The low light Miami Vice (2007) look. is this possible with HVX?

filthrich said:
I have a feature coming up and the whole movie is at night in the projects. Just secured a small armory for the shoot out scenes. and two motorized wheelchairs. don't ask.
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Aw C'mon! How can you say DON'T ASK!!!!!!!!:)

Checked out the pictures of "Torn". NICE.

Obviously Gage and I have a healthy disagreement over whether you can achieve the MV look with the HVX, etc. In my experience with the Viper, it seems clear that Mann is deliberately using available lights or lights that most DPs on Hollywood films would consider far too weak, in order to for him to use the unique capabilities of his cameras to dig in to the night, giving that wonderfully unique look of L.A. never seen before.

You certainly can achieve lovely results with the HVX etc at night if you light it right. But that's very different to looking like MV. What Mattykins has suggested is really interesting and I'll certainly look into it, but I'd certainly do a lot of tests if you want to shoot that way.

Good luck!

PS I noticed on your profile you have AE. I remember you asking about CCing before - you can do heaps in AE. If you duplicate your footage to create mask layers, you can change not only the color of individual objects easily, but add a huge array of effects to them. Try, for example, dragging a lens flare effect onto your footage and playing with the parameters. You'll soon find that you can achieve far more in post than you often can on location. Things like that can raelly make your footage shine.
 
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dvxhutch said:
Aw C'mon! How can you say DON'T ASK!!!!!!!!:)

Checked out the pictures of "Torn". NICE.

Obviously Gage and I have a healthy disagreement over whether you can achieve the MV look with the HVX, etc. In my experience with the Viper, it seems clear that Mann is deliberately using available lights or lights that most DPs on Hollywood films would consider far too weak, in order to for him to use the unique capabilities of his cameras to dig in to the night, giving that wonderfully unique look of L.A. never seen before.

You certainly can achieve lovely results with the HVX etc at night if you light it right. But that's very different to looking like MV. What Mattykins has suggested is really interesting and I'll certainly look into it, but I'd certainly do a lot of tests if you want to shoot that way.

Good luck!

PS I noticed on your profile you have AE. I remember you asking about CCing before - you can do heaps in AE. If you duplicate your footage to create mask layers, you can change not only the color of individual objects easily, but add a huge array of effects to them. Try, for example, dragging a lens flare effect onto your footage and playing with the parameters. You'll soon find that you can achieve far more in post than you often can on location. Things like that can raelly make your footage shine.
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Thank you for the information. I will just have to experiment.
I am so new AE it's not even funny. I just watch the co-pilot tutorials and duplicate the steps. I will mess with the lens flare when I get back home. The basics of AE are not too difficult. to get real nice seems to take years. Thanks for checking out the Torn footage. It locked yesterday. It is not a great movie but I will get better. :Drogar-Dum(DBG):
 
I love the look Mann used in collateral and Miami vice too. I think the most important thing to do is find the right location. There was a lot of Available light in his night shots. Also I'm pretty sure he lit some of the background buildings too.

I'm pretty sure he shot at 1/25 too. I remember reading that somewhere too.
 
I need to do some research to find out if he lit the night scenes or used available light only. there seems to be some confusion on what MM acutally did. I am sure the information is out there somewhere. below is a taken from an article that was linked in an earlier thread.

We therefore found ourselves running a fine line,” he continues. “We’d light beautiful night exteriors that looked amazing and natural and had so much detail, but when we went in for the close-ups, we had to overlight the actors to reduce the noise on their faces. On the monitor, it looked horrible and incredibly overlit. It was very hard to wrap my head around what we were doing, and it went against every instinct I have as a cinematographer. It was a constant battle between what looked good on set and what would look good at the film-out every weekend.”
The filmmakers discovered that any levels below 20 IRE at +3dB or 30 IRE at +6dB on the actors’ faces rendered an unacceptable amount of noise on the projected film image. Respectively, 20 and 30 IRE are roughly equivalent to 21⁄3 stops and 11⁄2 stops below medium gray (about 55 IRE) on a video signal. According to Cameron, at those gain levels in VideoStream mode, the Viper was actually more sensitive to low ambient light, with less noise, than the CineAlta.
Mann was also insistent about the kind of lighting he wanted for the taxi interior, which Cameron describes as “no light, really. Michael wanted it to feel like ambient light with no specific source. That, coupled with the challenge of filming in a real cab that had little or no room to place any kind of lights, made it incredibly challenging to design an effective plan.”
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With regard to signal-to-noise ratio, Beebe discovered that the HD cameras could be pushed even further than +6dB in certain situations. “+12dB is really the threshold of where you’d ever want to go,” he remarks. “We ended up doing +12dB only on the F900. We pushed the Viper to +9dB, but that was the highest we ever went. The real key was to keep the actors’ faces in an acceptable range. As a viewer, your focus is always on the actor, and we found we could get away with a lot of noise in the background as long as we weren’t seeing noise on the actors’ faces.”
 
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I remember from the commentary on Collateral that for the scene where the guy is thrown out of the window that the exterior alley was shot in three seperate locations. Mann didn't like the backdrop as Cruise's character emerged from the building etc which is pretty interesting. Also I think I recall him talking about whacking some huge lights on the skyscraper at the end.

Also very interesting that they made a bank of lights from the same stuff used in cellphone keypads to light the interior of the cab.
 
HuckLBerry said:
I remember from the commentary on Collateral that for the scene where the guy is thrown out of the window that the exterior alley was shot in three seperate locations. Mann didn't like the backdrop as Cruise's character emerged from the building etc which is pretty interesting. Also I think I recall him talking about whacking some huge lights on the skyscraper at the end.

Also very interesting that they made a bank of lights from the same stuff used in cellphone keypads to light the interior of the cab.
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That alley info is crazy. I would never even look that deeply into it. I guess that's why I post here and not from my yacht.
 
Huy Vu said:
It's questionable how "usable" Mann's footage was to start with. I watched Miama Vice and turned it off immediately when it got to the first grainy night scene because I couldn't stomach it anymore. Looks like crap.
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When was this? I watched Miami Vice and it all looked awesome to me. I'll like that looked and used it myself. I was shooting on the DVX100 and it handle's lowlight very well. I should've shot those in 60i because that was the look I wanted for the night scenes. (Like the TV show Cops).

-Nate
 
Filth: I find it interesting that you cut that quote just after saying he "didnt want any light in the cab", but just after he said that they used these:

After investigating many options, Cameron and his chief lighting technician, Phil Walker, chose a new fixture: Electrolumi-nescent Display (ELD) panels. The thin, flexible pieces of plastic encase laminated phosphors and operate much in the same way that Indiglo watches and mobile-telephone displays do. Walker worked with NovaTek, a manufacturer of ELD panels, to custom-create a mixture of phosphors that would provide an acceptable color temperature for the HD cameras. “In the beginning, Michael preferred a warmer color temp, but we eventually settled on a slightly cool green that looked very natural,” recalls
Cameron. “That was the easy part. It then took about four weeks to get the panels made, which left us with about a week before principal photography to set them up in the cabs.”
 
GageFX said:
Filth: I find it interesting that you cut that quote just after saying he "didnt want any light in the cab", but just after he said that they used these:

After investigating many options, Cameron and his chief lighting technician, Phil Walker, chose a new fixture: Electrolumi-nescent Display (ELD) panels. The thin, flexible pieces of plastic encase laminated phosphors and operate much in the same way that Indiglo watches and mobile-telephone displays do. Walker worked with NovaTek, a manufacturer of ELD panels, to custom-create a mixture of phosphors that would provide an acceptable color temperature for the HD cameras. “In the beginning, Michael preferred a warmer color temp, but we eventually settled on a slightly cool green that looked very natural,” recalls
Cameron. “That was the easy part. It then took about four weeks to get the panels made, which left us with about a week before principal photography to set them up in the cabs.”
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Gage,

You are correct, it's pretty cool how they lit the cab interior!
 
I have seen those a hundred times at Ikea and thought they were over priced for the home. But for a production they are a bargain. I may try a few of those out when I need them.
 
filthrich said:
Thank you for the information. I will just have to experiment.
I am so new AE it's not even funny. I just watch the co-pilot tutorials and duplicate the steps. I will mess with the lens flare when I get back home. The basics of AE are not too difficult. to get real nice seems to take years. Thanks for checking out the Torn footage. It locked yesterday. It is not a great movie but I will get better. :Drogar-Dum(DBG):
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You've watched the co-pilot footage? GREAT. Here's an old trick of the trade that may help.

If you don't have a nice 35mm (stills) camera, I'm sure you can borrow one. If you buy a roll of slow film - like the Fuji Velvia with an ISO of 50 or 100 - shoot some static night shots of buildings, street lights, subways, the moon etc., process and scan them into your computer, and you can digitally composite them into the background of your footage using AE.

Sounds like a lot of hard work? Not at all. Go to videocopilot.net, scroll down to the bottom of the tutorials page, and you'll see the very first tutorial, which shows how to put a nice sky background into footage of a rider jumping over a dirt mound. That tutorial will show you everything you need to know, including motion tracking and a few other cool tricks, to get great results.

There are some limitations, such as not being able to use moving images, but you can get some brilliant results. You can also obviously use this for daytime footage too.

At worst, you'll have taught yourself how to use many important aspects of AE.

At best, it might give you the look you're after, by using your HVX/DVX footage up close, and 35mm footage for background detail, which you'll never be able to achieve with the HVX.

And you can always tell your friends you're shooting your next feature on 35mm, and ALMOST keep a straight face. :)
 
Cool. Make sure you use a tripod as exposure time will be long, otherwise you'll get blurry images. Perhaps google "night photography" before you start for some more tips. Good luck.
 
hmmmm, did you buy those from China?


they had similar ones attatched to thier clothes tonight.
 
Th only bit I didn't like in Miami Vice was the shower scene in cuba(??) I thought that looked horribly video with the burn-out and colour palette they chose.
 
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