The Quickest Way to Lose My Respect...

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

I have no problem with this. Even if the thumbs are touching. But somewhere between this and making the full on gesture, one becomes a tool. It's a very fine line.

Oh come on! What if I need to demonstrate how quickly I want the camera man to pan up?

[Scott Crawley]

Has anybody tried both? Artemis and viewfinder ? Any comments ?

I have not used Viewfinder Cine but have found Artemis to be a helpful preproduction tool for communication, previs and kit load out planning. The saved snapshots include GPS, camera and lens simulation data. When you use them right in your storyboards that data becomes part of the boards and that is very handy.

It is much easier to snap a pic with an accurate representation of your format and lens choice and pass your iPhone, email it or use Artemis Remote to transmit it right to an iPad for review, than it is to look over each other's shoulder and peer through a finger finder.

Viewfinder appears to have 2 advantages:

Accepts wide angle adapters. Artemis windows the available image within a frame guide to show wide angle views. It's OK, but if you want to see the whole frame Viewfinder might be the way to go.

It appears to have better organized menus. The GUI looks equally functional to Artemis, but the menus look more encompassing and neater. With Artemis to set the camera and lens info, you drill down through successive windows.

There is also a Panavision app, but it doesn't have many reviews and they are mostly negative. It includes sun tracking data which would be really nice to have included in either of the other two apps. For now I use Sun Seeker for that.

[Scott Crawley]

Oh come on! What if I need to demonstrate how quickly I want the camera man to pan up?

There are standard terms in use for this. Otherwise fast, medium speed and slow work. The cameraman has to take technical limitations like shutter speed frame rate and rolling shutter into account, so it's not as if he is free to exactly duplicate your demonstration anyway.

BTW you do understand that we are just having fun here, right?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Has anybody tried both? Artemis and viewfinder ? Any comments ?

They can help you visualize. I kinda made one of my own too just playing around, but didn't see the need to release yet another $0.99/free camera tool to clutter the app store. The shortcoming with them is you can't really approximate very wide angle / short focal lengths via the integrated camera. I don't recall which of the viewfinder apps does it, but there's one that attempts to simulate the AOV/FOV of wider than physically possible framing by showing the onboard camera image with stretched/interpolated garbage on each side. It's not really useful, but does at least give you a frame of reference <pun intended> that shows how at least elements in the center of your view would relate to the overall acquired frame size.

[Bill Anderson]

Cut an (appropriate aspect ratio) aperture out of a piece of black card stock. Say about 6" wide aperture in an 8X10" board. Not sexy, but it's a surprisingly effective little number for quickly plotting framing, focal length, composition, camera moves, locations, and so on. ( :

[Luis de la Cerda]

Don't you think hand framing is useless unless you close one eye, which none of the people in those photos is doing?

[Scott Crawley]

Don't you think hand framing is useless unless you close one eye, which none of the people in those photos is doing?

No. Do you watch a film with one eye? Is one eye better at composition than the other? Will your left tell you where to place the camera while your right can not?

I don't get it. How is closing one eye supposed to help?

[Stephen Strangways]

[Bob Gundu]

Love it.... thinking out of the box.... or should I say frame???

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I don't get it. How is closing one eye supposed to help?

Luckily this is a question you can answer yourself. :D Hold up your hands and look through your fingers with 2 eyes.... And then one. The framing changes dramatically depending on which eye you look through.