C200: Free Solo burned dvd

S

Stills2HDConvert

Well-known member
I was a little surprised that the DVD for Free Solo is burned and not pressed.

Supposedly shot on Canon gear, not C200, but since I like hanging out here with ya'll…

Also surprised it wasn't on Blu Ray.
 
May be the expected sales is less, so someone is there writing the film to DVDs on demand?

My DVD player is gathering dust but is still lying near the TV console. I guess I haven't used it since a year and half.

I think Free Solo was shot with C300II
 
puredrifting said:
Weird, in 2019. They must have a geezer demographic ;-)
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I am just such a geezer :thumbsup:

Mostly buy blu rays, but occasionally dvds. I watch such movies over and over again to study them. Inevitably, they will go out of print and be unsupported on streaming platforms. It's hard to find a decent copy of 'The Parallax View' for example. So many of the great indies from the 90s are totally unavailable now. Film history is in the middle of a kind of great forgetting in my opinion.

That said, I don't think I'll buy the dvd of 'Free Solo'. Saw it in the theater and it was by far the most visceral experience I've had watching a film in a long time... my hands are sweating just typing this.

They did shoot mostly on Canon cameras - c300s, 1dx, etc - although I did see one 'Making Of' that showed them using a Blackmagic Ursa and that monster Canon 50 1000 lens for some shots. Good making op doc here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wjmIFlnNo
 
From the BTS I've watched, it seems they shot mostly with Canon gear. Here I'm getting super granular, but there's also this:
Screen Shot 2019-07-15 at 7.14.06 PM.jpg
 
Tempted to conjecture as why they chose that camera for those shots from El Capitan Meadow (I assume) when Canon most likely provided them with everything they could want. (To head off any presupposition of camera dissing, I own a c300mkii. I'll use it until it dies.) Although it's just a hypothetical, I wonder why they made that choice. Probably a very simple reason.

Would love to hear more from those camera operators. Is anyone aware of any perhaps more obscure podcasts in which the other camera operators speak about their experience?
 
The simplest answer is for better cinematic image quality.

I find myself saying this somewhere at least once a week, but the Blackmagics (even with all of their issues) make a lot of cameras look less than ideal when it comes to pure cinematic - "this looks like 'Hollywood' with minimal effort" - image quality. Especially if they used the 4.6K UM, which has much more DR for that environment.

There aren't many other reasons as the C300 Mark II has a lot of things you'd want in a video camera.
 
As far as I remember, the image from that meadow angle did not look super good to my eye. Could easily have been operator error, but I recall it looking a little out of focus. No hate, but don't see how the BM would have looked any better than a C300 MKII, especially in the 4k24p 10 bit codec.
 
Pretty much the same reason why ARRIs may/do end up looking better than mostly everything else even in their 2.5K resolution.

It's unexplainable and paper specs get thrown out the window.

In this case, the Blackmagics have a much more filmic look (IMO) even in 1080p.
 
As someone who has been loaned cameras and other gear from Canon, y'all are overlooking the most probable cause why there
wasn't a C300 MKII on that tripod the BMD is on. It's really simple, Canon probably didn't have enough C300 MKIIs laying around to give them.

When companies loan filmmakers gear, they don't go into the warehouse and open fresh boxes and just hand out new cameras, they have a pool
of loaner and borrower cameras for journalist reviews and Canon Service loaners, you get what you get. Canon provided us with some loaner gear
last year for several shoots and each time, the cameras and gear that were available to us was considerably different.
 
Makes sense. I had an analogous thought which was basically 'because that was the camera the operator had with him that day.'

They were shooting for months and months and the crew had no idea when Alex Honnold was going to commit and do the actual climb. Stands to reason that they showed up to work that day, watched Honnold climb past the point where he could downclimb, and the operator just used the camera he had.

Interesting thought exercise. Thanks for participating.

Think I need to rewatch this movie.
 
puredrifting said:
As someone who has been loaned cameras and other gear from Canon, y'all are overlooking the most probable cause why there
wasn't a C300 MKII on that tripod the BMD is on. It's really simple, Canon probably didn't have enough C300 MKIIs laying around to give them.

When companies loan filmmakers gear, they don't go into the warehouse and open fresh boxes and just hand out new cameras, they have a pool
of loaner and borrower cameras for journalist reviews and Canon Service loaners, you get what you get. Canon provided us with some loaner gear
last year for several shoots and each time, the cameras and gear that were available to us was considerably different.
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Truly depends on how important you are.

Absolutely not an insult...but if you have a guaranteed audience of millions and millions and millions for your product, rest-assured they will have enough cameras for you.

In this particular case, just randomly having the BM camera around does make sense as well.
 
Kohl said:
Tempted to conjecture as why they chose that camera for those shots from El Capitan Meadow (I assume) when Canon most likely provided them with everything they could want. (To head off any presupposition of camera dissing, I own a c300mkii. I'll use it until it dies.) Although it's just a hypothetical, I wonder why they made that choice. Probably a very simple reason.

Would love to hear more from those camera operators. Is anyone aware of any perhaps more obscure podcasts in which the other camera operators speak about their experience?
Click to expand...

I'm guessing it has to do with powering the lens. BM might have been the better choice for ease of use with V-mount batteries. The canons get a little messy when completely rigged up. Maybe even eliminating a single cable (IDK if this was the case) gave them peace of mind for such a critical part of the shoot.
 
puredrifting said:
As someone who has been loaned cameras and other gear from Canon, y'all are overlooking the most probable cause why there
wasn't a C300 MKII on that tripod the BMD is on. It's really simple, Canon probably didn't have enough C300 MKIIs laying around to give them.
Click to expand...

This is absolutely the most likely scenario. To add, I'm betting someone on the production owned the Ursa Mini and brought it when they were short a camera. You can't swing a dead cat on any given shoot and not hit 5 PAs that own a Blackmagic camera of some sort.
 
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