darwinandpaine
Well-known member
I just finished a 15 day feature shoot with the HVX/M2 combo (720pn) and I thought I'd give a little report.
First of all, my AC and I rated the HVX with the M2 at 160 ISO. This means that you need a helluva lotta light. I was rarely able to get my stop above f4 indoors (without blinding the talent) and shot a lot of the film at 1/24 because I had to. Fortunately, the film was very talkie and the 1/24 didn't really hurt us. When there was action, I always tried to keep the shutter at 1/60 by adding a bit more light and hoping the talent didn't complain. A small interior generally required about 3-4k of light to get the contrast ratios right --- even when there was a lot of light pouring through windows (the movie was shot entirely on location, mostly in people's houses or local businesses).
I shot mostly with an 85mm f2, a 50mm f1.4, and a 135mm f2.8 (all Nikons). I occasionally used a 24mm f2.8. Shooting at f4 or wider means that you have to have a good AC who can really pull focus well, and I was lucky on that account. My AC was fantastic and the actors were great at hitting their marks. If you're going to shoot with the M2, a good AC is a must!
The biggest problem with the M2 is that you cannot shoot into any kind of light --- at least not with any of my lenses. Anything that went above 105 IRE would cause horrible ghosting. We were constantly having to diffuse the practicals and for one night-time fire scene, we had to take the M2 off completely as the ghosting made it look as though the actor's pants were on fire. Perhaps better lenses would not have done this. I don't know. (Any suggestions from other M2 owners?)
As for workflow, we had two 8 gig P2 cards and two 4 gig P2 cards. We had a dedicated media management person who would take the cards and offload them. We only used one card at a time, and when we got down to the 2 minute mark we would fly the card out and dump it via my G4 laptop. This worked great and we never had to use the 4 gig cards.
We did run into some trouble with the hard drives. The director had bought two 1TB "MyBook" external drives from Western Digital. We put them into a RAID 1 configuration and had two 500GB mirrors for offloading. After only one week, the first drive's Firewire port failed. Fortunately, the USB 2.0 and FW800 ports were still good. So, we started using the second drive, and to our dismay, after the second week, that drive went bad completely --- none of the ports worked and the primary drive went down completely. We ended up swapping the data to a third drive and copying it over to the first drive. From that point on, we used a PC with USB 2.0 for the transfer to the original "MyBook" which was still mirrored and useful despite its bad FW400 port. The worse part about this experience was how completely useless Western Digital support was. They had nothing to say but, "that's never happened before." I would recommend that you steer clear of these drives for anything valuable.
Our lighting kit consisted of the following:
Flolight 1400
Lowel Caselite
Lowel Scandle
Alzo Digital 2000
Two 1000w Arri Lights
Three Lowel Pro lights
Two 575w HMIs
Three 650w tweenies
Two China balls
and more (including some Kinos we hardly used)...
The three florescents (Flolight, Caselite, and Scandle) were our workhorses. They're really fantastic when you're looking for a big, broad, natural light look. With daylight tubes, they work perfectly with open windows and run cool so your talent doesn't melt. The Alzo 2000 was also fantastic at bringing up overall room light (it's rated at 2400w equivalent). It also runs pretty cool, but the fan is a bit noisy --- better for wide masters.
We used the 575 HMI mostly to mimic sunlight coming in from outside. It's a big light and a pain to set up, so we used it only when we had to. The Lowel Pro lights were great for putting on a boom and adding a little backlight. The rest of the lights were used less and often only bounced into the ceiling for some nice soft fill. The Arri Lights are fantastic for this, but they heat up the room like crazy.
Finally, everyone was impressed with the images. The HVX/M2 combo does a great job of creating the "film look" on a budget. I love working with this camera and could not be happier with it's performance on this project. (The one drawback is low light performance and the known issues of noise at around 30 IRE. The one truly bad looking scene we shot was the fireside scene. It wasn't the fire itself, but the smoke which macroblocked and looked awful.)
The M2 is also a fantastic tool, and I have nothing but good things to say about what Redrock has accomplished. If anyone has any other questions, feel free to ask.
First of all, my AC and I rated the HVX with the M2 at 160 ISO. This means that you need a helluva lotta light. I was rarely able to get my stop above f4 indoors (without blinding the talent) and shot a lot of the film at 1/24 because I had to. Fortunately, the film was very talkie and the 1/24 didn't really hurt us. When there was action, I always tried to keep the shutter at 1/60 by adding a bit more light and hoping the talent didn't complain. A small interior generally required about 3-4k of light to get the contrast ratios right --- even when there was a lot of light pouring through windows (the movie was shot entirely on location, mostly in people's houses or local businesses).
I shot mostly with an 85mm f2, a 50mm f1.4, and a 135mm f2.8 (all Nikons). I occasionally used a 24mm f2.8. Shooting at f4 or wider means that you have to have a good AC who can really pull focus well, and I was lucky on that account. My AC was fantastic and the actors were great at hitting their marks. If you're going to shoot with the M2, a good AC is a must!
The biggest problem with the M2 is that you cannot shoot into any kind of light --- at least not with any of my lenses. Anything that went above 105 IRE would cause horrible ghosting. We were constantly having to diffuse the practicals and for one night-time fire scene, we had to take the M2 off completely as the ghosting made it look as though the actor's pants were on fire. Perhaps better lenses would not have done this. I don't know. (Any suggestions from other M2 owners?)
As for workflow, we had two 8 gig P2 cards and two 4 gig P2 cards. We had a dedicated media management person who would take the cards and offload them. We only used one card at a time, and when we got down to the 2 minute mark we would fly the card out and dump it via my G4 laptop. This worked great and we never had to use the 4 gig cards.
We did run into some trouble with the hard drives. The director had bought two 1TB "MyBook" external drives from Western Digital. We put them into a RAID 1 configuration and had two 500GB mirrors for offloading. After only one week, the first drive's Firewire port failed. Fortunately, the USB 2.0 and FW800 ports were still good. So, we started using the second drive, and to our dismay, after the second week, that drive went bad completely --- none of the ports worked and the primary drive went down completely. We ended up swapping the data to a third drive and copying it over to the first drive. From that point on, we used a PC with USB 2.0 for the transfer to the original "MyBook" which was still mirrored and useful despite its bad FW400 port. The worse part about this experience was how completely useless Western Digital support was. They had nothing to say but, "that's never happened before." I would recommend that you steer clear of these drives for anything valuable.
Our lighting kit consisted of the following:
Flolight 1400
Lowel Caselite
Lowel Scandle
Alzo Digital 2000
Two 1000w Arri Lights
Three Lowel Pro lights
Two 575w HMIs
Three 650w tweenies
Two China balls
and more (including some Kinos we hardly used)...
The three florescents (Flolight, Caselite, and Scandle) were our workhorses. They're really fantastic when you're looking for a big, broad, natural light look. With daylight tubes, they work perfectly with open windows and run cool so your talent doesn't melt. The Alzo 2000 was also fantastic at bringing up overall room light (it's rated at 2400w equivalent). It also runs pretty cool, but the fan is a bit noisy --- better for wide masters.
We used the 575 HMI mostly to mimic sunlight coming in from outside. It's a big light and a pain to set up, so we used it only when we had to. The Lowel Pro lights were great for putting on a boom and adding a little backlight. The rest of the lights were used less and often only bounced into the ceiling for some nice soft fill. The Arri Lights are fantastic for this, but they heat up the room like crazy.
Finally, everyone was impressed with the images. The HVX/M2 combo does a great job of creating the "film look" on a budget. I love working with this camera and could not be happier with it's performance on this project. (The one drawback is low light performance and the known issues of noise at around 30 IRE. The one truly bad looking scene we shot was the fireside scene. It wasn't the fire itself, but the smoke which macroblocked and looked awful.)
The M2 is also a fantastic tool, and I have nothing but good things to say about what Redrock has accomplished. If anyone has any other questions, feel free to ask.
