HVX200 - 720p - letus35EF - horror short

X

Xax

Active member
*** UPDATE ***

http://www.sexnfun.net/sophie1.mov - first moving footage!

hi

me and a friend are dop'ing a horror short, first shots taken today, how do you guys like them? they arent color corrected yet, will be soon tho. working title is "sophie" ;)

expect a trailer in 1-2 weeks!

s1.jpg



s2.jpg



http://www.stilfabrik.ru
 
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Would like to know more about your setup as well. How much light loss you're experience. What lenses you've chosen to go with.

Any moving clips to show us? Accompanied with settings?

Really looking into purchasing a Letus35FE for my HVX as well.

Thanks.
 
third day today.
what a day.
third 16 hour day in row ;)

tomorrow we are doing the splatter scenes, expect moving stuff soon.
the letus35fe is working incredibly well so far. light loss is huge but if youve got movielights, its not an issue, the pictures are beautiful.

will post pics of my setup as well, it's

hvx200, letus35fe
20, 24, 28, 50, 90macro, 135, 200 mm canon fd lenses.
 
Xax said:
third day today.
what a day.
third 16 hour day in row ;)

tomorrow we are doing the splatter scenes, expect moving stuff soon.
the letus35fe is working incredibly well so far. light loss is huge but if youve got movielights, its not an issue, the pictures are beautiful.

will post pics of my setup as well, it's

hvx200, letus35fe
20, 24, 28, 50, 90macro, 135, 200 mm canon fd lenses.
Click to expand...

Can't wait to see some moving footage from ya.
 
Xax said:
26 hour day today.
damn.

will post footage soon ;)
Click to expand...

lol, that is some crazy working hours man!

Do share with us what it is that is taking up much of the time. Is it the setup times, working with a child actor (i believe that's a little girl in the 1st grab), various location changes, etc?

I've been on shoots that went slightly beyond 12 hours on back to back days!
 
i don't have any footage on my computer at home, will start editing tomorrow, then i am going to post a few clips and stills, as of yet, i can only offer a write up of the production conditions...

in advance: sorry for my english, i am not a native speaker :(

somewhen in october a friend and fellow moviemaker of mine asked me and a friend of mine about dop'ing (we always work together as 2 man directors of photography team) a short he has to make for a class in university, and as the script was quite interesting (interesting horror story, oportunity for good pictures), we agreed.

story: a girl gets a new flat for graduation, invites 5 of her friends for party, but it's not them whom will have the fun...

so preproduction started, he wanted around 15 minutes of film, we had 3 days planned. sfx shots included (nail into eye, head gets squished) etc. etc. as the murderer kills them people with a huge hammer. soon we agreed on a fourth day, we planned around 90 setups on 3 locations, and that was not doable in 3 days.

we painted storyboards for every setup, went on location, the director had rehearsals for over week, we looked at one rehearsal at the end...

i recently bought a hvx200 and had a letus35FE from my old dvx100 so we used that setup. i used a set of canon fd lenses which i bought off ebay piece for piece, including:

20mm, 2.8
24mm, 2.0
28mm, 2.0
50mm, 1.4
90mm, 2.5 (our workhorse)
135mm, 2.5
200mm, 2.8

will post a picture of the setup at the end.

we agreed on 720p/25p since my macbook pro won't be responsive enough for 1080i i thought.

we rented a sachtler 18 with carbon legs as my cartoni focus hasnt arrived yet, for the director we used a dell 2407fpw via 15m component cable, for focus we only had the camera's lcd (uhh, next time marshall hd monitor), indifocus with cavision rails and a geardear mattebox

as for light and grip, we got helluva-deal from a local rental.
1200w arrisun, 1200w arricompact, 2 1kw arri fresnel, dolly, minijib, lots of tracks, everything for less than 250usd, 4 days!! we had to pack quite a big package because we were shooting at night, only one exterior shot, but the letus35fe swallows quite some light, more on that later.

so preproduction was completed, shooting!

we had 2 8 gb p2 cards, an old pc laptop for offloading, a 300gb seagate external drive at an extra table in some extra room as the house was very very dusty

first day went almost flawless, 34 setups, 16 hour day, 2 hours after shooting completed i still sat at my laptop. i backed everything up at home on a second external drive for security reasons.

shooting with the letus35fe and hvx200 is not really a problerm if youve done it a few times and got the experience for the flaws.

the picture looks AWESOME, the only problem is the lighting.. we had china balls with 200w in them for the ambient, it was nearly enough, a 1kw fresnel with chimera was our key, mostly. at nights, we switched to 1,2kw hmi for more light so we can set the shutter degree to something like 90 or even 45 degrees for jitter if the hammer was swung. normally, we shot at 170 degrees. also, the lcd monitor of the hvx200 should not be used as a reference, you should always overexpose a bit! also, the monitor showed quite some grain in lots of pictures, but that was fault of the dell monitor i think. also, the resolution of the ground glass could be a tad better.

my girlfriend was first ac, since she worked with the letus35 as well already, it was not a problem, we almost had a film workflow, we agreed on putting A and B on the p2 cards, and only insert one at a time so that we won't get confused with copying and deleting the wrong cards.

i had the letus35 on rails as said plus a lens support which i used to support the letus35. it's absolutely essential if you are using the indifocus, otherwise a focus pull will move your image.

we also had a shoulder brace but didnt use that much.

everything went fine on the second day as well, very tight schedule, very hard lighting job, staging 6 people, interior with power out, cover everything, etc. etc. etc. the director did a very good job, every actor was an amateur, but he got out of them some performances i could not witness from a professional actor yet.

first real problem arised on the third day, the cord of the letus35fe broke, fortunately one electrician got his soldering set with him, so that was fixed without a problem as well. the letus35fe could have a LED to indicate the status of the adapter though.

everything was flawless as well on the fourth day, we had lots of blood and brain mass flying around, everything went well at the end, closing with a 26 hour day.

so we collected around 3-5 8gb p2 cards of footage every day, resulting in around 120-150 gb of data. it's very nice that you can record 16 minutes on a card in 720p, it's really enough to keep a steady workflow with offloading etc. i also got the clapboard on each thumbnail, so importing was so easy i wont even mention it here.

i am writing up such a summary because i read dvxuser.com a lot and got lots and lots of information from here, including the hvx book by barry green (thanks barry!), and just wanted to give back some information and more or less a good read

postproduction starts tomorrow, me and my gf are going to edit the footage on our macbook pros parallely, we are planning to color correct the whole stuff completely.

as said, i will post a picture of the setup a bit later and also some stills including scene files settings! (mostly we shot at chroma +6, and master ped -6, other settings default cinelike f6)

so long, enjoy ;)
 
Thank you for sharing that info with us until the images come and footage!!!

Seems like the Letus Flip's image was just fine for you. is that because it's a horror movie or was the image actually clean? Was it clean with all of the lenses? Sorry for so many questions. I'm interested in the Letus35FE right now as my adapter choice.
 
the image actually is clean, but i don't think that i would blow it up to 35mm.
it was clean with all the lenses, only with the 20mm, i got a bit of vignetting, but i like that stillistically anways.

don't be sorry for the questions, just ask! i researched a lot before buying the letus35fe as well... i would never shoot with an image that is not flipped, to much hassle. the thing is: don't get lenses that are over 2.8, even 2.5, then you're quite on the safe side...

here are some pictures of our setup:

on dolly - dvxuser batteries woohay!

aku019ahpdy5bat90.jpg



aku002kvt6p28ru6s.jpg


aktzz5cblxz3jmb9w.jpg


pictures taken by my lovely girlfriend and first ac, bettina :)


got questions? ASK!
 
Thanks for the willingness to field questions. I'm on the last few deciding factors of which adapter to purchase. The fact that the Letus flips the image keeps me wondering about how well it does with the HVX, as a clean picture is definitely what I'm looking for.

How did your DVXuser battery hold up? I have the same one in my HVX and it's a bit loose. It actually gets to the point where it'll disconnect and the camera shuts off.

I think most of my questions on the adapter itself would be answered with a few clips of the footage, if not the entire feature film. Speaking of that: are you guys planning to release a DVD? And, how long do you think the entire project will end up being?

If that's you camera op'ing, your hair r0x.
 
http://www.sexnfun.net/sophie1.mov - first moving footage!
i also replaced the two stills from the first page, like those ones better!

more coming soon

thanks for the hair comment ;), the batteries are perfect, got two of those, they are tight as hell...

we planned it as a 15 minute film, 10 minutes would be nice too. a dvd release is planned, yes :)
 
Xax,

Looking good! Better than I expected, actually. I do notice a bit of dark edging going on but it's probably going to suite the content. Otherwise, the Letus looked like it held up well to the lighting. Moving footage always does better than stills, to me.

I'll keep up with the updates in this thread for sure. Thanks for sharing!
 
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