frame. I think that feels in keeping with the way we experience the effect in real life. The global shutter on the F55 handles strobe flashes much like film. And I find that generally I have far fewer issues with scanning artifacts on giant LED screens with the global shutter, than I would off a rolling shutter.

22

Prismatic World Tour in 4K

For the Katy Perry shoot, even though we were shooting in Australia, which is a 50Hz environment, we actually shot 29.97p as our sync frame rate, plus some cameras in slo-mo at 59.94. That’s obviously troublesome, because lighting flicker can be a huge issue when you’re shooting at a different frequency to how the lamps are running. The show lighting rig had about 700 fixtures — probably nine different types of LED or moving lights, plus a dozen follow-spots, which are also an HMI source.

Most challenging of all were the 15 RGB lasers built into the set. With Cameron’s help I made sure we did thorough testing well in advance, checking every type of fixture in the rig to be certain that nothing was flickering, even when dimmed down, because sometimes lamps look fine when they’re running at 100%, but when you dim them down to 30% they start pulsing on camera. The lasers were more complicated. There’s no way to correct that in‑camera as every cue has a different frequency. I set up an F55 camera with our specific frame rate and shutter angle so the show’s laser technician Alex Oita could re-tune all the lasers off a video monitor by his desk. We had a couple of sessions, it took him a good few hours to dial the flicker out of every single laser cue in the show by trial and error. Then he stored those values, and ran his show differently for the filming nights.

As far as timecode goes, generally we try to jamsync the cameras either with Lockit boxes or hardfeed them time code generated from the truck.

That’s all time-of-day, so all the rushes match up with the audio recording timecode and any external video decks. It’s pretty straightforward. For slo-mo it’s not always possible to jam the cameras, in that case we shoot a digislate for every new mag, with the same time-of-day code as a sync reference for the editor. It’s helpful that the Sony cameras have a BNC input, unlike Alexas, which have a special TC cable that suppliers can’t always provide. Again, the F55’s fit neatly into the broadcast world in that respect.

I usually set up the camera menus myself, and save all the settings onto SD cards. Then the DIT’s can load these master settings into each camera via the 23

“It’s helpful that the Sony

cameras have a BNC input, unlike Alexas, which have a special TC cable that suppliers can’t always provide

“

SD slot, with only a few minor variations like clip naming, lens type, or frame rate (for any cameras shooting slo-mo). Keeping the cards loaded in every camera is a great backup in case we need to restore the correct settings. For example when painting the cameras by remote, the RCP in the truck can overwrite everything accidentally.

On the way home from a film festival last year, I was sitting next to a director on the plane, and we got talking about the films we’d seen, impressions of the festival and so on. Suddenly he says to me, “It’s such a relief to be talking to a cinematographer and it’s not about pixels! I’m so sick of pixels. Who cares how many pixels there are?” And that’s so true. There’s a lot of hype right now about 4K. I’m always excited about new technical challenges and what new gear can offer creatively, but ultimately there are many

much broadcasters invest in creating 4K content and how much they adapt to its challenges. I was shooting a ton of 3D a couple of years ago, but I guess it turned out that the public didn’t really have the appetite that producers and manufacturers were hoping for. We’ll find out in time. Certainly there’s an argument for shooting 4K and then down-rezzing.

The pictures are superior when you capture in 4K, there’s more detail even when it’s downsampled to 2K or HD, plus the original 4K material can archived so the project is more future-proof.

As far as improvements to the F55, I’ve been looking forward to the Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD options, which have just been released.

I’m not making a judgment about the comparative virtues of XAVC versus Apple ProRes here, it’s just that Apple ProRes has become such a standard codec for post-production. I find it frustrating when I’m shooting on XAVC and the rushes are immediately being transcoded to Apple ProRes and no one is ever going back to the original footage.

Obviously as a cinematographer, I want to maintain the integrity of what we’re shooting. I don’t want the footage to go through any extra processes because at that point, I can no longer control or understand what’s happening to the pictures, as they’re getting chewed up & regurgitated by strange algorithms. things that make a good camera. Stuff you can’t put your finger on — your instinctive response to the way the camera reacts to light, how it feels physically to hold and to work with, it’s character or personality I guess. All that stuff can have an effect on the images you create. I film a lot of bands. These guys are up on stage playing through an old valve amp from the 1960s. Why? There’s something about the sound of that amplifier they like. They couldn’t explain it to you, but it makes the music they want to hear. So, yes, I’m very excited by 4K, but ultimately it’s not the be-all and end-all.

With 4K, I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t take off in cinemas. Watching 4K on a big screen is a great viewing experience. I think the big unknown is whether families want to invest in a 4K TV in their living room, because that will ultimately decide how

Apple ProRes is well established and trusted, and XAVC is a little newer, but people are coming around to it I think. When the F55 and F5 first came out I could tell that post-production houses were nervous or simply unwilling to get into an area they were less confident about. Even when I went online and did my own research, and said, “Look, you can download this plug-in, you can do this that and the other,” I’d get a response like “Listen, we’ve got a tight deadline, five edit suites running, I just want to stick to what I know.” I’m sure that’ll change, because the F55 is becoming very popular and XAVC is very efficient. Software companies seem to be building in functionality for the codec. But it’s great that Sony has also now included options for more established workflows. It shows an open-mindedness I think, to make the camera user-friendly for production.

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

I haven’t been to grade the Katy Perry film yet. But we did extensive testing of the various frame rates, codecs and gamma. So I’m very confident about what the results are going to be like. The whole shoot was a very positive experience for me. Back in 2013 I had also filmed Katy Perry’s previous touring show in Los Angeles, for the feature documentary “Katy Perry: Part of Me 3D”. That was very different, as we were filming in 5K on Epic using a 3ality 3D rigs. For me, it was great to get back with the tour crew. Katy has a very loyal crew around her and they’ve been amazing both times. This can really make or break a concert shoot. It doesn’t matter how great the film crew is — if you don’t have the cooperation of the show, you’re dead. When tours like this are out on the road, they’re gigantic productions and they’re very much up against it. They’re loading in something like 50 trucks worth of gear in a day and putting up huge stages and lighting rigs. When a film crew turns up, it is only going to make their life miserable. You’re in everybody’s way. You’re a complete nuisance. And it really makes a difference when they’re on your side. Jay Schmit, Katy’s tour production manager, was very helpful back in LA and he was just as helpful in Australia this time round. Baz Halpin, who designed the show, was also very generous. We worked together closely when it came to deciding what lighting to add or change for the filming, but as Baz couldn’t make it to the shoot himself it was important that he could trust me to make whatever adjustments were needed once I met up with his lighting crew on the road. Lighting director Drew Gnagey was totally on-side and took all the extra follow spots and lighting changes in his stride.

We were also very lucky to have the show’s original programmer with us, Eric Marchwinski, who flew over from LA to run the additional lighting package.

He already knew the show inside out, and did a great job of tying in the audience lighting and making it feel like part of the show. Each of us had a lighting console, networked together so any one of us could grab hold of a fader and make adjustments to lighting levels on the fly. Eric knew the plot so well that in fact it was generally quicker for me to just point at stuff on the monitor and within seconds he’d already dived into the program and grabbed whichever lamp needed adjusting. I’m always in awe of the technical ability these guys have.

Luckily, the F55 is a camera that you can throw almost anything at, but even then, it doesn’t guarantee that the show will automatically look as good on screen as it does to the eye. You can’t just run the show the same as every other night when the cameras roll in. The lighting needs to be adapted to allow for the limitations of the recording medium, which becomes a collaborative process.

There’s no way I would want to take the credit for all that. In the first place, Baz’s lighting design was stunning. And when it came to finessing the show for our cameras, his crew had a big input. They were looking at the monitor with me and did all the button-pushing. They were impressed by the F55 cameras as well. Every night, they see their own live video pictures of Katy up on the show’s giant LED screens, which the tour shoots with normal HDTV cameras. All of a sudden they’re looking at a monitor with pictures from the F55s, and they’re all saying, “Wow — this looks great!”

“Luckily, the F55 is a camera that you can throw almost anything at, but even then, it doesn’t guarantee that the show will automatically look as good on screen as it does to the eye

“

25

“I haven’t been to grade the

Katy Perry film yet. But we did extensive testing of the various frame rates, codecs and gamma.

So I’m very confident about what the results are going to be like. The whole shoot was a very positive experience for me

“

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

“We see productions like Katy Perry’s ‘Prismatic Tour’ taking advantage of current technologies to deliver bigger, brighter, more dramatic and cinematic events to larger audiences as demand grows for 4K experiences

“

DIT — Tim Schumann & Head DIT Nir Shelter

Given the scale and complexity of the camera department, Lemac National Rental Manager, Brett Dwyer, offered the production the added support of having two Lemac camera techs on- set throughout the production — ensuring that every camera set-up, position, lens & format change were well understood and pre-planned, as time was of the 27

essence throughout the two shoot days. Mike Vlack, Lemac Senior Rentals Tech, joined Brett in designing the camera & lens package and working with the freelance crew of focus pullers and 2nd Acs to communicate requirements quickly and often on the fly when changes arose.

The blending of crew members from both the TV / OB world and film / commercial / drama world was a key ingredient which was also overseen

by Lemac, with terrific management by Sydney Rentals Manager, Lynn Simpson.

The great thing about incorporating the F55 into this sort of OB production style is that it was perfectly configurable for any of the various camera set-ups — handheld with a Canon 17-120mm cine-servo zoom, on dollies with 12:1 Optimo zooms, or on Steadicam (Cabrio 19-90mm), Tower Cam (Optimo 16-42mm) or on the Super Technocrane (Optimo 17-80mm). We

Head DIT, Nir Shelter

Glitch-free data-wrangling was essential. The 4K material from each camera was managed on-set by a Lemac team of data runners and wranglers delivering dual verified copies of the performances.

Tim Schumann and Matthias Pittner from Lemac worked closely with Nir Shelter, head data wrangler.

were easily able to add or remove RAW recorders if requirements for camera positions changed.

Brett Dwyer explains: “Lemac’s focus on the technological landscape places us in a key position with understanding and preparedness for evolving production methods — as in this case with The Prismatic World Tour. Increasingly nowadays, we are being contacted to provide 4K cameras and workflows as clients look to future-proof their productions, and this request goes hand-in-hand with a reliance on traditional film / digital cinema tools such as PL mount 35mm production zooms and the infrastructure and experience required to support this equipment. We see productions like Katy Perry’s ‘Prismatic Tour’ taking advantage of current technologies to deliver bigger, brighter, more dramatic and cinematic events to larger audiences as demand grows for 4K experiences.”

“We designed and implemented a system that would allow maximum throughput of the data and the ability to offload from all cameras simultaneously with no chance of a bottleneck,” says Schumann.

“Nir was fantastic and very proficient. His work on Wolverine, The Great Gatsby and various other top‑end productions was invaluable, especially during the testing and planning phase in the week before the shoot. With four data-runners, three wranglers and a lot of concentration, we offloaded more than 40 terabytes of data from the 15 cameras over two nights.

With all cameras rolling at all times, including four cameras shooting Sony RAW and others shooting high speed at double the data rate, there was no room for error or confusion.

“It’s very easy to lose composure and lose track of which cards are going where, but with a very wellorganized and well-tested system, we managed it,” he says. “With Apple Mac computers, Pomfort Silverstack software, Silicon Memory-supplied storage and Nir’s custom-built data logging software Cinewrangler, everything was check-summed, logged and transferred safely, with no data loss. The producer walked away with dual copies of all of the 4K data just hours after the end of the concert.”

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Prismatic World Tour in 4K

Bolke Burnaby Lautier Bolke Burnaby Lautier is Manager of Operations, Sports & Events for United, part of the Newer Media Group. United, which specializes in integrating 4K and film solutions in multicamera production, supplied, installed and operated a series of camera control units such as Copperhead Telecast, along with C-Motion 3-axis lens control systems, allowing the F55s to integrate smoothly into the OB production model, complete with ‘studio-style’ operation of some cameras, where the operator works from a stance that is perpendicular to the rear of the camera, with both hands on individual panbars for zoom and focus.

Lautier: “What you’re seeing the past two years is that all the upside of using film-based cameras is being used in concerts,” says Lautier. “But of course those cameras are not built for that application.

There are several solutions, but there is not really a standard workflow. I don’t just mean technically, but also on budget. We put together a workflow that works quite well, and we’ve been asked to do a series of concerts around the world, including Coldplay and Santana, for example. Beyonce in Paris was a big one, also in 4K.

now NEP. We were the party in the middle. We take the cameras and trucks and we join them together.

We make sure that the set-up is usable, and we convert it to controls via C-Motion so that the camera person actually recognizes the equipment in his or her hands and can work it. We make sure that all the signals are going up and down from the truck to the camera and back, so that we have proper record, iris control and access control on the camera.”

“Katy Perry is our most recent big one,” he says.

“For that shoot, we got the cameras locally, from Lemac, and we got the truck from Global, which is

“The clean from the camera on output 1 is the part we record,” says Lautier. “But most of the time, we also take SDI-3 from another out. We take a dirty out so we have all the data from the camera in card data and batteries. We put a LUT on that one if we’re shooting in Log so the director of photography and the technicians are looking at a LUT’d picture. If needed, we will bring a signal feed back into the open cams system with intercom integrated — a technical channel and of course a production channel. It’s got two data channels, one for the camera painting and the other for iris control. And you can feed the mics over it with this type of camera. So we basically take a film-style camera, put this to it, and all the

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Power and communications are fed via “black boxes,” developed by United and mounted on the camera. Wireless lens control systems such as the Preston FIZ or ARRI WLC are popular in the cine realm. But the C-Motion systems provide an interface for the “ENG-style” zoom and focus controllers to be plugged in to the motor controlling the cine zoom lens. This is important for both OB truck control of the iris and the camera operator’s comfort and familiarity standing behind the camera in studio mode.

The “black box” — United has yet to give it a name — is small enough to mount on the back of the camera without compromising the ability to handhold. The box is connected by SMPTE Fiber to a CCU in the truck. That connection powers the camera and takes the video lines back to the truck.

options that are lacking from an F55 compared to a 2500 are in that box. So it’s also being timecoded and locked in the truck. Even if you’re recording in the truck and on HD and you use it as a proxy in your other post, you can take your XAVC 4K material, relay that with the same timecode, make your edits and finish it all in 4K. “In our view, the black box is the same as the CA4000,” says Lautier. “The only difference is that you keep your internal record, and it’s a universal device so you can use it on any flavor of camera. The director can have a choice in camera and still make it work, which is a great benefit. Especially at this point, the look and feel you want for a concert is important.

4K is, of course, also important, but there are a lot of concerts done in HD with the F55s or Alexa purely for the look and feel of it — the shallow depth of field — and not especially for 4K. This way there’s an affordable solution.

“On the Katy Perry shoot, there was a lot of prep, of course, but the rig on-site was just a day,” says Lautier. “We fully tested and did three records — the first show, a rehearsal, and the second show. It was a great production, very smooth. Lemac and NEP did a great job for a first show in this configuration and this size, so that’s a compliment to them.”

Regarding adaptability, Lautier says, “The F55 is, at the moment, the camera that is easiest. One of the reasons is that it’s an affordable camera. But the protocols on the control of the camera are the same as in Sony’s 2500s or the 1500s — it’s standard. The only thing you need to make sure of is the type of lens you use. If you split out the iris and do that on a separate motor, there are several solutions. So at the moment, the F55 is the most commonly used camera. At the same time, I must say the camera at the moment is about the cheapest part of the whole thing. The first piece of glass is more expensive than the camera by now. So I see cameras more as a choice you make in look and feel. The system behind it, that’s going to stay.

30

Prismatic World Tour in 4K

The experience for Lemac and NEP Australia in joining forces to deliver this production as an Australian first, marks the convergence of TV and film / digital cinema — demonstrating to a world-wide audience that these two — often separate fields — are well equipped to pool their resources and experience and offer real 4K productions to a wide range of projects and clients.

F55 on the Tower Cam during Katy Perry’s finale: “Firework”

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Lemac proudly celebrates 40 years in service of the Australian Film & Television Industry in 2015. For more information, please visit: www.lemac.com.au

Photos courtesy of Lemac.

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33

The Wonder List

By Philip Bloom

Philip Bloom left Sky News after 17 years working as a news cameraman, 9 years later he has built a up a globally respected reputation within the industry. From filming with Canon DSLRs on Lucasfilm’s Red Tails to shooting the BAFTA/Raindance winning documentary How To Start A Revolution through to his latest project The Wonder List for CNN, Bloom is known for bringing high quality imagery to every project he works on.

Besides his on location dedication to his craft, his huge passion is well known and shared through numerous social media platforms. His very popular website www.philipbloom.net has become one of the main educational resources for filmmakers across the globe.

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The Wonder List

A blank template. That is what I had to work with when CNN asked me to shoot their first in-house original documentary series. Current show like Parts Unknown with Anthony Bourdain are produced externally. This was to be a bit of an experiment for them and they were incredibly open to any ideas I had.

essential for me and the part that made me want to shoot the show. It is what I love to do both in my own personal work and, if I am lucky enough, in my professional work.

Part of the reason I accepted this series, which was a 6 month commitment of my time, was the fact they wanted it to look really unique and special. The other was the concept.

So what would make this unique to other shows visually? There are, after all, a lot of exceptionally well shot documentary series out there, not least CNN’s own Parts Unknown. I wanted to create a specific look that would be associated with the series and of course it would need to be as “cinematic” as possible.

The show, which became The Wonder List, was pitched to me as a global series travelling to incredible places that were on the brink of change, mostly for the worst, and create a time capsule. The key part though, was that it would be very much carried by the human element; real characters that we, the viewers, would connect to. This was

Now, this word cinematic is of course utterly subjective as cinema has so many different styles. For me, it meant a mixture of classically composed framing and motivated movement. I wanted to use various tools and shooting styles to lift the production value beyond what you would expect for a low-budget, small crewed show.

I wanted to use various tools and shooting styles to lift the production value beyond what you would expect for a low-budget, small crewed show.

35

I wanted to create a specific look that would be associated with the series and of course it would need to be as “cinematic� as possible.

36

The Wonder List

We were just four people for almost all of the 8 episodes filming in 8 countries across 5 continents. Myself, the host Bill Weir, the main producer for each episode who would be shooting B camera and a more junior producer who would take on numerous roles. I did get an assistant for the last two shoots and it helped enormously, of course, but for the most part I was a one-man band.

37

Choosing the right camera would make or break this for me. The camera couldn’t be too heavy, it needed to be usable for a one-man band, have great audio. It also needed to be able to shoot 4K internally if needed. It also needed to be able to shoot super slow motion. Of course, it also had to be super 35mm. The large sensor look is the only way I shoot; it gives me total control over my depth of field. Shallow when I want that look and

The Sony PMW-F55 ... It’s a marvelous camera with a gorgeous image and features galore. It’s also very robust and something I would trust in some extreme environments.

deep when needed. A 2/3" camera with a big B4 lens would have been easier in many ways, but not something I wanted.

I really like the Canon look and the C300 is a terrific documentary camera, but I needed features this camera simply didn’t have. Luckily, the one that did was the camera I owned. The Sony PMW-F55.

This would work for what I needed beautifully indeed. It’s a marvelous camera with a gorgeous image and features galore. It’s also very robust and something I would trust in some extreme environments.

38

The Wonder List

Choosing the right camera would make or break this for me. The camera couldn’t be too heavy, it needed to be usable for a one-man band, have great audio. It also needed to be able to shoot 4K internally if needed.

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The Wonder List

Rounding out the other tools for the show was the Sony A7s camera that lived on the Freefly systems MoVI M5 3 axis gimbal stabilizer.

41

Rounding out the other tools for the show was the Sony A7s camera that lived on the Freefly systems MoVI M5 3 axis gimbal stabilizer. Now, they do make a bigger M15 that would take the F55 but my god, it would kill me. These things get very heavy quickly. There are things like “easyrigs” to take the weight but I needed to work fast. This was, after all, a documentary and I would need to go from MoVI to tripod frequently. This is why the A7s lived on the M5 for the whole series.

Using the MoVI was never one of my initial ideas for the show but after messing around with it on a test shoot for the series; I knew I wanted to use it. How well could it cope with the roughness of a documentary shoot? I had no idea; it would be a baptism by fire!

When using devices like this you cannot touch the camera.

Normally on shoots using tools like this you would have a focus puller. There was of course no focus puller on this show, there wasn’t. There was no assistant for the most part. There was no sound recordist either; all audio was recorded by us in cameras or using a Zoom H6. This was a tiny crew so therefore compromises had to be made I always tried to find a way to minimize them.

With the MoVI M5 I found a way. Initially, I just set the aperture to around F8 to give me a workable depth of field and using a Canon 16-35 F4 lens on a Metabones to E-mount adaptor. I set the focus to just off infinity. This worked fine until I needed to get close, then it was soft and I had to try and reach over to the lens and adjust it. Also, the exposure changed frequently during shots and I was reaching for the ISO dial.

By about half way through the series I had figured out the very best way to use it for a one-man band. It meant using Freefly’s MoVI ring; a fig-rig style bit of gear that made it much easier to hold without killing my back and also let me rest it on the ground — something you cannot do with the default hand grips. Normally, you need a stand. The other thing that helped was switching to the Sony/Zeiss 16-35mm F4 FE lens — a native E-mount lens that I put into autofocus mode. I don’t believe auto-focus works that well in video for many things and I rarely use it, but here it worked a treat. The 16mm wide angle of course helped a lot. The other key thing I did was set the ISO range to something like 200-8000 and put the camera in auto ISO mode with the exposure compensation set to -0.7 to make sure I held those highlights. Often I left it in manual mode but when I knew exposure would need to be changed the smooth ramping in auto ISO mode was essential. The A7s is so good in low light and even at 8000 ISO, if exposed correctly shows minimal noise.

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The Wonder List

In some episodes we also used a drone; it was rare to be able to though as the legality in most countries for commercial use is still, forgive the pun, up in the air. In Vanuatu in the South Pacific, which is where our premiere episode is set, we were able. These flying cameras are incredibly freeing. Whilst the camera on board the DJI Inspire 1 wasn’t the best it did it cut in just fine and gave us an extra dimension. I used it for creating those impossible dolly moves, those impossible job shots‌plus of course a few aerials!

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The Wonder List

I shot the F55 S-Log3 mode because I wanted to get the best dynamic range. I rarely shoot with a baked in profile. I want the best latitude for post grading. Sadly, the grading wasn’t quite what I had hoped. I did have a specific look in mind for the show but so often you have to let go in these situations and accept you can’t have total control; especially as post was done in New York and I am London based.

The camera performed brilliantly. Whilst the show isn’t a 4K show, I did actually shoot about a 1/3rd of the show in 4K. I had the discussion with CNN and I gave them the reasons why I wanted to shoot entirely 4K but the additional post cost was deemed too high so I had to shoot HD. It wouldn’t have worked out anyway as the device I needed to record 4K on the A7s, the Atomos Shogun, didn’t actually come out until we had shot 7 episodes so it was too late.

Some of the places we went to were so utterly magnificent I just couldn’t bring myself to shoot in HD; I switched to 4K. 45

Some of the places we went to were so utterly magnificent I just couldn’t bring myself to shoot in HD; I switched to 4K and hoped I wouldn’t get too much grief from the post house for doing so!

The camera performed brilliantly. Whilst the show isn’t a 4K show, I did actually shoot about a 1/3rd of the show in 4K. 46

The Wonder List

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All the interviews were shot HD though, I like to shoot 4K for interviews on HD projects normally because of the ability to crop in but as we had three cameras on almost all of them it wasn’t needed. The F55 generally did the main 2 shot, frequently a symmetrical profile frame with the C100 and A7s (I brought two of them with me) as B-cameras doing dirty single frames.

Matching these cameras in post wasn’t going to be that easy of course, but it was just one of those things I couldn’t avoid. There was no budget for 3 F55s and I needed the A7s for the MoVI after all! We tried to remember to shoot an X-Rite color chart to give the colorist (which I had hoped for) a fighting chance!

The other time I was forced to shoot HD was because I wanted to shoot at 180 FPS to give us another signature look. In 4K you can only shoot up to 60 FPS. Whilst it isn’t supposed to be left in for 4K, I found the image I got from it more pleasing and less harsh. You really do need this filter (CBK- 55F2K Optical Low Pass filter) if you shoot over 60fps as the image can get some moiré and aliasing if you aren’t careful.

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The Wonder List

Just before we went to Vanuatu I found out we had a weight limit on the little plane that would be island hopping with us. Normally, my gear, which was in about six or more cases, weighed upwards of 180 KGs. I was told I had to get it down to 110 KGs. Now this would indeed mean quite a compromise. One of the biggest issues was also the potential lack of electricity in some places. I use the Sony V-Lock batteries with my F55 and I was going through almost four day. If we wouldn’t have power for three days or so that would mean bringing at least 12 plus another charger or two. This is a lot more weight; not less! Thankfully, a solution presented itself just in time — the PXW-FS7 that I had seen at IBC. The one I had ordered through CVP in the UK came into stock just in time. It uses the old EX1/ EX3 BP

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batteries, which I have loads of as I still own an EX3. The bigger ones also lasted a fair amount of time. By taking this camera instead of the F55 I would save on weight with the camera itself as it’s a fair bit lighter plus three days’ worth of batteries was about the same weight as one and a half V-lock batteries.

Was there a big difference between the F55 and the FS7 when shooting the show? Well it was version1.00 firmware which is always a risk but I had thoroughly tested it before committing to using it. It actually has a higher base sensitivity than the F55 — 2000 ISO instead of 1250 ISO. The one main downside was it wouldn’t take the OLPF from my F55 so any super slow motion would suffer a little quality wise. It was a compromise I was willing to accept. Life is just a series of compromises!

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The Wonder List

The F55 is still my preferred camera for other, more high-end work.

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In fact, the camera performed brilliantly. Its ergonomics are friendlier for handheld work, especially its built-in extended hand grip and by being lighter, plus working as a one-man band, it was easier to lug around. Also the benefit of having an extra stage on the ND filter wheel is very useful.

For the remaining three episodes after this I switched to the FS7 and didn’t regret it. I did miss a few things from the F55, the side control panel and especially the DC out for powering my Small HD DP7 Pro High Bright monitor but I feel I made the right decision. The F55 is still my preferred camera for other, more high-end work.

It’s an incredible feeling to have the series all finished and already out there for the world to see. We put everything into this; it was beyond exhausting at times as some of the days stretched to up to 20 hours or so with all the offloading and gear cleaning I had to do each day. I offloaded all the cards to two drives then gave Julian, the junior producer, the cards after to do the same so we could make sure we didn’t miss anything.

Despite all the downsides to working with so much gear with such a small crew I wouldn’t have done it any other way, although I wouldn’t recommend it and I certainly don’t what it to be seen as an example and reason to cut down on crew sizes. We made it work, just, but it was damn hard work. I guess I just like to make life hard for myself!

If a second series is commissioned and they want me back then I wouldn’t take the easy route and shoot on just one camera. Everything I used added a special dimension to the episodes. I truly feel we have created a unique looking and very cinematic show and something I feel truly proud of.

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The world of Cry Havoc Productions

By Dylan Weiss

By Dylan Weiss The foundation for Cry Havoc Productions wasn’t laid on a sound stage or in the field, but rather on a motorcycle adventure along the California Coast.

Fourteen years ago, my father and I took a lengthy ride from Los Angeles to San Francisco up the Pacific Coast Highway.

At the time, he was a burnt out exec who’d worked for a variety of networks, including ABC and Fox Sports, and I was a precocious film school grad cutting my teeth as an editor and continually feeling frustrated with the footage being handed over for an edit.

Late one night, after a glorious day of twisting the throttle, our discussion veered towards what we both wanted to do when we proverbially ‘grew up’…

The result turned out to be the greatest adventure we could ever imagine…

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Cry Havoc Productions

For nearly a decade and half our indie pro co, Cry Havoc, has specialized in high-performance factual documentaries for national and international cable networks. The majority of our work focuses on exploring the automotive world. It’s a fortuitous intersection of personal and professional passion that has not only helped build our business but also introduced us to a variety of amazingly like‑minded individuals around the world.

This past year we completed work on two new factual television series; a 8x60 called Supercar Superbuild for Discovery Networks International and a 12x30 historical biography series titled How We Got Here on the titans of American business for The American Heroes Channel in the United States.

On the Supercars front we had the distinct honor to film at a wide variety of locations all around the world and capture rare inside looks at some remarkable machinery. We were the first boots on the ground in Germany to film serial number 001 of the new Porsche 918 Hybrid Hypercar, the first to see the new Ford Mustang roll off the line in Michigan, and we were able to witness the pre-series for the all-new Lamborghini Huracán in Italy. Additionally we filmed Aston Martin and Bentley in the United Kingdom, Pagani and Maserati in Italy, and the all-new Dodge Viper in Detroit.

“

This past year we completed work on two new factual television series; a 8x60 called Supercar Superbuild for Discovery Networks International and a 12x30 historical biography series titled How We Got Here on the titans of American business for The American Heroes Channel in the United States.

”

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Cry Havoc Productions

On How We Got Here we delved into the stories behind some of American’s most notable historical business figures, such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Samuel Colt, Samuel Morse, Adolphus Busch, and the team behind Harley-Davidson.

In many respects the two series were 180º apart in style & substance — on Supercar Superbuild the mandate from the network was to craft a visually rich series of programs that evolved the process genre, featured plenty of camera movement and dynamic action footage.

On the other hand, How We Got Here was keyed around often heavily lit intimate interpersonal recreations and a plethora of traditional interviews.

What both series had in common were tight shooting schedules and budgets.

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“

On the other hand, How We Got Here was keyed around often heavily lit intimate interpersonal recreations and a plethora of traditional interviews.

”

To successfully complete both projects we knew we needed to find flexible tools and some new solutions. As they say in woodworking, “It all comes down to having the right tool for the right job”.

Historically we’ve always been a PDW-F800 shop, while also taking advantage of a variety of smaller rigs, such as the EX1, EX3, and F3 for specialty situations.

The battle-tested F800s were a fixture for three reasons; they have always had remarkable reliability, tremendous focal lengths thanks to their robust B4 lens, and they offered the ability to pull a disc out at the end of a long day of shooting.

Over the years, as we honed our ply and trade, the F800s helped us organically develop a SWAT team approach to filming, where a small crew parachutes into a given location — grabs the goods and gets out quickly…

Speed and versatility have become paramount.

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For instance, on our Supercar shows we’ll typically spend three-days inside of a car factory filming at an extremely rapid pace where each member takes on a distinct role and we have very little overlap.

Every camera is assigned one specialized bit of kit, whether that’s a jib, a slider, a dolly, or some kind of camera stabilizing device (easy rig, glidecam, MoVI, etc).

While those tools help create compelling images, they also add to our overall case count and travel weight — two distinct disadvantages when you do a lot of international travel because it raises travel costs and wears crew out quickly.

On the other end of the spectrum stood our How We Got Here historical project — while our shooting pace wasn’t going to slow down significantly, the need for greater dynamic range, faster lens changes, and a more filmic shooting style was obvious.

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“

Every camera is assigned one specialized bit of kit, whether that’s a jib, a slider, a dolly, or some kind of camera stabilizing device (easy rig, glidecam, MoVI, etc).

”

So when I sat down with our sage Director of Photography, Stephen Harrison, to initially discuss the two projects, our starting point wasn’t sensor size or depth of field, but rather weight, expandability, and versatility.

How could we start moving in a direction that allows for maximum options while in the field?

What cameras offered the best battery technology and the longest lasting run times?

Which rigs gave us a chance to pair down the case count?

Ultimately, we settled on adding an F5 & FS700 to our arsenal.

The combination offered the ability to share glass across a wide range of camera bodies (not only with each other but also with our Canon 5Ds, which we use for promotional stills, behind the scenes images and camera car pov).

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Cry Havoc Productions

“

For nearly a decade and half our indie pro co, Cry Havoc, has specialized in high‑performance factual documentaries for national and international cable networks. The majority have been focused on exploring the automotive world.

”

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Cry Havoc Productions

Additionally, the F5 is remarkably light for handheld use — which cut down on the need for a second Easy Rig stabilizer — thus saving us weight & time — and perhaps more importantly for us, the lightweight radically changed the amount of ballast we needed for jib work. We no longer needed to travel with a hundred pounds of weight plates!

Better yet the continual improvements in SxS™ transfer protocols and hard drive tech made multiple card dumps a reality for our nimble crew. No more all-nighters transferring cards!

On Supercar Superbuild, the camera’s wide dynamic range fundamentally changed our shooting style — typically, we have very little control of the lighting environments for the majority of our automotive location shoots and often encounter a wide variety of sources. The F5 handled them all flawlessly.

However, the real beauty of the F5 came when we needed to transform from an ENG-styled shoot to a more theatrical one. When needed to pull out the lighting stops on How We Got Here and approach a more cinematic look, the F5 had the ability to act like a film camera and deliver precisely the look we were hunting for on our recreations without any fuss.

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“

However, the real beauty of the F5 came when we needed to transform from an ENG-styled shoot to a more theatrical one.

�

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Cry Havoc Productions

“

...the F5 is remarkably light for handheld use — which cut down on the need for a second Easy Rig stabilizer — thus saving us weight & time — and perhaps more importantly for us, the lightweight radically changed the amount of ballast we needed for jib work. We no longer needed to travel with a hundred pounds of weight plates!

”

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Cry Havoc Productions

On both projects ensuring that we would capture the correct look was important, but perhaps in contrast to many in our profession we don’t spend a great deal of man power on LUTs or overly complex workflows.

Instead, given our budgetary and crew compliment constraints, we constantly strive to get the look we want correctly in the field.

In our perfect world, what the camera captures is ideally exactly what you’d see on your screen at home.

Thanks in large part to the tremendous versatility built in to the camera, it was easy to ensure that cameras were matched and everyone was balanced correctly. It’s a true testament to the thought process put into the camera’s design and engineering.

It also makes one feel more secure in camera purchases in the future — next season we’ll take the final step and hit the road with a full outfit of F5s. We’re eagerly looking forward to trying out the new CBK-55BK shoulder doc unit!

Overall the F5 features remarkable versatility, lightweight construction, a beautiful image and has a magnificent viewfinder to boot.

The F5 & FS700’s picture quality, reliability and flexibility in the field has made us true believers in not only the solid state revolution, but Sony’s ability to help create the right tools for any job!

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About Cry Havoc Productions, Inc. Since 2001, Cry Havoc Productions has been creating factually based original programming for national and international cable networks around the world. We specialize in telling the stories of Fortune 500 brands in visually dynamic ways.

Credits include work for the National Geographic Channel, National Geographic Channel International, Discovery Networks International, Animal Planet, The Science Channel, and the American Heroes Channel.

Brands featured in the work include; AMG, Aston Martin, Bentley, Bimota, BMW Motorad, Bugatti, Chrysler, 
Dodge, Ducati, Ferrari, Ford, General Motors, Honda, 
Jaguar, Kawasaki, Lamborghini, Land Rover, Maserati, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Michelin, MV Agusta, Pagani, Porsche, Rolls Royce, RUF, Suzuki, Toyota, Yamaha.

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Ben Smithard, BSC on

The Second Best Exotic

Marigold Hotel

By Jon Fauer, ASC Film and Digital Times

A conversation with Ben Smithard, BSC about his work as Cinematographer on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, released in the USA on March 6, 2015.

Photos: Laurie Sparham Š 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

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Ben Smithard, BSC 70

Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

JON FAUER: Tell us about the style of The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and how you and the director arrived at the look.

BEN SMITHARD: It involved lots of conversations.

The biggest thing was actually going to India. Most of the preparation for the film and how it was going to look came about by just being there, taking photographs, going to locations, and discussing. I didn’t shoot the first Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. But, there was that reference. Obviously we were using some of the same locations, even though we were shooting on digital.

The experience of being in India was a big part of making the film. Being in India, the actual experience informs your viewpoint on how you would shoot the film. Because at the end of the day, we’re following characters in this story who are experiencing India in a similar way that I’m experiencing it.

We were shooting in the same place that they are supposed to be in. We’re not shooting Jaipur for Calcutta or Jaipur for Mumbai. The scenes in Mumbai were shot in Mumbai, the scenes that are set in Jaipur were shot in Jaipur. You get to understand what the characters are going through because you’re there, going through it with them. When all the cast and crew from England got there, along with a massive Indian crew, it almost felt as though we were part of the story.

I shot my previous film, Belle, on the Sony F65. I think it was the first British feature film done on the F65, and I liked the look Of course, John Madden, the director, and I discussed all the usual things you discuss when you’re making a film. You make reference to other films and photos.

This is a contemporary film set in a real place and we’re shooting it for real. I have a love of photojournalism and photography, so I was like a kid in a sweet shop when I got there. I was taking 71

photographs of everything. The hardest thing about shooting this movie was trying to avoid the cultural clichés of India, photographically. That’s very difficult because India is one of the most photographed places in the world. Because the people generally are very happy for you to photograph them, it’s easy. The difficulty comes in making something completely original. So the look of this film is driven by the story. You follow the story, follow the characters. I tried to make it look interesting.

John Madden is not only a great director, he is an amazing craftsperson. I think that’s a great thing in a director, somebody who really understands the craft of filmmaking. When you’ve got an ally like that, there’s nothing you cannot do. You can achieve anything. I think there are a lot of directors who are very clever and very smart and they do understand it—especially the ones I’ve worked with. I had a great experience working with John. He’s very special and he’s very smart. He’s a very giving person and I loved every minute of the experience of making this movie.

JON FAUER: Tell me about camera choice on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

BEN SMITHARD: Originally there was a conversation about shooting film on the project. But we were in Jaipur and Udaipur, which is quite a long way away from the lab in Mumbai. Although they shot film on the first Exotic Marigold Hotel I had a bit of a concern about the reliability of the laboratory.

I shot my previous film, Belle, on the Sony F65. I think it was the first British feature film done on the F65, and I liked the look. When we moved away from film on the The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel I decided on the F65 because I knew that we would be taking the cameras from London and shipping them to India. I was very happy with the camera and the rental company that I use, Movietech in Pinewood Studios, London. They are very reliable and the lenses from that company are amazing.

They’re all really well looked after. My decision to shoot with the F65 was based mainly on the fact that I’d already shot a movie on it. I knew what I was getting with the camera.

John Madden is not only a great director, he is an amazing craftsperson. I think that’s a great thing in a director, somebody who really understands the craft of filmmaking

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Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

JON FAUER: Movietech is John Venables and John Buckley, right?

BEN SMITHARD: That’s it. You know you’re going to get really good backup with them, which was important being in India. When I used the F65 on Belle, there were no technical hitches at all with the camera. It was completely reliable, and if you’re shooting in India, you need a reliable camera.

JON FAUER: How many cameras did you take?

BEN SMITHARD: We took three cameras. We shot with two and we had a spare body the whole time.

JON FAUER: What lenses did you use?

BEN SMITHARD: Our entire lens package came straight from Belle. I knew what I was getting. I used 73

the whole range of Cooke S4 primes from 14 to 135 mm—the same set that I used on Belle. I also used the Angenieux 17-80, which is my personal favorite zoom lens. It’s very sharp. There’s a really nice look to it. I have that on my camera nearly all the time. I also had the Angenieux Optimo 24-290 and 28-76.

JON FAUER: How was the match between the Cooke S4 primes and the Angenieux zooms?

BEN SMITHARD: If you’re going to use a piece of very good glass like the Cooke S4 lenses, then you need a good zoom.

I like working on zooms as much as I can. I use the primes for handheld or Steadicam. I’ve never had any major problems trying to match them, to be honest. I like the Angenieux Zooms. I like the way they’re built. They are well-made, and

When I used the F65 on Belle, there were no technical hitches at all with the camera. It was completely reliable, and if you’re shooting in India, you need a reliable camera.

well-constructed. If there’s a very slight color shift between zooms and primes, it’s easy to correct in the DI. That never really worries me.

time of year. But everything had a diffused quality already, so we didn’t need to over-diffuse the images with filters.

JON FAUER: Did you use any diffusion or filtration?

At night, it gets foggy, so night scenes don’t need diffusion on the lenses either. We did a lot of night shots, and around 2:00 to 4:00 in the morning that time of the year, there was a lot of rolling fog. It could really fog up our whole location. We were very lucky.

In some scenes, the background looks like I filled it with smoke, but I didn’t. It’s actually fog. There were a couple of takes with people at night in front of really blown-out highlights from car headlights.

But there wasn’t anything wrong with the camera.

In India, many people just have their headlights on full-beam or they’re not adjusted very well. It’s quite foggy and dusty and the highlights bloom. There’s nothing you can do about that. That’s just India at night. I haven’t been to many places like that before.

BEN SMITHARD: That’s an interesting point. I sometimes used diffusion. John Madden, the director, wanted the film to look as realistic as possible, so I didn’t over-diffuse it. I used very light diffusion here and there, but nothing that was too noticeable.

Also, the atmosphere where we were shooting, Jaipur, in northwest of India, is a city in desert scrubland. If you can imagine, it’s a bit like California.

You don’t really see blue skies very often because there’s dust in the air. When you’re in the city, you don’t see lots of white clouds. It’s very bright this

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Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

JON FAUER: Can you give us an example of how you and John Madden worked together on a particular scene developing a shot or a look?

BEN SMITHARD: I can give you a general overview.

This was a film consisting of many scenes with complicated camera moves and very good actors.

I had worked with quite a few of them before. I operate “A” Camera (the main camera). I have done this on every movie I’ve made. It is a big job when you’re lighting as well. But it’s something I do and I enjoy.

In doing very complicated camera moves with famous actors, their positioning and blocking within the scene is crucial. You’re doing intricate movements around them and designing dolly moves. The thing is, John may be sitting at the monitor and I’d be either tracking left and then pushing into a two-shot or swinging over into a three-shot and then going into a single over-theshoulder and then pushing in. As we were doing it, he’d understand exactly, always, all the time. He’d know precisely what my problem was and he’d say something like, “Okay, Maggie, you just need to move a little bit to the left and then when the camera’s there, you just move forward a couple of feet so you open up onto that character.” He’s awesome. And this would happen on a daily basis because John just gets it, he sees it, and he makes my job so much easier. If I had to do all of that myself, it would take so much more energy. And then what happens is you get it all lined up and it’s rehearsed really well and you’ve got it and you finally realize, “Oh, you know what? I’ve got to light this bloody scene.” So if you’ve got a director who’s just brilliant like John is, you can do all that because he’s guiding you and helping. It was a perfect collaboration.

The actors were all great. I’ve worked with Judy Dench three to four times, and I’ve worked with Celia Imrie. I’ve worked with Bill Nighy. I hadn’t worked with Richard Gere or Maggie Smith. But when you’ve got that caliber of actors, even though they’re all really nice and easy, you’ve still got to position them where you want them to be.

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In doing very complicated camera moves with famous actors, their positioning and blocking within the scene is crucial. You’re doing intricate movements around them and designing dolly moves.

John Madden came from theater and television, and he excels at being able to move the actors into the right positions for the shot to work.

John also understands light. It is quite unique for a director to really get what you’re trying to do with the light, and that makes a huge difference to a cinematographer. For example, you walk into a location, and as a cameraman you naturally want to put the camera in a place that takes advantage of the natural light. You gravitate to where the camera should be. John always understands that.

He doesn’t push you into a part of the location that doesn’t really work for the available light.

Of course, there were situations, especially in the actual hotel, where we couldn’t shoot at the right time of day to make it work because the schedule wouldn’t allow it. But in general, I wouldn’t be saying to the director, “This is going to look much better here because the light is coming from that direction from behind that building and backlit there.” He understands immediately what you’re trying to do to make the image look much better.

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Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The actors were all great. I’ve worked with Judy Dench three to four times, and I’ve worked with Celia Imrie. I’ve worked with Bill Nighy. I hadn’t worked with Richard Gere or Maggie Smith. But when you’ve got that caliber of actors, even though they’re all really nice and easy, you’ve still got to position them where you want them to be.

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Dev Patel and Tina Desai on the set of THE SECOND BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL. Photo: Laurie Sparham. © Fox Searchlight.

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If you do a location picture, one minute you’re inside, next minute you’re outside, next you’re a night exterior, and then a dark, day interior.

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JON FAUER: It looks like you use a Cartoni head.

BEN SMITHARD: Yes, it’s a Cartoni Maxima head, and I used it for the first time on Belle. I really liked it. It’s a bit beefier and stronger than the others. It’s really smooth. When you’ve got an F65 with a big Angenieux zoom on, it’s better because it can take a bit more weight. Now I own it. When I finished Marigold Hotel, I bought it off Movietech. It lives upstairs in my office in my house, three stories up.

It’s a bit heavy with the box that it comes in, climbing up all those stairs. I take the head out the box and carry it up separately.

But it’s a great head.

JON FAUER: Did you have a DIT? BEN SMITHARD: Yes, we had a DIT who came to India. We had a data wrangler as well. An issue I have on pretty much every film I do is that since I’m operating “A” Camera, I don’t get to sit and watch monitors on set. People ask me all the time whether I am interested in grading on the set. I’m not really, to be honest. Because grading should be done by the colorist, at the end, in a suite that probably cost half a million quid in a perfect environment. The colorist is very knowledgeable and very talented in their job.

I think if I didn’t operate the camera, maybe I would be sitting in a tent playing around with color wheels

and trying to get a certain look. But I can’t do that. I just want to get the densities and contrast right from shot to shot. If you do a location picture, one minute you’re inside, next minute you’re outside, next you’re a night exterior, and then a dark, day interior. I don’t know how you could set look-up tables for all those locations. So I don’t get into it. The colorists all say, “Well, why would you?” And then we spend maybe two or three weeks to grade at the end.

The key thing is that I got the right contrast density in the dailies. Some cinematographers, and I applaud them, set the look to be as a close to how they want it while they’re shooting, so everyone gets used to it in the offline and there are no surprises when you to grade the final film. But the truth is I’ve never had an issue with the final grade anywhere. I just go in there and do what I always thought the film should be like anyway.

JON FAUER: Did you use the F65 for everything?

BEN SMITHARD: I also took a RED Scarlet with me.

I used it for interior car scenes, because it’s smaller or I could make it really small. The cars in the film were tiny. They’re mostly night scenes. They matched nicely. In the digital world, the differences are quite subtle. It’s not like film, where there are big differences between the film stocks.

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Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

JON FAUER: What about the final DI grading?

Where was it done?

JON FAUER: Did you work with a local production services and house?

BEN SMITHARD: It was done at Molinare, which is the company that I use often, with the same grader, Gareth Spensley. He graded “Belle,” and other feature films and TV projects that I’ve done. I trust the company. They’re very good. Their main DI suite is one of the best in London. We graded in that theater, which has a very big screen. We graded on Baselight.

Gareth is a genius with that piece of machinery and I always feel very comfortable working with Molinare.

John was very happy with them.

BEN SMITHARD: The production service company was called India Tech One. They were really helpful.

The cameras and all the grip gear came from London. They all got shipped over. The dollies and track and tripods and all the grip gear came from London. The cranes and remote heads came from Mumbai (Scorpio from Servicevision).

JON FAUER: Did you grade in 4K or 2K? BEN SMITHARD: I graded in 2K. But they conformed in 4K. The 4K conform was there for us to use, if we ever needed it for more detail or for compositing.

But ultimately, the project was 2K. JON FAUER: Did you bring your key crew members from England?

BEN SMITHARD: Yes. I took a focus puller, second AC, Steadicam operator (Alastair Rae), DIT, key grip, and data wrangler from England. We had an Indian gaffer.

He came highly recommended from somebody I’d worked with before, and he was a very good gaffer.

JON FAUER: How big was the total crew?

BEN SMITHARD: The crew was massive. I would check the call sheet every day just to see how many people there were. When you added it up, it would very rarely be fewer than 400 people. That’s cast and crew. Sometimes with extras and so on, it went up to a thousand. There were a lot of people. When I first arrived, I wondered, “Wow. How do you work on a film set with so many people?”

But ultimately, the dynamics of the movie process isn’t that much different because all those people are spread out all over the place. There’s definitely more people on an Indian film set than in the West, for sure. But it was manageable, easy to get along, and I enjoyed pretty much all of it.

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Our gaffer owned the lighting company in Mumbai.

It was was top-notch. We had every type of light.

We had moving lights on all the dance numbers at the end. At the wedding party, we had a massive amount of light. Some of the night shoots had really big lighting set-ups. I planned the lighting like I do on every film. If you plan it to the very last detail, it just makes things so much easier when you get there and you just go through as much detail with the director as possible.

We had moving lights on all the dance numbers at the end. At the wedding party, we had a massive amount of light. Some of the night shoots had really big lighting set-ups.

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Ben Smithard, BSC on The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

The surrounding walls of the fort were 30 or 40 feet high and about 15 feet wide. So we could put our lights all the way around...

We were shooting in a great big colonial fort with big, high walls all the way around it. You could walk all the way round this huge house inside the fort. The surrounding walls of the fort were 30 or 40 feet high and about 15 feet wide.

So we could put our lights all the way around, and whichever way we were pointing, we could turn the lights on or off — and take advantage of backlight and threequarter backlight or whatever.

There were always 25 to 30 electricians on every day. So when you ask to move five 18Ks, it gets done very quickly. That’s a big move. We had every HMI from 200 watts to 18K. We had at least two ARRI Maxes and maybe more.

Because it was a contemporary film, I didn’t have any reservations about using all types of light. Apart from LEDs. I haven’t really gotten into LEDs yet. For night interiors we used Dedolights, Kino Flos and small Fresnel units.

JON FAUER: Ben, thank you so much for your time. It’s been a fascinating discussion.

BEN SMITHARD: You’re very welcome, Jon. Cheers, mate.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud Part 1 of a Series

By Melanie Nelson and David Rosen Sony Cloud Production Services Sony Cloud Production Services Ci allow productions to capture, color, and review — from anywhere in the world

Introduction Everyone uses “The Cloud” in one way or another today, from apps to maps to email. But when it comes to large-format, high-bandwidth professional media files, it’s important to understand how the cloud can make production workflows more collaborative. Imagine the flexibility and accessibility that comes when software and devices are connected in the cloud. Think of the efficiencies you create for remote teams.

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In April 2013, Sony’s Cloud Production Services was created and delivered Ci, a cloud-based collaborative production workspace with the industry’s first production applications designed to upload, preview, share, create, and archive high-value, high-resolution content. Since then, Ci has been used by tens of thousands of creative professionals on daytime talk shows, major motion pictures, pilots, and independent productions. The Weather Channel used Ci to organize, share, and

file stories during the Winter Games in Sochi, and the Festival del film Locarno used Ci to test the upload of film submissions, establish a secure way for the Festival Committee to review films, and assist in onsite production workflows.

University of Southern California, Raycom Media, Turner, NBCUniversal, ITN, and Sony’s own digital entertainment companies (Sony Pictures Entertainment, Crackle, Sony Computer

Entertainment and Sony Content Marketing) all use Ci to store, share, review, rough-cut and archive material with virtual worldwide teams.

In 2014, Ci integrated with Sony Professional’s Wireless Adapter, and Catalyst Preview software to create a streamlined ‘Camera to Cloud’ collaborative production workflow that covers everything from capture to color to review.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

PRODUCTION CHALLENGES Video professionals need to be able to see footage and discuss it with each other. The ability to simply share large media files so teams can review between different locations and devices can be daunting. You’re shooting in New York, editorial is in LA, regional offices around the world want to share content with HQ, promo and trailer departments want a preview into what materials may be available. How do you get content off your camera and in a format or state ready to be reviewed by a myriad of editors, producers, and team members — in minutes, not hours?

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OFF LOCATION LOS ANGELES, LONDON, VANCOUVER

MARKETING

POST/VFX

LEGAL

I NEED TO WORK OR SHARE FOOTAGE WITH PEOPLE.

Y

PR

CI WORKSPACE

ON LOCATION I NEED TO CAPTURE FOOTAGE.

WIRELESS CAMERA

OX

OX

PRODUCER

PR

Y

DIRECTOR

NEW YORK

SOURCE MATERIAL/4K RAW

I NEED TO LOAD, BACK-UP, & ORGANIZE FOOTAGE.

CATALYST PREPARE

Sony’s camera-to-cloud capabilities can give creative professionals a faster, easier workflow. Once the production company has set up their preferred Ci company or team workspace they can invite team members and grant permissions to upload, preview, download and more. Camera operators can then use the Wireless Camera Adapter, which is a 3G / 4G / LTE / wireless LAN adapter made for XDCAM cameras, to upload optimized proxies directly to Ci for quick review of dailies or to start collaborating with off-set post production or VXF editors. Or, when shooting in 4K RAW, camera operators can import source materials and files into Catalyst Prepare to prep footage by applying a quick LUT and compression setting and then upload the optimized file. They can invite the director and producer who are currently in London to a review Worksession to get immediate feedback. Editors can access files and get started on assembly cuts from compressed dailies or request master files to be uploaded to Ci as well. And marketing and legal teams can get a jump on reviewing footage for promo or trailer usage or review a critical scene that needs legal approval with virtually no delay.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

CAPTURE. Sony makes it easy for camera operators to upload original footage directly into Ci via Sony’s wireless adapter, the CBKWA100. Instead of dubbing 20 copies of footage or risking lost or damaged hard drives, Ci gets the footage into the hands of the production team safely and securely. They can see if they got the shot they wanted, wrap the set, and move on to the next scene — saving everyone time, money, and headaches.

COLOR.

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(and more.)

If you need to make simple edits or apply color looks to your footage, Sony Creative Software’s Catalyst Prepare can log footage, perform a simple rough edit, and export that edit as video, or as an EDL for import into another NLE for further editing. Catalyst Prepare users can apply color correction, make simple edits, or transcode files into different formats, and full shots or color-corrected clips can be exported directly with the click of a mouse. This gives anyone who needs to see footage the accessibility they need to approve that perfect shot from anywhere in the world.

REVIEW. YOUR DIGITAL WORKSPACE AWAITS. Ci also helps camera operators, filmmakers, producers — any professional working with moving images that needs to give multiple people in multiple locations the ability to work with those files. Using cloud storage, upload technology, elements of social media, and traditional and mobile computing platforms, Ci makes delivering footage directly from the camera to multiple parties as easy as pressing a few buttons — without having to use couriers and hard drives. If you have an Internet connection and a connected device that runs Apple Safari or Google Chrome, both of which support HTML5 and MP4, you can use Ci.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

ALL-IN-ONE MEDIA PRODUCTION WORKSPACE. Once a Ci account is created, videographers can take footage files and upload them to a Ci Workspace. Workspaces are available in Personal, Team, and Company subscriptions and are tailored to each user’s work style. Personal Workspaces let individual users upload footage and organize and store their personal files or works-in-progress. Team Workspaces allow multiple users to access the same workspace and files collaboratively. Team Workspaces also offer more storage options as well as faster file transfers using Aspera’s file acceleration technology. Company Workspaces allow larger organizations to manage multiple Team Workspaces that enable in- and out-of-network employees, vendors, or partners with advanced permission capabilities to share and access files they need. Company Workspaces also offer customizable storage options under a single administrative account. Ci’s dashboard will associate your personal Ci Workspace with every Team and Company Workspace you’ve been invited to so it’s easy to access every Workspace, project, or file whenever needed.

UPLOAD. ORGANIZE. ACCESS. Once in your Workspace, Ci users can upload footage, organize it into folders, and access all the footage in their account. As files upload, Ci will generate proxies to use for preview and collaboration from a variety of professional codecs including XAVC™, H264 and ProRes. These proxy files allow the user, or anyone invited by the user, to view the footage without having to kill large amounts of data and bandwidth that comes with downloading large video files. The proxy files start at 270p (mobile), and can be optimized up to 1080p depending on the type of bandwidth accessible for the account. Ci also currently supports XAVC Intraframe, and soon XAVC Long GOP. Ci provides accelerated uploads and downloads of RAW files and is currently working on developing proxy generations for preview capabilities. In the meantime, Sony Creative Software’s Catalyst Browse or Catalyst Prepare allow the debayering of Sony RAW footage to other formats, which can then be uploaded directly to Ci. Ci’s open API also lets you integrate your existing systems simply and securely, so you can use your favorite production tools while still taking advantage of the cloud.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

PICK. PACK. SHIP, & TRACK. Ci users can create MediaBoxes to securely send files to production team members or anyone else. Recipients receive an email with links to embedded proxies and, if desired, a link to download the footage. MediaBoxes have several security options including password protection, download permissions, and link expiration. With built-in productivity tracking, Ci also keeps track of who opens, views, and downloads footage.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

CREATIVE COLLABORATION REIMAGINED. Ci’s real-time collaboration tools are designed to improve productivity and reduce turnaround times. Using Ci WorkSessions like VideoReview and AudioReview — producers, directors, cinematographers, and visual artists can collaborate by using features like frame-specific commenting and annotation, which can be exported to XML or PDF. Users invited to WorkSessions can draw or make notes at the frame level to create simple timelines with annotations and threaded comments that can be exported as markers into non-linear editing systems for fine-tuning and finishing.

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Ci-eeing through the Cloud

ON THE ROAD & ON LOCATION. As we grow more dependent on mobile technologies every day, production professionals want the ability to review their content from anywhere in the world, on almost any device. Ci’s suite of proxy files for uploaded footage is designed for mobile workforces and devices, allowing users to preview footage from a cellphone without having to wait for a long, high-quality download. Ci’s adaptive streaming ensures that you get the best viewing experience your bandwidth can support. Ci also created the IOS app — Ci Mobile — which lets users log in to Ci as well upload footage and images shot from their mobile device directly to Ci. Directors, DPs and location scouts can send shot ideas and location photos to the entire team or preview dailies shot from another set location.

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DISCOVER CI. Designed specifically for uploading and delivering large media files and enabling collaborative workflows, studios, broadcasters, production houses, and independent filmmakers are discovering how Ci can bring virtual teams together, improve productivity and reduce turnaround times. To learn more and get a free trial visit: sonymcs.com/go/cinealta Network services, content, and the operating system and software of this Product may be subject to individual terms and conditions and changed, interrupted or discontinued at any time and may require fees, registration and credit card information.

User Case Study: The Weather Company Looks to the Cloud Working among distributed teams and resources under tight timelines and varied conditions is a significant challenge for all TV broadcasters, and The Weather Company is no exception. Through The Weather Channel, weather.com, Weather Underground, Intellicast.com, and third-party publishing partners, the company provides millions of people every day with the world’s best weather forecasts, content and data, and connects with them through television, online, mobile and tablet screens.

Historically, TWC has used traditional storage media, satellite-based technology, physical shipping and transfer mechanisms. However, TWC teams located across the globe were increasingly producing webisodes, long-form content, and field reports, while being challenged by shortened time frames and delivery constraints.

The Weather Company needed a robust and secure platform that could handle the varied video content

they work with, and chose Sony Cloud Production Services (Sony CPS). The Ci platform met several of TWC’s requirements. TWC required a simple, straightforward workflow that allowed any of their team members to easily access and understand the platform. Team members needed to upload materials quickly and efficiently and review and share materials with colleagues around the globe.

Ci gave the company a web browser-based user interface that made it easy to log-in, navigate, upload and share content. Ci also offered applications that let users review footage to determine what they want to use as part of their workflow.

The Sony MCS Ci Products and Platform gave TWC the ability to collaborate on time-sensitive weather video and audio footage, make production decisions, and upload content available for distribution — to and from any location in the world — including the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia.

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Creating a

POWER-ful Graphic Look

for Sony Playstation® Network Series

By David Heuring

On the shifting landscape of television, another landmark passed this March, when Powers, the small-screen adaptation of the noir comic book series of that name, premiered. The show stars Sharlto Copley and Susan Heyward as homicide detectives who investigate cases involving superheroes and supervillains.

In addition to the combination of police procedural and superhuman powers, what’s unique about Powers is that it is the first original live-action television series on Sony’s PlayStation Network. It’s also the latest in a growing list of over-the-top content shot with Sony’s F55 4K cameras.

The show streams exclusively on PlayStation consoles, with the exception of the first episode currently on Youtube. PS Plus subscribers can watch the entire first season — 10 episodes — for free. To see the first episode of Powers click here.

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Creating a Power-ful Graphic

Director David Slade and cinematographer John Lynch handled the first two episodes, and Jan RichterFriis handled cinematography on the subsequent eight. Two of those chapters were directed by Mikael Salomon, ASC, a cinematographer-turned-director whose keen eye was behind the camera on films like The Abyss, Always and Far & Away. After more than 50 films and two Oscar nominations as a cinematographer, Salomon turned to directing more than 15 years ago. His experience shooting for master directors like Ron Howard, Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg didn’t hurt either.

The Powers production was based in Atlanta, where the main set depicted a police station. A good portion — it varied according to the script — was done on locations in the Atlanta area. The budget was rumored to be roughly $3.6 million per episode. The pilot was done in 12 days, and the other episodes in eight.

Given the visual effects-heavy subject matter, there was a lot of fire, explosions, and characters flying through the air.

Most of the superpowered characters are dressed normally — as opposed to tights and a cape.

“My first episode included a lot of dialogue, relative to the overall series,” says Salomon. “When you have good actors, it becomes something you want to look at.”

Although Salomon and Richter-Friis are both Danish and have known each other for years, this was their first collaboration.

When the duo came onto the project, the decision to shoot on the Sony F55 in 4K resolution had already been made. In the end, they were happy with the choice.

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When the duo came onto the project, the decision to shoot on the Sony F55 in 4K resolution had already been made. In the end, they were happy with the choice.

“The end result looks nice,” says Salomon.

“The contrast ratio is impressive — it holds up very well even in very high contrast situations. We had a lot of very challenging situations, shooting fire wide open, for example. Usually that kind of thing burns out. But we were able to maintain some detail.”

The importance of well-photographed flames reminded Salomon of Backdraft, Ron Howard’s 1991 firefighter tale. The visual effects photography on that project earned a share of an Oscar nomination for Salomon, who also handled the live-action cinematography.

“On Backdraft, I obviously shot film, and I had the luxury of lighting the set to a very high level, in order to stop down and get some detail,” he says. “In television, you often have to go with what’s there, and often you get a very white flame, which is not how audiences experience fire. So I thought the Sony camera was helpful in that way.”

“The end result looks nice,” says Salomon. “The contrast ratio is impressive – it holds up very well even in very high contrast situations.

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Salomon did have some criticisms of the camera. “I would say that there were some ergonomic issues,” he says. “There were some incompatibility issues with accessories that caused some shutdowns. We lost some time and that was upsetting.

And in order to go to 120 frames per second, you have to go in and take the lens off to add a high speed filter. But when it’s all said and done, it’s a very nice image.”

For his episodes – The Raconteur of the Funeral Circuit and F@#k the Big Chiller — Salomon asked Richter-Friis to add contrast and shape to the look established in the pilot.

Usually two or three F55 cameras were used. On-set monitors presented images in Rec 709 format. The lenses were primes or short zooms.

They did take advantage of the ability to shoot at frame rates up to 240, although 120 was a more common rate for over-cranked scenes.

Richter-Friis says that he respected the look established in the pilot, given the difficulties of getting the production underway.

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Usually two or three F55 cameras were used. On-set monitors presented images in Rec 709 format.

Creating a Power-ful Graphic

“But of course, you can’t help but go your own way to an extent,” he says. “I think the Sony camera — and all modern HD cameras — really like soft light. Hard light is tricky, and obviously in television you have to make it look good in no time. On Powers, we had more crew, and I did not operate the camera.”

The look that Salomon and Richter-Friis arrived at was very graphic. The ARRI/Zeiss Master Prime lenses used on the pilot were an important element in the look. “Like a comic book, it’s very contrasty,” says Richter-Friis. “I tried to shoot between a 2 and a 2.8, which gives the focus puller a bit more of a chance. We were so pressed for time. We couldn’t keep doing takes. But we still had nice out-of-focus backgrounds, which instantly make things look much more cinematic.”

Richter-Friis switched up his approach for some flashback scenes, using some old Bausch & Lomb Super Baltar lenses. “They’re so imperfect in such a nice and soft way that they have a really great look,” he says. “Those flashbacks ended up looking really cinematic.

They’re also very flattering on actresses — they make a face look really nice and it take away some of the blemishes.

“I think it’s very interesting to use old aged lenses,” he says. “It creates a good look and it takes the video look away. If I was doing another series and I was doing the pilot, I could be quite tempted to use like, older lenses all the way through. It can result in quite a strong look.

“Like a comic book, it’s very contrasty,” says Richter-Friis. “I tried to shoot between a 2 and a 2.8...

Creating a Power-ful Graphic

“Shooting 4K has its challenges,” he says. “TVs are so huge today, and we don’t want to distract people or have them noticing folds, wig lines, makeup, wrinkles or blemishes. We want to direct viewers into the story.

We want to create an environment where they don’t think of those details. I think by shooting 4K you risk having too much detail.

“But afterwards, you can do a lot to bring things back,” he says. “There’s so much information that you can do a lot of tweaking in the grade.

The plan is for postproduction to down-convert to 2K when they do the visual effects. It’s interesting to work with it in the grade to take away a bit of that excessive detail and sharpness in the 4K.” The filmmakers sought to add energy and dynamism by moving the camera extensively throughout. But he says the camera adapted well to the changes.

“The F55 camera is very stable,” he says. “You can trust the ASA rating, so the lighting crew can use a light meter for pre-lighting, so that when I came in, the lighting crew had normally lit it quite right.”

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Having two full camera crews on at all times added flexibility. For some episodes, the director would ask for a crane or Steadicam, depending on the script. Richter-Friis says that the F55 worked quickly and well with A camera operator Larry Karman’s Steadicam rig, a quality that the showrunners appreciated as well as the camera department and the directors. The F55’s accuracy and efficiency were also pluses.

“The F55 camera is very stable,” he says. “You can trust the ASA rating, so the lighting crew can use a light meter for pre-lighting...

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Creating a Power-ful Graphic

“I love the color range and I love the dynamic range,” he says. “The amount that it sees into the darkness is quite amazing, and it does affect the way you’re lighting. In the darkness, you don’t need very much light. And if you want it very contrasty, you can always dial in more contrast later in the timing.”

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Generally, the F55s were set to expose at 800 ASA rather than their native rating of 1250.

Richter-Friis says that Lynch’s testing revealed that the 800 rating virtually eliminated noise.

For a few action and high-speed scenes or low-light situations, the cameras were set at 1250 ASA.

“I love the color range and I love the dynamic range,” he says.

“The amount that it sees into the darkness is quite amazing...

“That dynamic range allows you to move faster because you don’t need to light every corner,” says Richter-Friis. “There will be ambient light, which will just bleed into corners, so you can use less light.

They’re so fast — and with a fast

lens, it’s quite quick to work with.

I find myself working to get lamps down to the right level. If you have a night situation and you put a big lamp in a cherry picker, it’s like a leftover from the old days of film.

You don’t need that much.”

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Creating a Power-ful Graphic

In tune with his old-school approach, Richter-Friis worked without a DIT on the set. That decision was mainly due to some last-minute cost savings imposed on the production.

“I tried to fight for a DIT, but in the end, it didn’t work out,” he says. “I worked mostly with a LUT called Rec 709A. I found that the in-camera LUTs were a little different from the ones we were able to generate with the help of Sony.

In the end, Sony gave me a Pluto box, which gave me the opportunity to choose from several different LUTs.” The Pluto box is a processing solution from Pandora that can process two independent 4:4:4 data streams or a single uncompressed 4K data channel in real time.

“The RAW signal would come from the camera,” says Richter-Friis. “Using the Pluto box, we would choose a LUT on the set that we were happy with, and we planned to use the grading session more for matching. We were recording in a Log format, which captures a very flat image, but with lots of information. We didn’t do a final grade on the set, and that’s also based on my background as a film cameraman. We never used to have anything finalized on set. We had light meters and we knew what we were getting — we knew we had something to work with later.”

We were recording in a Log format, which captures a very flat image, but with lots of information.

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Visual effects supervisor Glenn Neufeld was a frequent visitor to the set. “We had a lot of scenes with stunt people flying on lines, and we also had a lot of green screen,” says Richter-Friis. “The 4K comes in really handy with the green screen work. It makes post-production work so much easier.”

Regarding the Sony F55 cameras, Richter-Friis says, “The only thing I wish for is that Sony would make a special version of the F55 for old film cameramen like myself who have been brought up with film — to make it simpler.

They could call it the F55C. I think they could lose a lot of the menus, and make it almost a box with a lens mount and one button. Because when you shoot features and dramas of this level, you’re always going to go into a timing suite, and fiddle with it later. So there’s actually no need to have a perfect picture on set. You can get lost in the menus.

There are too many options.

Most directors with a bit of experience can abstract. If they’re looking at a picture that’s a little bit flat or a little bit green or with a little less contrast or something, they can imagine there’s a lot of scope to do whatever you want to do in post. They don’t need to see it perfectly on the set.

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In terms of lighting for Powers, Richter-Friis used a mix of sources.

In long gray corridors inside a special high security jail designed to incarcerate superheroes with special powers, he used soft KinoFlo fixtures above, and sometimes places LEDs along the floors. The main police station set included high windows, which Richter-Friis lit from the outside with 12K tungsten fixtures through strong diffusion. Closer work was done with Kino Flo Celeb and Cineo LED fixtures, the latter of which was used with Chimera hoods next to the camera. Richter-Friis calls the Cineo more powerful and punchy.

“In the studio, all the lighting was run through its own wi-fi network and controlled through an iPad,” says the cinematographer. “The desk operator could stand next to camera and operate every lamp. It’s a very clever and quick way to work.”

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Creating a Power-ful Graphic

In long gray corridors inside a special high security jail designed to incarcerate superheroes with special powers, he used soft KinoFlo fixtures above...

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Creating a Power-ful Graphic

All in all, Richter-Friis found Powers to be an engaging assignment.

“It was great to work on a project that starts out interestingly and then develops into something beyond what we had imagined,” he says. “It was a great experience working with all the directors, but especially Mikael, because I’ve known him so long. I actually used him as a reference to get the job!”

Reflecting on the many changes in filmmaking technology since Backdraft in 1991, Salomon adds, “If you don’t embrace new technology, you’re going to fall hopelessly behind. And I have to say that some of the new technology I love. I think it’s amazing. But I also think DPs these days have it so much easier, because they can achieve effects that we, before, would spend hours doing, using huge and expensive equipment.

All the things we used to do in terms of matching — now you can just roll back and take a look. Now, you can shoot night exterior basically without any light. You can get all the headlights to burn through. You can get all the natural light.

So these improvements made possible by modern camera sure do make things easier. And there are some shows, small movies that would never have been made without the newer, more user-friendly, efficient and cheaper equipment. Certainly, some of the magic and mystery has gone out of it, but whether that’s bad or good, I don’t know. But I welcome the new technologies.”

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The End

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Going the

speed of sound with Agamemnon Andrianos

By David Heuring

Agamemnon Andrianos is a five-time Emmy nominee whose 30 years in the professional audio world includes work on features like Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and James and the Giant Peach as well as on high-end television like The Wonder Years, Nash Bridges, Desperate Housewives and most recently, Powers, Sony’s entry in the original streaming content realm.

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Speed of sound with Agamemnon Andrianos

Question: What are the main challenges you face on Powers?

Andrianos: We have a pretty large cast, which requires camera coverage that is pretty deep — two to four cameras for everything. And at any given time, I have to cover all those angles with microphones. So that involves a combination of body mics and boom microphones that will cover what the camera sees and work with what each director brings to the set.

Each episode has its own unique individual signature, so there’s no one set of challenges, aside from the location, the actors, and

So you have the mixing board, the recorders and the wireless in a stack on one cart.

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getting good sound in difficult conditions.

Q: Can you walk me through your setup?

Andrianos: A typical motion picture cart consists of a variety of equipment. Our system, from the top, it’s our wireless high end audio Sony DWX system, and it’s set up with a couple other Lectrosonics receivers.

There’s a video monitor to look at the image that the camera’s looking at, followed by some more wireless systems that are part of the wireless booms, as well as the transmission back to the director for monitoring. Below that are the recorders. There’s

a Sound Devices 970, which is capable of 32 tracks, or 64 tracks. On this particular show, we’re only using about 10 tracks. And the Aaton Cantar is an 8-track recorder, so they’re basically in tandem.

And this is a monitoring device that monitors all the inputs from the mixer. So you have the mixing board, the recorders and the wireless in a stack on one cart. That’s typical for motion picture work. Every sound mixer you talk to will have a different rig that does similar things, but this is a fairly compact system that can roll around. It’s a recording studio on wheels.

It runs off battery packs and does the job for motion picture work.

Q: You’ve been testing a new Sony audio system, Can you tell me about your thought process and how that fits into your approach?

Andrianos: Traditionally, for motion picture sound, we use boom microphones and body mics to work with the actors on location. That technology is limited by the bandwidth, the frequency response, the dynamic range and the noise floor. Typically, we have a palette of equipment to use — things that you need to get the audio to sound very natural, articulate and particular to the frame. The Sony equipment is new digital technology that is quite linear, quite open and very smooth-sounding. And the most important thing is the actual dynamic range that these systems give us — it’s extraordinary, and very accurate to the voice. It’s been an eye-opener in the technology of radio mics. It is truly spectacular.

And the most important thing is the actual dynamic range that these systems give us...

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Speed of sound with Agamemnon Andrianos

Q: Can you give an example of how this additional dynamic range helps?

Andrianos: Typically, we in the industry use Lectrosonics, Sescom, and Audio Ltd. tools.

Sony’s kind of a newcomer to production sound. The biggest difference I see is in the noise floor and the dynamic range. The sound quality itself is just truly accurate, like a hardwired microphone. You cannot discern the difference between this wireless system and a mic that is plugged in with a hardline into the mixing board. That’s a major difference versus the wireless systems that have been used in the past. You want to have that accuracy on a set because that’s the measure of a true performance. Having that accuracy at the first stage of recording gives you an advantage.

Q: What are some of some of the more difficult production environments you’ve been encountering on Powers?

Andrianos: Typically on Powers we do a lot of location work, and there are some very noisy locations. They’ll have a noise floor from about 80 to maybe 90 dB of 119

SPL just out in the environment. That makes it very challenging to get a good recording. It’s just environmental noise. And you want to get a high ratio of the recorded sound versus the background noise so that the voice can come through. With the Sony microphone, you can get quite good dynamic range that is very accurate for the scene. The Sony has an openness and a clarity that is very special. That articulation and great dynamic range bring out the

best voice quality. It’s almost like the timbre of an instrument. If you look at the human voice and its range, it’s quite dynamic. So to record it accurately, there’s a tremendous range that must be covered. To have a wireless microphone that does that as well as a hardwired microphone is quite innovative.

Q: How would you assess the build quality of this new system? How do you see it holding up to the rigors of production?

Andrianos: The build quality is very impressive. The transmitterreceivers seem to be a really nice package. The rack mounting’s excellent. The transmitter looks pretty robust. The access to the menus is very good. It’s very easy to learn the system. There’s great frequency range. You can have the command remote function right at the sound cart, so you don’t need to be doing this at the transmitter. You can access all parameters very readily. It’s quite advanced. Learn the menu curves and you could be pretty up to speed for working with the system.

The Sony has an openness and a clarity that is very special. That articulation and great dynamic range bring out the best voice quality.

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Speed of sound with Agamemnon Andrianos

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Q: What about compatibility with other analog units?

Andrianos: There is a way to slot this system with other typical analog transmitter-receivers, but most of the things we use are a hybrid of analog and digital, so it seems to fit right in there. I keep my whole system analog right up to the front end, but the wireless mics are all either digital hybrids or digital. But the Sony is an all-digital system and you can tailor-fit it. It’s not a big issue, but you have a lot of flexibility to go all-digital or allanalog, depending on how your system is set up.

Q: What about encryption? That is an important topic these days, isn’t it?

Andrianos: Encryption is the wave of the future. As we work on these sets, privacy is critical, so that’s a big feature. I look forward to using that — it’s going to be really valuable for motion picture sets.

It will give me the ability that I know that my set is a closed set when I have my wireless mics set up.

Q: How about the frequency coverage range?

Andrianos: In terms of frequency coverage, you can basically tailor it to what you need. The transmitters are in blocks — they’re quite good and can be spread out from high to low bands within the digital and analog RF spectrum. It’d be nice to see a broader range. The current system that I use is in blocks, and it is limited by the block ranges, so you have to buy receivers and transmitters to have compatibility. But Sony has a larger tenability over several more available blocks.

Q: So your overall impressions, conclusions?

Would you recommend it to other sound engineers?

For additional information on Sony’s Audio equipment, please click here or visit www.sony.com/proaudio

Andrianos: Hands down, I’d absolutely recommend it. And I would say it’s very valuable to have as a tool in your kit.

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A Bet’s A Bet. Shooting a Raunchy Comedy in 15 days

By Director of Photography Jendra Jarnagin

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New England’s most successful divorce attorney, Vince (Geoff Stults) has it all — a thriving practice, good friends, and his pick of any woman in town from the bored housewives he represents to pretty young co-eds working as strippers. To Vince, life is one big competition, and losing is unacceptable. This also applies in his dating life with his “love ‘em and leave ‘em” attitude. But Vince finally meets his match in Jane (Mena Suvari). Jane is equally successful, beautiful, and has spent the last year traveling the world taking her revenge on all men for her cheating husband and ugly divorce.

When Vince and Jane meet through their best friends, Vince immediately sees a new conquest and Jane sees a new target. Together they enter into a series of entertaining wagers with each other where the winner gets to decide the fate of the loser.

A hilarious, sexy, romantic comedy also starring Kristin Chenoweth, Eric Roberts, Jennifer Finnigan, Josh Hopkins, and Kenan Thompson, A Bet’s A Bet proves that love is the one bet where everyone wins.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

Mrs. Kemp (played by Kristin Chenoweth) in pleasantly surprised to hear the results of her divorce settlement.

Available worldwide on Video‑On‑Demand and DVD in early 2015.

Released by VMI Worldwide in partnership with Cinedigm.

Directed by Jennifer Finnigan and Jonathan Silverman.

Produced by Chad Verdi and Gino Pereira for Verdi Productions.

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I was really excited to be offered this film, because the script was so tight and polished, it read more like a quality studio film than an independent film. And from our first phone interview, I fell in love with the directors: the husband and wife team of Jennifer Finnigan and Jonathan Silverman, both highly experienced, talented and successful actors.

DP Jendra Jarnagin with co-directors Jonathan Silverman and Jennifer Finnigan.

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Photo Credit: National Geo by screen Photo Will grab Vinci 126

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Photo by Will Vinci Jendra and B camera operator Amanda McGrady set up a night exterior, with A Camera 1st AC Nolan Ball.

I’d also been wanting to work with prolific Rhode Island producer, Chad Verdi, being a native Rhode Islander myself. The biggest thrill was that I got to shoot in my hometown of Cranston, RI. I stayed at my dad’s house and 2/3 of the locations were less than 2 miles away! In fact one of our main locations was my idea: a “multi-club” called Mardi Gras where my mother used to go line dancing when I was a teenager.

It was made clear to me before accepting the job that the budget was tight, with an ambitious 15 day schedule, and that we would need to shoot 2 cameras. The F55 was new at the time, and I was looking forward to trying it out, after being very impressed with the image quality of a short film I shot on the Sony F65, and liking the new form factor of the F55. I was excited Sony had finally made a camera that was shaped like a camera.

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So I shot some extensive tests. Since the camera was so new at the time there was a lot of industry interest in the camera and I kept getting a lot of phone calls and people being referred to me to ask about my tests. So I decided to post a comprehensive test report on my blog so I could reduce the time I was spending on in-depth phone calls with all the inquiries I was getting.

My test report is available online, though keep in mind that this was the earliest firmware (June 2013) and there have been a lot more features and improvements introduced since then.

Click here to view the test.

We screened the tests at Goldcrest Post in NYC and I drew some surprising conclusions. First and foremost, I saw no benefit to shooting 4K RAW on this budget when the XAVC™ codec was so good. I devised tests designed to stress the codec and it turns out that I could not break the codec, no matter how hard I tried. The next thing that impressed me was the low light performance. I determined I would not hesitate to bump up the ISO one stop to 2500 (from its already impressive native 1250.) In some cases I would be willing to use 5000 ISO, but only if I shot the whole scene that way, so the noise characteristics didn’t show in contrast to non-boosted material. The other significant take‑away from my testing was that I felt the HD material looked nearly indistinguishable from the 4K material when viewed on a 2K projector. The downsampling in‑camera from the 4K sensor looked like 4K originated material, not like HD. So the decision to shoot 4K or HD become a practical one, not an aesthetic one. I was fine with whatever turned out to be best for the project. We had a discussion with the post-production supervisor (who luckily was already involved during prep), the editor and the producers and devised a workflow to shoot 4K. I’ll speak more about the workflow later, but the main reasons for deciding on 4K was that with the XAVC codec the file sizes were reasonable so we thought it was best for future-proofing the movie to originate on 4K. We also considered the possibility of re-framing in post, though we were able to get enough coverage that it didn’t turn out to be necessary very often.

Photo by Will Vinci Co-director Jonathan Silverman and Jendra look on as Alec Jarnagin rehearses a Steadicam shot at The Glory Hole.

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We assembled a small lighting package (our biggest guns were 2K tungsten and 1.8 HMI) and we only had one or two 2000W generators for convenience. I had a stellar local crew, and was excited that I finally got to work with Gaffer Brandon Meadows and Key Grip Paul Bulgin, since I liked them a lot when we prepped and scouted a feature slated to shoot in Rhode Island a few years ago that sadly had been cancelled.

I wanted my B camera operator to also be the 2nd Unit DP, as I was planning to utilize a lot of 2nd Unit to make this schedule work, and the opening credit sequence was a post card style montage of beauty shots of the state, requiring lots and lots of B roll. For that we hired Amanda McGrady and we also had someone on the team shooting B roll every weekend in different parts of the state: sometimes me and sometimes DIT/Post Production Supervisor Sam Eilertsen, who has shot several features as DP for Verdi Productions. I had my husband Alec Jarnagin, SOC as Steadicam Operator for a few days as well, and we also sent him out to shoot B roll while he was there.

Between our two camera packages, we shared one set of Sony CineAlta 4K lenses, and for each camera we had an accessories kit from Solid Camera, that allowed extra mounting points and a solid top handle, like a cage without adding bulk. My favorite aspect of the Solid Camera accessories was the increased positioning options for the viewfinder. I must say I really love the brightness, sharpness and quality of the super lightweight 7-inch LCD monitor that comes with the F55

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camera. I wish it was available separately to be compatible with other cameras, so I could buy it to use it all the time; I love it so much. Rounding out our camera package were my go-to filters for close ups: Tiffen Soft FX ½ and Soft FX 1. I like how they reduce harshness when too much detail is unwanted, without making the image look affected. I call them the “invisible filter” and hardly ever shoot a project without them in my toolkit.

Photo by Will Vinci Jendra shoots a Close Up of Jane at the firing range, assisted by Nolan Ball, as the location owner looks on.

“I must say I really love the brightness, sharpness and quality of the super lightweight 7-inch LCD monitor that comes with the F55 camera.�

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Stylistically, we were going for a slick and beautiful look, without too much artifice. This film is like a romantic comedy with an edge. We had some occasional use of emotionally appropriate handheld camera work but mostly utilized dolly and some Steadicam for an understated, seamless style. Jennifer had assembled a “look book” on Pinterest that was very helpful, and their main word to describe the look they wanted was “warm,” which I came to understand wasn’t just about color, but also emotional tone. When we started talking about what kinds of movies they liked, “Crazy Stupid Love” came to mind as a comedy with great lighting that I loved the look of. When I mentioned it, Jonny got very excited, since they had the same film in mind and just hadn’t mentioned it yet, so that became our prime visual reference. They even threw in a nod to the movie in one of the lines of our film.

Jane takes care of Vince after he was unknowingly slipped some drugs.

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Courtesy of Verdi Productions

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THE SHOOT The shoot went very smoothly, since we had done a decent amount of prep. We only had a half hour of overtime the whole shoot, and I am proud that it doesn’t look like it was shot in 15 days. It also doesn’t look like it was made on a shoestring and avoids many of the compromises we are accustomed to when shooting with multiple cameras.

Stephanie (played by co-director Jennifer Finnigan) confronts her boyfriend Kenny (Josh Hopkins) after a surprising discovery.

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Photo by Will Vinci

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We were cracking up every day on set and once I even strained my abs while holding in laughter, while bent over the camera in the hilarious Charades scene. The cast and crew kept betting each other ridiculous things, in keeping with the spirit of the film, and we all had a great time. Of

course we could have done a lot more if we had more time and money, but my only true regret is that we didn’t have stand-ins. That caused a lot of issues and inefficiency and would be the first thing I would change if we had it to do over again.

A hilarious game of Charades brings Vince & Jane’s best friends into their competitive relationship. Kenny (played by Josh Hopkins) and Stephanie (played by co‑director Jennifer Finnigan) are the couple responsible for Vince & Jane meeting.

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Photo by Will Vinci Jendra and Co-director Jennifer Finnigan share a laugh; Production Designer Kevin Lang looks on.

Our biggest factor in pulling off this ambitious schedule was smart use of locations. We had 61 scenes, (5 of which were night exteriors) 34 speaking roles and 17 locations. We spent a whole week at a large house that doubled as 4 different character’s homes, and used the neighbor’s front yard for the Pickle Prince of Providence’s patio, a major turning point in the film. We spent another week at Mardi Gras nightclub, which served as 4 different bars and clubs in the film, each having multiple scenes. And the third week of production was spent at all the other locations. We even built 2 sets in the production office: the therapist’s office, and the nursing home where Vince’s punishment for losing a bet is to entertain senior citizens by attempting to make balloon animals, while dressed as a clown.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions 136

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We shot-listed every scene in advance, often while visiting the locations, and sometimes I shot photo storyboards with my DSLR or the Artemis director’s viewfinder app on my iPhone. For the firing range scene in particular we had to precisely map out the exact camera positions and lenses in advance, for a variety of reasons. First and foremost was safety since they were firing blanks and some inserts were shot with live ammo. Also the space in there was super tight with the dividers between the lanes, and we had a very small window of time to accomplish the scene. Of course we wanted to let the actors maximize the time and minimize our time spent discussing shots and moving the camera around.

For most other scenes we were more flexible about deviating from our shot list, based on new ideas in the blocking rehearsals. One of the most interesting scenes in the film from a cinematography standpoint was Jonny’s idea. He asked it we could devise a way to do an entire pool

game scene (more than 2 pages long) as one shot without cutting. I loved the idea and thought it was very possible if we moved back and forth on a dolly track and kept them in motion most of the time.

The idea was to start wide as she broke, push in to track with them as they talked and flirted and as we paid attention to their conversation, not drawing attention to the fact that she was running the table.

The audience, like Vince, isn’t really noticing that she’s cleaning up, until we pull back again at the end as she sinks the 8 ball. We spent most of our time rehearsing all the beats and positions on the dolly track for me to counter their movements and be in all the right places to show and not show exactly the right things at the right moments. We had a backup plan of some added coverage if it didn’t work out, but we got it successfully in just a few takes. When you watch the scene, its very effective in that you don’t really notice the lack of a cut. It flows organically without being gimmicky.

We joked on the scout that this would be the scene we talk about in the magazine article.

The filmmakers shot the pool scene in one moving shot, to shift attention away from Jane instantly winning, without Vince ever having a shot.

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Courtesy of Verdi Productions

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

Gaffer Brandon Meadows devised a self-illuminated table to avoid adding any lights or stands that would be reflected in the mirrored light-up walls of the club.

One of our most interesting challenges was a gorgeous nightclub space within Mardi Gras that had lots of great built-in lighting design. For the scene where some strangers dose Vince with ecstasy, the walls light up with these half-mirrored convex bubbles, (see photo). They are really cool looking, so I wanted to make full use of them and not avoid them. However when you look at them, they reflect 360 degrees of the room. Hiding ourselves in the dark was hard enough, but there was no way to add ANY of our own lights without seeing them. So we had to devise a way to light the scene with practical lights that could be seen in the reflections. Brandon, the Gaffer, had a genius idea

and quickly devised a light-up piece of furniture. He and Paul, the Key Grip, removed the cover of one of the tables that the club had, quickly found and cut a piece of plexi glass, backed it with heavy diffusion and threw some Kino Flos inside. The table was like a storage bench and there was no ventilation inside so the lights were overheating, so they packed them in bags of ice! The most impressive thing is that they had this whole thing ready in less than 20 minutes. By the time we were ready to shoot we didn’t need to wait on it at all. It looks great, adds a lot to the scene and solved our lighting dilemma. I love creative problem solving and the teamwork of devising clever solutions.

“When you watch the scene, its very effective in that you don’t really notice the lack of a cut. It flows organically without being gimmicky. We joked on the scout that this would be the scene we talk about in the magazine article.”

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The scenes where we really pushed the camera to its limits were two scenes where different characters were driving around at night. When I got the script, they asked if they needed to rewrite those as being “out of our league” on this budget. I said “let’s wait til we shoot some tests. I’ve heard the F55 is incredible in low light.” So I shot one of the scenes at 5000 ISO and the other was sufficient at 2500. We were prepared to throw up one or two of our own lights to drive by or hit some backgrounds if there was too big of a dead spot, but we ended up not having the time, and it worked out fine. The secret to pulling this off was some really careful scouting. I went out by myself for many hours with the location manager searching for interesting looking brightly lit streets in downtown Providence. I shot some videos on my 7D at 6400 ISO to see where there was enough light on the surrounding buildings. We read the scenes to time out the driving and narrowed down which were the most interesting streets that allowed enough time for all the dialogue. Once we had some choices, we even figured out our cues for when to roll and when to call action, etc. I sent some scouting videos to the directors and they loved it!

It looks really natural to see the interplay of all the real city lights across their faces: traffic lights shifting from green to red, tail lights of the cars in front of them, lights from the lit-up buildings of downtown Providence. It looks so real because it IS real. The only augmentation that I provided was lining the car interiors with white muslin, anywhere that the camera didn’t see. And I brought along a LitePanels MicroPro battery powered LED light. It ended up being pretty strong at that exposure so to avoid looking fake I put heavy diffusion on it, dimmed it all the way down, and bounced it off the back seat, next to where I was sitting with the camera on my shoulder. I wanted to add a little texture to the backs of the seats, since my body was blocking the light coming in the back window. I was so amazed that I kept thinking, “this is what cinematographers have been waiting for all our lives: to shoot at night and with minimal effort have it look how it looks in real life.” We were working with such low light levels that in color correction we actually had to bring down the brightness of the dashboard lights.

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Kenny and Stephanie drive home after their performance at the gay club. This scene was shot at ISO 5000, utilizing existing city lighting.

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

“I was so amazed that I kept thinking, “this is what cinematographers have been waiting for all our lives: to shoot at night and with minimal effort have it look how it looks in real life.”

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WORKFLOW We took full advantage of one of the unique features of this camera which is simultaneous XAVC recording (in either 4K or HD) and XDCAM™ recording in HD. Our editor, Keith Croket, wanted to use Final Cut Pro 7, which no longer supports new codecs. XAVC is supported in Premiere and FCPX but not 7. But XDCAM is supported in FCP 7. So no transcoding was needed since the camera can record both simultaneously. That was a huge amount of effort saved and a really smart feature to have in a camera.

Jendra rolling on a shot at one of the nightclub scenes.

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I discussed our whole finishing path with Sam Eilertsen, our Post Production Supervisor, and wanted to make sure that he could do a conform to the original 4K material in-house at Verdi Productions, without incurring additional cost at the post house. I’ve had low budget features hampered in their finishing in the past, because of not being able to afford the costly extra step of a conform (aka on-line edit.) Upon completing a test with Keith in LA, Sam assured me this would be no problem, and we therefore decided there was no reason not to shoot 4K. Sam worked as our DIT and assistant editor on set, reviewing circle takes with the Directors, and dialing in some quick and simple preliminary color correction to the dailies, since we were shooting in

S-Log2. Since we had this option without costing us any extra time, we opted not to use any LUTs on set, other than the camera output option of the standard Rec. 709 LUT. By the time we wrapped, we were able to view most of the movie as an assembly before it was sent to Keith in LA. It was hugely helpful for any potential reshoots, inserts, needed 2nd unit, and to get the feedback for how we were doing with coverage and other compromises necessitated by the schedule.

When it came time to finish post, Sam had a genius idea that I suspect more and more productions will begin to utilize, but I had not yet thought of myself nor heard of anyone else doing this.

Instead of a rushed one-week DI in the expensive full‑service post facility (we used Modulus in

Courtesy of Verdi Productions

Vince treats Jane to a candle-lit dinner.

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Photo by Will Vinci

Boston) Sam had the time, equipment and skills to do a first pass himself using Davinci Resolve at Verdi Productions office. I thought this was a great idea since my own and many other DPs experience of a rushed DI meant having to make several compromises in “choosing your battles” in terms of time management. He went through the movie once, dialing in some baseline corrections, then I came back to RI for a few days to supervise and was happy to discover he was a very good colorist.

We got through most of the film in the time I was there and I left him with some notes on my wishes for the final touches. He finished it up, and took it to Modulus to check it on their calibrated displays, with just a few minor corrections needed.

We had a cast & crew screening of the DCP at the Showcase Cinemas in Warwick, RI, which was the first time I got to see the finished film with color, sound mix and music. It looked great and I’m really happy with how it turned out. It’s great to see any of your work on a large screen with a large audience, but especially a comedy. This was the movie theater I grew up going to nearly every weekend, so it was very exciting and rewarding to have my own film screening there, with many family and friends in attendance.

Sam had this to say about his experience with grading the final film: “A Bet’s A Bet was a pleasure to grade since it was clean, consistent, and well shot. There wasn’t a lot of ‘cleaning up’ needed; it was all about enhancement. I was able to easily conform the XDCAM proxies back to the original XAVC MXF files, which were seamless to work with in Resolve. I would always start with the S-Log2to-Rec. 709 LUT as a base, sometimes layering the log back in for very bright highlights. The F55 has amazing highlight range, so there was always a lot of information to work with in the brights. We devised one technique to give some scenes a ‘postcard’ feel which Jendra referred to as ‘Sam’s Secret Sauce’: basically I would key the highlights from the graded image, blur them, and screen‑blend back on top, emulating a diffusion filter which I could dial in at different strengths. I think that doing additional diffusion in post is a great option for DPs because it means you don’t have to hardcode the diffusion into your original image. The scenes shot at ISO 5000, as well as a few shots we had enlarged significantly in post, were de‑noised using the NeatVideo OFX plugin, but this was needed in only a handful of instances.

The film was mastered as a 1080p ProResHQ and dubbed to HDCAM SR™ for delivery, although because the film was shot in 4K and required no visual effects work, we have the option of creating a 4K master if 4K distribution becomes an option in the future.”

A Bet’s A Bet was released in the US on DVD and VOD in January 2015, and will be available worldwide in June 2015. (international title: The Opposite Sex) For more information about Jendra Jarnagin, or to see a trailer for the movie, visit Jendra’s website www.floatingcamera.com

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TWC Sports Produced by Mike DesRoches

Twitter: @DesRochesSony Senior Sales Support Engineer, Sony Electronics Inc.

At Time Warner Cable Sports (TWC Sports), the Production Operations Department strives to provide their regional sports networks’ professional team partners — the Los Angeles Lakers, LA Galaxy, Los Angeles Sparks and Los Angeles Dodgers — with compelling, high quality images.

These images, which are critical to telling a better story, support Time Warner Cable SportsNet’s, Time Warner Cable Deportes’ and SportsNet LA’s programming philosophies of depth and access, which give fans an in-depth look into every aspect of their favorite teams.

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TWC Sports

Typically, an ENG workflow must meet specific demands that are universal to the industry: quick turnaround capabilities, reliable equipment and compatibility between live production trucks and production facilities. The standardization on Sony PDW-F800s is the clear choice for many networks worldwide for these reasons, including TWC Sports. TWC Sports relies heavily on the Sony F800 shooting 1080/60i, but understands that other steps and investments were necessary in order to compete with a changing visual landscape. With the help of Sony, TWC Sports is meeting that challenge head-on.

As large sensor formats and shallow depth of field become more commonplace and sought after, Time Warner Cable Sports has looked to identify ways to address that creative need without complicating the workflow or turn-around speeds required to support a live sports environment.

Many large sensor cameras have disadvantages specifically attributed to the ergonomics, technical workflows or lack of standard ENG functions. After testing most large sensor cameras, TWC Sports decided to invest in the Sony PMW-F55 because of its versatility and the on-going commitment Sony has provided from shoot through post production.

TWC Sports’ ENG needs are met with the same XDCAM 50Mbps 422 codec found in the F800. File-based transfers are made from the PMW-1000 and PDW-HR1/MK1 decks.

The Original Programing and Promotions departments are able to take advantage of the stunning, high speedshooting capabilities in HD and 2K, and enhanced picture resolution, including 4K and UHD. 147

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Below is a description of the various workflows and departments taking advantage of the Sony F55 at TWC SPORTS. ENG Applications: With the new Canon CN7x17 PL mount lens, TWC Sports photographers can quickly set up their cameras with traditional ergonomics and functions.

ENG ergonomics and control layouts have been developed after many years in the field and exist for a reason. In conjunction with the new Canon lens, TWC Sports has invested in multiple Sony CBK55BK shoulder mount build-up kits. They’ve proven invaluable with full ENG controls, proper balance, 149

An F55 with the ENG build-up kit being used for a spring training interview.

and support for their Lectrosonics receivers. Prior to the shoulder mount kit being announced, TWC Sports staff photographers used the F55 for ENG, but experienced limitations as it lacked a quick way to change white balance or adjust audio levels on the fly. With these limitations, TWC Sports worked hard to conceptualize and provide feedback directly to Sony. Once the production models arrived, this new ENG concept was met with many questions and required some technical planning, but the collaboration and ongoing support from Sony made the transition simple.

ENG in the Field: Before deploying in the field for ENG, TWC Sports painted the F55 to match the existing F800 cameras. PMW-1000 decks were installed in the live production trucks used on location at Dodger Stadium, STAPLES Center and Stub Hub Center.

The content is shot in XAVC™ and played out of the PMW-1000 into an EVS where the truck has immediate access to the content. The F55 can also be used as a live camera for talkbacks with the studio.

Transitioning to the PMW-1000 decks not only gives TWC Sports the ability to integrate high-end F55 content, but other cameras as well. To provide additional camera angles and support to many different departments, the company has also invested in the Sony PMW-100’s and PMW-EX1R cameras, both of which also shoot to SxS™ cards.

These cameras have proven to be very valuable when shooting player arrivals, quick pressers and other short sound bites where necessity overrules the need for a F800 or F55. This flexibility gives TWC Sports the ability to accommodate many more shoots, by prioritizing what equipment is deployed to a specific event or game.

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Original programming and promotions: Sit-down Feature Interviews

Live Game Action TWC Sports strives to be more innovative and intelligent when creating original programming, knowing that it gives viewers more depth and access to its team partners than fans have ever seen before. To do this, TWC Sports uses a variety of cameras in the Original Programming department.

Although DSLRs have become an important tool needed to shoot behind the scenes in tight spaces (like on the team plane, for example), they do have limiting features and functionality. When shooting sports, following focus and snap zooming, a fast break can be very challenging with a DSLR. The limitations with audio and picture quality compression are also limiting factors. The Sony F55 picks up the slack and truly rounds out the Original Programming department’s toolset, with plenty of features and formats to grow into as the networks continue to evolve.

Sit-down interviews with some of the biggest names in sports are important to TWC Sports’ programming and the F55 is capable of delivering a reliable product. Before the F55, additional cameras were needed to capture many additional angles. Now, a producer can choose to shoot wide, and push into a tighter shot in post. Having the ability to shoot 4K XAVC to SxS cards helps keep the workflow simplified. When turn-around times are tight, TWC Sports shoots 4K XAVC and XDCAM 50Mbps simultaneously onto SxS cards. The 4K copy can be used in post to create an episode of the networks’ signature interview program “Connected With…” and the XDCAM copy is given to studio show producers so that they can use snippets of it to promote the upcoming episode.

TWC Sports F55 Camera Kits Lenses: TWC Sports has standardized on three primary categories: ENG: New Canon 17-120mm PL zoom lens. The range of Canon’s newest PL zoom is the perfect match for the F55. The lens balances nicely on the F55. When using the center crop feature, ENG shooters can double the length without loosing any light loss.

Sit-down features: Sony Cinema Primes/ Canon EF Primes Canon EF: Canon EF lenses provide support across multiple kits. The Optitek adapters allow F55 shooters to use glass originally assigned and purchased for DSLR kits. This flexibility in the field gives all ENG and documentary shooting assignments another creative option and flexibility that was impossible only a couple years ago.

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Many of the TWCS crew at Lakers Media Day: Joseph Dias, Luca Desando-Grassi, Mike DesRoches (Sony), Anthony Violanto, Jeff Spencer, Brian DeCloux, Andy Schlachtenhaufen, Sean Jackson, Glenn Shimada, Andre Fontenelle.

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