Kodak Australia Helpful

Left a message on the Kodak site U.S. asking the difference between 5219 (Vision3 500T, http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5219.htm) and 5230 (500T, http://motion.kodak.com/AU/en/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5230.htm) as it was newly listed with a newer data sheet.

Received a phone call from a Kodak Australia rep (Fuji Australia last year or the year before I had to chase down numbers which most were no longer working it seemed..) explaining that 5230 is basically Vision2 (iirc) and lower cost and aimed for TV dramas etc etc. with a more limited format size and length range. He was quite helpful and enthusiastic

5219 is still the latest and greatest 500T. It comes in 100ft spools.. so it's ready to bulk load, so I dont have to buy a 400ft core and rewind by hand into a bulk loader.. which takes some damn time last time I tried.

50D comes in a 200 ft core at the smallest size.. which isn't too bad, I'd like to try that too.

And also 1000ft of 65mm.. to trim down into my saved up 120 spools and paper.

New Portra 400... overexposed 5 stops?? ISO 12.5??

Hmmm.

So on one of our photowalks in Melbourne city, I incident metered for the shade, as most of my subject as in the shade and wanted to optimise exposure for my subject, this is an extra +5 stops compared to a subject in the sunlit areas... yet it handled this mixed shade/sun combination beautifully, and flattened out the lighting contrast and did not get too dense, tones are reproduced beautifull for subjects both in shade and sun, it handles such a extreme harsh contrast condition wonderfully.. I have midtones for both!

The New Portra 400.. it has fine grain.. it is very sharp, it has wonderful saturation, and a ton of local contrast snap, very good skin tones.. it is high speed.. it is pushable.. it handles overexposure, it retains highlights, it can compensate high contrast with increased exposure without pull-processing.. if you had to have only 1 colour film, this would be it, forget Ektar, you can do everything with this.

If I was shooting for the sunlit area.. you would call this an EI of 12.5! This isn't a pull-process either, it is standard.

First 10 people in Australia to Like my services page, get free C-41 processing and web size scanning of a single roll of 35mm or 120, includes cross-processing and an pull/push you wish to have done.
http://www.photodan.com.au/services.php

Portra 400 pushed to 1600

New Portra 400 pushed to 1600.. that's 4 minutes 15 seconds in C-41 developer :)

This new film is beautiful and it handles excellent at 1600.. as long as you push it though!

Though there is invariably going to be a couple of times when a bit of underexposure will be introduced, so perhaps a push to 3200, but using an EI of 1600 for exposure would be best, or push to 1600 with an EI of 1250 or 1000 even better.

Portra 400 @ 1600

 

First 10 people in Australia to Like my services page, get free C-41 processing and web size scanning of a single roll of 35mm or 120, includes cross-processing and an pull/push you wish to have done.
http://www.photodan.com.au/services.php

Portra 400 pushed to 25600

Pushed 6 stops. 7 minutes and 30 seconds processing time in Flexicolor C-41 at 39 degrees celsius.

Density range is thin, image is poor, and lots of scanner noise present. It's at this point several things spring to mind:

1. Use a fast lens to begin with (well I just need the $ for that Mamiya 645 80mm f/1.9!)
2. It's at this point, the mercury vapour and hydrogen peroxide latensification looks attractive.
3. Perhaps a tiny pre-flash.
4. A "pre-developer" if you will for about 1 minute or so, phenidone-ascorbic acid speed enhancing developer, long enough to begin to have action, without making a visible image, just to amplify the silver image a bit, in case C-41 can't discern as low intensity sites as a speed enhancing b&w dev can. Which then can be then processed through C-41 after.
5. Rehal processing, after bleaching, instead of fixing, run it through C-41 again to increase dye gain.
6. Combine hydrogen peroxide with a colour developer or C-41 during development to gain more dye yield.
7. Combine points 2 through 6.

Anyway, here is one of the images, probably the best off the roll. I do not recommend this. A push to 6400 might be doable to a good quality, the 3200 results I've seen online are quite good, I think a push to 6400, but shot with an EI of 3200 might be best though.

First 10 peoplein Australia to click Like on my services page get free C-41 processing and web size scanning for any 35mm or 120, including cross-processing and/or push/pulling (still need to get your film to me and provide return postage if you're not local).
http://www.photodan.com.au/services.php

Fucking Irritated

Update: Dumb bitch tried to sign me up to another eyeka account replacing one of the letters in my username with a number after she changed my details to her email (again), fucking fraudulent trying to sign someone else up... thankfully it looks like it needs to be activated first before it'll stop you using the same email for another account.

I've told her several times that the account belongs to me and is mine, that she can stick the video on her own fucking profile.
 
Update: Back to pissed off, "you'll be hearing from our solicitor", ah fuck off. What a fuck tard.

Update: Let me just say they are completely fucking unprofessional, they just tried taking the account again.. apparently if you've logged in to the site and your session hasnt expired.. even if the password was changed from a different login session on another computer.. you wont have to enter the password on the other computer, you're session is still good to go as is.. how insecure.

I'm going to have to stay on top of this..


Alrighty,



Since I was doing pretty much nothing in the way film (as in motion picture/video, I decided to find others to work with or for, even if it would be pretty basic it would keep me doing something and making contacts at least.

Anyway, I ended up filming and editing a commercial for a competition, for Carmen Hopkins of  "Angelgazers Film Productions", which was in Ballarat, and I finished off the colour grading and some sound replacement and syncing at home (I'm in Melbourne).

Uploaded it to vimeo with a password for a preview, approval,  asked if she had an account or if I should create a new one, so I create a new one like told (Captain Hindsight informed me I should have not made it as I was registering my own account.. but force of habit whe signing up to things.. and I still had to use my own email to activate it) then uploaded before the dead line to the competition site (dead line is now extended to March I believe).

Anyway so today she wanted to add that it was by "Carmen Hopkins of Angelgazers film productions", that's fine, I added that, they asked for the username/password so they could update it at will if needed, fine, so I changed the password to something  random they could use (as I dont want to give out my own personal password that I create and remember etc).

Well about 10 minutes later I get another call being angry at me for stealing their work and passing it off as my own. Rude. I had added that it was by "Carmen Hopkins of Angelgazerz film productions" in the description.

After the call, I checked the page, and they had deleted my other work I had added to my profile, changed my profile to be in her name, and changed the email address. Wow, just fucking wow. They had done all that before calling. Talk about burning bridges and being unprofessional. I'm certain now they intended this when asking for the username/password.

Of course I quickly changed the email back to mine and changed the password again, then fixed my profile up.

If you're going to steal someone's work you dont put in who it's actually by.

If I wanted to be as unprofessional as they have acted I would simply delete the video and replace it with a rickroll.

I've left the video on there, and made it even more explicity clear who it's by, and who did what. And that to ask for her if it happens to win. I left her contact information intact on my profile (phone/mailing address) which I hadn't filled out as I didn't notice it as a requirement if you ended up winning so you can be contacted. Anyway I left that info on there so she can be contacted, as I am not reciprocally unprofessionl.

Captain Hindsight also says that she should have given me her profile login in details to put it on hers in the first place, since she actually does have an account on there since there is a comment from her on the video.




Yes, so I was quite mad, the username is my identity, not to be associated with someone else, and it doesn't matter anyway as it's so damn unprofessional.

Anger subsided to merely being highly irritated once I made sure my account is now safe from being vandalised again.

If you have Googled this

That means you might have spoken to them and will be collaborating with them on some fashion.

This situation could have been avoided with more organisation, and well, foresight on my part (never hurts) as opposed to hindsight (:P) to avoid issues. But it was completely the fault of their unprofessionalism, I won't tolerate the actions they took, then calling me to make angry accusations, and then saying "thanks for all your hard work on the ad" nicely and hanging up like they've got what they wanted anyway now that they had control of the account.

If you're going to be shooting or editing for them, be aware you'll/they'll most likely still be shooting with the same camera.. which is a horrifying SD camera with no manual focus, no manual exposure.

You can point it where you want to get right exposure and then lock the exposure.. but it also locks the focus.. no autofocus or touch screen zone focus.. completely locked together.

The image resolution is well below the maximum potential of SD, the compression is lousy and has a lot of artefacts, and the signal to noise ratio is poor. Grading half-decently will be exceptionally hard without further degradation of the piture.

Also it'll all be relying on available lighting, and no sound recording really (apart from inbuilt on the camera).

Canon dSLR, simple detail & moire solution for 1080p

Au revoir moire, Sayonara jaggies, Hello detail.

I do not know what this didn't occur to me earlier (of course it may have occurred to someone else earlier, I just haven't read about it - but have read a lot of complaining or wishing for fixes in Magic Lantern for things like this).

Moire and lack of detail and jaggies occur in the Canon dSLR videos because there is no down scaling algorthim (sucks), meaning you end up with 1920x1080 straight pixels from the massive resolution sensor, no accounting for the gap between the pixels.

Quite like a nearest-neighbour down size in photoshop.

Well, you can fix this with an optical blur filter, to put the details out of focus... wait there is merit in this.

Even crappy lenses are too sharp for nearest neighbour down sized 1080p video off a high resolution sensor.

If the sensor was actually 1080p there wouldn't be (much) of a problem with that.

You want to enlarge (put out of focus) image detail over the sensor so you don't have a bunch of missing spatial detail thats gone flying out the window with all the other pixels being thrown out. Similar to an AA filter in the camera for stills.

To demonstrate this I have prepared a still image from a 5D II (shamelessly stolen test image from dpreview), cropped a section that seemed good, and downsized to the same factor as 1080p would be (5616 / 1920) using the nearest neighbour 'filter' (no filter, raw pixels grabbed and others chucked out), bicubic filter, and lastly, one with a gaussian blur of 1 pixel (seemed to be most appropriate size for this test) and then downsized using the nearest neighbour method (as to emulate the 5D II + some kind of softening filter on the lens).

Images are then enlarged to 200% for pixel peeping purposes.

You will have to view/download the full image to see the differences, I made it all as one image for convenience, no sharpening has been applied.

I think that a full-sensor sampling in-camera then a gaussian blur or fast blur, then nearest neighbour down size would actually be pretty damn good - because we're not losing detail, but this also blurs the noise, and would have significantly better noise characteristics @ 1080p.


Given the real detail level of the 5D II 1080p video is at or just above 720p (if you don't believe me take a still of the sharpest 1080p Canon video and downsize it using bicubic filter in Photoshop to 720p or just above, then back up to 1080p and see if you can spot any detail loss), I think that the detail loss is due to the way the image is sampled (similar to nearest neighbour) which loses detail, that is it chucks out the gaps between what it keeps, which creates moire, jaggies, etc, further detail is lost I believe in the compression of the jaggies.

So I believe the right softening filter on the Canon dSLRs may increase the detail level present, along with removing moire and jaggies.

(Update: No I do not think a diffusion filter will work well, it's overlaying the origina sharp image with a soft one to reate the diffusion, you want a just a soft filter with no diffusion, a solid peace weakish soft filter I'd think)

Infrared Sensitisation of Film

So I have some Tri-X (Arista  Premium 400) loaded in a patterson tank I presoaked in water, then soaked in a pigment that has a certain amount of IR absorption.

Now the film is drying in the tank and will be re-loaded into a reloadable 35mm canister.

Hopefully there'll be some pigment adjacent to the silver halide, and hopefully the pigment will be able to transfer energy to it.

I'll be shooting it with an R72 filter, focussed visually on a ruler for test shots, looking for a focus shift on the ruler.