FS7: NO Sony Fs7!!

The Potato Jet (aka Gene Nagata) has a bit of fame now and that lets him have a few perks. About a year ago, he was given a free run with ARRI cameras and a tête-à-tête with some ARRI sponsored pros. One sequence had him playing the role of a focus puller with the sonar aided focus system. Sonar provided only the range. The rest was being done manually via a remote control with its own screen showing a video feed, so a focus puller had both a correct distance and a visual confirmation of his choices.
 
Ben Scott said:
Okay mate sure, the greatest exponents of keeping things in focus on the planet are less clued up about the state of autofocus than 'man on internet #354'.

This is funnier than the wrestling stuff tbf.
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Well yeah from what they guy is quoted as saying yes it seems so .. and it makes sense. .. as I said ,they never have access to any AF.. you think they are reading up about the fx9 / fx6 AF in their spare time .. you have never known any FP,s thats for sure :) they are more likely watching the wrestling or the stock market ..
 
JPNola said:
Upon what do you base your claim that age is a factor in adoption of AF?
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Im my case getting old .. it will happen to you too .. and the obvious , people used to a certain way of working ,in high pressure environments, dont want to change .. plenty of big time film DP,s didnt want to have to learn Digital , and I dont blame them .. some Im sure retired that have to re learn , some must have been forced into doing to keep working , and a very few were smart and embraced it early .. you disagree with the logic .. ?
 
I don’t see the use of Autofocus or not as an analogy to the Digital vs Film.
AF on cine/video cameras will get better and better that’s a given.
But being a photographer since the first AF cameras were born and having been working in all kind of environments with all kinds of cameras, and remember AF on photo cameras are very advanced, I can tell you there is today still a use for manual focus in photography same as there will always be on Cine/Video world.
Sometimes the subject gets the most sophisticated AF go wrong (shinny surfaces for example), because the moment called for hyperfocal focus (the fastest Focus method on earth), or because the shot is so important you don’t want to miss focus. In those situations even with top of the line photo cameras you still use Manunal Focus.
It’s obvious that both technologies will co-exist more and more on Cine world. But I highly doubt we will a focus puller go jobless because technology any time soon.
 
If the focus puller goes jobless, the camera operator does too. :evil::crybaby:

lol, seriously though...year-after-year it just gets closer and closer to robots, and the big picture is that no matter how unnatural it may look to some and how much time we spend passionately discussing this on forums, it will not matter as the world transitions and adapts to machines doing most of the work.

 
NorBro said:
no matter how unnatural it may look to some and how much time we spend passionately discussing this on forums, it will not matter as the world transitions and adapts to it.
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Sort of. It depends on the cost/benefit equation and the marginal impact of having a human operator. (And, for the record, I was never arguing that AF would replace ACs, just that they would incorporate it into their workflow.)

For example, I had a debate with Brawley about gimbals because he generally dislikes them, but in the areas I work in they're considered a godsend.

And they're great - they're cheap, they're easy to learn and use, and they're effective. BUT if you really care about the character of the footage and camera movement and the extra effort and expense to use a steadicam instead of a gimbal is miniscule in the scope of your entire budget, then absolutely 4 times out of 5 the steadicam is the better tool to use.

So, will cooking shows in controlled environments go operatorless (or, more likely, just have a single operator who can set up the cameras and also catch the unusual angles and unexpected shots)? Sure. But what about for documentary or for commercials which are full of unusual and unexpected angles and put a premium on creativity and versatility? It won't be worth it to lose the human.

Even in a wedding scenario where, theoretically, you could replace the second cameraman with a follow-the-face robot, a single cameraman won't have time to run around setting it up. You'd need bare minimum a PA just to move the rig from place to place.

So, I see something like this probably paring down the good-paying (and easy) work available rather than eliminating it altogether. And I feel the same way about iPhone interviews that are relit in post, etc. It's not good for us, but it's not armageddon.
 
The way I see it is that in the beginning these kind of machines would do very simple, controlled work as you mentioned - and then eventually they would develop into much more complex operators.

Once these things become really advanced and are comfortably a part of society (most likely when we're all gone), they will undoubtedly do a lot of the work. Plus, with 16K, 32K cameras hovering around, you'll have extra angles in case the machines malfunction.

If not Hollywood...well then at least Vegas.

 
well, extra cut-ins maybe. not exactly extra angles (depending on how you look at it)

along the lines you're thinking - as machines improve, I imagine they could swallow up a larger and larger portion of the work we do as they get better and cheaper, and fewer types of work find it worthwhile to hire humans

and then there's always a luxury niche at the top where the humans are worth it (especially the ones who are good enough to still be in the game). for example, I've read predictions that having a human concierge, travel agent, or customer service rep will become a VIP perk, while the rest of us schmoes can only get Alexa on the line.

so, big budget stuff - the kind where they use a human operator in order to reproduce organic camera movements even for an animated film - would be the last place the humans get hired

what scares me more is automated editing. some of the stuff I do is quite creative, but some of it is somewhat rote and not difficult to imagine an AI doing nearly as good of a job for a fraction of the cost
 
Even if it's creative, AI could spit out 100 different versions of an edit in a few seconds and then the humans - the ultimate decision-makers who will always coexist with the robots - will make the final call (and/or tweak it).

Creativity is disposable as well.

And I thought not interacting with a human for those kind of services is a perk? :eek:
 
Everything I've read suggests that creativity is difficult for machines. So they can do something that's been done before and something that can be readily described schematically. Harder for them to do something that hasn't been done before, when the producer doesn't know exactly what they want or how to achieve it. I'm not that concerned about that.

I have had many frustrating experiences with chatbots. Now I usually just respond "human" however many times it takes them to transfer me to a person. The bots don't understand novelty or complexity. Or my emotional state. Humans are extraordinarily complicated machines. There are things that computers are much better at but the reverse is true as well
 
It will always be a question of how much they can learn and understand.

They'll have a great memory, and if they can understand what they are looking at, and recognize faces, and objects, and work off of metadata that includes keywords and time and any relation to the script that the machine also has registered, I think it will be able to create something coherent.

Maybe not making precise cuts at the perfect frames to show emotions or whatever, but I would think at least one of the 100 edits has to be decent enough for a first draft for a human to take over and expand on it.
 
I think what you'll first see with all the motorized jibs and sliders is an increase in a shot option and redundancy. High angle, low angle, sliding, swinging, moving, etc. In other words, it wouldn't be robots/preprogrammed machinery knowing what to shoot, it'd be them shooting something. From every angle. Six cameras, eight cameras, twelve cameras. All 8K Raw. Crop as your wont. Edit as you feel.
 
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That was pretty much what I meant with the hovering cameras in 16K, 32K on the last page.

Just constantly filming...something.
 
sounds greeeeeat

incidentally, the worst spots I've ever seen were directed by an editor who just wanted to capture everything possible so he could have control in the editing room. zero direction to the shoot. the videos were boring and sucked
 
ha, well...100 million dollar Hollywood films with lots of direction are also criticized as boring and subpar - so darn if you do, darn if you don't.

The people that made the Star Wars' that ruined it for you or what not probably weren't thinking, "Let's make something everyone will hate."

That's why I think in the grand scheme of such a fast paced society, it will be more about a product being good enough and it's onto the next. Clockwork...
 
jj abrams was thinking, "people want to see han and leia and the millennium falcon again." and bob iger was thinking, "let's repeat the same storyline as a new hope. people loved that story." all of which was true and they grossed over a billion dollars.

but that's not a very creative way of thinking. it's profit-driven and risk-averse. machine-like, if you will. and we'll get more crap like that if people (and they're already doing this) feed data about blockbusters into a computer which tries to find a formula to repeat.

or we could have more "Get Out"s. the choice is ours (sorta)
 
I actually just saw the Twilight Zone episode two nights ago that possibly inspired Get Out. "The Trade-Ins".

I never knew anything about it or any possible inspiration (and I still didn't read much about it), but as soon as I saw the first 10 minutes of the episode I thought about the film and googled about the connection and sure enough there were some articles about it.
 
that's interesting, especially since Peele got the job doing the twilight reboot. i hadn't heard of the trade-ins.

the reasons Get Out was so good, though, as far as I can tell, were that Peele spent 10 years writing it and was deeply emotionally invested in the connections to slavery and the experience of Afrrican-American life. so, mostly hard work and inspiration. I heard that Us wasn't nearly as good or as poignant, and I heard some of his explanation of it and it seemed to lack the deep conviction of Get Out

PS avatar was written in 2 weeks and it showed
 
Donny 123 said:
Im my case getting old .. it will happen to you too .. and the obvious , people used to a certain way of working ,in high pressure environments, dont want to change .. plenty of big time film DP,s didnt want to have to learn Digital , and I dont blame them .. some Im sure retired that have to re learn , some must have been forced into doing to keep working , and a very few were smart and embraced it early .. you disagree with the logic .. ?
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It was less that they didn’t want to have to learn something new and more that it took video a long time to get to where it was of satisfactory quality. Older DP’s have embraced all manner of new tech: Movi, for example.

Older DP’s have been no slower in adopting AF than younger DP’s in narrative filmmaking. It is the nature of the work that has seen that work be slower to adopt AF, not the age of people doing that work or some stubbornness or resistance to learning that is age-related. Even with advances in the tech there is still too much chance that AF will have a mind of its own. The tech isn’t quite there yet. Close, but not enough.
 
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