Ask David Mullen ANYTHING

[Joe G.]

David,

Big questions now that you're shooting Epic...

Hows the HDRx, and do you have any samples?

Does striving for that 18 stops do weird things to the motion?

What's your opinion on the whole feature, and what settings do you prefer?

Bonus:

Do you think it would be possible to use an anamorphic adapter on the fixed Scarlet?

[David Mullen ASC]

HDRx works, but it's not a cure-all, you need to think about when to use it. There are some motion issues, but they probably will be reduced as new techniques are developed to blend the B-frames over the A-frames. If there isn't much motion and where I need the extra highlight detail is limited to a specific area that people don't cross, like a window in the shot or the sky above the actors' heads, etc. then I think you might as well go for max HDRx (+6) because you can control how much you blend that extra detail into the normal exposure. If the shot is messier, more motion, more complex, then +3 is a good option. I used it at +4 a lot of times.

There is also the increase in data to keep in mind and the reduced recording times.

I still used things like an ND.60 grad when I could to control bright parts of the frame rather than over-use the HDRx function.

When I do the final D.I., that's when I'll have a better sense of HDRx and how it helps. I just hope which shots used it is somehow flagged in the EDL so I don't have to guess when I watch the D.I.

If you want an anamorphic squeeze, a fixed lens would require something like the old 1.33X adaptors made for DV cameras; I don't think much of them. The optical loss would counteract any improvement from not cropping the frame to get 2.40.

[dean merrill]

Hello,
I am attending a lighting and grip course at The Workshops next week, and I am wondering if you have any suggestions on lighting scenarios that I should study? I do have experience lighting, and feel like I have a good understanding of it, but would like to challenge myself in the subtleties of it. Right now my direction is really working on lighting really smooth and sensual skin tones. I have investigated harsh and directional lighting and found it pretty easy... almost like a one-liner.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
~Dean

[David Mullen ASC]

I'm not sure creating a big soft source for a portrait is particularly hard in a classroom set-up, the hard part tends to be when you are moving quickly in a small location and the camera is moving around, etc. Of course, soft portrait lighting is an art into itself because the angle of the light, the height, etc. can have different effects on different faces.

Roger Deakins is a master at what I'd call dramatic soft lighting, i.e. soft lighting that maintains contrast and thus drama & mood. I'd study one his more intimate dramas, such as "In the Valley of Elah" for example, or "A Beautiful Mind", or "The Man Who Wasn't There". He's like a painter who never uses extraneous brushstrokes. There's light where it needs to be and not where it doesn't.

For a more advanced study, I'd look at the whole history of soft lighting in movies, from the use of Cooper Hewitt soft boxes in late 20's movies, to the use of bounce lighting in the French New Wave, the soft lighting used in British movies of the mid-60's and 70's by David Watkin, Ozzie Morris, John Alcott, the 70's work of Gordon Willis and the use of overhead soft boxes, Storaro's use of large single-source lighting (soft & hard), the post-70's stuff like Philippe Rousselot's use of Chinese Lanterns, Darius Khondji's use of Kinoflos, etc.

Of course, the real secret to getting smooth and sensuous skintones is to hire actresses with smooth and sensuous skintones...

[Adam Eden]

Hey David I am sure you can answer this for me.

I am getting restored currently some Russian Lomo Anamorphic lenses, 35mm, 50, and 80mm.
When shooting in anamorphic mode on the RED and after squeezing the footage back to a normal aspect, what is the equivalent MM in a normal lens? IE does 35MM anamorphic = 35MM Normal, if you centre cut the anamorphic to full 16x9 and try and match it with another red shooting normal aspect lenses in the same mode IE 4k ana and 4k 16:9


Thanks in advance

[David Mullen ASC]

The Lomos have a 2X horizontal squeeze, so if shooting 4-perf 35mm you basically have the equivalent of shooting on a spherical lens of half the focal length in terms of equivalency of horizontal view. So a 50mm anamorphic is like a 25mm spherical image cropped to 2.40, assuming the same width of film stock is exposed (in real terms, however, anamorphic photography exposes the Academy width of 35mm and Super-35 exposes the Full Aperture width, so the conversion factor is not exactly 2X, it's more like 1.83X).

However, it's a bit more complicated than that if you want to be particular about field of view differences because of the 1.20 : 1 area of the M-X sensor used for a 2.40 : 1 anamorphic image. In 4K 2:1 spherical mode, you record a 22.12mm width of the sensor; in 4K ANA mode, you record a 14.93mm area of the sensor but the image has a 2X horizontal squeeze (optical).

So you can think of it as having a 29.86mm wide sensor in terms of horizontal field of view (14.93 x 2), compared to a 22.12mm sensor width. That's a 1.35X conversion factor. So your 50mm 2X anamorphic on the Red One in 4K ANA mode would be like shooting on a 37mm spherical lens on the Red One in 4K 2:1 in terms of the horizontal field of view.

[Adam Eden]

Thank you David.
You are definately "THE MAN"! And deserve a pay rise!

As I want to mix The anamorphic look with a set of MKIII Super speeds and finish full frame 1080P without cropping the image. So your information will help my director immensely.

[David Mullen ASC]

Thank you David.
You are definately "THE MAN"! And deserve a pay rise!

As I want to mix The anamorphic look with a set of MKIII Super speeds and finish full frame 1080P without cropping the image.

You can't... some cropping has to happen with the 2X anamorphic photography to fill a 16x9 HD screen with no letterboxing. Think of it, you have a 2X squeeze to the image that needs to be unsqueezed. If you don't want to crop, that would mean that once you unsqueeze the recorded image, it becomes exactly 1.78 : 1.

So the recorded image with the 2X optical squeeze would have to have a 0.89 : 1 aspect ratio -- there is no recording mode on the Red One that does that.

The closest is the ANA mode, which records a 1.20 : 1 aspect ratio, so once you unsqueeze the image, you have a 2.40 : 1 aspect ratio. But that's wider than 16x9 so would require letterboxing to fit, or require cropping the sides to get from 2.40 to 1.78.

[Adam Eden]

You can't... some cropping has to happen with the 2X anamorphic photography to fill a 16x9 HD screen with no letterboxing. Think of it, you have a 2X squeeze to the image that needs to be unsqueezed. If you don't want to crop, that would mean that once you unsqueeze the recorded image, it becomes exactly 1.78 : 1.

So the recorded image with the 2X optical squeeze would have to have a 0.89 : 1 aspect ratio -- there is no recording mode on the Red One that does that.

The closest is the ANA mode, which records a 1.20 : 1 aspect ratio, so once you unsqueeze the image, you have a 2.40 : 1 aspect ratio. But that's wider than 16x9 so would require letterboxing to fit, or require cropping the sides to get from 2.40 to 1.78.

I understand about cutting the sides off. The main reason we want to shoot anamorphic is for the wicked flares. This will be the "B" camera. I will need to do some tests and draw some marks on the monitor so we know what we are cutting off in anamorphic mode.

[David Mullen ASC]

I understand about cutting the sides off.

Cutting off the sides affects the horizontal field of view, in 4K ANA mode, you will only be using 11.07mm x 12.44mm area of the sensor for the 1.78 image with the 2X anamorphic lens... in some ways that makes the calculations easier because 4K 16:9 mode (but not 4K HD mode) uses a 22.12mm x 11.06mm sensor area -- so your anamorphic shots will use almost exactly half of the sensor area that your spherical lens shots will use, and since your 2X anamorphic lenses sees twice as much horizontally, it means that your 50mm anamorphic image, once cropped to 1.78, will see about the same width as your 50mm spherical lensed shots in normal 4K mode.